Pivot Years. World War II in 20th-Century History

Although historians have always considered World War II a momentous event, they have seldom made it the intellectual focal point for the development of broader interpretations of the 20th century. Many recent narratives have located the defining processes elsewhere. For good reason, historians have drawn attention to the profound political and social upheavals around the turn of the 20th century, which inaugurated an ‘age of high modernity’ or ‘age of territoriality’ that would shape Western nations for decades to come. While these accounts usually reach into the 1960s and 1970s, this is where other historians begin their search for the ‘origins of our present’, focusing on the deep shifts occurring in economic and political orders as well as in intellectual discourse during these decades. In both schools of thought, World War II does not figure as a crucial driver of change. ¹ Other historical approaches to the 20th century see the war's importance more in its enabling condition. Histories framing the Holocaust as the century's emblematic event have emphasized that the war created exceptional political and ideological circumstances in which unprecedented mass murder suddenly became conceivable. ² Conversely, accounts of globalization have wrestled with the question of whether the war had globalizing or deglobalizing effects, which in either case does not bestow a fundamentally distinct quality upon the early 1940s when compared to other historical periods. ³ A notable exception is provided by those historians of European history who have portrayed the World War as a period defined by an intensification and readaptation of political discourse, such as on planning, the welfare state or individual rights, which had emerged in the 1920s and would remain influential until at least the 1960s. ⁴

The classical view of the war, building on the dialectic of catastrophe and reconstruction, remains very much alive in current historiography. From this vantage point, the war represents the absolute culmination, as it were, of physical devastation, social dissolution, psychological exhaustion and human immortality. Yet unexpectedly, many war-torn societies quickly re-emerged from the depths of misery and destitution, paving the way for an astonishing rise ‘out of the ashes’. ⁵ In Europe, this ascent characterized both West and East to the extent that violent conflict abated, political systems gained stability and societies gradually enjoyed a measure of economic prosperity and social security. Undoubtedly, this dualistic picture holds much historical truth. Who could deny that the war marked a climax of destruction, in light of its appalling record of death and suffering? The war left 60 million dead, a substantial majority of which were civilians, reduced countless cities across Europe and Asia to rubble, and displaced 60 million people in Europe and perhaps 90 million in China. ⁶ Yet by setting the unparalleled violence of World War II apart from earlier conflicts and by reducing post-war history to the process of overcoming its terrifying results, this interpretation tends to dissect the century into two halves that appear disconnected or at best linked by contrast.

Furthermore, the dichotomic view of destruction and reconstruction reflects an almost exclusively European perspective. While developments in Japan would neatly fit into this picture, they have rarely been included explicitly. More importantly, the regional histories of China, South East Asia, Africa and Latin America followed different trajectories that produced distinct chronologies and narratives. To view the war's end as a moment of liberation, for instance, persuasively captures the experience of many European countries that had suffered under National Socialist occupation – albeit mostly those in the West, since Eastern Europe witnessed the simultaneous reoccupation by Soviet forces. Beyond Europe, the differences in perceptions were arguably even more profound. ⁷ In China, the Japanese surrender simply ushered in the next round of the civil war between the Guomindang and the Communists; in many African countries, the European colonial powers reverted to pre-war patterns of colonial rule; finally, in Argentina, a country less directly affected by the global conflict, the year 1945 was memorable not for the war but for the mythical rise of Juan Perón. Until recently, these regional experiences played a negligible role in the vast literature on the World War. The European, sometimes even Eurocentric perspective has proven strikingly pervasive, determining not only the geographical focus of historical research but also important patterns of interpretation. ⁸

Given the shortcomings of the classical approach and, more generally, the fact that many of the recent, more comprehensive narratives are centred on other periods or events, a reconsideration of how to situate World War II in the history of the 20th century may be a promising endeavour. This seems even more compelling against the backdrop of the surge of interest the war has stimulated in the historiography of the past 10–15 years. This surge has mainly found expression in a flurry of specialized studies inspired by novel questions and approaches. Yet it has also produced a number of new attempts to synthesize the war's history that have intensified thought about possible conceptualizations. ⁹ Moreover, several related or overlapping fields of historical study have recently seen rapid progress, such as the history of World War I, the history of conflict and violence, colonial and imperial history, and international history.

Partly by drawing from and discussing this novel research, partly by suggesting possible avenues that seem worthwhile pursuing further, this article elaborates three perspectives on World War II and reflects on the consequences these may have for embedding it within the century's broader history. Firstly, I argue that the global history of the war reveals longer historical trajectories stretching back to the 19th century, serves to question the traditional notion of the ‘interwar’ period and stresses the war's long-term consequences for the history of the second half of the century. Secondly, I demonstrate that several influential interpretations of World War II need to be understood as part of its intellectual legacy. By historicizing them, we can unearth frameworks of ideas that connect the war with the post-war period. Finally, I explore the inner coherence of an ‘age of world wars’. Inasmuch as the two global wars were interwoven by important historical threads, the years between the prelude to the first war and the aftermath of the second can be considered an important period of change in its own right.

1. Global war

In recent years, historians have begun to examine the global dimension of World War II, embarking with some delay on a path that the historiography of the First World War had already taken some 10–15 years earlier, with significant consequences for our understanding of this event. ¹⁰ New research not only highlights the war's impact on Africa, Asia and Latin America, but also how regional developments in turn contributed to the global course of events. In particular, these studies have focused on the potentially worldwide connections and interlinkages created by the war – from colonial soldiers dispatched to distant battlefields and global production networks geared towards waging a war of immense geographical proportions to the global entanglements of regional conflict and the reinvigoration of globalist thought in response to the worldwide struggle. ¹¹ A global view thus contributes to a richer and more complex picture of the world war. But it also suggests important ways of thinking about the war's place within the context of larger historical developments: by raising questions of chronology, revealing the imperial nature of conflict and highlighting the far-reaching consequences of the war for the second half of the century.

To begin with, the war's global dimension makes it necessary to transcend the chronological limits of 1939 and 1945 that have become so deeply ingrained in European historical thought. Recent studies have converged in extending the war's temporal space in both directions even though they have offered different timelines. While historians have traced the origins of the war back to various events in the 1930s, they have shifted its end point to the late 1940s or even the early 1950s. ¹² Including immediate post-war struggles such as the civil wars between Poles and Ukrainians, in Greece or in China, the violent partition of India, the Dutch recolonization war in Indonesia or the internationalized Korean civil war can serve to highlight both the multidimensional nature of international conflict and the ways in which the world war spilled over into the entangled and ongoing processes of nation building, decolonization, and the ‘Cold War’.

