1939: The Balance Sheet: Paradoxes and Imponderables

• World War II was worse for Europe's civilian population than World War I was.
• It was filled with tense moments and unexpected developments.
• The debate about World War II's origins has been less divisive than the debate about World War I's origins.
• Some of the most appalling horrors of modern times occurred under the auspices of the "good" side.

• During World War II, there were many surprising developments and paradoxes, including the transition from militant antiCommunist to a kind of admirer of Stalin and the Soviet system, as well as the capitalist-Communist alliance against Nazism.

• The relationship between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany was the greatest roller-coaster ride of all time.
• After gaining domination of most of Europe, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in late June 1941 and moved Germany's military forces close to Moscow and Leningrad.
• The end of the Soviet Union was predicted by many observers.

• The Soviet forces launched a counteroffensive at the Battle of Stalingrad.
• Germany's armies were on the defensive.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The treatment of both prisoners of war and civilians under Nazi domination in World War II was barbaric from the beginning, but reached unparalleled depths of brutality and genocidal intent once Nazi Germany began to feel the pressures of total war and then impending defeat.

• The status of Danzig and the Polish Corridor were the most resented provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
• If Hitler had taken up those issues first in 1938, he would have received a more reasonable response from Chamberlain than he did in regards to the Sudetenland.

• This wasn't the best place to take such a firm stance, but it was the only place where he would let Hitler get away with anything.

• Hitler didn't take the threat seriously because he believed that Germany could achieve a quick victory over Poland and that Britain and France would offer some sort of face-saving compromise.
• While prepared to defend themselves against an attack from Germany, the French were not prepared to launch a major attack on Germany to aid Poland.

• It was difficult for British and French military forces to come directly to Poland's defense.
• An obvious step was to negotiate an alliance with Poland's eastern neighbor, the Soviet Union, but the long-standing obstacles in that regard remained: The Poles and Soviets distrusted one another profoundly, and an alliance with Communist Russia was a bitter pill to swallow for many conservatives in France Even though it had signed treaties with Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union was not invited to the conference.
• Red Army troops were not allowed to be on Poland's land.

• Poland would experience great suffering at the hands of Nazi Germany.
• Poland's leaders, who were themselves expansionists and who had just shown themselves to be quick to take advantage of Czechoslovakia's vulnerability after the fall of the Berlin Wall, are not likely to be described as "Christ-like".

• The British and French delegations traveled to Moscow in the spring and summer of 1939 to negotiate a treaty, but were unable to come up with an agreement that satisfied both sides.
• The Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 23, 1939 was often described as a deal between two unprincipled dictators, which allowed Hitler to launch World War II.
• Both dictators were unprincipled, but the pact was more about national interest than ideological affinity.
• Germany and Russia had a lot to offer each other at this point, whereas for Soviet Russia an alliance with France and Britain seemed less promising.

• Stalin and his advisers became suspicious of the covert motives of Britain and France because of their poor opposition to Hitler.

• Many conservatives had expressed their hopes for a turn of events.
• Even if an alliance could have been forged with France and Britain, it was obvious that they would be reluctant allies, and they might later sign a separate peace with Germany.

• The British and French didn't think Stalin was a good ally in the fight against Germany.
• Beyond signatures on a piece of paper, trust and advantages were necessary for alliances to survive, but trust was absent on both sides and advantages might change.
• The first major foreign-policy move of the Bolsheviks was the peace treaty with Germany, and after the war they had signed the Rapallo Treaty with the Weimar Republic.
• When the alliances seemed to be beneficial, they were not uncommon.

• Stalin was able to stay out of war with Poland at a time when his purges of the Red Army's leadership left Soviet Russia vulnerable.
• By the terms of the pact, Russia's western borders would be extended significantly, and in an attached secret protocol, spheres of influence were outlined that allowed the Soviet Union to take over much of the territory Russia had lost in World War I.
• Tensions with Japan on the Manchurian border made staying out of any conflict in the west more attractive to Stalin.

• The Pact opened the way for world war.
• Between 1914 and 1919, an estimated 60 million people died in military and civilian battles in Europe, North Africa, and Asia, but in the next six years, there were more deaths.
• The period from late 1939 to early 1943 seemed to many Europeans to be when Hitler's Reich would dominate Europe for many years.

• The Nazi-Soviet Pact marked an ominous point in regards to the situation of Europe's Jews, since the war opened wide the options for mass murder.

• Nazi leaders gained life-and-death power over millions of Jews, despite the prospect of international indignation.
• Almost all of Europe's Jews lived in the former tsarist lands of Poland and the Jewish Pale of Settlement by late 1941.
• In the midst of a raging war, Nazi leaders were drawn to more violent solutions to deal with the additional millions of Jews.

• In early August 1914, cheering crowds greeted the start of World War I, but in early September 1939 they didn't greet the start of World War II.
• In Berlin, the popular mood remained somber, a reaction that disappointed and angered Hitler.
• Those who were told that "peace in our time" had been achieved were deliriously happy.

• In World War I, the defensive had enjoyed an advantage due to the coordinated offensive of aircraft and concentrated armored units.
• The air force was used to increase the striking force of the panzer divisions.
• In World War I, air strikes served to prepare the armored units, which were largely unaffected by machine-gun fire, and thus needed less preparation.
• Tanks could span trenches dug in World War I by rolling over the barbed wire.
• The howl of the sirens attached to the German Stuka dive bombers contributed to the panic of the Polish, both soldiers and civilians.
• German forces were in Warsaw in less than four weeks.

• Russia lost most of its territory in the war with Poland in 1920-1 when he ordered his forces to attack Poland's east.

• The British and French leaders did not agree with Hitler's plan to defeat Poland.
• Germany was not prepared for a full-scale war and so they refused his offers of an armistice.
• The fact that Germany's economy had not shifted into the kind of high gear necessary for a long, grinding general war reflected the fact that Hitler did not expect one, but it also reflected his reticence to impose on the German population the kind of belttightening that a lengthy war would

• Hitler reacted to the cards that had been dealt him differently than a brilliant impro viser.
• Since January 1933, that brilliance had won him many victories, first in domestic and then in foreign policy, but whether it could prevail over more fundamental realities in the long run was a question.
• The consequences of Hitler's lack of planning for a long war would emerge more strongly as the war went on, but even in September 1939 the Nazi Reich, enlarged in the course of 1938 from 62 to 80 million inhabitants, was taking on a very large challenge.

• Britain and France were able to access the world's resources because of their control of the seas.

• Italy provided a way for goods to get into Germany.

• As part of the secret agreements of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Soviet Russia continued to deliver food and raw materials to Germany.
• The tactics used on the battlefield in September 1939 were not certain to work in other areas.
• They wouldn't work over a body of water as an attack on Britain would do, but the terrain in the north of France and adjoining Belgium differed from that of Poland, and the immense fortifications of the Maginot Line seemed.

• The British and French wanted to weaken Germany by blockade rather than attacking it.
• Both sides were hesitant to start an air war because they didn't want to start a war that would lead to reprisals.
• During the winter months of November through March, the Germans used them to train, the French and British waited, pondering alternatives but also building up their weaponry at a rapid rate.

• The Winter War between the Soviet Union and the Finns lasted from December to March 1940 and was relevant to both sides.
• It was not a joke or a fake.
• After taking over most of the Polish territory that was part of the tsarist empire, Stalin moved to strengthen his influence over other parts of the empire.
• The treaties of "mutual assistance" were signed by the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
• Vyborg was a territory at the head of the Gulf of Finland that was only twenty miles from the Russian city of Leningrad.
• The Red Army attacked without a formal declaration of war and in violation of a non-aggression pact between the two countries.

• The Red Army had more airplanes and tanks than the Finns, but the Red Army lost most of its officer corps in the purges.
• The Soviet Union was kicked out of the League of Nations for this aggression.
• The Communist parties of the world, already under the burden of defending the Nazi-Soviet Pact, now had to try to portray the Finns as the villains of the conflict.

• The signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact plummeted the Popular Front period.

• The war was a disaster for the Soviet Union.
• More Soviet soldiers were killed and wounded by the Finns than by the rest of the army.
• The Red Army was able to impose its will in gaining the Vyborg area.
• The fact that the brave little Finns became an ally of Nazi Germany was a somewhat awkward and seldom emphasized detail of this expanding war, though really no more awkward or morally objectionable than the later alliance of Britain and the United States with Soviet Russia.

• The British and Americans became enemies of the Finns, who joined the Nazi armies to attack the Soviet Union.
• The attractions of realpolitik are more persuasively illustrated than the paradoxes of defining and fighting evil.

• The Poles experienced repeated attempts to destroy their independent spirit under tsarist rule.
• Both the Communists and the Nazis were ruthless in their approach to exterminating Poland's elites.
• In the area taken over by the Communists, it was only the Jewish bourgeoisie that was targeted.
• Jewish race was the fatal category in the area taken over by the Nazis.
• Since a large part of the Jewish population in Poland was bourgeois by Communist standards, Nazi and Communist measures against Jews paralleled one another.
• The Soviets put thousands of Poles to death, mostly peasants and non-Jews, in "Sovietizing" or imposing agriculture collectivized in eastern Poland, whereas the Nazi goals were more in the direction of "Germanizing" their area, expelling the surviving Poles and other Slavs

• In April- May 1940, some 22,000 Polish military officers and other leading Poles were put to death as "anti-Soviet elements" by the Soviet secret police.
• The remains of several thousand of those executed by the Soviets were found by the Nazis in the area of theKatyn Forest in the Ukraine in April 1943.
• Stalin blamed the Nazis instead of denying responsibility.
• Despite growing evidence to the contrary, the Soviet leaders continued to deny until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

• The war ended abruptly in April 1940, when German forces overwhelmed both countries.
• The German divisions, stretched out at times for miles, emerged out of the Ardennes well ahead of schedule, and then raced through open country toward the English Channel, reaching Dunkirk on the coast at the end of May.

• The French and British were taken by surprise and outmaneuvered by the Germans.
• In one of the war's most dramatic episodes, hundreds of small private boats helped the British navy rescue 330,000 French and British troops who were surrounded at Dunkirk.
• Most of the soldiers were delivered to British shores to fight another day, but they had to leave tons of valuable military equipment on the beach.

• There was no miracle at the Marne, and the French had suffered 100,000 casualties, so there was no point in fighting anymore.
• A new government led by a hero of the previous war sued for peace.
• The Maginot Line was irrelevant because the Germans never had to attack it directly.

• France was disgraced.
• The future for Britain looked bleak as Germany's military reputation reached new heights.
• The British were expected to come to terms again.
• The British rallied to the leader.
• But, aside from his stirring rhetoric and indomitable belief in victory, Churchill offered something else, somewhat unexpected from a prominent right-wing politician who had once so lavishly praised Mussolini and for some time had remained cautiously open-minded about Hitler: a ringing indictment of the German Fuhrer and

• The horrors of Nazism were proving worse than Communism, but he was the most consistent opponent of Communism.
• Britain needed the Communists in order to stand up to the Nazis.

• Britain's navy was still the most powerful in the world, whereas Germany's smaller navy was weakened in the April Norwegian campaign.
• The Battle of Britain became an air battle, one of the largest and most dramatic.
• Hitler was promised by Goering that he was unable to keep.

• Britain could be reduced to submission by air attacks alone, making invasion easy or even unnecessary.

• If Goering had stuck to his original plan of bombing Britain's airfields and radar stations, he might have succeeded in bringing Britain to its knees.
• He switched targets in order to bomb London in revenge for the British bombing of German cities in late August.
• The House of Commons and many other historic buildings were almost demolished by the Luftwaffe after they targeted London relentlessly from the second week of September to early November.

• At this point in time, London was not a military target of the same significance as airfields, radar stations, and defense industries.
• The British didn't sue for peace because of the "Blitz" in London.
• Britain's factories in the rest of the country were increasing their production of war materials.
• The effectiveness of a new technology, radar, began to take a heavy toll on German aircraft.

• Hitler began to look toward Soviet Russia because of Germany's heavy loss of aircraft and failure to gain the quick victories that he had become accustomed to.
• Germany should never fight on two fronts according to Hitler.
• The beginning of the end for the "infallible" Fuhrer came in the Battle of Britain.
• Hitler kept on gambling because an addicted gambler's good luck cannot last.
• After the deeper flaws of the Fuhrer's leadership and the workings of the Nazi war machine began to make themselves felt, a string of even-more-brilliant victories for Hitler's armies was yet to come.

• Hundreds of thousands of lives were lost in Hitler's wars in Poland and western Europe, but they were over quickly.

• The war with Russia was different.
• It would rage from late June 1941 until the spring of 1945, with many ferocious battles far exceeded in deaths, wanton cruelty, and wholesale destruction.
• The war between the Nazis and Communists resulted in more deaths and destruction than any other war in human history.
• Both the Nazis and the Soviets mistreated prisoners of war and the civilian population.
• The Nazi treatment of millions of people of "inferior race" during these four years of war came to rival the mass murder of "class enemies" by the Bolshevik regime in the previous two decades.
• The first were condemned to be ethnic cleansing, the murder of its elites, and enslavement.
• The second were condemned to death.
• The phrase "war without mercy" was borrowed from the Pacific War, where racial demonization led both Americans and Japanese to numerous battlefield atrocities.

• Hitler and his generals wanted to protect their southern flank against a possible attack by the British in the Balkans.

• Germany's armies were victorious again.
• The attack on Yugoslavia began on April 6.
• Belgrade, Yugoslavia's capital, was 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 Crete was captured by the German army in late May, after Mussolini had been defeated by the Greek army.

• The army that Hitler had gathered on Russia's western border by June 22 was the largest invasion force in history, with over 3 million soldiers, 600,000 motor vehicles, and 750,000 horses.
• Smaller contingents of other armies allied with the Germans were present in the south and north of the invasion force.
• The attack was launched along the entire frontier, but its main thrusts were carried out by the German panzer divisions.

• The Soviet air force was destroyed within the first few days of the attack, causing confusion and panic in the ranks of the Red Army.

• It's hard to understand how a huge military force could assemble on Russia's borders and still be surprised.
• Stalin was warned about the gathering invasion force many times, but he dismissed the warnings as a result of the continued efforts of Britain and France to instill distrust in his Nazi ally.
• It took him a long time to recover from the shock of defeat.
• 3 million Red Army troops were killed, wounded or captured in the first hundred days of battle.
• Many of the captured would die of exposure to the elements, war wounds, and starvation in the Nazi prisoner-of-war camps.
• Thousands of the Red Army's leaders were shot.

• The quality of military leadership, weapons, troop training, and battlefield tactics of the Germans were more important than the raw numbers of the opposing armies.
• The Red Army had twice as many planes and three times as many tanks as the German-led forces, but their leadership was still inexperienced, and much of their weaponry was of inferior quality.
• By November 1941 Nazi forces had driven to within twenty miles of Moscow, and the conclusion was only natural that Germany's legendary military had prevailed, as they had from 1914 to 1918, over Russian forces that were larger in numbers but of inferior quality.

• The conclusion that Nazism was now demonstrating an even more decisive superiority to Soviet Communism was widely accepted.
• Observers throughout Europe were impressed by Germany's string of battlefield victories.
• When news came that the Nazi invaders were being welcomed as liberators in many areas of Soviet Russia, there was little surprise.
• The horrors of collectivization were still fresh in the memory of the Ukrainian population, whereas the German military forces that had occupied the area three decades before were generally favorable.
• The only recent example of the Red Army battle-readiness had been in the Winter War of 1939-40, and, for European observers who thought in racial terms, and many did, it was a case of predictions now being confirmed: Soviet Russia, a Slavic realm run by fanatical Jews.

• For much of 1941 and 1942, Hitler's Reich dominated Europe more oppressively than Napoleon's empire had.
• The New Order in Europe, a united states of Europe, including several categories of states, were ruled over by the Third Reich.
• Despite being neutral, Sweden and Switzerland continued to deliver vital raw materials to Germany during the war.
• The hope that Germany could be defeated by blockade was dashed by the resources now available to the Greater German Reich.
• Britain could not seriously entertain the idea of invading the Continent on its own.

• The history of Europe might have been different had Hitler decided to pull back to secure defensive lines for the winter and concentrate on his gains.
• It didn't include contingency plans for war extending throughout the winter and for a war of attrition over several years.
• Germany's troops were exhausted in the late autumn and their supply lines were dangerously overextended.
• German motorized units were not prepared for the cold of the Russian winter, and German soldiers were not supplied with winter clothing.
• Planes and tanks were often frozen up.

• Napoleon's defeat was the result of many factors, including overconfidence, overextended lines, and the refusal of Russia's generals to accept defeat.
• Stalin regained his composure and the Red Army launched a major counteroffensive in the first week of December 1941, driving the Germans back from Moscow.
• The German war machine had met its first major blow, similar to the blow it took in the air battle over Britain.
• The two armies were exhausted by January.

