The descent of Europe

TO HELL AND BACK
Europe, 1914-1949
Ian Kershaw
Viking
593 pages (illustrated); $35

Ian Kershaw's chilling epic-size history produces aftershocks connected to our current news headlines. Polish soldiers close border. ... Grim jobs report. ... Germans want sanctions against Russia. ... Europe migrant crisis boils over. ... They are all so reminiscent of the drum rolls that preceded Europe's descent into "the pit of barbarism" during a century of two world wars that almost destroyed its civilisation, followed by 40 years of Cold War. Seventy years after the democracies, together with the Red Army, triumphed in World War II, and 25 years after the reunification of Germany, the new Europe has made what Mr Kershaw deems an "astonishing recovery."

Mr Kershaw will devote a second volume to Europe's rise from the ashes, but the continent today is hardly immune to recurrent economic and political crises. To Hell and Back should be required reading in every chancellery, every editorial cockpit and every place where peevish Euro-sceptics do their thinking.

Why did Europe go mad? The four horsemen of the apocalypse Mr Kershaw identifies are a dramatic rise of ethnic-racist nationalism; angry, conflicting demands for territorial revisionism; acute class conflict that took on sharper focus by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; and a prolonged crisis of capitalism that many thought terminal. The turmoil of the inter-war years would have tested a Bismarck, a Charlemagne. It troubles Mr Kershaw, as it should all of us, that the seminal catastrophe of World War I could have been avoided, and the second war it bequeathed was as much the result of moral cowardice and political miscalculation in the West as in the rampant new imperialisms of Germany, Italy and Japan. Might we not blunder again?

Mr Kershaw argues that World War I could have been forestalled if Vienna had acted with speed to punish Serbia for its complicity in the murder of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As Mr Kershaw puts it, the Austrian Empire "knew only two speeds, slow and dead stop." By the time Vienna sent its ultimatum to Belgrade, three weeks after the assassination, Russia, with France in tow, had encouraged the Serbs to be more bloody-minded.

Mr Kershaw identifies a second missed opportunity to avert mass slaughter. He writes that even as Russia started to mobilise in the summer of 1914 - much before Germany - "a firm British declaration of neutrality… might even at a late hour have prevented general war. But Grey's disastrous hesitation meant that the room for diplomatic initiatives vanished."

Sir Edward Grey, who died in 1933, is an appealing figure, spared much criticism for his diplomacy in World War I, but David Owen, who stood at the same window as foreign secretary from 1977 to 1979, buttresses Mr Kershaw's judgment with an explanation of Grey's fatal ambivalence, which forfeited a role for Britain as a referee. Mr Owen's recent book The Hidden Perspective, documents how, in 1906, Grey, unbeknown to the Cabinet, approved secret talks between British and French military chiefs, committing Britain to land an expeditionary force in the event of war.

The consequences were almost 15 million dead in World War I, followed by the Bolshevik Revolution and World War II.

Mr Kershaw heads his chapter on the years after World War I with the judgment on the 1919 Versailles peace conference by Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years." Foch was right almost to the day, not alone in his scepticism; John Maynard Keynes and Herbert Hoover shared it. Nobody seems to have noted that the day the treaty was signed, June 28, 1919, was the day five years before when the shots were fired at Sarajevo.

The Big Three (Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau) were midwives to 10 new nation-states born from four sundered empires, but Mr Kershaw finds vindication in his central thesis about the fundamental importance of religious and ethnic division within a heterogeneous state. Almost all of the states that were the fruit of Versailles were ethnically homogeneous.

The big test for the democracies came at dawn on March 7, 1936, when German soldiers, with flags flying and drums beating, marched into the Rhineland, the buffer zone between France and Germany, demilitarised for an indefinite period by Versailles. Mr Kershaw accurately writes of 1936: "This proved the last chance, short of war, for the Western democracies to stop Hitler in his tracks... only a small German force advanced into the Rhineland, and with orders to retreat if challenged."

Another mistake that doomed Europe, even before Chamberlain's sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, was the response to the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Mr Kershaw, in another emphatic echo of our times, is unhesitant in exposing the democracies' economically futile and socially divisive attempts to balance budgets in a downturn. Hitler's grip, and the German economy, was boosted by Germany's combination of work-creation, state investment, a new freedom given to enterprise - and, it must be said, state repression of the left and the trade unions. Germany's stunning revival, well before high spending on rearmament, produced a Germany so strong that by 1939 it constituted "the supreme factor in the European constellation of power."

It still is - but now it's the moral leader of Europe in its embrace of hundreds of thousands of refugees. Another positive omen: The world's fastest growing Jewish population is in Berlin, the source of the Holocaust.

© The New York Times News Service, 2015