Regarding the start of the conflagration, a truly globalized war arguably only emerged once the United States entered the conflict in 1941/42 since it was the American war effort that directly linked the vast war theatres in Europe and Asia. The violent erosion of the international order, however, had already commenced in the early 1930s. Now Japan, Italy and Germany began to embark on their expansionist projects, which they would pursue on an ever greater scale into the 1940s. Japan conquered Manchuria in 1931 and waged an all-out war against China from 1937 onwards. Mussolini's fascist regime occupied Ethiopia in 1935–36 and Albania in 1939. In the interim, Italy fought the Republican camp in the Spanish Civil War. The National Socialist regime in Germany joined its ally in this campaign before annexing the sovereign state of Austria in 1938 and invading Czechoslovakia in March 1939, where the Nazis established their first occupation regime. ¹³ To what degree each of these events formed part of World War II is certainly debatable since not all of them were strongly tied to the course of the war as it unfolded from 1939 or 1941 onwards. Ethiopia was a sideshow in the North African war before the British expelled the Italian troops by May 1941. The Spanish Civil War ended in the spring of 1939, several months before the outbreak of the European war (yet it was not uncommon for observers to retrospectively regard it as the ‘first battle of the Second World War’ a few years later). ¹⁴ Finally, the conquest of Manchuria was the product of the Kwantung Army's unauthorized foray, not planned by the Japanese government as part of a large regional war – even though the highly industrialized puppet state of ‘Manchukuo’ would become integral to Japanese visions of a ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’ in the early 1940s.

Nonetheless, all the aggressive moves undertaken by the three expansionist regimes suggest a ‘long’ road to the World War, paved with visions of conquest, the relentless will to destroy the international order, and the quest for opportunities to put this will into practice. In light of the fact that the violent interventions and occupations had already been underway for years when Hitler invaded Poland and triggered the great European war, the traditional notion of the ‘interwar’ period appears problematic. If indeed there was an intermediate phase to speak of, it shrinks considerably when we take into account how after World War I, large-scale violence persisted in the form of civil wars, paramilitary operations, state wars and pogroms ravaging the vast geographical arch from Finland to the Caucasus and Turkey. ¹⁵ In a strict sense, only eight years separated the end of the Russian Civil War from the Japanese attack on Manchuria. Admittedly, regional experiences varied widely – large parts of Eastern Europe, for instance, experienced a period of relative peace between 1923 and 1939. Yet the global history of conflict underscores how vulnerable and embattled the international order remained throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The inclusion of the colonial world would reinforce this point even further – here, a clearly discernible caesura in regard to the history of violent struggle appears entirely absent. After the immense mobilizations of the ‘Wilsonian Moment’, anticolonial unrest never completely subsided during the 1920s and 1930s – again, with regional variations – and colonial states seldom failed to react with brutal repression. ¹⁶

This is not to imply that the period in question constituted a linear arc of constant warfare and continuously explosive conflict. The Dawes and Locarno era brought a radically new attempt at solving endemic international problems, and the Great Depression, experienced as a shock by contemporaries, decisively widened the room for manoeuvre for aggressive regimes. But the series of assaults on the international order, which was only briefly interrupted, reminds us of how limited the effects of international stabilization remained and that fantasies of violent expansion did not originate in the world economic crisis. Historians who have recently made a strong case for the ‘openness’ of the interwar period may therefore have missed the point. ¹⁷ That the history of this period could have taken a different path is an important but also self-evident truth. Determinism seems oddly misplaced if we want to explain the highly complex sequence of events that culminated in another great war. However, since the historiography of the past decades has not produced any major deterministic narrative of the first half of the century, there is no need to fight windmills. Instead of stressing openness, accounts of the ‘interwar’ period and the war years may provide more historical clarity when they seek to determine potentials for violence and breakdown, to reconstruct how and to what extent they could be contained and to explain why they ultimately escalated. ¹⁸

Beyond chronology, the imperial character of the war is a second area where the global perspective offers clues on how to embed World War II within broader historical trends. ¹⁹ The expansionist projects of Germany, Japan and (with qualifications) Italy can all be considered profoundly radicalized forms of imperial conquest that drove the long-standing European obsession with dividing the world to the extreme. ²⁰ All were aimed at conquering vast stretches of contiguous territories as a means to attaining self-sufficiency by exploiting resources and gaining ‘living space’ for future settlement. To establish their rule, the three states fought their wars with unrestrained violence, much of it directed against civilians and geared towards stifling perceived or real insurgencies. In the process, they installed occupation regimes designed to brutally subjugate local populations. Moreover, many occupiers conceived of themselves as colonial masters, likened the occupied areas to the European overseas empires or perceived Chinese, Slavs and other groups in dehumanizing terms. While these processes have recently attracted considerable interest, historians have devoted less attention to the Soviet role in the imperial world war. Yet for two briefer moments in 1939/40 and 1943–45, the Soviet Union was also an expansionist power whose policies operated within an imperial framework. ²¹ Even prior to this, under the shadow of the looming war, the Stalinist regime had forcibly removed more than 150.000 Koreans from the Far Eastern border regions; several other groups, defined in ethnic terms, would follow. The Soviet leadership thus revived a Tsarist instrument widely used before and during World War I, thereby reproducing the logic of preventive violence against groups that were mistrusted as immutably subversive. When the Soviets embarked on their territorial conquest in the wake of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, they occupied and annexed those territories in North Eastern and Eastern Central Europe that had once belonged to the Tsarist Empire, which included Eastern Poland, Bessarabia, the Baltics and Finland (which resisted the Soviet invasion in a fierce battle).