• December 1941 is considered to be a major turning point.
• The Japanese launched an air attack on the US navy at Pearl Harbor.
• Four days later, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States.
• Hitler and his military advisers did not believe that the United States could mobilize quickly enough to make a difference in Europe's war, which is why they made that declaration.
• Without a declaration of war by Germany, the United States might have avoided or postponed direct engagement in the European conflict, concentrating on the defeat of Japan.
• Roosevelt and his advisers made a major strategic decision: to make the defeat of Germany its highest priority, which meant a massive increase in aid to Britain, since if the British Isles fell into Nazi hands the notion of an eventual invasion of Germany by the United States would have appeared futile.

• Americans were against entering another European war.
• After the shock of the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Germany's declaration of war against Poland, the ranks of the Americans who admired Nazi Germany waned.
• By the time of the Battle of Britain, American sympathies were against the Nazis, even if most Americans still wanted to avoid another world war.

• By the summer of 1941, the American government had begun preparing for war by drafting over a million men and launching a major program of ship-building.
• After Germany attacked Russia in 1941, the lease was extended to Russia.

• It was suggested that Hitler's alleged triumph of the will was due to a triumph of reasonable decisions over his impulsive ones.
• Under Nazi rule, the German reputation for efficiency was less deserved.
• The Third Reich and the New Order were plagued by rivalries between competing agencies and people who had taken over ill-defined positions of power.

• After the Red Army's December counteroffensive, Hitler began to give orders that implied planning for a longer war, but for some time Germany's economy and society remained less fully and efficiently mobilized for war than was Britain's.
• In spite of the country's staggering losses in the summer and autumn of 1941, the Soviet economy was able to rebound, eventually producing materials for war more effectively than the German New Order did.
• The Soviets began putting weaponry in the field that countered the reputation of Russian or Communist products, even in terms of quality.
• The success of Russia's counteroffensive was not determined by the Russian winter.
• Something closer to equality began to emerge as the battle-readiness of the Red Army grew, as newly placed Soviet generals found their footing.

• If there ever was a single, overall order, December 1941 would be the month in which Hitler's order for the Final Solution was most likely given.
• The new reality was that Nazi Germany had thrown its net over millions of Jews.
• If there had been confusion about how to solve the Jewish Question, a more comprehensive move toward mass murder emerged.
• The mass murder of Jews began before December 1941.
• All prisoners of war who were identified as "thoroughly Bolshevized" should be put to death immediately.

• The open-ended crimi nality of this order was objected to by a few of Hitler's generals.
• It was an order that, given Nazi ideology, easily merged into a license to murder any and all Jews under Nazi control.
• The squads were set up by Himmler's SS in 1939 to follow the regular armies and wipe out any resistance behind the lines.

• The mass executions were carried out in the field.
• In the past wars, partisans and guerrillas were put to death in the "ordinary" and messy ways.
• The murders were more centrally directed and the scale was greater.

• The extent to which these in-the-field murders evolved into something more fully unprecedented in scope and design - that is, mechanized mass murder - has been the subject of much scholarly debate.
• The Nazis' use of modern industrial methods in the concentration camps, poison gas most notoriously, may have resulted in fewer deaths than the atrocious conditions in the camps and ghettos, which involved rampant disease, exposure to the elements, overwork, and "ordinary" executions.

• By the spring of 1942, a number of camps had been constructed in Poland.
• Concentration camps for political dissidents have existed in Germany since 1933, and similar camps have been used by other nations before that.
• Many thousands died in the initial variety of Nazi camps, but many more died in the British and Spanish camps, mostly from disease and exposure to the elements.
• There were fewer precedents for camps designed with the explicit goal of murdering an entire people, race, or category of humanity as quickly and efficiently as possible.
• The camps of the Soviet Union are close to the camps of Nazi Germany.
• Being sent to a Soviet prison was seen as a death sentence, though the death came from neglect, disease, or an executioner's bullet, not factory-style mass murder.
• The actions taken by the Soviet authorities against the "kulaks as a class" and other "seditious" ethnic minorities were very close to those taken against the "Jews as a race".

• It has been speculated that by December 1941 the likelihood of defeat had begun to gnaw into Hitler's consciousness, and that his decision to order that all Jews under Nazi control be put to death had much to do with it.
• The United States was fully in the war because he failed to bring down the British.
• It is thought that Hitler had the power to win his war against the Jews since millions of them were under his control.

• It is difficult to determine the priority of that war in Hitler's mind.
• There is evidence that he and other Nazi leaders diverted vital resources away from the battlefields on the eastern front and towards the extermination camps, but the matter is mired in baffling complexities and seeming contradictions - typical of the Nazi Reich as a whole.
• In 1942 and 1943, the death camps went into high gear, and it is difficult to imagine that such a massive undertaking would have proceeded without support from Hitler.

• A further complicating factor is that, by the spring of 1942, the Fuhrer had turned his attention to another all-out attack against the Red Army, this time concentrating on southern Russia.
• In the summer of 1942, Nazi armies went from victory to victory in their drive toward the oil fields of the Caucasus Mountains.

• The Red Army's counteroffensive at Stalingrad was more decisive than it had been in the battles outside Moscow in the previous year.
• The general of the Red Army, Friedrich von Paulus, surrendered to Hitler in November.
• By the end of January 1943, only ninety thousand soldiers, including twenty-four generals, were still alive.
• They wouldn't live to see Germany again.

• Communism seemed to be defeating Nazism in the five-month battle, which resulted in the deaths of over a million Soviet soldiers and civilians.
• The news that the tank warfare in North Africa against the "desert fox," Erwin Rommel, had begun to turn in favor of the British and rapidly arriving Americans in the fall of 1942 gave the sense of a turning tide.
• Until the first months of 1943, German submarines were taking a heavy toll on ships from America to Britain, but after technological advances in detecting submarines and an effective convoy system, a growing number of American ships began arriving in British harbors.

• The story of World War II in Europe from early 1943 to June 1945 was one of Nazi retreat.
• The battle in July and August 1943 around the Kursk salient, occupied by the Red Army, was the most famous battle of the eastern front.
• The greatest clash of tanks in history took place.
• It was the most expensive day of aerial warfare in history.
• It was the first major battle in which the celebrated German panzer units failed to break through enemy defenses.
• By land, by sea, by air, and in arenas where the German military had been most feared, the Nazi Reich had begun to suffer defeat.

• Four and a half decades after the end of the war, there was a remarkable economic recovery, with no general war.
• The two and a half decades after the end of the Cold War saw dramatic changes in the lands where Communists had ruled but also in western Europe, which took major steps toward economic union.
• Germany was allowed to reunify.

• The new German Reich was smaller than the old one, but it still became Europe's most productive country.

• The victory at Stalingrad in January 1943 made it clear that the days of the Third Reich were numbered.
• The triumph of the Allied powers in the summer of 1945 was exhilarating for many Europeans, but also marked a time of widespread despair and hopelessness as another war was building, possibly involving atomic bombs or other weapons of massive destruction.
• The simmering tensions between the former Allied victors did not lead to a general war in Europe.
• After the end of the Cold War, the fear of large armies clashing and the bombing of cities with mass civilian deaths did not develop in Europe.

• The initial passions of the Cold War waned over the course of four and a half decades, as the attachment of Europeans to competing ideologies gradually diversified and weakened.
• The end of the Soviet empire was more of a whimper than a bang.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The healing process in Communist-dominated eastern Europe was slower and less complete than in western, free-market Europe, which was a factor in the collapse of the Soviet empire.
• Eastern Europe evolved into a region of material comfort and physical security compared to other parts of the world.
• In western Europe, there were disagreements about how far the welfare state should expand in trying to mitigate the destructive aspects of the free market and how much that market needed to be preserved to encourage economic dynamism.
• There were major differences about how best to manage the economy in Communist-ruled states.
• The economies of nearly all European nations were rebuilt.
• Bombed-out cities were gradually restored.
• Millions of acres were replanted.

• It was the most improved period in European history.

• The Europeans' power and sense of self changed over time.
• Europe's world position before 1914 was taken over by the United States and the Soviet Union, but those two non- European or semi- European powers could themselves be considered remnants of European civilization.
• Growing numbers of Europeans, especially those born after 1945, came to view their past in fundamentally different ways, as the shadow of the previous period of European history was dark and chilling.
• The appearance of the phrase "mastering the past," as distinguished from the more familiar "learning the lessons of history," suggested the difference.

• There was a tendency among some historians to see European history as uniquely tainting, building toward genocide and self-destruction.

• The result of this painful self-examination was that Europe became one of the most tolerant areas of the world, as well as one of the most prosperous.
• The openness of the intellectual climate in Europe's liberal-democratic states was impressive in comparison to previous periods, even though the tolerance and self-criticism of Europeans had definite limits.
• Europe's nations became places of refuge for millions of nonEuropeans, fleeing dictatorships, ethnic or religious persecution, and, perhaps most of all, poverty.

• The movement toward European unity touched on a range of issues, from rela tively concrete economic ones to more elusive ones of nationalist attachment, ethical values, and legal norms.
• Europeans cultivated a loose sense of common identity in "Christendom" and then as part of the European concert of nations, with various kinds of economic and cultural ties.
• The move toward greater unity, as well as the ensuing Cold War, was a result of the revulsion over the tragedies of 1914 to 1945 and the threat of Communism.
• The expansion of the Soviet empire put a lid on eastern- European hypernationalism.

• The effort to achieve economic integration was mostly a success, if hard-earned and tenuous at times.
• A single dominant European identity, one that subordinated existing national identities to a larger European one, remained an ever-receding prospect, despite the fact that Nationalist antipathies in Europe did decline significantly.

• The closest parallels have to do with unrealistic hopes dashed.
• The oil embargo instituted by Arab nations following the war with Israel in 1973 caused the worst economic slump since the war, but also reflected other economic trends.

• The nature of the Cold War changed in these years, as the soviets were allowed to step away from strict supervision by their leaders, and western- European democracies distanced themselves from the kind of leadership exercised by the United States.
• The late 1970s and early 1980s saw renewed tension between the United States and the Soviet Union, as both presidents Carter and Reagan pushed a more aggressive foreign policy, with a stress on the issue of human rights in the Soviet Union and on competing military budgets.

• It is clear that the cracks in the structure of Communist rule in eastern Europe were getting worse.
• The Communist rule of the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse when Gorbachev took over.
• Gorbachev's toleration was extended to the point of no longer insisting on the role of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as long as the leading role was recognized.
• The collapse of European Communism and the beginning of a new era of history happened in the late 1980s.

• The European New Order was barely established before it started to unraveling, and the Thousand Year Reich only lasted twelve years.
• The American giant began to flex its muscles, supplying Britain and Russia with vital materials, while the Red Army continued its relentless drive.
• The first landing of American troops was in north Africa in November 1942, followed by Sicily in July 1943, and then the major landing at Normandy in June 1944.
• The final victory in Europe took place in May 1945.

• At this point in time, anyone's guess was the future shape of Europe.
• How to deal with the Nazis and those allied with them was uncertain.
• The full extent of the atrocities committed during the war was still unknown, and the deeper meaning of those atrocities as yet not searchingly explored, and the efforts of the postwar tribunals at Nuremberg to achieve some sort of justice left.

• After the end of the war, the shape of the postwar European world remained up in the air.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The issue of the postwar settlement was problematic because the historical records of the Americans and British were inconsistent with the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
• The Soviet Union's long standing and explicit rejection of those principles was a bigger problem.
• There is less reliable evidence in regard to the affection and mutual admiration of the Big Three (as they were called) for one another, but more surprising was the fact that they were both anti-Communists.

• Many in the Allied camp still believed in the guilt of the Germans.
• That belief implied that collective punishment was justified.
• Not all of the ardent Nazis in the German population were guilty of criminal actions.

• Millions of others claimed to have silently rejected Nazi actions, but they had done little or nothing to oppose them.

• The paradoxes of Wilsonian ideals of national self-determination were already familiar, as was the notion that the Germans were not to be given the same rights as other peoples.
• The situation of various eastern-European peoples was more complicated.
• If allowed to choose their form of government after the war, they would almost certainly have voted for extreme nationalist, anti-Soviet, and antisemitic ones.
• The Soviets were not likely to approve of having right-wing neighbors.
• The citizens of the United States of African origin, or the Arab majority in Palestine, would continue to be denied the right to vote for the form of government under which they lived after the war ended.

• Jews are being arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto.
• Jewish families surrender to the Nazis in 1943.
• The residents of the ghetto rose against the Nazis and held their ground for several months, but were defeated after fierce fighting in April and May.

• The devil is in the details.

• The view of Germans as inherently criminal was reinforced by war-time propaganda and even if precise definitions were not available, few disputed the criminal nature of the Third Reich.
• After the end of the war, the dimensions of that criminality became apparent, but not the full dimensions for a long time.
• There were many reports of Nazi atrocities during the war and threats to punish war criminals.
• There was a certain reticence to believe all of those reports because of the fabrications and exaggerations that took place during and after World War I.
• Many of the war-time reports evoked a revulsion so profound as to numb the ability to comprehend.

• The Congress of Vienna in 1814-15 and the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were the only peace conferences of their kind after World War II.
• A series of extraordinary war-time conferences of the Allies were held to coordinate the war effort and work out the principles to be applied to the postwar settlement.
• Within a few years the war-time tensions between the great powers emerged to take on threatening forms, despite the fact that these conferences served as a de facto peace settlement.
• At the Paris Peace Conference and the Congress of Vienna, there was a clash of strong personalities and seemingly irreconcilable national interests.
• Personal diplomacy played a key role at the four most famous conferences.
• The photos taken of the seated leaders at those conferences have achieved icon status due to the fact that they exercised powers far exceeding those of the leaders at Vienna in 1815 and Paris in 1919.

• The face-to-face encounters between Stalin and Churchill were able to say that Stalin was one of the most intransigent anti- Communists in the world.
• By the time of the Battle of Britain, Hitler was described as a form of rule that exceeded all forms of human wickedness, including Communism.
• He began to believe that an alliance with the Soviet Union was the best way to counter the threat of Nazi Germany.
• After the Soviet Union was attacked by Nazi Germany, the Allies formed an alliance with the Communists.
• He dropped his anti-Communism and began to praise Stalin's leadership and the accomplishments of the Soviet system.
• In private, he expressed a personal affection for Stalin.

• Stalin missed the first conference of the Allied leaders, at Casablanca in January 1943, but the Big Three met twice, first at Tehran in November 1943 and then at Yalta in February 1945.

• After Germany's defeat, Roosevelt died a month after Yalta, before the July conference at Potsdam.
• His vice-president was Harry S. Truman.
• The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, was voted out of office in the July British elections, as the Potsdam conference was in progress.

• The United States, Great Britain, and Soviet Russia formed the Grand Alliance in 1942.
• Before long, Roosevelt and war-time propagandists in the United States were also praising the leader of the Soviets, "Uncle Joe" Stalin.
• The public language of anti-Axis, liberal-democratic values that came to be associated with the Grand Alliance had a resemblance to the language of the Popular Front from 1936 to 1939.
• The years of failure and disillusionment were followed by nearly two years of a Nazi-Communist coalition.
• For anyone with a memory of more than five years, recent precedents were tainting any renewed pro-Soviet rhetoric.
• Although a brave face prevailed from early 1942 to the end of the war, it was hard to ignore that the Grand Alliance was composed of those who had recently been bitter enemies.
• The Allies were together until the enemies were defeated.

• The political and personal differences between Roosevelt and Churchill were hidden from the public and the two men developed a friendship.
• The Atlantic Charter of August 1942 was worked on by the British leader after he spent three weeks with the American president in the White House discussing war strategies.

• The Casablanca conference was called to approve a number of decisions about the strategy of the war in Europe.
• The decision to make it likely that the Germans would fight to the bitter end was criticized by some advisers because it implied that a separate, negotiated peace with Germany would not happen.
• The Allies believed that they could not sully the purity of their cause by compromising with evil.

• Stalin didn't make it to the conference because his country was still fighting for survival at Stalingrad.

• Americans would make peace with Nazi Germany.
• The alarm was linked to his suspicion that the reason the British and Americans repeatedly postponed the date of establishing a second front in western Europe was to allow the German and Soviet armies to battle on as long as possible.
• Stalin believed that the real motive behind the policy of appeasement was to encourage Hitler to go to the east.

• There was a lot of reason to delay establishing the western front.

• The most costly battles continued to be waged on the eastern front even after the landings in North Africa, Italy, and finally Normandy.
• After the Normandy landing, Hitler continued to station most of his armed forces there.
• By the end of the war, the Red Army and the Soviet civilian population had suffered terrible losses, which the Soviet leaders stressed in general terms but masked in detail, since they felt vulnerable to the Anglo-Americans.

