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Europe's Identity of 20th Century

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Submitted By brittvonk
Words 997
Pages 4
Britt Vonk
History 158c
Prof. Cramsey

Europe’s Identity Crisis
Europe today presents an attractive image: a plethora of states where people live in close proximity, prosperous, stable and (mostly) at peace with themselves and the world. Europe yesterday, however, was a little different: the killing field of the 20th century. From 1912 to 1949 it was the site of war, destitution and at least three sustained and partly successful attempts to destroy and exterminate whole populations. Hundreds of millions of Europeans were killed, imprisoned, tortured, uprooted and expelled in the name of racial, political and national ideological goals. The thirty years of war was followed an unprecedented 45-year period of peace, even if it was a peace imposed by the Cold War. How should one tell the story of twentieth century European history? Was it the process of capitalism and liberal democracy, referring the world wars as aberrations of “true” European history? In Dark Continent, Mark Mazower highlights the historical contingency of this European era. “Though we may like to think democracy’s victory in the Cold War proves its deep roots in Europe’s soil, history tells us otherwise” (Mazower, 5) He ties his interpretation into his themes of decline, fall, and social struggles in Europe to his thesis that communism, Nazism, and democracy are more related than they might seem. Through these views of the forms of governments and the main social struggle of the era, Mazower helps the reader gain a greater understanding of interwar Europe. In this essay I will present how fascisms and communism were just as European as liberal democracy, as it is easy to retrospectively consider them anomalies of European history. Additionally I will focus on Mazower’s view on Nazism and how Nazism stood out from the other European visions and gained its power throughout Europe.

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