Furthermore, the world war saw the prolongation or resurgence of many older, high-imperialist ambitions and conflicts. By attempting to tear down an international order that supposedly denied them their rightful place, the fascist and militarist regimes resumed or repeated the challenge Germany, Italy and Japan had posed to the concert of great powers from the 1880s onwards. To be sure, no simple continuities connected these earlier imperial ambitions to the wars of the 1930s and 1940s. The invasions of Ethiopia, China and Eastern Europe constituted a distinct form of aggressiveness and reached a new quality of violence and destruction, which was planned as an integral part of the endeavour from the outset. The following example offers a case in point: taking ‘revenge’ for the defeat of the Italian colonial army at Adua in 1896 figured prominently in the propagandistic legitimation for the attack on Ethiopia in 1935. Yet Mussolini and the fascist leadership also conceived of this war as a genuinely novel, fascist war, characterized by speed and overwhelming force and aimed at creating the ‘new fascist man’ through combat. ²² Moreover, the ideological struggle against ‘Bolshevism’ added a crucial dimension in that it accounted for much of the violent zeal of all three regimes; for the National Socialists, annihilating the ‘Judeo-Bolshevik’ empire of the Soviet Union even formed the very core of their self-proclaimed ‘war of extermination’. Not least, fanatical antisemitism was an essential factor in the National Socialist murder of the European Jews, which has no parallel in colonial warfare or, for that matter, in any other of the wars of the early 1940s. These differences notwithstanding, the expansionist drives launched by these three states in the 1930s and 1940s preserved the structure of a struggle between self-perceived imperial have-nots on the one hand, and those they deemed the privileged guardians of global power on the other. ²³ Similarly, the Soviet-Japanese conflict was a continuation of the clash in which both powers had been intermittently embroiled since the 1890s. Between 1937 and 1939 both sides fought several border wars in which Soviet forces ultimately displayed their superiority. ²⁴ This outcome helped convince the Japanese leadership to pursue the ‘Southern’ expansion instead of fighting its European arch-enemy, possibly in an alliance with National Socialist Germany. Several years later, the Soviet Union would participate in the final chapter of the Asian war when Stalin launched an extremely bloody invasion of Manchuria after the bombing of Hiroshima.

For the European powers, the war was essentially, if not exclusively, about preserving their colonial empires in the considerably enlarged form they had assumed in the late 19th century (and in parts after the Great War). These empires hugely gained in importance, arguably enhancing a trend that had already characterized World War I. ²⁵ Great Britain recruited 2.5 million Indians for military service, one million Africans (mostly as labourers) and 2.5 million soldiers from the Dominions. Soldiers from the colonies fought in all the important theatres of war. In addition, African ports, railways and military bases served as indispensable hubs in Britain's global logistical network. In particular, African raw materials such as rubber, tin or uranium were in high demand, especially after the Japanese occupation of South East Asia. While the British war effort thus proved to be highly dependent on the resources mobilized in its vast empire, the ‘Free French’ forces under Charles de Gaulle virtually only existed in the colonies. The majority of soldiers killed in French uniform after June 1940 came from the colonies.

Finally, even when one hesitates to liken the imperial character of the United States to the European overseas empires, the US were anything but a closed nation-state engaged in a global war effort. ²⁶ While the US government and businesses pushed domestic production of key resources such as oil or synthetic rubber to unforeseen heights, they still needed to create long supply chains to procure essential raw materials, such as copper from Chile, ore from Bolivia or Bauxite from the Caribbean. More generally, the United States turned into the (dominant) partner of a largely self-sufficient Anglo-American economic zone of worldwide reach. In fact, considering the far-flung logistical networks all main belligerents developed to mobilize resources and transport goods, World War II appears as a global struggle between several enormous economic areas, including the Japanese-dominated ‘Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere’, the immense (Eastern) European zone occupied by Germany and the largely autarkic Soviet Union.

Combining the various imperial layers of the global conflagration, World War II reveals itself as the culmination, in many ways, of the age of high imperialism and thus as part of a historical period stretching back to the 1880s. Around the turn of the century, these developments had appeared all but unlikely. Just when the imperialist ‘scramble’ was coming to a close, the assumption had been widespread in political and academic circles in the United States and Europe that in the near future the world would be controlled by a small number of giant empires. ²⁷ Most commentators who painted this scenario in vivid colours predicted the British Empire, the United States and Russia would be among the imperial rulers of the world. Some also believed Japan to be a candidate, and German authors hoped Germany would feature in the future imperial concert. If there ever was a moment when the world resembled these fin-de-siècle visions, it had arrived in 1942.

The world war not only marked the climactic end point of trends that had emerged in the late 19th century, however, but also proved to have a lasting impact on the history of the latter half of the 20th century. By highlighting the war's role as a catalyst for the transformation of the international order, global history opens up a final interpretive perspective. ²⁸ The real beginning of the end of colonial rule was among the most momentous processes stimulated by the war. Even though the war in 1914–18 had already set in motion a chain of protests that lingered on into the 1920s and 1930s in many colonized regions, such as the Middle East or Indochina, colonial powers had managed to uphold colonial rule by combining innocuous political concessions with fierce repression. World War II then crucially undermined the foundation of imperial stability. Due to the immense contributions of the colonies to the empires’ war efforts, expectations of political gains among colonial subjects had grown considerably and arguably ran even higher than they had 25 years previously. At any rate, the new demands were taken up by nationalist and anticolonial movements that proved to be politically more experienced and much better organized than their predecessors. Not least, Europeans provided them with new discourses of legitimation, such as the promise of ‘development’ that they increasingly emphasized as the war's end approached. Of more immediate importance was the Japanese conquest of the European colonies in South East Asia, which revealed to many colonial observers how utterly hollow the claim of the superior ‘White race’ actually was. Subsequently, the new Japanese rulers strengthened some of the local nationalist groups, such as in Indonesia or the Philippines, while others gained legitimacy by resisting their imperial overlords. Both contributed to the resolute opposition these groups would mount against the return of their former European masters. When the Japanese finally surrendered, they left behind a power vacuum that lasted for a brief but decisive moment, as anticolonial activists hastened to create facts on the ground. The relentless struggle for recolonization and decolonization, sparked by the return of the European colonialists after the war, would cast a dark shadow over many colonies for years or even decades to come. Whatever changes World War II had brought, they certainly did not pre-determine the outcome of this protracted colonial endgame. Yet once nationalist movements proclaimed independence, as in Vietnam, or actually attained full sovereignty, as in the Philippines, India, Burma and Indonesia between 1946 and 1949, they crossed an important historical threshold. For the first time, the definitive end of colonial rule was a real option, and the more colonies gained independence, the more movements elsewhere came to demand the same for themselves.