• The fundamental truths of this disproportion of suffering cast long shadows.
• The war-time conferences were in the shadows.
• The armies of the Western Allies generally made slow progress and suffered a few shocking reverses.
• Although the battles in north Africa had turned in favor of the British and Americans by early 1943, progress there had been much slower than anticipated.

• Roosevelt was convinced that he could allay Stalin's suspicions by personally meeting him.
• He believed that with his personal charm, he could convince Stalin that the capitalist world would not act in a way that the Communists would act in.
• Roosevelt understood that he needed to show great sensitivity to Stalin's concerns by avoiding confrontations or dwelling on the unhappy recent past, but that was a tall order.
• Roosevelt was hopeful that he could convince Stalin to accept a vision of the postwar world in which the major powers, capitalist and Communist, would cooperate in keeping the peace, a vision that would not make much sense to a man of Stalin's personal beliefs.

• Stalin's suspicion that Roosevelt and Churchill would cooperate against him was unwarranted.
• They both tried to get Stalin's support against the other.

• Roosevelt told Stalin that he agreed with the Communists that Europe's imperial holdings should be dismantled after the war.
• The naivete of the Americans in foreign affairs was referred to slightly by Churchill in his private conversations with Stalin at Tehran.

• The meeting was held in Tehran from November 28 to December 1.
• Stalin had not left Soviet territory since he took power.
• The informal exchanges between the Big Three were strange, perhaps more so than the formal decisions reached.
• There was a certain symbolism in how far Roosevelt and Churchill were willing to go to accommodate their Communist ally, since he remained unwilling to do more than step over the Soviet border, while they had to travel thousands of miles.
• Stalin wanted his own people to be in charge of security, so most of the meetings were held in the Soviet Union.
• There was a personal gift from King George VI to the citizens of Stalingrad and the people of the Soviet Union, as well as a specially prepared sword of honor, at an elaborate banquet that was hosted by the Prime Minister.
• Stalin kissed the sword after accepting it.

• He did not give a comparable gift to the American or British people.

• Stalin avoided direct confrontations.
• It might be argued that Stalin was the most effective in personal diplomacy because he seemed to persuade his capitalist interlocutors that he was, after all, a modest, reasonable sort.
• The Tehran conference had an aura of unreality because Roosevelt believed he could convince Stalin that Marxist theory was flawed and that capitalist leaders could be trusted.

After several meetings with Stalin, Churchill commented that "Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler."

• Much of the playful repartee by the Big Three at Tehran is very real.

• Stalin approved the murder of thousands of Polish officers in the spring of 1940, after overseeing the arrests and execution of thousands of his own military leaders.

• The idea of putting thousands of German officers to death was hardly a large step for him, but the Big Three at Tehran finally postponed decisions about the exact punishments to be meted out to Nazi military officers.

• In 1814-15 and 1919, the problem of Poland proved to be particularly troublesome, threatening to divide the Big Three irreparably.
• They put off binding decisions again.

• Poland was to remain friendly to the Soviet Union even though there would be free elections.

• The mass of Poland's population was deeply anti-Russian and anti-Communist.
• The Red Army and the Soviet secret police would have to guarantee friendship between Poland and the Soviet Union in order for a regime there to be elected.

• Stalin's main concern was to get a firm commitment for the Anglo-American landing in western Europe, and that concern was more or less satisfied at Tehran, after so many postponements.
• Roosevelt got one concession, a further, if still tentative, statement from Stalin in support of the United Nations Organization.

• Stalin agreed to go along with the creation of the United Nations because of the state of Soviet Russia at the end of the war.
• The rights of military conquest were included in the foreign policy "realism" that he was a firm believer in.
• He told the Yugoslav Communist that everyone imposes his own system as far as his army can go.
• By dividing Europe into spheres, the Soviet Union would have 90 percent influence, Britain 10 percent.

• The figures were not binding, but they showed his belief that military power was more important than the people's right to choose their own governments.
• Stalin agreed.
• Roosevelt was persuaded that the peace could only be preserved after the United States and Britain had operated as a kind of police force for several years.
• Roosevelt continued to insist that the world's great powers should be in control of the United Nations, not the nations of the world.

• Few European nations believe in free elections.
• After the war, the Americans imposed their own system of government "as far as their army could reach" in order to make sure friendly regimes were established in areas with large Communist followings.
• The establishment of American-style democracy was less blatant than the Soviet-style democracy because the rich Americans and liberal democracy were more popular in western Europe.

• American power, economic and military, contributed to the victory of the Entente in World War I, and that power would again provide an important tilt to the balance in World War II if Americans were less inclined to believe.
• The landing in western Europe was widely expected to be a decisive display of American power, and Hitler's last hope to survive seemed to be based on Germany's ability to repel the landing.
• If the landing failed, he believed the Anglo-American leaders would file for peace.
• The success of the landing appeared to be in doubt for a while.
• The weather cooperated on June 6 after a last-minute postponement on June 5.
• The Germans were not at their highest alert because of the bad weather, and the Anglo-American forces were able to surprise them.
• The Germans were tricked into believing that the main landing would happen in the south of Normandy, which is the shortest route across the English Channel.

• Omaha Beach was one of the battles that took place along the Normandy coast.
• The total number of casualties for the Anglo-American forces in the landing was over 10,000.
• The losses on the German side were the same as they were on the eastern front, but were not large.
• The main goal of the landing was to bring 2.2 million men and half a million military vehicles across the Channel.
• On June 22, the Red Army launched a major offensive on the northern edge of the eastern front, with over a hundred divisions and 4,000 tanks.
• By late July, the Red Army had pushed Nazi lines back to Warsaw and inflicted over half a million casualties.

• There were significant differences between the eastern and western fronts.
• The Anglo-American forces moved slowly after establishing a beachhead.
• The American army consisted of a significant amount of raw recruits, and they faced battle-hardened opponents.

• In the area of the Ardennes Forest, where Germany's armies had so famously broken through in the spring of 1940, Americans were surprised.
• The counteroffensive was halted and contained after the Americans suffered some 90,000 casualties.

• The contribution of the French to the Normandy landing was small because Anglo-American forces were gradually being superseded by French recruits.
• After France's humiliation, General Charles De Gaulle established himself as the leader of the anti-Vichy Free French, but both Roosevelt and Churchill disliked him, and he joked about it in the midst of the war.
• The date of the Normandy landing and the date of the landing in north Africa were not known to De Gaulle.
• By the end of the war, De Gaulle's forces had grown to 1.25 million, with ten divisions fighting in Germany, and he had become recognized as France's leader, but reestablishing France as a major power was a hard sell.

• The Franco-German border was not crossed by the Western Allies until 1945.
• Soviet forces were pushing into the valley as they worked their way into Germany.
• They renewed their offensive in January 1945.
• The Yalta meeting of the Big Three took place in February 1945, which was when Germany's defeat was certain.

• Yalta became the most famous of the war-time conferences because Roosevelt had given away eastern Europe at Yalta because of his naive beliefs about Stalin and frail health.
• Compared to Soviet Russia's military victories, these factors seem unimportant.
• If Roosevelt had arrived at Tehran as a supplicant, he would have been aware of Russia's entry into the war against Japan.

• It had been the case for a long time.
• If Roosevelt had been in better health, or if he had been more willing to challenge Stalin, things would have worked out better for the settlement in eastern Europe.
• Roosevelt might not have gotten Stalin's promise to declare war on Japan or his support for the United Nations.

• After Roosevelt's death in April and the surrender of Germany in early May, the new American president assumed a distinctly more confrontational stance, and was harshly criticized by some historians for unnecessarily antagonizing Stalin, allegedly resulting in levels of hostility in the ensuing Cold War.
• There were many reasons for Truman's stance.
• He was a different personality with a different past and different options, and he had little of Roosevelt's confidence in his own personal charm and political adroitness, as the heavy burden of war-time leadership was so suddenly thrust.

• The fact that the United States was days away from dropping atomic bombs on Japan was important to him.
• The importance of Russia entering the war against Japan seemed less important.

• There was a shift in the feelings of anti-Nazi cooperation when the conference began.
• The reports of mass rapes by the Red Army in eastern Europe, which provoked indignation in the United States, particularly among Americans of eastern European origin, constituted an important element of the vote for the Democratic Party.
• Historians have debated how much Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs was decisive.
• Stalin was impressed with the power of the United States and was forced to surrender.

• The award of 10 billion dollars to the Soviet Union was one of the things that was left undecided at Tehran and Yalta.
• The Allied conferences can't be said to have achieved genuine consensus on a range of topics, as the following year saw much wrangling over exact details and alleged broken promises.
• The Oder-Neisse line was not formally accepted as Germany's permanent eastern frontier by the Americans or British, but it became permanent after a peace conference was not held.
• Plans for trials of the major Nazi leaders, as well as military occupation zones, were agreed upon at Potsdam.

• The first camps were constructed in 1942.
• By the summer of 1944, deportations to eastern- European ghettoes and death camps had reached a peak, after two years of mass murder and genocide by the Nazis.
• Some 400,000 Hungarian Jews, most of whom had been sheltered by Hungarian authorities, were transported to their deaths at Auschwitz and elsewhere during the last full year of war.
• In the final months of the war, thousands of others perished in various work details and elsewhere outside the camps, including prisoners of war and members of the anti-Nazi resistance.

• The total number of Jews put to death, or who died as a result of Nazi oppression, has been the subject of sometimes passionate debate, but the estimate of 4 to 6 million is most widely accepted by scholars.
• Estimates of the number of Jews who died as a direct result of Nazi oppression must be kept in mind, as must the number of other deaths, most notably of non-Jews in Poland and the Soviet Union.

• In 1944, with the help of the Red Army, the Nazi authorities closed and destroyed the camps at Auschwitz, and the surviving inmates were moved to western camps.
• Many thousands of people died in the western camps from overwork, neglect, and disease before the Allied armies arrived.
• They were in a weakened state after liberation.

• In most of the areas liberated from Nazi rule, there was some kind of reprisal against captured Germans.
• Over 100,000 people were brought before special courts in France, and 1500 of them were sentenced to death.
• Over 700 traitors, collaborators, and Fascist elements received the death penalty from special courts in Czechoslovakia, with equal numbers sentenced to life in prison, and 20,000 others to lesser prison sentences.
• The majority of Germans who were active in the Nazis were driven out of the Czechoslovak state in accord with agreements reached at Potsdam.
• The areas of former eastern Germany that are now allocated to Poland had larger numbers.
• Some 12 million ethnic Germans were obliged to move from eastern and central Europe to what is now West Germany.
• It was one of the most extensive examples of ethnic cleansing.

• The extent to which the special trials in other countries were fair was not a major concern at the time.
• Mob rule prevailed, and even where there were formal hearings, they hardly correspond to rigorous standards of due process.
• Executions were carried out after a verdict was reached.
• The death penalty was temporarily restored in countries that had abolished it.
• In Germany, local trials were held in different occupied zones, but they were not always concerned with legal niceties and rarely maintained consistency of punishment.

• The Allies wanted to spread the word about the crimes of the Nazi leaders.
• After lengthy negotiations, it was agreed that a series of trials would be held at Nuremberg and that they would respect American notions of due process.
• The Soviet leaders had their own show trials of the late 1930s that they had in mind when they were in favor of formal trials.
• Two judges from Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and the United States will be part of the International Military Tribunal.

• The Trial of the Major War Criminals was the most famous of the trials.
• Understanding the inner workings of the Nazi state was limited at this point, so the prosecution had its work cut out for it.

• There was a lot of information gained in the interrogations of the accused, but the significance of that information could not have been adequately understood within the allotted time.
• The decisions about the exact procedures and underlying legal principles of the trials were flawed because of the compromises necessary.
• There were moral issues and legal issues.

• The lack of justice at Nuremberg became a contentious issue.
• The trials' violation of a number of widely recognized legal principles caused some observers and legal experts to be upset.

• There was a double standard in punishing Germans for crimes that the Allies had committed, such as bombing civilian centers, torturing spies, executing prisoners of war or using them as slave labor.
• Nazi defendants were not allowed to claim in their defense that they had done what the Allies had done.

• The Soviet Union was accused of applying a double standard since it was an ally of Nazi Germany in 1939 and the attack on Poland was denounced by the Nuremberg prosecutors.
• The lack of judicial independence in the Soviet Union made appointing Soviet judges a travesty.
• The "crimes against humanity" committed by the Nazis had been equaled by the Soviets, according to many.

• Even if the trials at Nuremberg failed to live up to high ideals of jurisprudence, they were preferable to lining up against a wall and shooting the Nazis.
• Many more Nazi leaders would have been freed, including some of the worst, if the trials had been more rigorous in observing due process.

• There were other dilemmas linked to more fundamental issues.
• When defending the interests of the state, the leaders of modern nations like the kings of old could do no wrong.
• The idea of applying Christian standards to the actions of states in regard to one another was considered laughable by most statesmen at the Congress of Vienna.
• Europe's states did not readily recognize external limits to their sovereignty, especially when national defense or the survival of the nation was in question, even though there had been many refinements in the way that the monopoly of violence was exercised.

• The chief prosecutor of the first trial, Robert H. Jackson, did not think that the murder of the Jews was the most important crime of the Nazi regime.
• He believed that the most fundamental crime was the war.
• National aggrandizement through warfare by states recognizing no limit to their sovereignty was the most serious crime of modern times, he believed; other crimes, such as the murder of minorities, emerged from it.
• The Jews were killed because they got in the way of a war of expansion that the Nazis saw as a war of survival.

• Jackson believed that future world peace could only be assured if aggressive war was recognized as criminal.
• It was argued that military conquests should no longer confer rights on a victorious state since most of Europe's states had waged aggressive war for national aggrandizement.
• Both "crimes against peace" and "crimes against humanity" were common in the British and French empires, which were based on the rights of conquest.
• Territorial changes at the end of the war were based on the right of conquest of the Big Three.
• In the war-time conferences, decisions about borders and population transfers were made by them, and they often paid little or no attention to what the affected populations wanted.

• There was resistance to Jackson's reasoning.
• It raised a lot of questions about what military action was acceptable.

• Germany's rationale for war in August 1914 was that it was their right as a nation to defend itself, and that a pre-emptive attack was necessary before Russia could complete their military deployment.
• In a hostile capitalist world, the Soviets justified their alliance with Nazi Germany.

• A number of respected scholars have questioned if hatred of Jews was the main reason that Germans joined the Nazi Party or voted for Hitler.
• Fear of Communism may have been the main force driving Germany in the 1930s.
• Hitler was similar to previous German statesmen, businessmen, and military leaders in his desire to expand to the east.
• Both world wars are to be explained by Germany's inexorable rise and Europe's other major powers' refusal to accept it or be able to adjust to it peacefully - a central theme of this volume.

• The first Nuremberg trial did not draw the attention of most observers because of the debatable issues.

• The leaders of Nazi Germany were being brought to justice after years of war and the publicity surrounding the concentration camps in the summer of 1945.
• A lot of people claimed that they didn't know anything about the atrocities committed in the camps.
• Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop denied knowledge of what Hitler was planning in regards to the war with other nations and the genocide against the Jews.

• Historians debate about what the Germans knew about what was happening in the camps.
• At the time of the Nuremberg trials, little credence was given to the claims of the defendants that they knew little about what Hitler was thinking or doing.
• Evidence was presented that exposed them as liars.
• What has impressed subsequent observers is how little these men fit into the stereotypes of Nazi leaders.
• Streicher came out with the lowest score on the IQ tests.

• The head of the Luftwaffe, who was second in command to Hitler, was also an unnerving defendant.
• He had been ridiculed for putting on a lot of weight and living in luxury.
• He proved more than an intellectual match for Jackson on the stand.
• In his testimony, Goering seemed not to be intimidated or guilt-ridden, as he had scored 138 on the IQ test.

• He claimed to have had a number of Jewish friends.

• There was no way that Goering would be acquitted or given a light sentence because of the overwhelming evidence against him.
• He was sentenced to death.
• Streicher was also condemned to death, even if little proof was offered about his criminal actions.
• He was found to be criminally responsible for his antisemitic ideas.
• If the punishment was death, it was contrary to American notions of freedom of speech.

• The majority of those charged with being major Nazi war criminals at the first trial were not seen as fanatics.
• Most of the images did not look like hardened criminals.

• They could not possibly be described as agents of capitalism in crisis or resentful "little men," members of a bigoted bourgeoisie.
• Many of them had promising careers before the Nazi period, and most were better educated and more intelligent than anyone at the time.
• At the first Nuremberg trial, it is difficult to identify a distinct Nazi type among the accused.
• Twelve were sentenced to death and seven were sentenced to prison.
• Three were acquitted, which made it appear that the accused had been given a fair chance to defend themselves.

