Abstract
Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Political Violence in Twentieth Century Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011; ix + 258 pp.; US$29.99 pbk; ISBN 9780521182041
This ambitious volume endeavors to re-imagine the very terms that comprise its title – or at least to challenge any sense that they can be understood as given. Positing a long twentieth century, beginning with the ‘Eastern Crisis’ of the 1870s, and operating with a narrow definition of political violence that excludes criminality and ‘social’ or ‘structural’ violence, the authors quite productively negotiate the complex analytical terrain between four ‘expressions’ of political violence: war, genocide, revolution and terrorism.
Each of these expressions gets its own co-authored chapter, and although there is no conclusion, the editors’ introduction and a strong first chapter – jointly written by most of the contributing authors – effectively map out the chronological and analytical threads the authors seek to weave together. The authors explicitly endeavor to relativize 1945 as a turning point between a violent first half and a peaceful second half of the century. Instead, it figures as but one marker in the midst of five waves that articulate evolving logics of violence.
This chronological ordering begins in the ‘amalgam of international, imperial and ethnic conflicts’ (36) in southeastern Europe during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and proceeds through three additional waves (the First World War and revolution; the mid-1930s through the aftermath of the Second World War; and Cold War and decolonization) until a final wave, after the end of the Cold War, saw a return of ethnic violence and new forms of terrorism amidst the destabilization of a Western-dominated international order.
While these five waves structure chapters two through five (each exploring one of the four expressions of political violence), the first chapter serves to locate Europe as a site and engine of violence within the wider world. It interrogates the bounds of its geography as well as the meaning of Europe, more generally. Thus, in exploring the nature of European Empire, it notes that in comparison to Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the Habsburg Empire was the only land empire ‘regarded as properly European’ (18). Similarly, the example of ‘European quarters’ (not French quarters) in the cities of colonial Algeria serves as one way to relocate its boundaries. By articulating the ambiguities inherent both to the internal coherence of Europe and the lines drawn around it, these examples mark the book’s units of analysis as component parts of a global system.
It is in attempting to map out connections between these parts that the book frames its most probing questions: How should we explain the upsurge in (European) violence against non-European peoples after the Second World War? Why were the practitioners of the most expansive colonial violence not the ones who unleashed the most intense racist destruction during the Second World War?
If the book’s first sections articulate and query lines of continuity between expressions of political violence, the four analytical chapters dissect them. James McMillan’s chapter on war (the only one written without a co-author) suggests that the post-1945 absence of war was largely an ‘optical illusion’ (78) that concealed the expansive hot wars waged elsewhere. While he admits that Europeans did not publicly mobilize for war along the lines of the two World Wars, he suggests that they remained avid consumers of wars, particularly wars that, in a kind of return to nineteenth century terrain, tended to be waged in far off places.
The line of empire and imperial thinking also undergirds Donald Bloxham’s and A. Dirk Moses’s discussion of genocide. They suggest that ideas and ideology are insufficient explanations but also that the logic of genocide reflected something more than just a logic of destruction. In their attempt to explore the radicalization of imperial, military, and population management, they posit states as key agents of intolerance. But they also perceive the blurred lines between legal population transfers and ethnic cleansing as well as the ways that, for example, even after the Holocaust, ethnic homogenization continued throughout much of Europe, often violently. Here place played a particularly significant role in determining identities – and who wound up getting killed.
Revolution and counter-revolution, the third analytical frame, function as a kind of counter-point to the centrality of violent practices in the rest of the book. If one accepts Martin Conway and Robert Gerwarth’s assertion that not all revolutions were violent, it nonetheless remains less clear what made some violence revolutionary. Thus, while they point to the July 2005 bombing attack in the London subway as an indication that ‘revolutionary violence has not ended in Europe’ (171), they nonetheless assert that ‘Europe itself, or so it seems, has moved beyond revolution’ (175).
That the chapter on terrorism operates as the book’s conclusion is not inappropriate. Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer emphasize that terrorism is not a stand-alone phenomenon but emerges out of other events. Central to their analysis is the state, both as a target for and an agent of terror. If ‘politically motivated informal violence’ (177) defines part of the fluid terrain of terrorism, the state’s ability to apply the ‘terrorism label’ (176) makes clear how much this discussion depends on an analysis of practice and language. By considering the local rootedness of radical violence, this essay, like the volume as a whole, productively wrestles with the tensions between historical particularities and overarching analysis.
Villanova University