Similarly, the rise of the United States as a global superpower did not occur in the wake of the profound shifts in international power relations initiated by World War I, as has recently been argued. ²⁹ Rather, the ‘American Century’, as proclaimed by publisher Henry Luce in 1942, commenced in the early 1940s. ³⁰ That the United States gained an overwhelmingly dominant position on the world stage resulted, on the one hand, from the Roosevelt administration's decision to vigorously embark on the path of global engagement, which amounted to a secular break in foreign policy thought. ³¹ On the other hand, it was only the ‘production miracle’ of the war years that created the material capacity for the United States to embrace the role of a global leader. ³²

Moreover, as a consequence of their new globalist foreign policy, the United States acted as a driving force behind the creation of a new architecture of international organizations. For the deep changes in transnational governance that would shape international politics over the subsequent decades, the transformative power of the war also proved crucial. From the early 1940s, a broad consensus emerged among (mostly ‘Western’) foreign policy officials and international experts, according to whom an entirely new system of international security would be needed to forestall another catastrophe like the one currently engulfing the globe. They soon launched an array of initiatives aimed at creating the foundations for a more stable post-war world. The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration began an immense effort to aid refugees in Europe and Asia and to help rebuild regions devastated by the war. Economic and agrarian experts devised schemes to stimulate worldwide food production and provide for its distribution, in the hope of preventing famines similar to those that had killed millions during the war. Among the myriad plans, the creation of the United Nations Organization in 1945 was a relatively late step but clearly provided the fledgling international system with an emblematic new centre. Although many of these programmes and organizations were built in accordance with blueprints that had been developed by international officials during the 1920s and 1930s, their guiding principle was to overcome the perceived dramatic shortcomings of the League of Nations system. In the process, the transnational interventions launched by many of the new organizations reached unprecedented dimensions. The World Health Organization provides only one example of many. ³³ Leaving behind the mostly reactive approach of the past, the organization established the active pursuit of ‘world health’ as its bold new aim. These ambitions soon found their expression in extremely far-reaching campaigns to ‘eradicate’ selected diseases worldwide. At the peak of its new-found strength in the early 1960s, the WHO conducted its ‘Malaria Eradication Program’ – its largest up to that date – in no less than 85 states of the global South.

Thus, the historical impact of World War II was clearly not reduced to the havoc it wreaked. Several other momentous changes could be mentioned. The war proved crucial for the victory of the communists in the Chinese civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic as well as for the foundation of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict that erupted immediately thereafter. Even the superpower conflict had important roots in the World War since both the United States and the Soviet Union now learned to think in terms of global threats, developing the mindset that would prove so consequential for the dynamics playing out in the early ‘Cold War’. In all these domains, the war accelerated earlier trends and created the conditions for their breakthrough, acting as a powerful catalyst for a new world order.

2. The World War on its own terms

Even though the global entanglements of the war receded into the background of subsequent historiography, Western historical thought evolved under the spell of ideas that had emerged at the time for decades to come. Rooted in political debate, propaganda or academic reflection, they cast a long intellectual shadow over attempts to imbue the war period with proper historical meaning. Several of the most prominent interpretations palpably influenced the historical literature well into the 2000s and sometimes even beyond this point: those of ‘total war’, of a ‘modern Thirty Years’ War’ and of a ‘European’ or ‘international civil war’ (Weltbürgerkrieg [world civil war] in German). Historians employed them in a variety of ways: The notion of ‘total war’ came to form the core of a comprehensive research endeavour inquiring into the changing nature of modern warfare, whereas the ‘modern Thirty Years’ War’ served more as a metaphorical entry point for essayistic explorations of the period between 1914 and 1945. ³⁴ What they all shared was the fact that they originated as contemporaneous attempts to make sense of the causes, nature, or consequences of the second global war (and sometimes even earlier developments emerging in the wake of the first).

If we shift the perspective and examine these ideas in their own right, as interpretations and perceptions arising from the context of the war, they open new windows into the intellectual history of the war period. While the concept of ‘total war’ will be discussed in more detail below, the idea of an international civil war helps to highlight some important intellectual trajectories. ³⁵ This notion has proven to have a long life: its origins date back to World War I and the most recent wave of historical interest could be observed between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s. Over the decades, authors charged the formula with various meanings. During and after World War I, the notion of European civil war referred to what many observers regarded as the self-destruction of a continent bound together by strong cultural and social commonalities – a ‘civil conflict in the European family’, as John Maynard Keynes put it, in which members of a shared European civilization fought against each other. ³⁶ What resonated here was a positive view of transnational interdependence that had been fairly widespread in political and academic circles before the war. Around the end of the Great War, the communist movement projected a different notion. Particularly for Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, the supposedly imminent world revolution implied a large-scale civil war, as the working classes in all European nations would revolt against the bourgeoisie and topple their governments. In a giant upheaval that would either occur in parallel fashion or even be interconnected, all nations would be torn apart by the same inner conflict. Lenin consequently believed civil war was a ‘continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle’. ³⁷ Other authors, by contrast, took the extreme nature of violence that civil wars often displayed as their point of departure. If they conceived of the conflicts during the first half of the 20th century as a European civil war, it was because the warring parties pursued the complete destruction of their enemies, employing excessively brutal means.

The most influential understanding of the international civil war, however, framed the conflicts of the period in terms of a dualistic ideological confrontation that would be – or needed to be – waged to the extreme. Most notably, a number of prominent German right-wing intellectuals toyed with this idea. In the late 1930s, eminent legal scholar Carl Schmitt began to denounce the raging ‘world civil war’, which in his view had replaced the traditional clash between clearly separate nations. ³⁸ The fruit of an evil universalism, he argued, war was nowadays waged in the name of generalized moral values and thus necessarily aimed at the opponent's utter annihilation. Initially, Schmitt directed his critique at the post-war international order established by the Allies in Paris and forcibly upheld ever since. Once the United States entered the world war, however, he started to shift his attack, targeting a new world order dominated by the American hegemon. ³⁹ After the end of World War II, Schmitt, in a final transformation, located the ‘world civil war’ in the Cold War struggle between the superpowers. ⁴⁰

In the 1950s, a cross-disciplinary group of young German academics, all of whom had been deeply impressed by Schmitt, picked up the threads. Despite the considerable differences in their intellectual work, Reinhart Koselleck, Hanno Kesting, Roman Schnur and Nicolaus Sombart all interpreted the Cold War as a ‘world civil war’ pitting two universalized ideologies and philosophies of history against each other. ⁴¹ To lend more historical weight to this idea, they embedded the current global civil war within an expansive model of historical epochs stretching back to the 16th century. According to this model, the confessional age, the age of revolutions and revolutionary wars, partly also the world war era and finally, the Cold War all exemplified periods of polarized ideological conflict. National Socialism hardly figured in this elaborate system of historical parallels. The apologetic undercurrent was not always as bluntly visible as in the work of Schnur, who located the origins of the National Socialist murder of the European Jews in the French revolutionary terreur. ⁴² Yet National Socialism was clearly either derivative – just another link in the sequence of ideological battles characteristic of modernity as a whole – or reactive. In Kesting's view, National Socialism and Fascism had served to suspend the world civil war for at least three decades.