• In the trials of major war criminals, twenty-four prominent Nazis would receive the death sentence, and over a hundred would be sentenced to prison for life.
• Many prominent Nazis received light sentences or escaped punishment altogether, despite the fact that the number of death sentences was less than they had proposed.
• The Nuremberg verdicts were dismissed as "victors' justice" by a fair number of non-Germans, including legal experts in many liberal-democratic countries.

• There was no way to arrive at judgments sufficient to deal with the tragedies and injustice of these years.
• There was a similar dilemma in regards to how the Nazi past could ever be "mastered" by future generations of Germans.
• "Coming to grips" is a familiar metaphor, but in the case of the Nazi past it seemed that a quantum leap would be necessary, related to the assertion that the Holocaust was unprecedented and incomparable.

• The kind of guilt associated with a crime defined in such a way went far beyond the guilt for starting World War I; it had something more in common with the concept of the Crucifixion, that is, standing mystically outside history.
• The claim that Hitler had exercised some sort of demonic power caused decent people to lose their moral bearings and follow his orders, even for acts they somehow knew to be immoral.
• The excuse that Hitler's will had become the law in the Third Reich was not without plausibility, and some Nazi leaders claimed that they were only working toward the Fuhrer.

• It was convenient that many of the people who were close to Hitler were dead.
• Hitler and his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide at the end of April.
• Joseph Goebbels had taken his own life.
• His wife killed their six children and then committed suicide.
• After he was captured, Himmler used a hidden glass capsule of cyanide to kill himself.

• The logic of the position that Hitler's will was the law pointed to the conclusion that no one was responsible or guilty.
• The nation was under some sort of spell.
• Using a different metaphor, Nazi leaders had been mere pawns in a giant totalitarian machine that had crushed all notions of personal responsibility and operated according to its own inhuman logic.

• Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, did not deny his antisemitic beliefs, but he did deny his activities in expelling Jews from Germany.
• He was sentenced to twenty years in prison.
• In other societies, the moral defects of other leaders - credulity, greed, duplicity, ambition, miscalculation, lack of civil courage - were common.

• This was a question that would haunt subsequent generations and was related to the long-debated issue of the nature and goals of modern antisemitism.
• On the one hand, the mass murder of Jews seems to be a product of antisemitism, but on the other hand, what came to be called the Holocaust was more than a product of antisemitism.
• It was initiated by Germany, a country that was widely considered to be Europe's least antisemitic before 1914.
• The move to mass murder was not in response to popular pressure from the German people, but in order to enhance his popularity, Hitler tried to give the impression that he was a moderate.
• Germany's advanced state of industrialization and the related efficiency and discipline of its people, especially their respect for state authority, may also be considered an obvious factor in making the Holocaust possible, but as such seems an overly general culprit.

• Many other factors might be mentioned in trying to explain how the Holocaust occurred, but relying on any single one as an independent force is clearly inadequate.
• Under Mussolini, fascistism began as explicitly opposed to antisemitism and racism, and in fact attracted a number of Jewish admirers, inside Italy and on the right of the Zionism movement.
• The mass murder of Jews during the war in which tens of millions of non-Jews perished made the Holocaust possible.
• The mass murder of Jews came at the end of a period in which mass death and appalling crimes against humanity, on the battlefront and inside the Soviet Union, occurred on an unprecedented scale and intensity.

• The end of the war and the immediate postwar period are covered in many studies of Nazism and the Holocaust.

• Europe was reduced to bombed-out landscapes and smoking ruins at the end of the war.
• In comparison to World War I, civilian deaths and urban destruction far exceeded that of homeless refugees, gangs of lawless, brutalized youth, and crowded into various camps begging for food and shelter.
• In the areas overrun by the Red Army, an estimated 2 million women were raped, often repeatedly and in front of their husbands or families, with little or no effort by the Army's officers to exercise control.

• The war-time meetings of the Big Three tended to paper over fundamental differences or delay addressing them, but with the defeat of Nazi Germany those differences reasserted themselves inexorably.
• The question became more complex after Stalin's death, but the lessons learned in the 1930s colored international relations for the next half-century.

• The military deaths in World War II were a bit less than in World War I, in part because the stalemate of the trenches between 1914 and 1918 was replaced by motorized and armored units and more rapidly moving battlefronts between 1939 and 1945.
• The totals in both wars were huge.

• Deaths varied greatly from country to country.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• After Soviet archives were opened to Western scholars in the 1990s, the widely accepted estimate was that around 26 million Soviet citizens perished during World War II, well over half of them civilians.
• The total number of war-time deaths in Europe was around 45 million, and the Soviet Union suffered more deaths than all the other countries combined.

• Estimates of German losses are difficult because the German Reich's borders changed so much.
• The Poles had the greatest war-time losses.
• For Italy, the number of dead, military and civilians was less than 1 percent of its total population, compared to 16 percent for Poland, 14 percent for the Soviet Union, and 9 percent for Germany.
• France suffered fewer military deaths in World War II than it did in World War I, mostly because it dropped out of the war for about four years, but French civilians suffered both at the hands of their Nazi occupiers.
• The Battle of Britain was mostly an air war with bombing of civilian centers, but the final proportion of Britain's war-time dead to its total population was close to 1 percent.
• Military deaths for the United States were around 420,000 since there were no battles on the American mainland.
• The lowest rate of all the major combatants was 0.22 percent of the total population.
• The Soviet rate was five times greater.

• The millions of dead and crippled and extensive material destruction of the war meant that postwar production plummeted in many areas.

• Thousands of people died of exposure to the elements during the winter when Europe's population lived in hunger.
• In the major areas of combat, political chaos was a threat.
• Germany and Austria remained under Allied military occupation longer than other countries, to some degree reducing the potential for chaos, but the destruction of Germany's urban areas by May 1945 seemed overwhelming, due to Allied strategic bombing.
• European civilization, especially its German element, had reached its nadir according to some.
• The mood at the end of the war was bleak, but that was an overreaction.

• Forced transfers of population replaced the effort in 1919 to draw national borders to fit existing populations according to language and ethnicity, as the nature of the European states that would be reestablished in the two to three years after the war remained uncertain.
• This could be called a final solution to the problem of non-Jewish minorities in Europe's nation-states, one that was started by the Nazis and was sanctioned by the Allies at the end of the war.

• Most of Europe's states were more diverse before 1939.
• Stalin's dictum that each nation should impose its system "as far as its army could reach" meant that nearly all of eastern Europe came under Communist rule by 1948.

• Tensions between the Western Allies and the Soviets increased after the war ended, but both sides agreed that Germany should not be allowed to reemerging.
• The Reich could be divided into a predominantly Catholic state and a predominantly Protestant one.
• Prussiaceded much of its territory to Poland at the end of World War I, which resulted in a reduction of the Reich before Hitler took power.
• Even if Germany were allowed to reunify, there was a question as to which borders it would return to.

• The expansion of the Nazi Reich in 1938 to include Austria and Czechoslovakia had no legitimacy in the eyes of the Allies, and those two countries were reestablished after the war.
• Austria was reestablished but not responsible for the crimes of the Nazis.
• It became the first victim of Nazi Germany's territorial expansion due to the Austrians' embrace of unity with Nazi Germany in 1938.

• Henry Morgenthau, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Treasury, put forth one of the most drastic plans to solve the German Question.
• He was one of the people who wanted Nazi leaders to be put to death.
• He wanted Germany to be broken up into smaller units so they wouldn't be able to wage modern warfare.
• The practical implications of his plan were duly considered and it was abandoned because preindustrial states would not be able to feed and provide Germany's large population.

• The proposal that millions of Germans be shipped to a non- European area was rejected as even more ill conceived.

• Making decisions about Germany's political future merged with the question of how ordinary citizens are treated.
• The major war criminals were to be dealt with by the Nuremberg tribunals, but the design of punishment for the many millions of Germans who had been active party members seemed uncomfortably close to collective punishment.
• It was difficult to get enough information about the major war criminals to convict them in courts of law, and the prospect of imprisoning millions of Germans was impractical and distasteful.
• The issue of appropriate treatment was further complicated by Jackson's opening remarks at the first Nuremberg trial, in which he made a distinction between the guilty German leaders and the German people, who he described as victims of Nazi tyranny.

• Many non-Jewish Germans, Austrians included, were victims of Nazism, especially those on the liberal, socialist, and Communist left.
• 3 to 4 million non-Jewish Germans had suffered Nazi persecution, which included being put under police watch, losing their jobs, and facing imprisonment or terms in concentration camps, where many perished or emerged broken in body and spirit.
• Finding qualified Germans who might take up postwar positions of authority but who were untainted by Nazi associations was often frustrating.

• In other countries, the leaders of the new governments were usually from the anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist resistance movements, but by 1945 the organized opposition inside Germany had been reduced to insignificance.

• The failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, led by Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, resulted in the arrest and execution of prominent military figures and members of other non-Nazi traditional elites.

• Even if no proof was found that they were part of the plot to assassinate Hitler, the Gestapo used the occasion to arrest and execute those suspected of anti-Nazi sympathies.
• The White Rose Movement, composed of intellectuals and university students, did not find a significant response to their pamphlet campaign against Nazism.

• After lengthy interrogation, the main leaders of the White Rose were guillotined.

• With the assumption that a large part of the German population had been nazified, the Americans started programs in each zone.
• On the one hand, denazification was mocked as naive and unjust by the German population, but on the other, it was considered a failure.
• Millions of Germans were told to fill out questionnaires about their pasts in order to get rid of unmanageable paperwork.
• Some of the more practical measures, such as outlawing the Nazi Party, removing former Nazi Party members from positions of authority, and destroying statues of Hitler, were accepted as appropriate.
• The idea that the German population could be reeducated in a few years to embrace different values was not realistic.
• Postwar polls showed how attitudes towards Nazism were retained by a significant portion of the German population.
• Von Stauffenberg and the leaders of the White Rose became positive symbols for a new Germany after decades.

• The trials of the Nazi leaders who weren't tried at Nuremberg were put in the hands of German authorities.
• Even with the best of wills, the task was bound to offend one or more people.
• It was easier to bring the less serious cases to trial first, which meant that relatively minor offenders were quickly and at times harshly punished, whereas many of the more serious and more complicated cases were repeatedly postponed.
• The pileup of cases led to a series of amnesties.
• By 1949 all but a few hundred of the millions of Germans who had been identified as probably culpable had been released.
• The punishments for those who collaborated with Nazi rulers in France, Holland, and Norway were more severe than the punishments meted out to the Nazi rulers themselves inside West Germany.

• The trials of the most notorious Nazis, who had initially evaded capture, continued into the 1980s.
• It would take decades before it was concluded that most Germans didn't like Nazism very much.
• The shift was gradual and probably had less to do with the formal efforts to reeducate Germans than with the fact that older Nazis were dying off.
• The attitudes of Europe's younger generations changed a lot by the late 1960s, but the distance between generations in Germany was particularly stark.

• The plans of Soviet officials for dealing with the Nazis remaining in the Soviet zone had parallels with the Morgenthau Plan in terms of their initial severity and their determination to reorganize the German economy in fundamental ways.
• Rather than deindustrialization, the Soviets wanted to replace Nazi economic structures with those modeled on Soviet Communism.
• The Marxist doctrine made a distinction between agents of capitalism and victims.
• The Communist Party would give proper leadership to the people.
• When one regime was replaced by another, the task of reeducating the people appeared easier, but communist leaders in the Soviet zone were prone to compromises, hoping to gain popularity.

• The memories of World War II were being pushed aside by the Cold War.
• The concern of leaders in the United States to have a German ally against the perceived threat of Soviet expansion weakened the determination to deal with the Nazis.
• The critics who criticized the Nuremberg trials as representing "victors' justice" did not offer superior alternatives to those who denounced the whole denazification experience as a whitewash.
• The rising passions of the Cold War made up for the fact that the Nazis had gotten away with murder.

• The administration of the four zones of military occupation, American, British, French, and Soviet, became mired in mutual recrimination over their respective roles and rights after the Potsdam conference.

• Sudeten d U.S.S.R.

• Germany is changing its borders.

• There is an issue of responsibility for the Cold War.
• The Soviets claimed that they had suffered more from the war than the Western Allies did.
• It was difficult to contest but also impossibly open-ended.
• Hundreds of thousands of forced laborers from Germany were used by the Soviet authorities in the immediate postwar years.
• In the first year after the war, a lot of Germany's industrial infrastructure was taken over by the Soviets.
• The Soviets moved 10 billion dollars' worth of agricultural and industrial goods from Germany to the Soviet Union in five years.
• It reduced the German population to even greater destitution in many areas, but it only caused a fraction of Nazi damage to the Soviet Union.

• By the autumn of 1949, the four zones of occupied Germany had been divided into western and eastern states.
• The Federal Republic of West Germany or the Bonn Republic is informally known as the American, British, and French zones.
• The German Democratic Republic was informally East Germany and had its capital in Berlin.
• The Federal Republic lacked the large, previously dominating Prussian element of the Weimar Republic, but some of them were similar to it.
• An extensive bill of rights was included to address the perceived weaknesses of the constitution.

• The term "people's republic" was used for most of the eastern European countries that fell under Soviet domination.
• The means of production were taken over by the state and the state itself was guided by the Communist Party in these republics.
• Walter Ulbricht, a particularly wooden Stalinist who became the most familiar face of East German Communism, was the leader of the former KPD.

• The first general elections in West Germany saw the emergence of two major parties.

• The pre-Nazi Catholic Center Party had roots in the Christian Democratic Union.
• The Social Democratic Party was a revival of the pre-Nazi party.
• The Center Party and the SPD were the two largest parties of the initially ruling Weimar Coalition, but they did not form a reliable majority in the following years.
• Both the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats could aspire to win an absolute majority, though a secure majority remained an ever-elusive goal for both, as the situation had changed significantly by 1949.
• The right-wing parties were mostly gone during the Weimar years.
• People who voted Nationalist or Nazi in the past are now voting for the Christian Democratic Party.
• The Communists in West Germany did not have a lot of popular appeal.
• The Free Democratic Party has roots in the Democratic and People's parties of the Weimar years.
• The Free Democrats allied with the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats in order to provide them with more secure parliamentary majorities.

• The leaders of the two major parties were different from those of the Weimar parent parties.
• Kurt was in the concentration camps of the Third Reich for twelve years.
• He emerged from the camps shattered in health but still harbored a belief that he could lead Germany from ruin to the promised land of democratic socialism.
• During World War I, when he had lost his right arm, he was treated with relative leniency by the Nazis, but his stubbornness cost him his life.

• Konrad Adenauer was a less remarkable figure.
• He was able to survive the Nazi years by walking a fine line, not compromising his Catholic beliefs, but also avoiding the kind of overt opposition to Nazi rule that would have resulted in his being sent to.

• His vision was for Germany to have a free-market economy and a Western-style society.
• Adenauer was a man of cunning political instincts and strong opinions, but he also had few illusions about his fellow Germans.
• He was a stern, no-nonsense leader, but he was able to compromise when necessary.

• Observers concluded that only an authoritarian but politically flexible fig ure had a chance of ruling West Germany.
• His resemblances were countered by more profound differences.
• He was neither a Protestant nor a Junker, he was a Catholic.
• In 1949, West Germany was fifty-fifty Catholic and Protestant, whereas the Reich had a large Protestant majority.
• Prussia had been destroyed by the Junker ruling class.

• It was politically foolish to overdo denazification.
• He wasn't particularly curious about the Nazi pasts of many who came to hold important positions in the Federal Republic.
• As part of his effort to rehabilitate Germany's moral standing in the world, he established good relations with the new state of Israel.
• He believed that an anti-Communist stance was crucial to maintaining a close alliance with the United States.

• The American leaders preferred Adenauer, who expressed socialist convictions that drew him into confrontations with American military authorities.
• He had a dream of Germany being neutral in the Cold War.
• He wanted to nationalize the industry because he thought Germany's elite supported Hitler.
• The Christian Democratic Union gained the support of the Free Democrats and the Bavarian Christian Social Union in the 1949 national elections in order to win more seats in the Bundestag.

• He assumed an opposition to almost everything undertaken by the Christian Democrats after he was incensed by Adenauer's victory.
• Many of his party's leaders were unenthusiastic about his intransigent anticapitalism, hoping instead to continue the transformation of their party toward democratic reformism and the "vital" political center.

• Their dilemma was solved by Schumacher's frail health.
• He lost his arm in World War I and had a leg amputation in December 1951, and died at age fifty-six.

• The SPD adopted a new program in 1959 that made an even cleaner break with Marxist theories of class conflict and economic determinism than it had in the past.
• Classical philosophy and Christian ethics were emphasized in the program.
• Private ownership of the means of production and open market incentives were both pronounced by the SPD.

• The Social Democrats won many provincial and urban victories, most notably in Berlin, but national office remained elusive from 1949 to 1969.

