Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century

Citation

Mazower, M. (2008). Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. Penguin Books.

Chapter Summary

First published in 1998, the book is an interpretive history of Europe from the end of the First World War to the wars in former Yugoslavia, in about 500 pages. Its central claim, as Tony Judt summarised it in The New York Times, is that it is wrong "to read the present back into the past" (Mazower's words) and assume that democracy is rooted in Europe's soil because the Cold War ended as it did. Mazower presents the continent's century as a struggle between tolerance and racial extermination, imperial ambition and national self-determination, and liberty and the tyrannies of Right and Left. The first three chapters are described from their titles and the opening chapter, and the later chapters from the book's themes as reviewers describe them.

Chapter 1: The Deserted Temple: Democracy's Rise and Fall

The opening chapter begins in 1918, when the fall of the great autocratic empires left thirteen republics in Europe where there had been three, and parliamentary democracy was enthroned across the continent in new constitutions. It then follows how liberalism's triumph proved short-lived: the shadow of the Russian Revolution, the authoritarian turns from Hungary in 1919 to Italy in 1922 and Poland in 1926, and the Depression after 1929, by which time the key political debates were taking place on the Right.

Chapter 2: Empires, Nations, Minorities

The title announces the chapter's themes: the collapse of multinational empires, the nation-states that replaced them and the position of minorities. Mirna Zakic's review notes that the book places the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany in the context of the culmination and end of imperialism.

Chapter 3: Healthy Bodies, Sick Bodies

The title suggests a treatment of the body in social policy. Reviews single out the book's account of eugenics and racism: Judt quotes Mazower on the German racial welfare state as the apotheosis of widespread trends in European social thought, and Zakic lists eugenics and racism among the subjects.

Later chapters

According to the reviews, the rest of the book follows the competition of liberal democracy, fascism and communism: the discrediting of the liberal vision between the wars, the Second World War and the German occupation (including the appeal of collaboration and of a Nazi "new order"), the postwar reconstruction of Western Europe and the Communist takeover in the East, the growth of the welfare state and the Cold War, the collapse of Communism in 1989, and the challenges of the European Union and the Yugoslav wars. Mirna Zakic describes a final part on the European Union and the fragility of a single European identity.

Key Concepts

Throughout the book

• Democracy as contingent: the claim that democracy was one of several possible outcomes of the century, not the natural destination of European history.
• Authoritarian alternatives: that for much of the interwar period the main political debates took place on the Right and that dictatorships were often as efficient as organisers of society as democracies.
• Collaboration and the "new order": the point that many Europeans saw Hitler's Europe as an improvement on the disputatious continent they knew.
• Exhaustion with politics: the reviewers' summary of the postwar settlement, in which politics became something to be endured.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• A clear argument. Judt called the book splendid and its case convincing; the "contingency of democracy" thesis gives the whole narrative direction.
• Breadth. Donald Sassoon praised its breadth and apposite comments on countries from Bulgaria and Romania to Finland and Denmark.
• Range of sources. Judt wrote that the themes are developed with examples drawn from many languages.
• Attention to the colonial dimension. Judt noted Mazower's sensitivity to the imperial side of Europe's domestic history.

Limitations

• Questioned emphasis. Judt argued that Mazower perhaps overstates the likelihood that Europe would have been organised along Nazi lines in the late 1930s, since the virtues of democracy had not been forgotten even in 1939–40.
• Limited attention to great-power politics. Judt observed that this makes the book rather intra-European and exaggerates some East–West economic parallels.
• Recent history. Sassoon found the book becomes a little journalistic when it turns to the most recent decades.

Where It Fits in the Course

In the twentieth-century history course, Mazower is the European, interpretive counterpart to the global surveys. Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes covers the world from 1914 to 1991, Keylor's The Twentieth-Century World and Beyond is an international-history textbook, and Duiker's Contemporary World History is an introductory survey that gives balanced attention to the world outside Europe. McMahon's The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction and Westad's The Global Cold War cover the postwar period that occupies the later part of Mazower, the latter from the standpoint of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Mazower is best read after a survey, as an argument about what a European story looks like when democracy's victory is not taken for granted.

How to Use This Book

Mazower is for readers who know the outline of twentieth-century European history: a survey of modern Europe or of the century will do. Read the opening chapter closely, since it states the argument. Then follow the book in order, as it is a continuous narrative, or select the chapters on the periods covered by a course. Reading Judt's review beforehand gives a map of the argument.

For a seminar, pair it with Westad to contrast Europe with the world outside it, and ask in each period what Mazower's thesis implies about choices that appeared open. Check the Penguin edition's notes and bibliography for further reading on any country of interest.