To a surprising degree, German historians have overlooked that the idea of international civil war also stood at the cradle of post-war German ‘Zeitgeschichte’ (Contemporary History), as it came to be institutionalized from the 1950s onwards. When German émigré historian Hans Rothfels defined 1917 as the beginning of the present (and therefore of Zeitgeschichte) in his legendary 1953 essay ‘Zeitgeschichte als Aufgabe’, he grounded this view in the supposed ‘universal situation of civil war’. After the strange interlude of the age of nation states, Rothfels argued, this situation had re-established itself with the ‘double event’ of the American entry into World War I and the Bolshevik revolution, connecting the present to the type of conflict characteristic of the confessional age and the French revolutionary era. ⁴³ By contrast, Ernst Nolte's view of the ‘European civil war’ produced much more heated debate when it triggered the so-called Historikerstreit of the late 1980s. Yet it would be erroneous to see Nolte's highly controversial work as a direct evolution from the positions right-wing intellectuals had developed in the 1930s or 1950s. Not only did Nolte frame the main ideological dualism as the clash between National Socialism and Bolshevism; but he also drove the exculpatory implications of the ‘European civil war’ to their chilling extreme. Reversing causalities, he pointed to what he thought was an understandable fear among the European bourgeoisie of an exterminatory Bolshevik assault and interpreted the Holocaust as a legitimate, if anticipated reaction to the Bolshevik ‘class murder’. ⁴⁴

Although the notion of an international civil war was most prominent among rightist intellectuals, it never remained confined to these circles. Interestingly, a more ‘leftist’ interpretation had been present almost from the beginning. In 1938, German-American political scientist Carl Joachim Friedrich regarded the Spanish Civil War as symptomatic of a Europe ‘divided in hostile camps’ rallying around fanatical ideological movements, which ‘cut across nations and create the setting for civil as much as for foreign war’. ⁴⁵ Friedrich, too, believed this sort of deeply polarized conflict resembled the confessional age (and he surmised that 1936 may have marked the beginning of a new Thirty Years’ War). Unlike all other commentators, however, Friedrich assumed a much more global perspective. In fact, if Indian Communist Manabendra Nath Roy had charged that ‘the ‘World’ of the world revolution was limited to Europe and America’ in his famous controversy with Lenin in 1920, the same was true for the talk of ‘world civil war’. ⁴⁶ Friedrich for his part subsumed the Japanese war in China – which he saw mainly as a conflict between Japan and the Soviet Union – under the overarching constellation of international civil war. Half a century later, Eric J. Hobsbawm, in his magisterial Age of Extremes, restricted this model again to North America and Europe. In his view – more an aperçu than an interpretation – the interwar and war periods had been marked by an ‘international ideological civil war’ between ‘progress’ and ‘reaction’, which he spelled out as ‘on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously, the Russian revolution; on the other, its opponents’. ⁴⁷

Overall, then, the idea of a bipolar ideological conflict proved no less appealing for Marxists and left liberals than it did for right-wing intellectuals – while a centrist concept never emerged. The ideological fault line that was supposedly at the heart of the international civil war proved to be fairly flexible. If the fascist–communist dualism prevailed in the discourse of the 1930s, the thrust of the debate clearly shifted to the opposition between democratic capitalism and a communist planned economy from the 1950s onwards. Yet the main antagonistic forces could also be identified as Western democracy and National Socialism (as Ernst Jünger believed along with Schmitt in the 1940s) or as the revolutionary left on the one hand and its conservative as well as extreme rightist opponents on the other hand (as posited by Hobsbawm). ⁴⁸ Those authors who emphasized the polarity between democracy and communism found it hard to situate National Socialism and Fascism, which somehow dropped from their historical model. Some felt they had to accommodate it, if only as an exception – Rothfels and Hobsbawm spoke of a temporary ‘triangle’ of ideological currents –, while for others, making National Socialism vanish from the historical picture was the whole point.

From the viewpoint of this discourse, the end of World War II, the defeat of the German and Japanese claims to world domination and the onset of the confrontation between the new superpowers clearly did not mark a profound break. Rather, the persistence of an intellectual framework that subsumed the various kinds of international conflict under a bipolar superstructure provided for a fairly smooth transition. At the same time, the strong emphasis observers from the 1950s onwards placed on the ideological nature of current world affairs were not as novel as historians have often believed. The diagnosis of bipolar ideological confrontation, which was so popular after World War II, proved to be partly rooted in perceptions of the world war era. In its various guises, the idea of a world split into ideological camps was symptomatic of both the interwar, war and post-war years, all forming a sort of age of ideological interpretation.

Subsequent generations of historians who employed the concept of international civil war to describe the political landscape of the 1930s and 1940s have inevitably carried some of this intellectual baggage over with them. From today's vantage point, the interpretation appears particularly reductionist, levelling the multifaceted and complex nature of the political antagonisms of these decades by prioritizing one of the fault lines at the expense of others. Undoubtedly, both Communism and Fascism turned into widely attractive transnational movements inspiring political ideas and action in virtually all regions of the world. Yet rather than forming monolithic blocs, these ideologies were adapted and reshaped by political activists according to regional or group-related needs and interests. ⁴⁹ Moreover, they developed in the midst of a much broader and dense web of international conflicts – with Communists fighting Social Democrats, Polish nationalists fighting Ukrainian nationalists, Spanish anarchists fighting Spanish Catholics, Vietnamese nationalists, both Communist and non-Communist, fighting French imperialists, and many more.