• The Christian Democrats were not hard line defenders of capitalism.
• Germany's economic recovery was linked to the tradition of state intervention to regulate capitalism's excesses and to aid the lower orders.
• Both social-democratic and Christian-democratic versions of a fine-tuned capitalism are capable of controlling the free market's tendencies to undermine social solidarity.
• After World War II, all major political tendencies in Europe accepted the role of the state in regulating capitalism.

• At the end of the war, an Austrian identity came back to life.

• Vienna was surrounded by the Soviet zone and was divided into four occupation zones.
• The Social Democratic and Christian Social parties of the first republic had roots in the Socialist Party and People's Party, but with new names, the Socialist Party and People's Party, the latter moving away from its earlier close identification with the Catholic Church.

• The two main parties were able to put aside the violence that had characterized their parent parties during the 1930s in order to form a two-party system.
• Suppressing memories of the recent past, or creating a mythical, more bearable past, was a tendency in most European countries, but that tendency took on particularly striking aspects, as part of Austria's being Nazism's first victim.
• It was plausible that both parties had been anti-Nazi when the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, as the pretense was attractive and one does not blame a victim.
• The common experience of persecution, which meant that in some cases, being in the same prison cells or concentration camps, contributed to the surprising tolerance that each party extended to the other after the war.

• The new political arrangements worked well.
• Austria experienced its own kind of economic miracle, based on what was termed a "social partnership" of capital and labor, after some very hard times in the postwar years.
• Austria regained its prewar unity within a decade of the end of the war.
• Austria was a neutral country during the Cold War.

• Europe did not have a "hot" or "shooting war", but rather threats, military build-ups, and some hair-raising confrontations.
• Most of Europe became involved in the dispute over the status of Berlin, which was one of the initial arenas of Cold War confrontation.
• In Korea, full-out shooting wars occurred in June 1950 to July 1953 due to the conflict in the form of "Communism vs. Democracy".
• The spread of Communism to China in 1949 was seen as a great victory for Communism and thus the Soviet Union, which further fueled the fires of anti-Communism in the United States and Europe.

• The exact point at which the Cold War began is difficult to say since there were no formal declarations of war.
• Truman assumed a more confrontational stance than Roosevelt, but hopes for continued Allied cooperation remained alive for most of the rest of 1945.

• By early March 1946, the tone of the east-west relations was becoming more serious.

• At the time, the "iron-curtain" speech was seen as an undiplomatic provocation by the public.
• Those who still harbored hopes for postwar cooperation reacted in such a way.
• Moderates and left-wingers in Britain criticized Churchill as an irresponsible war-monger, just like they criticized him in the 1930s.

• Many years ago, it was thought that the Cold War had arisen from the West's resistance to Soviet aggression.
• As he had warned against the appeasement of Nazi Germany, he was thought to have been prescient in his iron-curtain speech.
• Appeasing dictators only whetted their appetites; they must be met with force.
• The Soviet Union became the new Nazi Germany and Stalin the new Hitler for many people in the West.
• The counternarrative grew in appeal as the century progressed, one that emphasized American capitalism as the real trouble-maker, whereas the Soviet Union was seen as gravely weakened by the war and acting defensively against the aggressive stance of the United States.

• There are parallels between the changing views of the origins of the Cold War and the changing views of the origins of World War I.
• Historians of the Cold War have tended to emphasize the clash of expansionist states, each with a universalist ideology that demonized its opposition, while seeing itself as courageously defending high principles.
• The Cold War appears to be predictable rather than the result of bad leadership.

• The early accounts of World War I and the Cold War were both characterized by moral outrage that focused on the central role of evil people.
• At Tehran and Yalta, "personal diplomacy" played a key role, and with Roosevelt's death, things changed at Potsdam in part because different people were involved.
• If Roosevelt had lived, history might have taken different directions.

• Revisionist interpretations of the origins of the Cold War have come to be termed as Assumptions related to such speculations.
• It seems that the most to be expected was a somewhat less dangerous or intense confrontation, not genuine or lasting harmony.

• The fact that there were only two major powers in the postwar years had ominous implications.
• Psychic instability and dangerous mood swings are referred to as "bipolar" in recent times.
• "bipolarity," in the sense of two poles of power, could be termed inherently dangerous in diplomacy.

• Communism and liberal democracy were demonizing each other after World War II, which led to the dangers of bipolarity.
• There was something profoundly "structural" at work in those years, something deeper than personality in the worsening relations between the Soviet Union and the United States.

• In the 19th century, Russia and America viewed each other as polar opposites.
• The United States and France would emerge as major world powers in the future according to the French observer of early democracy in the United States.
• In the Russian Civil War, the United States sent troops into Russia.
• The New Deal and Popular Front had a common enemy in Nazi Germany and the decline in overt hostility was a result of that.
• When the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed in August 1939, the relationship relapsed into a familiar if also more intense hostility.

• The argument that moral ideals also matter in international relations overlaps with the issue of personality.
• The United States and the Soviet Union are not morally equal states, according to some people.
• The most hostile to the Soviet Union in the immediate postwar period pointed to Stalin's appalling personal record and the Communist regime since 1917.
• Stalin imposed Communism in eastern Europe after the Third Reich was destroyed.

• Stalin made a number of conciliatory gestures in the immediate postwar period, whereas the Americans made a number of provocative ones, according to the revisionists.
• Stalin understood how foolish it would be to provoke the Americans during the war, according to the revisionist argument.
• Stalin's initial conciliatory actions did not add up to his sincerely working for peace and lasting international harmony.
• He was going to return to the brutal methods he had used in the 1930s.
• For Stalin's detractors, the attempt to present him as a rational, reliable leader, simply pursuing the national interest of his country, has something in common with the description of Hitler as a traditional statesman.
• Stalin's past revealed his true moral essence, despite the fact that he could appear reasonable.

• The relationship between the Soviet Union and the United States was in a state of limbo from 1945 to 1947, with both sides making conciliatory gestures, but by the beginning of 1948 the hopes for harmonious relations had largely disappeared.
• A battle over the status of Berlin averted a shooting war for the rest of the year.
• The coalition governments of Communists and non-Communists that had been patched together at the end of the war fell apart in both eastern and western Europe.
• The Truman Doctrine was proclaimed by the United States in March 1947, promising military aid to any country that was threatened by Communism.
• The Marshall Plan, which promised billions of dollars to restore the economies of Europe, was more decisive in permanently separating the two sides.
• The Truman Doctrine was seen by Stalin as less threatening than the Plan because a number of eastern European states were tempted to apply for aid under its provisions.

• The Plan's promise to open Europe's economy to American trade and investment was one of the main attractions for members of the United States congress.
• The Plan was perceived by Stalin as American capitalist expansion into areas that were friendly to the Soviet Union.
• Communism's appeal was to impoverished populations, but most Americans saw the Plan in a more altruistic light.
• It was believed that restoring Europe's economy was crucial to defeating Communism.

• The Czechoslovak Communist Party won 38 percent of the vote in 1946, making it the strongest party.
• The Communist Party leader, Klement Gottwald, was appointed to head a multiparty cabinet by President Edvard Benes, who was on friendly terms with Stalin and who had also been president at the time of the Munich Agreements.

• The Czechoslovak model seemed poised to demonstrate how Communist rule could be introduced non-violently through the ballot box, with far-reaching implications for other countries.
• The Czech population was more friendly to the Soviet Union than most other eastern European populations.
• After the Red Army liberated the Czechs from Nazi tyranny, the country looked eastward for protection from future German revanchist designs.

• By the summer of 1947, the Communist-led cabinet had alienated large parts of the population, and many anticipated that in the May 1948 elections support for the Czech Communist Party would decline.
• The role of Communists in coalition governments was "enhanced" by the Soviet authorities in other areas of eastern Europe.
• By the autumn of 1947, Stalin was resorting to more tried and true methods, despite the fact that a majority of the population supported Communism in free elections.
• The Czech Communists staged a bloodless coup in February 1948, removing other parties from their positions of power.

• Stalin began to reveal suspicions of "nationalist devia tions" by Communist Party leaders elsewhere.
• The most prominent example was in Yugoslavia, where Josip Broz, better known by his revolutionary name, Tito, enjoyed strong popular support.
• "Titoism" came to be considered a particularly dangerous heresy because of its popularity and because it aroused suspicions on Stalin's part.

• The Czech Coup did not involve direct confrontations between the military forces of the Soviet Union and the Western Allies, but they did develop in the months immediately following it, in the form of the Soviets blocking road and rail access to Berlin from the west.
• The division of Berlin seemed to promise future difficulties, and it is understandable only in the calm of the end of the war, when various tentative administrative agreements were being made in anticipation of a general peace conference.
• Stalin held the strong cards in the confrontation over access to the city, but he encountered resistance from the Americans and British.
• Europe seemed to be on the verge of a general war as other countries watched in fascination.

• The Anglo-Americans decided to provide the western sectors of Berlin by air after the generals on both sides urged a major show of armed force.
• That seemed impractical, if not sheer folly, to many at the time, but it finally succeeded and became one of the most famous and defining episodes of the Cold War, known as the Berlin Airlift.

• If American planes were shot down, Truman was ready for a shooting war, but he wouldn't allow his military leaders to move atomic bombs to Germany.
• In this war of nerves lasting over a year, Soviet pilots harassed Anglo-American transport aircraft and even fired warning shots, but no serious air battles developed.
• The 2.5 million West Berliners who were cut off from normal transports were able to be moved by air.

• The blockade was called off by Stalin in May 1949.
• During the last months of the Berlin Airlift, the United States, Britain, and France formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which promised to defend any one of its members against military aggression by the Soviet Union.
• When the Soviet Union exploded its own atomic bomb in August 1949, it was much earlier than the Western observers had expected, and it led to a rise in hostility between the two blocs.
• One of the atomic weapons was about to start a third world war.
• Many crises were yet to come and the horror of that prospect may have been crucial to averting war in the next half-century.

• The Cold War's center was in Europe, even if the actual fighting broke out in non-European areas, because studies tend to focus on US-Soviet relations.

• In the course of the twentieth century, the revolutionary mystique was declared moribund, a romantic fantasy, dangerous in the way that it encouraged leftwing fanaticism and provoked right-wing reaction.
• If tattered and torn, that mystique survived many ups and downs.
• Even if the dictatorial and terrorist aspects of Bolshevik rule repelled many on the socialist left, it contributed to its remark able durability.
• Many people kept their feelings under control because they considered the greater threat from Nazi Germany to be more important than the horrors of Stalinism.
• The Mystique seemed to have been dealt a death blow by the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
• After the Battle of Stalingrad, the vision of the Soviet Union as the enduring heart and soul of that mystical, expansive concept, "the revolution," was revived, and Stalin's reputation as its leader rose again to super human dimensions in the minds of many.
• In Europe, the Soviet model generally declined in attractiveness and non-Soviet revolutionary models proved to have little lasting power after his death.
• In western Europe, revolutionary socialists never came close to power, and democratic socialists only experienced success in limited areas.

• Some people who had memories of the dark side of Stalin's rule rationalized or suppressed them.
• Stalin's paranoia began to revive in the late 1940s.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The MystIQUE OF REVOLUTION made it easier for many outside the Soviet Union to retain their faith in the Homeland of the Revolution for a longer period of time.
• There were many on the left who believed that Soviet Communism was a betrayal of socialist ideals.

• The Soviet mystique spread more widely after World War II than it did after 1917, but it was still problematic.
• In eastern Europe, the Communist ascent was assured by the presence of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, not by popular action.
• Many did entertain the idea of different paths to Communism, even though the hints turned out to be deceptive.
• It was an issue when the Communist parties were first founded in 1919-21, and it reappeared repeatedly throughout the twentieth century in Europe and in the rest of the world.
• After Stalin's death and the victory of the Communists in China, the Soviet path to Communism, with the leading role of the Soviet Communist Party, was no longer the only one.

• The different ways in which the Communists came to power in the Soviet bloc countries differed from the way the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917.

• Many people in western Europe who had abandoned the belief in a violent seizure of power by a revolutionary elite with the goal of introducing socialism still harbored socialist hopes of various sorts, mostly because they believed the free market and competitive individualism were unacceptably merciless and destructive to social solidarity.
• They concluded that capitalism had shown itself to be flawed even as an effective economic system.
• The term "democratic socialists" was not without its problems since both capitalist America and Communist Russia claimed to be "democratic."
• They said that genuine majority support was needed before socialist measures could be introduced.

• Those who preferred to be called liberals, radicals, or Christian democrats were more likely to overlap with Democratic socialists.
• Most European socialists came to accept that the free market was more productive than the state.
• The most reliable guarantees of social harmony were found to be high levels of production.
• If the state were to grow too powerful, they worried that individual freedoms in other arenas would be at risk.

• After World War II, Democratic socialists were more pragmatic than ideological in the measures they proposed, working cautiously toward a goal that they freely admitted was open-ended.
• They were edging away from aspects of capitalism that were all too real for them.
• The democratic socialists were derided as weak compromisers by the communists.
• As the century progressed, it became common for non-Communists to refer to the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc countries as the only ones in which real, existing socialism was in place.
• The term "real socialism" was first used in the Soviet Union in the late 1960s to emphasize that the socialism that already existed in the country was as good as it gets.

• Britain is a model of gradual evolution toward liberal democracy and welfare capitalism in the 19th century.
• The British Labour Party, with its base in the practical, non-ideological tradeunion movement, resisted identifying itself explicitly with socialist ideas before World War I.
• The experience of the war and the revolutionary enthusiasms immediately following it contributed to a sharp move toward doctrinaire socialism for Labour.

• Labour's first year in government in 1924 lasted less than a year because a majority of Britain's population was not ready for a reconstruction of society.
• After which Conservative-dominated governments ruled throughout the 1930s, the second Labour government from 1929 to 1931 was even more flop than the first.
• By 1945 Britain had been through a decade of depression and six years of war socialism, which many considered to be "war socialism".
• Labour Party leaders gained experience in national government and enjoyed a rising public confidence as they served in prominent positions in the ruling coalition cabinets.
• Labour gained from the fear that a return to rule by the Conservative Party would lead to another depression.
• There was a feeling in Britain that a period of heroic sacrifice was over and that the focus would be on domestic issues.

• The nation's new priorities made the party ill-suited to deal with.

• The Labour party won more seats in Parliament than the Conservatives.
• The nationalization of a third of the nation's industries, the takeover of the Bank of England, and the introduction of the national health program were some of the measures that were taken.

• His daughter found his rhetoric to be over the top.

• Socialism as practiced during the war did not harm anyone.
• The children of this country have never been so well fed.
• The rich didn't die because their meat ration was larger than the poor's.
• One of our strongest bonds was the sharing and feeling of sacrifice.

• The Labour Party's leader, Clement Attlee, was a good man, but he was dismissed as a sheep in sheep's clothing.
• The Beveridge Report was prepared during the war by the head of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge.
• After the war, the government should take wide-ranging action to revive the economy and ensure a more secure, productive life for Britain's working classes.
• Beveridge's background was with the Liberal Party, not the Labour or the British socialists, and he believed in the value of the free market.
• The comprehensiveness of his report was in accord with most of Labour's recommendations, even though socialists had previously termed Liberal "patchwork."

• It's indicative of the temper of those years when Conservative leaders didn't criticize the Report, even though some complained about how much it would cost.
• The positive response to it was related to the avoidance.
• The Report was supported by 86 percent of the British population by the end of the war.
• When the Conservatives returned to power in 1951 on a slim parliamentary majority, they sought to fine-tune, not repeal, the measures introduced in the previous six years.
• The postwar consensus in favor of welfare capitalism ended in the late 1970s.

• The majority of the industry was in private hands.
• The British have always been known for their obsessive concern with social class.
• In speech, manners, dress, and/or cultural tastes, class hierarchy and hostilities persisted for the rest of the century.
• Equality of opportunity and upward mobility were elusive goals.
• According to a survey in the mid-1970s, a fifth of Britain's population still owned less than a tenth of the nation's wealth.

• For the years of Labour rule, failure is too harsh a word.
• The extent to which Britain's economy was in deep distress by the end of the war needs to be taken into account when evaluating those years.
• The most obvious explanation for Britain's condition was six years of war, but there was a decade of economic stagnation and depression before that.
• Trying to build a socialist society after decades of destruction was certain to be frustrating.

• The country's savings had largely been wiped out, and it had incurred a huge trade deficit during the war.
• The kinds of measures proposed by the Beveridge Report required substantial savings and productive surpluses.
• Britain had neither.
• The same realities would have been faced by conservatives in power.

