Just Finished Reading: Dark Continent – Europe’s Twentieth Century by Mark Mazower (FP: 1998)

As you can no doubt imagine, covering a goodly chunk of a continent over around a hundred years of its history in a shade over 400 pages is going to look at trends more than details and incidents of significance rather than detailed narratives. This is the case with this somewhat dense but fascinating volume. Starting with the aftermath of the First World War the author hits the highlights of the Soviet Revolution and the chaos in the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire and the defeated Germany. With boundaries redrawn and whole ‘new’ nations created (or recreated) – to say nothing of internal fighting and civil war – mass migrations took place the likes of which the world had not seen before and would not experience again until the end of the Second World War. As reconstruction moved ahead and Reparations became ever more problematic the western democracies struggled and sometimes failed to address the needs and the demands of their populations. Both Italy and, a decade or so later, Germany abandoned democracy altogether in an attempt to redress grievances arising directly from the First World War. Concentrating at times on Germany, Russia, France and Italy the author highlighted the various attempts to reshape the world, or at least their small part of it, in their image – and how each in turn largely failed in their endeavours. With Reconstruction as the major issue arising from World War Two, the US had learnt its lesson from the first war and instituted the Marshall Plan both to revive/reinvigorate the European economy (and not insignificantly bolster its own after the boom years of the war) and as a direct counter to the Soviet threat. This treat also assisted in the growing integration of Europe firstly as an economic entity and then, increasingly, as a political one. It had been a long time coming but the idea of a European Union or even a United States of Europe had been seriously talked about – at least in some quarters – since the 1920’s.

This was at times a dense read. Even without more than a cursory look at the world wars themselves the author still had a lot of ground to cover. But cover it he did and cover it very well indeed. This is much more than a brief overview of the western end of a continental mass. This is looking over broad flowing rivers and then diving down into the depths to discover both how the rivers flowed and what caused them to periodically change their course. Some time was spent of islands in the stream and where rivers met, sometimes almost imperceptive and at other times in great cataracts or waterfalls. Occasionally individual fish where pulled out and examined before being released back into their natural environment – but you get the point before my allusions to the flow of historical narrative moves too far into the strained and farcical. Although comparatively short – considering the subject matter and scope – this was a very accomplished work that would reward repeated reading to tease out a fuller understanding of the historical events that shaped Europe. Definitely recommended but be prepared to give it the time and effort it deserves.