3. Age of World Wars

When Neville Chamberlain embarked on the first airplane ride of his life in September 1938 to meet Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden and defuse the Sudeten Crisis in an early instance of shuttle diplomacy, he had the July crisis on top of his mind. After the outbreak of the World War in 1914, he explained to the German ‘Führer’, ‘England had been reproached on many sides because she had not made her intentions [of entering the war] clear enough’. This time, Chamberlain left no doubt that ‘the possibility of a war must be taken into account’. ⁵⁰ To the British Prime Minister, this reference came naturally, and he was certainly not alone. People who were around 40 years of age at the end of the 1930s, when Japan and Germany began their wars of conquest, had lived through the war of 1914–18 as adolescents or young adults. To them, the idea of living in an age of world wars was depressingly obvious.

In the copious historical literature, however, the question of how the World Wars were interlinked, both causally and in contemporaneous thought, has stimulated surprisingly little systematic reflection. Essentially, historians have pursued four more or less fruitful avenues. Firstly, they have illuminated the revisionist roots of the Italian and German expansionist drives in the 1920s and 1930s. ⁵¹ Even though their plans of occupation and exploitation ultimately went far beyond, the ‘unfinished business’ (Ian Kershaw) of eviscerating the Paris peace order remained an important driving force. Secondly, historians variously engaged in generic comparisons between the two World Wars, highlighting similarities and differences in those features that ostensibly distinguished them from earlier wars, such as extreme mobilization of economies and societies or methods of ‘total’ warfare. ⁵² These comparisons remained static, however, as they not only passed over the causal dynamics that possibly connected the wars, but also changes in the historical contexts of the wars. Thirdly, several European histories have framed the years between 1914 and 1945 as a coherent period in terms of the endemic political instability, recurring economic crises and numerous excesses of violence, in contrast to both the previous and subsequent eras. ⁵³ Finally, a number of empirical studies specifically focused on important connections between the wars, such as the practice and perception of the aerial war or possible continuities in the German occupations of Eastern Europe. ⁵⁴ Most recently, historians have turned their attention to the multiple civil wars that appear emblematic of European history between the 1910s and 1940s, finally setting out to replace the speculative interpretation of ‘international civil war’ with precise empirical study. ⁵⁵ While demonstrating how productive this connective perspective can be, these authors usually did not use their findings to reflect on the nature of the world war era more generally.

Overwhelmingly, the literature has treated each of the world wars on its own terms. Consequently, historians today face two immensely rich yet largely separate bodies of historiography. The links between the wars were manifold, however, and they operated at different levels. The Paris peace treaties were by no means the only legacy of World War I that proved to have a lasting effect. Many Ukrainian nationalists vividly recalled the failed attempt to create a Ukrainian nation state in 1917–18 when they saw a new window of opportunity with the German invasion of the Soviet Union. ⁵⁶ Everywhere in Eastern Europe, conflicts arising from projects of nation building in multi-ethnic regions constituted their own kind of unfinished business. Many of these conflicts had originated even before World War I but were profoundly shaped by its course and outcome as well as by the simmering problems of the 1920s and 1930s. ⁵⁷ On a different note, in many of the belligerent countries, the Great War had raised the question of female industrial labour, sparking ongoing discussions that established the terms for labour policies when the second global war arrived. ⁵⁸ Likewise, World War I had given rise to the first attempts at international criminal prosecution, forming the basis upon which legal experts would later build when preparing the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. ⁵⁹

Examining these causal as well as perceptual links between the World Wars not only contributes to a better understanding of the period itself – it also provides an important angle from which to determine the place of World War II within the 20th century. Two brief case studies may serve to illustrate this point. To begin with, the whole complex of expectations of a future war and explanations for this war once it had begun underscores the strong inner coherence of the period. Military planning staffs and military theorists commenced with their intellectual preparation for the next war as soon as World War I had ended in 1918. In the 1920s, a remarkably polyphonous debate unfolded, in which futurist visions of a radically destructive aerial war – as imagined by Italian theorist Giulio Douhet – alternately clashed and coexisted with more traditional scenarios. Theorists such as the highly popular George Soldan in Germany envisioned a future war that would resemble World War I in many important respects. ⁶⁰ Even so, a broad if sometimes tacit consensus emerged among military authors that the development of warfare had crossed a threshold during the Great War, precluding any return to the way wars had previously been fought. ⁶¹ Most military thinkers agreed that the use of airplanes and tanks would change the nature of war at least to some degree. More importantly, all believed that the relentless mobilization of societies would be the hallmark of every major war in the future and would ultimately decide its outcome. It was within this context that the concept of ‘total war’ came to full fruition. Coined at the end of World War I, the term initially reflected the perceived novelty of the comprehensive civilian mobilization that observers regarded as a defining feature of the European war. ⁶² In one of the earliest instances of its usage, French right-wing writer Léon Daudet spoke of the ‘extension of the battle […] to the political, economic, commercial, industrial, intellectual, juridical and financial domains’. ⁶³ This conception not only emphasised the crucial importance of economic and material resources in a highly industrialized war, but also the unprecedented physical and psychological strain placed on society at large. Particularly in the 1930s, various authors radicalized the concept by fleshing out a component that had been inherent all along (and discussed among military theorists since the early post-war period): If modern warfare depended on the effort of the entire population to sustain it, then this population had to become the target of attacks in order to bring the war to a victorious conclusion. In other words, total war required total annihilation. ⁶⁴ At the same time, theorists and intellectuals pointed out that in the next war, much more could be done to exhaust civilian and industrial capacities to the fullest than had been the case in the Great War. Evoking ‘total war’ in this sense was a way of conjuring up and even intellectually preparing an even more extreme war of the future. ⁶⁵ The expectation of an increasingly limitless war became so deeply entrenched in the military discourse during the 1920s and 1930s that it may well have contributed to the circumstance that belligerent governments really did mobilize social and economic resources on such a vast scale once the war broke out.

Furthermore, the experience of World War I strongly influenced French and British diplomacy towards the aggressive German revisionism of the 1930s. ⁶⁶ If the Chamberlain and (to a lesser degree) Daladier governments persisted in their search for a peaceful settlement in the face of the ever-increasing demands made by the National Socialists, they were partly motivated by the fearful prospect that the next great war would be even more devastating than the last. Beyond this, they firmly assumed their societies were unwilling to enter a new war precisely because of the harrowing memories of the last war – although they probably misread the public mood, which hardened in the aftermath of the Munich Accord. At any rate, experiences of the Great War profoundly shaped the path that led both the British and French societies into war. German air raids had had a traumatic impact on considerable parts of the British public, irrespective of how limited these attacks may have seemed once the aerial war assumed massively destructive proportions in the 1940s. ⁶⁷ Such memories created a pervasive feeling of helplessness among the British as they witnessed the rapid pace of German rearmament. When the war had finally broken out, large sectors of the British and French public accepted their fate, albeit with a deep sense of disillusionment.