• Britain's war-time deficits were covered by American Lend Lease, but the American congress stipulated that they be terminated at the end of the war.
• Keynes was sent to Washington in September to negotiate a new loan, based on the argument that the economic collapse of Britain would not be in the interests of the United States.
• The Americans granted a loan of $3.75 billion to be repaid over fifty years at 2 percent interest.
• The British were angry about the loan because they were the ones who stood up for democracy against Nazi tyranny.
• The richest country in the world, its own territory undamaged by war, acted like a skinflint.

• The Congress of the United States was more generous as Cold War tensions increased.
• The Marshall Plan aid for Europe added up to over $20 billion, but the British people were still obliged to endure a period of harsh austerity.
• Germany, the country that was defeated at the end of the war, recovered more quickly than Britain.
• Britain's insolvency had implications that went beyond domestic issues, showing that it could no longer function as the world power it had been.
• The inability to support the monarchists against the Communists in the Greek civil war was an implication.
• Britain's withdrawal from its imperial holdings was more than just a related event.
• While officially supporting anti- imperialist movements, the United States took over the rewards and burdens of European imperialism.

• It was ironic that Labour's program of 1945-51, emphasizing its socialist nature, would have been difficult if not impossible without American financial support.
• The measures taken by Labour may have moved the country towards socialism.
• The boundary line between capitalism and democratic socialism became a political issue in most countries of western Europe during the Cold War because of the preference of the Americans for a "liberal" variety of democracy, one that had close connections to the free market and private ownership of the means of production.

• It is interesting that the area of parliamentary democracy that has been successful is also socialistic.
• The Labour government's self-proclaimed socialism attracted more attention from Americans than the social democratic parties.
• The idea that the social wounds inflicted by capitalist development could be healed while at the same actually enhancing economic performance was offered by some observers.

• In the early 19th century, it was among Europe's poorer areas, but by the 1970s it would be among the richest, and in the twentieth century it was mostly under social-democratic governments.
• Material conditions that were revealingly different from those of most of the rest of the continent made the Nordic Way possible.
• A Protestant background, high levels of literacy, languages, and physical characteristics were all common in Nordic Scandinavia.
• In terms of the social bases attracted to socialism, the most significant difference between Sweden and the rest of Europe was the lower level of tension between urban and rural workers.
• The large numbers of workers in the fishing and lumber industries made it possible for national political alliances of parties representing workers in city and countryside.

• The relationship between capital and labor was finally characterized by a willingness to compromise.

• Sweden, which had the largest population in 1945 and the most developed industry of the three, was able to benefit from trade with Germany during both wars because it remained neutral.
• Social-democratic leaders entered into coalition cabinets with non-socialist parties.
• They were junior partners, but in 1932 they formed a coalition with the Farmers' Party, setting the stage for the successful social-democratic leadership of the country during the Depression.
• During the Depression, the Swedish social democrats took bold initiatives in order to compensate for the lack of private investment without feeling the need to balance the budget yearly.
• According to social-democratic theorists, trying to balance the budget each year had the effect of accentuating deflationary trends whereas government expenditures in social services and public works would help to stimulate the economy.

• The British approach to private ownership of the means of production was different in the Nordic countries.
• Labour wanted the state to take over private enterprises, but the Swedes were content to leave ownership in private hands.
• The success of the Scandinavian story in the 1960s earned it widespread admiration, despite the fact that it was not an exact model for other areas.
• The majority of the population of the Nordic countries have begun to enjoy better health, to live longer, to be better educated, and to have a higher standard of material existence than the population of any other area of Europe.

• Conservative critics said that socialism made life too easy or boring.
• After 1945, the "real socialism" of the Soviet Union and the countries of eastern Europe could not be accused of being too easy or of leaving the capitalist ethic intact.
• There have been fundamental changes in those countries.

• The problems associated with describing the rule of the Bolsheviks as socialist are major.
• The purges of the late 1930s are considered to be the antithesis of the ideals of the Enlightenment.
• The entire "Soviet experiment" could be seen as a failure due to the huge suffering of Soviet Russia's population from 1917 to 1939.

• A new generation of revolutionary idealists rallied to the banners of the Communist movement after the Battle of Stalingrad and the defeat of Hitler's armies.
• Although the Cold War caused a resurgence of militant anti-Communism in western Europe and the United States, it did not lead to the creation of the Red Army.
• The power of Soviet Communism was regained during the Cold War by a large number of prominent intellectuals who were not actual party members.

• Stalin was the epitome of the revolutionary mystique in these years.
• Millions of Soviet citizens gave in to hysterical grief when he died at the age of seventy-four.
• Stalin had mellowed in his old age.
• He became sickly in the last years of his life.
• A new round of trials and mass arrests in both the Soviet Union and the Soviet Bloc were put on hold after his death.

• The purges of the 1930s became more explicit this time.
• The creation of Israel in 1948 seems to have awakened Stalin's suspicion that the Jews had never been genuinely loyal citizens, and many Soviet Jews did express enthusiasm for the new Jewish state.
• The Soviet government began to make life difficult for Jews after 1948, taking measures to reduce the overrepresentation of Jews in various arenas.
• A number of prominent doctors, nearly all of whom were Jewish, were accused of planning to poison Stalin and other Soviet leaders.

• The cult of personality around Stalin grew to Orwellian dimensions.

• At the peak of Hitler's popularity, he was not appreciated with such extravagance.
• The German Fuhrer was a charismatic orator who had won a large popular following before becoming chancellor and was credited with bringing order, prosperity, and international respect to the country.
• Stalin was a poor orator who rarely made public speeches.
• He had overseen more than two decades in which untold millions of ordinary Soviet citizens had been arrested and sent to prison camps, to say nothing of the millions of peasants who died during collectivization.

• Stalin's lieutenants lived in dread of his disfavor, which colored their public adulation of him.
• The purge of the Old Bolsheviks in the late 1930s was not the only one of Stalin's own young people.
• Stalin was praised by Communist leaders in the Eastern Bloc countries.
• Stalin was elevated to god-like status even in the western democracies.
• Yugoslavia was the only Communist country in which the Stalin cult encountered significant resistance, and it was where the Communist Partisans fought off the Nazis and came to power.
• By the end of World War II, Tito began to question Stalin's insistence on unquestioning conformity to Soviet dictates, even though he had been an obedient Stalinist.
• Other Communist leaders had shown some inclination to independence, but they lacked the popularity of their own countries and were unable to retain political power without the support of the Soviet Union.

• The official line from Moscow was for Communists to avoid pressing for social revolution in the name of preserving the broadest possible anti-fascist alliance, but one of the ways that Tito had initially shown independence was in making social revolution part of the war-time program of his Partisans.
• Stalin was stymied by the lack of a military invasion of Yugoslavia, even though he tried to destroy it.
• He went to great lengths to make sure that no other Communists would follow his example.

• The postwar equivalent of being charged with Trotskyism was being charged with Titoism.
• From 1949 until Stalin's death, arrests and show trials were common in eastern Europe.
• In the early postwar period, Communists enjoyed popular support in the country of Czechoslovakia.
• The leader of the Communist Party was arrested along with thirteen other people and charged with a range of crimes.

• A full year after the show trial, Slansky confessed and asked to be given the death penalty.
• He was put to death five days after the verdict was handed down.

• There is little question that Stalin is responsible for the power struggles within the Communist parties.
• Stalin's personal role in the history of the Soviet Union since the mid-1920s is related to that point.
• The trials were abandoned after Stalin was laid to rest.
• After Stalin's death, his lieutenants jockeyed for position.
• It was obvious that they couldn't rule like Stalin, but there was uncertainty about what the alternatives would be.
• There was no heir apparent.
• Stalin's vigilance in assuring that no one came close to rivaling him reflected the general mediocrity of those lieutenants.

• Stalin's death opened the way for a new era for many people who were hoping for the Soviet Union to be the Homeland of the Revolution.
• Some people were concerned about the possibility of chaos and civil war.

• The "Soviet experiment" had been an abysmal failure.

• The leader of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, was arrested in June of 1953.
• Stalin once referred to him as "our Himmler," and Beria's secret police was very brutal.
• In June, Beria was charged with having been a spy for the West for the past thirty years, as well as planning to restore capitalism to the Soviet Union.
• He was executed in December after being found guilty in a rigged court hearing.
• The charges against him and his immediate execution were reminiscent of the methods of the 1930s and suggested the extent to which Stalinist habits remained among those who would soon be proclaiming their desire to de-Stalinize Soviet Russia.

• Stalin's lieutenants spoke of the need for "collective leadership" and "socialist legal ity."
• Nikita Khrushchev was the most colorful of Stalin's lieutenants.
• He retained a belief in Communism's superiority to capitalism, even though it had been freed of Stalinist excesses.

• The full extent of Khrushchev's break with Stalinism was laid out in a four-hour speech at a congress of the twentieth party.
• Stalin's rule was described in surprisingly frank detail by Khrushchev.
• He shocked some of his audience, but his speech was often interrupted by applause.
• In his speech, Khrushchev admitted that he too had been "infected" by Stalinism, and that virtually all Soviet leaders had been implicated in Stalin's crimes.
• The speech was a remarkably bold gamble.

• Khrushchev restricted his denunciations to Stalin's per sonality, not to Communism as a ruling system.
• He described the collectivization of agriculture and the five-year plans as necessary to preserve the revolution, while Stalin's purges were not.
• The victory of Communism could come without war between nations, if Khrushchev had accepted the possibility of "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist powers.
• The conclusion was influenced by Khrushchev's experiences in war and his understanding of how much the Soviet people wanted peace.

• Khrushchev acknowledged in his speech that the path to Communism could be different from the Soviet model, which helped to reduce tensions with Tito, and that the charges against the "national deviationists" in eastern Europe were unwarranted.
• The concept of acceptably different paths was still vaguely defined, and for a Soviet leader to admit that the Soviet Union had given disastrously poor leadership in the past opened a Pandora's box, leading to a series of dramatic crises for the rest of the year.

• Some of the points made in Khrushchev's speech touched upon the long standing ambiguities of the theory.
• The exaggerated elitism allowed Communists to feel justified in resorting to violence to maintain their rule.
• The assumption that a majority of the common people supported social revolution was a stubborn element of the revolutionary mystique.
• By the early 1950s, that concept was even more questionable in many eastern European countries.
• Communist leaders would need to pay more attention to gaining popularity as a result of Khrushchev's move away from using Stalinist terror as a ruling device.
• He took a number of steps to achieve greater popular support in the Soviet Union, such as emphasizing consumer-goods production, freeing political prisoners, and starting a more peaceful foreign policy.
• In the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, how these initiatives would play out remained uncertain.
• What some were hoping for was for revolutionary socialism to move beyond the confines of Marxism with a human face, most famously represented in the past by Rosa Luxemburg.

• Many of Khrushchev's ideas were patently exploratory.
• The repressive methods under Khrushchev and his successors were not as violent as those under Stalin.

• Khrushchev was in power until October 1964.
• His efforts to revive the Soviet economy and reputation of Communism experienced ups and downs, but can't be termed a success given his grandiose claims about Communism's future economic productivity.
• He was allowed to retire despite being kept under guard.
• He was known to have fallen into a deep depression in his retirement years, but he was able to dictate memoirs that were never published in the Soviet Union.
• The fascinating details of those memoirs are part of the reason that historians generally have a more sympathetic sense of him than they do of the people who succeeded him.
• Khrushchev was energetic and down to earth.
• He was the most "human" of the post-Stalin leaders until the rise of Gorbachev.

• Khrushchev was hardened by the 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 800-273-3217 He didn't respect Western-style liberal democracy because he wanted to move away from the worst Stalinist extremes.
• The way the country had been ruled since the mid-1920s was distrustful by most Soviet leaders.
• After Khrushchev's speech, a crucial test came in Poland, a land where hatred of both Russian imperialism and Communism was especially deep.
• After Khrushchev's speech, the popular protest against Communist rule in Poland became violent.

• Wladyslaw Gomulka was a popular Communist leader in Poland.
• After Stalin's death, he was released from prison in December of 1954.
• He was an obvious candidate to return to a leadership role after the reshuffling of the government.
• When Khrushchev met Gomulka in October of 1956, he was initially suspicious, but Gomulka was not intimidated and the two finally hit it off.
• In ruling Poland, Gomulka was given considerable latitude.

• A violent clash of Soviet and Polish forces was averted, and the role of personality seems obvious.
• Gomulka was in power for six years longer than Khrushchev.
• He was identified with the persecutions of neo-Stalinism, including the antisemitism that drove out most of the Jews in the country, when he said the Party would lead Poland along a new path to socialism.

• It was more difficult to avoid a violent confrontation in Hungary, which has a population that is hostile to Communism.
• The Soviet leaders were worried that the events in Poland would have a domino effect.
• The Stalinists in Hungary were notorious for staging grotesque purge trials before Stalin's death.
• Imre Nagy, a Hungarian Communist leader who looked like Gomulka, had served as premier for two years but was deposed by the Stalinist group.

• After popular unrest increased, it assumed strongly anti-Soviet dimensions.

• Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders were alarmed by these developments.
• The Soviets accepted Nagy's promises that he would be able to calm the situation, much as Gomulka did.
• Nagy was associated with popular demands for a complete withdrawal of Soviet troops.
• He began to speak of a multiparty future for Hungary.

• The Soviets ordered a full-scale military invasion of Hungary in November after concluding that Nagy was a traitor to the Communist cause.
• It was the most violent clash of the Cold War years in Europe and resulted in around 3000 deaths and a mass emigration out of Hungary.
• More than 35,000 Hungarians were arrested in postinvasion measures and around 300 were sentenced to death.

• The invasion was intended to impress other dissidents in the soviet bloc.
• A number of previously sympathetic intellectuals turned hostile as a result of a drop in membership in the communist parties.
• Even if some of his cabinet members spoke in favor of a policy of freeing eastern Europe, the reaction of the American president was reassuring.
• The spheres of influence established at the end of the war were to remain in place.

• Despite promises by both sides to work for "peaceful coexistence," areas of continued tension remained after 1956.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 is considered to be the most terrifying moment of the Cold War by historians.
• While Nagy's move toward a non-Communist Hungary was viewed by the Soviets as a betrayal of their ideals, the move toward establishing a Communist regime in Cuba was viewed by American leaders as a betrayal of their ideals.

• Castro was more popular than Nagy.

• The poorly planned Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, led by CIA-trained Cuban exiles, turned into a humiliating fiasco for the newly elected American President, John F. Kennedy.

• Despite that failure, it seemed unlikely that the Americans would tolerate a Communist regime ninety miles from Florida, and Khrushchev, to prevent another invasion.
• Castro accepted.
• The missile sites under construction were detected by American high-altitude surveillance.
• During a tense confrontation in October, Kennedy demanded their removal.
• Khrushchev agreed to dismantle the sites and return the ships to Cuba with missiles on board.
• On a public level at least, the victory seemed entirely to belong to the United States, but Khrushchev's achievements were real if less publicized, in that Kennedy agreed never to invade Cuba and to dismantle the American missile sites that had been installed in Turkey.

• Castro ruled Cuba longer than any Communist leader in history, despite the fact that the Communist regime in Cuba survived longer than the Soviet empire in Europe.
• There are a number of implications for Europe and the status of Communism in that story, which is outside the history of Europe.
• Castro was also a Communist who could make credible claims to long-term popular support.
• Even if he became dependent on Soviet economic aid, he was still more than a puppet.
• The leadership of the Soviet Union in world Communism was detracted from in 1949 when Mao Zedong came into power in China, the world's most populous country, without the kind of Soviet aid that made Communist takeovers in eastern Europe possible.

• Castro's Communism, like that of the Soviet Union and the eastern-European republics, was an economic failure, but he remained a hero for many Cubans and for others in Latin America.
• If it was possible to surpass the cult around Stalin, the Chinese Communists did so in their cult of Mao.
• The number of people who died under Mao's rule was 888-282-0465 888-282-0465.
• 40 to 70 million deaths were caused by a series of poorly executed programs and mass hysteria caused by him in the Cultural Revolution.
• He destroyed cultural treasures and wreaked havoc on China's economy.
• It must be concluded that Mao served more than Stalin to associate the revolutionary mystique with mass murder and economic failure, even though there were some in Europe who found inspiration in Mao's leadership.

• In the five years from the Hungarian uprising to the confrontation over Cuba, the story of the two Germanies and the status of Berlin was relevant to the issue of Communism vs.
• Communism.
• East Germany's recovery was much slower than that of West Germany.
• The migration from the Communist side to the capitalist side via Berlin became a near flood because so many of them were young.
• Millions who voted with their feet clashed with Khrushchev's vision of a Communist future and the inevitable collapse of capitalism.

• During the Cold War of Communism's failure, the Berlin Wall was one of the most notorious symbols because of the migration out of East Germany.
• East Germans who tried to escape through the Wall were killed.

• It was difficult for some observers to forget that larger crowds in Berlin cheered for Hitler two decades earlier.
• The victory of the West in the Cold War was not assured at the time of Kennedy's speech, and five months later he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

• When Khrushchev met Kennedy, he thought the young president could be bullied.

• Kennedy's boast at Berlin might be cited as a competing assertion.
• The way in which others remained unconvinced is similar to the way in which both leaders were confident.

• Europeans recovered from the ravages of war and relinquished their worldwide empire in twenty years.
• It was a time of healing and economic recovery on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
• In western Europe, parliamentary democracies were established in most countries, and the first steps towards European economic and political unification were taken.

• After the Nuremberg trials, the awareness of the full horrors of Hitler's rule was a slow process, but by the late 1960s it became a major issue of an evolving European identity.
• The process of understanding the horrors of Stalin's rule was slower because the Soviet archives were closed and historians were under strict supervision.

• The collapse of Europe's world empire was largely related to the period of deep despair and self-doubt, but even the British, with the most far-flung of all empires, had long been of two minds about the benefits of imperialism.
• There had been more disagreement about the topic on the Continent, the left mostly in opposition, the right in favor.
• Even though the brutality and exploitative nature of colonial rule were condemned, even on the left, there was a tendency to see European rule as mostly beneficial to non- Europeans.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The United States, now the world's greatest power, was historically anti-imperialist.
• While Europeans had been destroying one another by the millions, non- European peoples had been growing in absolute and relative numbers, many at the same time beginning to embrace the kind of nationalist intoxication that had brought Europeans to ruin.
• In areas where local elites were unprepared to take over and where national boundaries were uncertain, nationalist passions raged, and European rule was no longer enjoyable.

• The details of the dismantling of Europe's empire were varied across the globe.
• Scores of new states were established in principle, but not close to becoming nation-states in the modern European sense.
• Most were plagued by internal unrest.
• India, Vietnam, Palestine, and Algeria all had a connection to European history from 1945 to the early 1960s.

• Europe's self-destruction was crucial, as Nazi Germany had conquered most of the European continent and weakened Britain.
• Many areas in Asia that had been under the rule of the three main imperial powers were overrun by the Japanese.
• Japanese rule was also destroyed.
• By 1949, the Communists had defeated the Nationalists in China and given support to the popular Communist leader, Ho Chi Minh.
• The French statemen's stubborn efforts to retain control over Vietnam cost the French around 200,000 dead and wounded, three times what France received through the Marshall Plan aid.

• India, the "jewel in the crown" of the British empire, has been the scene of rising movement for independence led by Mohandas Gandhi.
• The British argued that India's deep divisions would lead to civil war if independence came too quickly.

• Gandhi and other Indian leaders opposed a partition into Hindu and Muslim areas as Muslim leaders warned that they could not accept a Hindu-dominated unitary Indian state.
• In mid-August 1947, the British Prime Minister favored a rapid departure from India.

• In the final arrangements, the Muslim leaders obtained the partition they wanted, but then violence erupted in the autumn of 1947.

• Approximately the same number of Hindus fled out of Muslim-majority areas as Muslims did in either west or east Pakistan.
• Hundreds of thousands were killed in the process, and Gandhi was assassinated by a Hindu fanatic.
• Pakistan and India remained at daggers well into the next century.
• East Pakistan became a separate state in 1971 and India retained a Muslim population of 60 million.

• Most of the Middle East and north Africa became independent nation-states after World War I.
• The British and French ceded control of Jordan and Syria in 1946, with relatively few problems.
• The fate of the British mandate in Palestine was more problematic.
• It was already a hot spot in the interwar period and became the most disputed area of former European imperialism in the world.
• Its troubles affected the relations of European nations to one another and to the United States, as well as sparking bitter debates within the Jewish communities of the world.
• There is a new center in the Middle East.

• The situation in the Palestinian Mandate was relatively simple compared to what the British faced in India.
• Plans and proposals by British authorities have always been rejected by both Jews and Arabs.
• The dilemmas were connected to the contradictions of the declaration.
• The Zionists were against a democratic state embracing all of the Palestinian Mandate since they wanted to escape domination by non-Jews.
• The Jewish population had been arriving under constant and vehement Arab protest since 1919, and any Arab-controlled Palestinian state would be hostile to them.
• An Arab-controlled state would have been against any further Jewish immigration.
• If the area were divided into Arab and Jewish parts, it would result in crazy-quilt borders.
• For the foreseeable future, any Jewish-majority state would be very small and vulnerable to the hostile Arab states that surrounded it.
• The Arab-Israeli wars broke out in every decade after World War II, halted each time by shaky armistices and continuing smaller-scale violence.

• The British had many other concerns after World War II.
• The Labour government turned the matter over to the United Nations because they were fed up with terrorist atrocities against British officials.
• The partition plan was supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as a majority of the UN General Assembly.

• The Jewish sector had a bare majority of 560,000 Jews and 400,000 Arabs, while the other sector had a much stronger Arab majority.
• The leaders of the state of Israel were not happy with the plan, but they finally agreed to it.
• The state of Israel was formally established in 1948.
• Arab leaders refused to recognize the UN plan and the new Jewish state.

• The troops were sent into the area of the mandate.
• The Jews emerged victorious in that war, in fact seeming miraculous to many at the time.

• The nature of the Israeli victory resolved some major dilemmas for the new Jewish state, since in the course of the war around 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled the combat zones, most of them driven by orders from Israeli military officials but also by fear of Israeli political terrorists, or simply to avoid being caught in Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arab refugees were settled into squalid camps after Israeli authorities refused to allow the refugees to return.
• This was not the same kind of population exchange that had occurred in India, since it overwhelmingly involved the flight of Arabs out of Palestine but not of Jews; it was more akin to the mass flight of Germans at the end of World War II, but that comparison is also faulty.

• German refugees were put into a different category from the Palestinian refugees because of what Nazi Germany had done.
• The deaths and atrocities in Europe associated with driving populations from one territory to another exceeded those of the Israelis and Arabs in 1948.

• In the 1940s, population exchanges were common in Europe and the rest of the world.
• Most Europeans were overwhelmed with their own misery and paid little attention to the plight of the Palestinians.
• Refugee problems remained a sore point over the next seven decades, but they were not as intractable as those associated with former Palestine.

• By the time of the 1949 armistice, the new Jewish state had control over more territory than the UN plan had allocated to the Jewish sector.
• There was no formal peace treaty after the 1949 armistice.
• Most of the territory of the original Palestinian mandate was occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967.
• Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were established in the following years, provoking worldwide protests, but how much of the land would be made into permanent Israeli territory remained uncertain.

• The creation of a Jewish state alleviated some aspects of the Jewish Question and provided a home for Jewish refugees in Europe.
• The unresolved problems were major.

• It fed a fanatical hatred for the new state of Israel and the Diaspora Jews who supported it.
• Europeans were trying to resolve their guilt over what had happened to the Jews in Europe at the expense of the Palestinians, while the Arabs were trying to understand what happened to the Jews in Europe.

• The argument that the Palestinian territories were the historic homeland of Zionism was more persuasive than the other one.
• Around half a million Jews left Arab lands after 1948, heading for the new Jewish state.

• People are arriving in Palestine.
• Newly arrived Jewish refugees are at a port in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1947.

• Around 5 million Jews lived in the United States in the 1940s, and only a few thousand came from there.
• In subsequent years, emigration out of Israel to the United States exceeded emigration out of the United States to Israel, a development that provoked expressions of dismay and disgust on the part of Israeli leaders.

• The largest concentration of Jews at the end of World War II was in the Soviet Union.

• Soviet Jews were not allowed to emigrate in large numbers after the war because they were not allowed by the Soviet authorities.
• Over a million Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union after Stalin's death in 1989 to emigrate to Israel, helping to push the population of Jews in Israel to around 6 million by the end of the century.
• A majority of the world's Jews continued to live outside the Jewish state, despite the fact that an Arab minority of around 20 percent remained in Israel in the early twenty-first century.

• The events in Palestine from 1945 to 1949 were seen by many non-European nations as an expression of neo, and it would seem natural to describe them as an aspect of the demise of European imperialism.
• Most of Israel's first leaders were European.
• The European background of those leaders made them superior in terms of civilization to the Palestinian Arabs.
• One of the many justifications for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine was the belief that the Jews had a greater need for the land.

• The situation in Algeria, which was under French rule, had some similarities to that in Palestine, which was ruled by the British.
• Tunisia and Morocco gained independence from France in 1956.
• Compared to the bloody developments in Algeria, those countries remained on good terms with France.
• In Algeria, settlers from Europe faced a large population of native Arab residents, but they arrived earlier than in Palestine.
• Most of the settlers came from other European areas of the Mediterranean, but they still assumed the French language and identity.

• Algeria's Jews with non-Jews as "European settlers" is problematic since Jews had lived in the area since the late Middle Ages.
• The French government granted civil equality to European settlers in 1870, whereas the Arab majority was denied.
• By the end of World War II, there were a million European settlers in Algeria, ten times the number of Arabs.

• The Algerian Arab population, sparse at the beginning of the 19th century, had experienced a remarkable population increase by the 20th century.
• Since "Palestine" had previously been more of a vague geographic expression than a term referring to a long-existing or distinct ethnic entity of the people living in the areas, these points were related to questions about the validity of a separate Palestinian Arab identity.

• In both cases, European rule was attractive to Arab settlement.
• Anti-Jewish riots in Algeria during World War II were more violent than in mainland France, but Algerian Jewish identity remained overwhelmingly pro.
• The non-Jewish European population also opposed the idea of majority rule by Arabs.

• In Algeria, there was more recourse to terror by both sides before and after the war of 1948-9.
• The death toll in Algeria was higher than in Palestine.
• Over a million Arab civilians were killed in the decades following World War II.
• The death toll was caused by Arab-on-Arab terror, since the more radical groups wanted to destroy the more moderate.
• In their attempt to destroy Arab nationalist forces, French military forces engaged in torture.
• Algeria gained its independence in 1962 after those efforts were in vain.

• Algeria and Israel adopted nationality laws after gaining independence.

• The Israeli Law of Return, passed in 1950, gave citizenship to anyone with one Jewish grandparent, as well as civil equality to its non-Jewish minority.

• The European settlers had left by the time the Algerian Nationality law gave citizenship only to Muslims.
• Immigrants whose fathers were Muslim could not become citizens of the new state.

• It was decided that they should be given citizenship in the new Jewish state.
• Without formal conversion to Orthodox Judaism, they couldn't marry a real Jew in Israel because of the Orthodox rabbis' control over issues of marriage, birth, and death.
• The less strictly Orthodox Jewish majority of the country became hostile to the ultra-Orthodox because they avoided military service.

• The Nazi Final Solution to the Jewish Question was important in gaining support in Europe for the creation of the state of Israel, but the attitudes of Europeans to Jews and Israel thereafter evolved in surprising directions.
• "Mastering the past" came to mean different things to different people in different countries.
• All people make up stories about themselves that bolster their identities and disrespect their enemies, ignoring or suppressing evidence that fails to support those stories.

• The majority of people preferred to start with others.
• It became almost commonplace for the educated left in western Europe and the United States to assume that a nation must look at the ugly, repressed aspects of the past and recognize guilt, rather than deny or suppress them.

• The mass murder of Europe's Jews did not become a central issue until after 1989 in areas of the former Soviet Union.
• It was not just that Europeans were concerned with immediate problems of survival and reconstruction; reliable information about what would later be called the Holocaust was limited, at least compared to what would be known about it by the end of the century.
• The Germans, who came to be held up as models of rigorous self-examination, were initially in denial.
• The French were prone to exaggerating the extent of popular French resistance to Nazism and to go easy on relatively minor officials while dealing with some of the more prominent collaborators in the Vichy regime.

• The Nuremberg trials wanted to give wide publicity to the crimes of the Nazi leadership.
• Ordinary citizens should have known about the mass murder of Jews.
• In his six-volume history of the war, Churchill wrote nothing about the Holocaust.
• De Gaulle's memoirs largely ignored the topic.
• Eisenhower commanded every nearby unit that was not directly engaged in combat to visit the recently uncovered horrors at Ohrdruf, one of the largest concentration camps inside the Nazi Reich.
• He urged the delegations of newsmen and political officials to visit the camps.
• The local populations were ordered by Eisenhower to visit the grotesque sights and smells of the camps.

• Eisenhower was used to seeing carnage, but he was overwhelmed by Ohrdruf.
• During a tour of the camp, those standing near the Supreme Commander described him as pale and angry.
• His comments were likely prompted by reports that the majority of the German population were friendly to American soldiers who had not fought in combat.

• The hatred of the Germans by the general population of the United States seemed to diminish with the Cold War, as West Germany became a valued ally against Communism.
• The Cold War had contrasting and revealing reactions.
• Switzerland was one of the countries that remained neutral.

• After losing territory to the Soviet Union at the end of the war, it was allowed a curious kind of neutrality, but still remaining outside the Soviet bloc.
• During Spain's civil war, Franco accepted aid from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, but stayed out of World War II.
• Franco allowed American military forces to be stationed on Spanish territory during the Cold War.
• Ireland did not join World War II because of its history of hostility to Britain.
• Austria regained its formal unity in 1955, but it depended on avoiding a show of preference for either bloc.

• Yugoslavia was a Communist country, but by the late 1940s it had become a major heresy and was ranked among the unaligned.
• The United States courted Yugoslavia as an ally against the Soviet Union.
• Cold War hostilities, like World War II, produced some strange bedfellows.

• Most countries in western Europe that allied with the United States in the Cold War remained liberal-democratic.
• Portugal and Spain, both founding members of NATO, were both considered fascist by the public in World War II.
• Greece and Turkey became NATO members in 1952, but they were not functioning liberal democracies.
• Greece and Turkey were more hostile to one another than the Soviet Union was.

• The restoration of the borders of countries that had been under Nazi domination in western Europe was relatively easy compared to the changes in the borders of Germany and Poland.
• France should be restored to its 1940 borders, but the idea of reestablishing the Third Republic was overwhelmingly rejected.
• The French public was against creating a republic with a stronger executive branch.
• One of the Third Republic's most obvious flaws was the dominance of its legislative branch, and the French left still favored a powerful branch.

• In 1945, De Gaulle emerged as the leader of France, but it turned out that he was more well-liked as a leader in crisis than as a reconstruction leader.
• Roosevelt and Churchill thought that De Gaulle had ambitions.
• In June 1945, the Conservative Party was rejected by Britain's voters, but De Gaulle continued to play a key role in France's government after Roosevelt's death.

• After leading the interim government for six months, De Gaulle resigned on January 20, 1946, in order to get France's warring political groups to agree on a constitution for the new French republic.
• He gambled that he would be recalled by the public and that he could push through his idea of a republic with a stronger executive branch.
• The left-leaning constitution that was finally presented to the voters won only 36 percent support, with 31 percent opposed and 31 percent abstaining.
• After campaigning against it, De Gaulle retired in disgust to write his memoirs.

• In a time of crisis, De Gaulle would return in 1958, but he already made a lasting mark in guiding a divided and humiliated populace through perilous straits, as probably no other leader could have done.

• Both De Gaulle and Churchill were famous for their prose.
• In De Gaulle's case, that talent was used to spread some useful fictions about how France's population had resisted the German occupation, except for the few unhappy traitors who gave themselves over to the enemy.
• He approved the death penalty for Pierre Laval, the prime minister who was detested by the public.
• The head of the Vichy state and revered World War I hero was eighty-nine years old when put on trial, and by that time he was obviously no longer in command of his full mental powers.
• He died in prison six years later.

• Many ordinary citizens in both France and Germany had been compromised by denazification, and so punishing them was impractical.
• The German occupiers were less brutal to the French than in other countries, which resulted in the greater temptations of collaboration in France.
• By the end of the war, when the French resistance became more active, the French population had experienced a lot of suffering, both from their Nazi occupiers and from the ravages of war.
• A million families were homeless and a large proportion of the country's buildings were destroyed by Anglo-American bombing.
• 5 million French war prisoners and other laborers who were conscripted to work in Germany were making their way back home.

• France was a changed country by the end of the war.
• There was a lot of talk of revolutionary change in both countries, but nothing came of it.
• The British Communist Party won less than 1 percent of the vote in the June 1945 elections, while the French Communist Party won 26 percent.
• The Socialist Party came in third with 22 percent of the vote, and the Popular Republican Movement won the second largest vote with 24 percent.

• For the first time in French history, women were included in the popular vote, as the three parties with strong connections to the war-time resistance and all proponents of major political and economic changes won three-quarters of the vote.
• The Labour Party in Britain had won in June 1945, but these parties enjoyed a larger proportion of the total vote.
• The French parties differed from one another in a number of ways.
• The fact that the PCF was not advocating violent social revolution in 1945 and 1946 was reflected in the large vote that the PCF won.
• The Battle of Stalingrad and the drive of the Red Army into Nazi Germany enhanced the prestige of Communism.
• Many leaders of the SFIO and MRP were suspicious of Communist long-range intentions.