Finally, after the National Socialists had successfully launched their campaigns of conquest in 1939–40, politicians and intellectuals instantly embarked on an agonizing search for explanations. Many observers characteristically referred back to the period since World War I (and sometimes even earlier) to confront the causes of the new conflict. Marc Bloch's ‘testimony’, written after the French capitulation in the summer of 1940, was among the most prominent and far-reaching expressions of this soul-searching. ⁶⁸ The renowned historian traced the origins of what he believed to be the pervasive decadence of French society back to the period of the Great War, from which France, in his view, had emerged as a victim of its success. While the defeated Germans had come to master the military and technological powers of the modern age, he portrayed France as a thoroughly anachronistic country that was essentially refighting the last war.

If the inner cohesiveness of the world war era was reflected in the interlinked ways contemporaries anticipated and accounted for the Next Great War, it also strongly informed their political ideas for a post-war future. From the early 1940s onwards, an intense debate unfolded in Western countries about the restructuring of the political, economic and social orders – from constitutions and social security to family norms – to prevent another descent into dictatorship and war. ⁶⁹ These discussions were inextricably linked to diagnoses of the political problems, economic blunders and social fragmentation that had plagued Western societies during the 1920s and 1930s – mistakes and weaknesses which, in retrospect, were believed to have prepared the ground for the Second World War. Drawing lessons from the recent crisis-ridden past became a pervasive theme in this wide-ranging discourse on political reform and renewal. This impulse certainly drove discussions about the renovation of ‘democracy’. After the experience of dictatorial rule or foreign occupation, Western European politicians and political observers during the ‘long’ 1940s shared the preference for a markedly conservative form of democracy. ⁷⁰ Many commentators argued that the new democratic order needed to be based on a strong executive branch, ‘controlled’ and decidedly non-pluralistic forms of participation, federalist or subsidiary structures of power-sharing, effective social safeguards and guaranteed individual rights. These plans amounted to a reshaped democratic ideal that in many ways proved to be a direct reflection of the functional problems and potential for misuse attributed to interwar political systems. They responded to the painful experience of fractured party systems, the supposed egotism of interest groups, political vulnerability arising from the lack of provisions against unemployment, and finally the all-too-easy abolishment of democracies and their rapid transformation into authoritarian or totalitarian dictatorships.

The vibrant planning discourse surrounding the re-establishment of international organizations resembled these domestic reform debates in that the period between the 1920s and 1940s served as a ubiquitous foil against which the new structures of transnational governance were to be created. This clearly manifested itself in the conference at Bretton Woods in July 1944, where government officials, central bankers and financial experts from 44 states assembled to work out the foundations of the post-war economic order. The policies agreed upon here aimed at stimulating international trade, liberalizing markets and stabilizing currencies, and they were placed under the surveillance of new international organizations (such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund). Harry Dexter White, the mastermind of American economic planning, was not alone in concluding that this system had been devised to prevent a return to ‘the barbaric international economic relationships of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties’. ⁷¹ In fact, the Bretton Woods order came into life as a remedy for the defects that had eroded the international economy during the 1920s and 1930s, which experts retrospectively regarded as a crucial precondition of the outbreak of World War II. More specifically, delegates at Bretton Woods strove to ban the ghosts of trade protection, beggar-thy-neighbour currency devaluation and harmful retreat into regional autarky. These policies had all contributed to a rapid deterioration of international economic relations in the wake of the Great Depression. That planning the post-war future meant avoiding the mistakes of the recent past was also a central premise in all other domains of international governance, such as in debates on the UN Security Council, international human rights guarantees, humanitarian aid or health.

Of course, not all facets of the history of World War II were shaped by the effects or memories of World War I and its aftermath. In particular, the history of war-related violence against civilians seems to point to important disconnections and disjunctures. Occupation regimes during the World War of 1914–18 – in Belgium, France, Serbia or parts of the Baltic and Western Russia – were undoubtedly harsh and experienced as a genuine shock by the occupied populations. Yet rather than taking their cue from the experiences of occupiers in the Great War, the various systems of occupational rule that National Socialist Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union established some 25 years later were mainly inspired by the destructive utopias of highly ideologized and radicalized regimes. Furthermore, it remains a point of contention whether and how the appalling violence local populations in the Nazi-occupied Eastern European territories committed against Jews was related to the massive wave of pogroms between 1918 and 1921 that had cost the lives of probably at least 40,000 Jewish men and women. It is highly likely that local populations in the early 1940s had memories of the violent attacks 20 years earlier. However, it is more difficult to determine the extent to which these earlier excesses had prepared Poles, Lithuanians or Ukrainians for the mistreatment of Jews, let alone how they actually informed the massacres of the 1940s. ⁷² Yet even when important variations are taken into account, a dense network of interconnections emerges when we consider the ways in which the consequences, legacies and memories of World War I shaped the anticipation of, preparation for, or protection against the next war. The same applies to the ways in which the organization of war, political planning and social perceptions during the late 1930s and 1940s referred back to or built on the evaluation of the previous conflagration and its consequences. These cross-references reveal the era of the world wars as an important space of experience in its own right.

This sense of interconnection between the wars was not limited to Europe. In many colonies, imperial mobilization for the war produced an uneasy sense of déjà vu. In Indian political circles, there was a widespread perception that the European war essentially prolonged a phase of an intensified imperial showdown that had erupted in 1914. ⁷³ Significantly, these activists always understood the European aggression of the 1930s and 1940s as the kind of imperial war that current historians seek to retrieve. These views formed the backdrop to the Indian National Congress’ staunch rejection of British war policy in the fall of 1939. Their opposition was strongly motivated by the realization that the hardships Indians had endured while supporting the British war effort between 1914 and 1918 had not paid off politically in the two decades since. As the Congress stated in a signal resolution from September 1939, ‘the declared war aims’ in the Great War ‘were the preservation of democracy, self-determination and the freedom of small nations’ but in the end ‘the victorious Powers added largely to their colonial domains’. Subsequently, the British government had done nothing to stop the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Fascist intervention in the Spanish Civil War, Japanese aggression in China, or the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, even though Fascism and National Socialism needed to be seen as ‘the intensification of the principle of imperialism against which the Indian people have struggled for many years’. When after the German invasion of Poland the British government promised constitutional reform – but not independence – Indian nationalists regarded these declarations as an anachronistic rehearsal of positions that had been unacceptable for 20 years. ⁷⁴ Under the impression of renewed global hostilities, the seemingly immovable British stance led to a further deep delegitimation of British rule in India that prepared the ground for the final escalation of the struggle for independence.

4. Conclusion

In the history of the 20th century, World War II occupies an exceptional place on account of the havoc that the fighting and killing wreaked upon vast regions of the globe – not only Europe, but also South and South East Asia, North and sub-Saharan Africa. The scale of death and destruction was staggering and unprecedented in many regards. A lasting legacy of trauma and mourning that shapes cultures of memory to this day can be observed in all societies engulfed by the war. Yet the war's historical significance transcends its disruptive effects on social life and the violent dissolution of the material, political and moral foundations that societies would subsequently be at pains to rebuild and renew. Exploring the history of the conflict through the prisms of global transformations, contemporaneous interpretations of war and the connections between the two world wars suggests different possibilities for situating World War II within the overarching context of 20th-century history.

Firstly, these perspectives make it possible to inscribe the war in broader historical developments that originated in the late 19th century and evolved over the following decades until far into the second half of the 20th century. The World War represents an important juncture in the longer trajectory of imperialism, marking a crucial turning point in the process that led from the dramatic intensification of imperial expansion in the 1880s to the prolonged dissolution of colonial rule after the mid-20th century. The same is true for many other processes mentioned in this article – both national and international histories in the long 20th century were profoundly shaped by these developments. The war reflected and reconfigured significant longer-term trends in the history of state conflict, global governance, nation building, economic thought and systemic political change, all bequeathed by the late 19th century.

Secondly, the war proved to have a deeply transformative impact on these processes, prompting far-reaching changes that would influence the political, economic and social history of the century's second half in many ways. The multiple collapses of imperial rule in South East Asia, precipitated by Japanese expansionism and its implosion, created new opportunities for anticolonial movements to claim independence. Both the United States and the Soviet Union became economic and military heavyweights through their war efforts, poised for the global battles of the ‘Cold War’. Lessons drawn from the economic breakdowns of the 1920s and 1930s by politicians and experts who lived through a global war between vast economic zones propelled the implementation of liberal economic structures in large parts of the world. For experts dealing with the plight of refugees, food and health or international law, the global problems created by the war were a window of opportunity for the creation of new structures of transnational political intervention. Finally, the prospect of defeating the right-wing dictatorships stimulated discussion about a reformed and more resilient democracy, preparing the ground for a new wave of establishing democratic systems. In all these cases, World War II acted as a powerful catalyst for global change.

To be sure, World War I had already been a consequential moment of acceleration for all these developments. The Great War had marked the highest point in the mobilization of colonial resources that empires had seen up until then, making the metropolises painfully aware of their virtually existential dependence on empire. In the colonies, the same mobilization produced ardent expectations of an imminent end to colonial rule and, when these hopes were quashed, fomented anticolonial unrest to an unforeseen degree. As demonstrated by the Indian example, these events proved to be a significant prelude that strongly resonated when the next great war broke out 20 years later. Moreover, the world wars caused two profound and sudden shifts in the structure of the struggle for global power as it had emerged in the late 19th century. The fighting during the war of 1914–18 catapulted the United States and, to a lesser degree, Japan into the ranks of dominant powers, while defeat and revolution produced the new totalitarian challenge posed to the state system by Bolshevism and Fascism. By destroying the Fascist and military regimes on the one hand and relegating the Western European powers to a secondary position on the other, World War II would then only leave the United States and the Soviet Union as contenders for global supremacy. The war thus brought the hegemonic struggles to a provisional end point, setting the terms for international conflict during the almost five decades to come. ⁷⁵

In other areas, a similar picture emerges of two momentous impulses for change provoked by the global wars in quick succession. While the devastation caused by the Great War expedited the inauguration of an extensive system of international organizations, the experience of World War II galvanized efforts to profoundly recast both the ambitions and the institutional structures of transnational governance. Finally, the wars and their aftermath provoked two bloody waves of attempts at nation state building in the vast regions of Eastern Europe, which brought conflicts that had been seething since the late 19th century to an extremely violent ‘solution’. In fact, after World War II the region saw a measure of ethnic homogeneity unknown since the arrival of nationalism. ⁷⁶ These brief reflections make a case for the desirability of exploring in more detail the causal nexus between the world wars, which are understood as a sequence of transformative shifts going far beyond the revisionist legacy that arose from World War I. From this perspective, the pivot years may well turn out to be a pivotal period, stretching from 1911–1914 to 1945–53 and forming the core of an epoch encompassing the decades between the late 19th and late 20th centuries.

To the extent that such a causal nexus existed, it would further corroborate a third line of interpretation suggested in this article. In many ways, World War II can be seen as part of an age of world wars whose historical relevance is not limited to the fact that these three decades exhibited an exceptional level of crisis, instability and violence. Nor does this perspective entail a deterministic sense of inevitability, marking out a direct road leading from the Paris peace conference to German or even Japanese aggression in the late 1930s. Rather, this interpretation confronts the fact that historians need to retrospectively explain the process causing a second global catastrophe that followed upon the first. One explanatory factor lies in placing greater emphasis upon the precarious global order than many historical accounts have done thus far. The ‘interwar’ can hardly be seen as a monolithic period of peace; rather, it needs to be understood as fraying at the edges, threatened by simmering revisionist and expansionist programs and experienced differently in various regions. Moreover, the notion of an era of world wars stresses the strong perceptual links between the two global conflagrations that in many respects tied them together in a coherent space of experience. Experiences of the Great War determined how politicians, intellectuals and civilians imagined, prepared, attempted to avoid or, as in the Indian case, opposed the next great conflict. As the second globalised war approached, the first one served as a crucial point of reference for military scenarios, political strategies and economic planning. These interconnections also manifested themselves in several important interpretations of the war period that emerged at the time. For all their diversity, the discourses of ‘total war’, a ‘new Thirty Years’ War’ or ‘international civil war’ provided a means of making sense of events by compressing them into coherent and straightforward intellectual frameworks.