• It became obvious that the PCF, SFIO, and MRP couldn't agree on the kind of constitution France should have, or that they couldn't unite around the kind of coherent program offered by Labour in June 1945.
• The country avoided chaos that many had predicted.
• After the war, the rule of law was restored and a central government was established.

• France's devastated economy began to assume more normal and productive forms.
• The press was less corrupt than in the past.

• France became a "socialist" under Labour Party rule in the late 1940s.
• French state ownership of industrial enterprises was more extensive than in Britain because of the actions taken during the French Popular Front period in controlling the aviation and armaments industries.
• Notable banks, insurance companies, and the coal, gas, and electric industries were all under state control in France.
• A social security system was put in place that was more extensive than before, and French laborers were offered a role in plant management.
• France entered a period of unprecedented material wellbeing within a few decades.

• Twelve years was the length of the Fourth Republic.
• It revealed many of the defects of the Third, such as a constant shuffling of cabinet posts.
• The postwar unity of Communists, socialists, and centrists broke up in the spring of 1947.
• Many hoped that the broad coalitions formed after the war would last for an extended period, as the parties represented in the immediate postwar governments had emerged out of the anti-fascist alliance.

• The Communists in eastern Europe took over key cabinet posts and then absorbed or eliminated the other parties.
• The process in western Europe was different.
• Communists were included in the initial political alliances of the restored countries, but they were usually denied key cabinet posts, and then got rid of, one way or another, in 1947.
• The French Communist Party went into opposition in May 1947, and as a result viable parliamentary coalitions moved toward the center.

• The Italian population had lived under Fascist rule longer than any in Europe, and its parliamentary democracy before that had hardly been a model of efficiency, so establishing a liberal-democratic regime after the war was an even larger order than in France.
• By the late 1920s, Mussolini had become prime minister.
• After Mussolini became prime minister, Italy's king, Victor Emmanuel III, offered little resistance to the consolidation of Fascist power.
• He was involved in bringing Mussolini down.
• The king tried to save his throne by breaking with Mussolini and opening negotiations for a separate peace with the Allies.
• Hitler had become both president and chancellor in Germany.

• The Fuhrer was more popular than the Duce until the end of the war.
• Several of Mussolini's most important lieutenants decided that he must be deposed.
• The majority of the Fascist Council was similar to a cabinet.
• The Italians began to see the Germans as liberators and the Anglo-Americans as their enemies.

• Mussolini was freed by the Germans after being put under arrest.
• The Italian Social Republic was established in the north with Mussolini in charge.
• The war in Italy lasted for two years, longer than any other country on the western front, because of the German military's brutal suppression of the Italian resistance in the north.

• The prospect of a left-wing revolution in Italy was greater after the Nazis were driven from the country.
• In the north of the country, where the Communists had assumed leadership of many partisan forces and were in a strong position to take power, the prospect of the Communists taking power was very much feared by the area's industrialists.

• The Communists wanted to preserve the war-time alliance.
• Stalin's dictum that each nation should impose its own system "as far as its army could reach" was held and American military authorities demanded that the Communists give up their weapons.
• The leader of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti, was fully in agreement with the line from Moscow because he anticipated a Communist victory.
• At the end of the war, the PCI emerged as one of Italy's most popular parties, and many socialists were willing allies of the Communists.
• In the spring elections of 1948, with the Cold War in full swing, the PCI came in second to the Christian Democrats, and it would remain the largest non-ruling Communist party in Europe until the end of the century.
• Togliatti's appointment as vice-premier in the immediate postwar coalition was the closest the PCI came to national rule.
• One of the most respected politicians in Italy, he was considered the most intelligent and least dogmatic of Europe's Communist leaders.
• The Christian Democrats have a poor record of efficient and uncorrupt operation of local governments.

• There was a lot of popular violence in Italy after the war ended.
• 10,000 Fascists died from justice and score-settling.
• Hundreds of thousands of serious physical assaults were recorded, including the public humiliation of women with Fascist connections.
• Mussolini and his mistress were caught trying to escape to Switzerland.
• gruesome photos of their bodies hanging upside down were widely disseminated in Italy and abroad.

• The public trials of Fascist leaders were not held because they were not as bad as those of the Nazis.
• The events of July 1943 in Italy put anti-Fascist retribution in a different light, since some Fascist leaders could claim that they had been instrumental in overthrowing Mussolini and in rejecting the path Italian Fascism had taken in allying with Nazism.

• Most Italians didn't need much prompting to recognize the evils of Nazism, since they themselves had suffered under Nazi rule.
• Italians could claim to have re established democratic rule on their own, rather than having it imposed on them, as was the case for the Germans.
• The Italians' break with their past was further emphasized by the results of the constitutional referendum on July 2, 1946, which abolished the monarchy and replaced it with a liberal-democratic republic.
• Another sign of a new democratic age in Italy was that women gained the vote.

• Fascists remained in the government and judiciary, but Alcide De Gasperi, the head of the Christian Democratic Party and prime minister throughout the postwar years, effectively removed those plans.
• He was worried about the divisive effects of such a purge, but he was also worried that getting rid of former Fascists in the government and judiciary would strengthen the power of the revolutionary left and weaken the Christian Democrats.
• By early 1948, his party was emerging as Italy's most powerful; in the projected April elections, fear of a Communist takeover had become a central issue, and De Gasperi could count on the vote of the propertied as well as the support of the Vatican.
• The pope told Catholics to vote for the Christian Democrats and threatened to excommunicate those who voted Communist.
• The leaders of the US government had come to view Italy as a crucial battleground in the emerging Cold War and the Berlin Blockade would begin in June.
• American leaders went all out to support De Gasperi and his party.
• The Christian Democrats won an absolute majority in the elections, which was the only victory of a single party in Italian parliamentary history.

• In terms of American political discourse, the large role of the state in Italy's economy and society could easily qualify as "socialistic," since De Gasperi's party favored state.
• There was no wave of postwar nationalizations in Italy comparable to those in Britain and France, and the meagerness of the country's "defascistization" meant that a fair amount of Fascist law was allowed to remain on the books.
• In Labour-ruled Britain and Fourth-Republic France, the state retained control over a larger part of the economy.
• By the late 1950s, most of the rising income of the families of Italian workers was in the form of wages, while the rest came from various welfare payments administered by the state.

• De Gasperi dominated Italian politics and guided his country away from the left, like De Gaulle did in France.
• The new Italian republic was not as tough as the new French republic.
• Italy stumbled from crisis to crisis under Christian Democratic leadership.
• After his departure, De Gasperi's eight years as prime minister set a new record.
• After decades of parliamentary deadlocks and cabinet musical chairs, corruption and bureaucratic inefficiencies persisted.
• The Italian republic is not a failure.
• Italy eventually joined the ranks of the world's most affluent nations due to its reforms.

• Among those European leaders who supported plans for European integration, De Gasperi was prominent.
• Italians were disgusted by the results of extreme nationalism, and polls in the immediate postwar period showed them more favorable to the idea of European unity than most other Europeans.
• Even though the British were at this point among the least favorable, they still spoke favorably of a kind of united states of Europe.
• It would remain the question for a long time.
• With France and Germany leading the way, Britain would retain its identity from the Continent.
• The American model was deceptive.
• The citizens of the United States of America spoke a single language, they enjoyed a revered and tested constitution, and they had experienced modern nationalism as a unit rather than as many competing, often hostile nations.

• The details are complex and the issues are arcane, but the simple truth is that Europeans still feel stronger emotional attachment to their national identities than to an emerging European identity.
• Europeans were repelled by the nationalist extremes of the past, but still looked at the prospect of major limitations of their national sovereignty in any united states of Europe.

• The most widely accepted path was moving cautiously toward economic unity.
• The European Coal and Steel Community was formed in 1951.

• The economies of Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, and Luxemburg were pulled together by placing their coal and steel industries under the direction of a supra-national agency.
• The initiative of Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, and Jean Monnet, the French economic expert, was crucial to this initial step.
• Schuman was supported by a number of political leaders, including Christian Democrats such as De Gasperi and Adenauer, as well as Paul-Henri Spaak, the Socialist prime minister of Belgium.

• He was a native of the area and was proficient in both French and German.
• The Schuman Plan was a success.

• The Common Market was expanded seven years later to include a program of gradually lowering all tariffs, not just those of coal and steel, between the six member countries, and in other ways coordinating their economic policies.
• All tariffs had been abolished by 1968.
• The Common Market was larger than the United States in terms of capital productivity.
• Walter Hallstein was the first president.
• He put special emphasis on the long-range political ambitions contained in the Treaty of Rome and hailed its economic success.

• The Common Market was seen as a solid foundation for a politically united Europe by Hallstein and others.
• The German Question: West Germany's full membership in NATO - less than a decade after Nazi Germany's surrender - took some getting used to for those who had been through the Cold War.
• Fear of Communist expansion and pressure from the United States prevailed.
• The prosperity that came from economic cooperation with Germany was smooth.

• A decline in apprehension about Germany did not mean a concurrent acceptance of the idea of supra-national political institutions.
• De Gaulle became a major player again after he returned to power in France.
• He twice vetoed the idea of a British entry into the Common Market because Britain could be expected to challenge French leadership in ways that West Germany would not.
• De Gaulle believed that the special relationship between Britain and the United States was incompatible with the kind of separate European identity and future world role that he favored for the countries of the Common Market.

• The war in Algeria was the main cause of De Gaulle's return to power.
• He played a role in averting civil war that no other leader could have done.
• He oversaw the demise of the Fourth Republic as he moved toward negotiations for a peace settlement.
• The strong executive branch was included in the new Fifth Republic's constitution.
• The new constitution received overwhelming support in a referendum.

• France had a stable government.
• The Fourth Republic's constant cabinet changes and partisan turmoil made it possible for neglected tasks to be addressed.
• The Fifth Republic did not become a dictatorship, De Gaulle respected civil liberties, but the power of France's political parties was reduced, while non-elected technical experts assumed a larger role in the running of the country.
• Under Napoleon III, France became a plebiscitary democracy, which proved to be more effective than the last one.
• De Gaulle became the president of the republic, but no political term fit him at this point.
• His critics thought he was a modern sun king.
• There was something monarchical about him and his rule, but he was also popular, highly intelligent, and respectful of liberal-democratic niceties.

• By 1962, a peace treaty had been signed with the Algerian rebels, ending the war.
• Economic development is one of the concerns that could be directed by the French.
• France became the fifth economic power in the world in the 1960s.
• De Gaulle's vision of "glory" for France came down to challenging American hegemony.
• His challenge was popular with the French public across the political spectrum.

• The command structure of NATO was an unacceptable limitation of France's military independence and thus its national sovereignty, since it placed supreme command in the hands of a foreign general.
• NATO's command post was moved from Paris to Brussels, and French units were removed from the command.
• He criticized the American intervention in Vietnam and shifted France's stance on the conflict to be more critical of the Israelis.
• He took steps to establish atomic weapons for France after independence from the Soviet Union.

• It would not be justified to say that De Gaulle was antisemitic in spite of a notorious reference to Jews he made in criticizing the Israelis, after the Six-Day War.
• He retained a fundamentally realist concept of international relations, which meant that countries pursued interests rationally and not let emotions rule.
• He believed it was in France's national interest to distance itself from American power.

• There were any number of related issues that came into play.
• The English language's invasion of French was not mentioned by De Gaulle.
• He didn't hide his dislike for American mass culture.
• Pro- and anti-American sentiment in France had long vied with one another, as had pro- and anti-American sentiment in the United States.
• John F. Kennedy and his wife, who was of French origin, seemed to win over the hearts of the French public when they visited France in 1961.
• This young Irish-American, the country's first Catholic president, did not quite qualify as an Anglo-Saxon, but he still represented an assertive American power.

• The United States was not an enemy of the Soviet Union.
• In private conversations, De Gaulle warned Kennedy of the dangers of becoming involved in Vietnam, and in public, he spoke in support of the United States.

• It is not possible to conclude that De Gaulle achieved his goals because of his partner's resistance.
• The pro-American and pro-NATO chancellor, Ludwig Erhard, took over in the autumn of 1963.
• De Gaulle helped to diminish American influence and prestige in Europe and INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals INRDeals

• The 1970s and 1980s marked a distinct difference from the previous period of rapid economic growth.
• The demise of Communist rule in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was caused by a renewed scrutiny of leadership in both capitalist and Communist countries.

• The youthful rebellion of the late 1960s has been assumed to be the cause of generational conflict.
• Both the revolt of youth and the efflorescence of feminism were related to the trauma of war and the death of millions of young men between 1939 and 1945.

• The number of men killed in war in each country did not correlate with the extent of youthful rebellion and feminist activism after 1968.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The moderate to conservative Christian Democrats played a key role in most Continental democracies after the war.

• The decades that were dynamic in economic terms and had their own political excitements and crises were still cautious and boring in the eyes of the generation coming of age in the late 1960s.
• By the 1970s and 1980s, the average age of the leaders of democratic-socialist and Communist parties had risen.
• rank-and-file memberships tended to decline while party and trade-union memberships grew.

• The country of the Soviet Union was dubbed a "gerontocracy" due to the aging of the leaders.
• There was less evidence of the energy and idealism of the past.
• Moderate-to- conservative older men who had taken up positions of responsibility at war's end were in charge of western Europe's governments.
• There was a kinship between the youthful rebellion of the late 1960s and Margaret Thatcher's rule in Britain in the 1980s.
• Both aggressively attacked bureaucracy and sought to overturn established ways of doing things, even though they stood at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

• The year 1968, like 1848, has gone down in European history as one of continent-wide revolution, with initial hopes that were followed by disappointment and a rightward swing.
• In the spring of 1968, developments in two countries, France and Czechoslovakia, attracted worldwide attention.

• Before and after the war, there were a number of intriguingly atypical aspects to Czechoslovakia's history.
• The Communist Party won 38 percent of the vote in free elections in 1946, and the left-wing coalition took office in May of that year.

• In February 1948 Communists forced their non-Communist allies from positions of power, despite the predicted democratic evolution toward Communism.

• The Czech areas of the country were closer to western standards in literacy, economic productivity, and middle-class composition than the other areas of the soviet bloc.
• There was a question of whether a more democratic form of Communist rule was possible in Czechoslovakia.
• Alexander Dubcek assumed power in January.

• Dubcek came to power in a typically complex party shuffle but still based on decisions made by party leaders rather than in direct response to pressure from below.
• Soviet leaders and Communist Party officials in other Eastern Bloc countries were worried that their own populations might begin to ask for similar reforms and freedoms because of his popularity with students and intelligentsia.
• Many western-European Communists became enthusiastic supporters of Dubcek's reforms, citing them as confirmation of the argument that Communist parties could gain power legally and then rule with the support of a majority.
• Eurocommunism suggested a continued identification with Communist ideals but reservations about the models of gaining and retaining power of the Soviets.

• It's tempting to say that Dubcek is giving new life to the Communist mystique.
• He was curious about the role.
• He didn't have the charisma of a Trotsky or the self-assurance of a Lenin, as well as the ruthlessness of both.
• He came across as a decent if also ordinary man, with few of the qualities that might have been expected in someone who had grown up in the Soviet Union and had then worked his way up the party bureaucracy, somehow surviving periods of Stalinism, de-Stalinization, and neo-

• He was born in Slovakia to parents who had left the United States.
• When he was three years old, his parents moved to the Soviet Union where he was raised until he returned to Slovakia in 1938.

• After Khrushchev, Soviet leaders tended to be managers, not idealists, and they didn't know what to think of this modest Slovak.
• Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops rolled into the country in late August 1968, after various futile efforts to contain him and his supporters bureaucratically.
• The bewildered Czechoslovak population offered only passive resistance.
• The country was occupied by the Soviets until the fall of the empire in the early 1990s.
• Dubcek was removed from power in early 1969 and replaced by more pliant leaders.

• Observers noted similarities to the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, which supported the royalists in Greece against the Communists.
• The Brezhnev Doctrine marked a more blatant assertion of Soviet control in eastern Europe and a more explicit limitation of national sovereignty or popular rule in any Communist country.
• The long-term consequences of the Brezhnev Doctrine are not favorable to the prestige of Soviet Communism in Europe.
• The prestige was already diminished by the SinoSoviet Conflict, the Hungarian uprising of 1956, and the Berlin Wall.
• The August invasion was criticized by the majority of the Communist parties of Europe and the world.
• Relations within the soviet bloc would never be the same after soviet leaders succeeded in suppressing what they perceived as a major threat.

• In some respects, the unrest in western Europe in early 1968 was different from the unrest in Czechoslovakia.
• The goals of the young rebels of 1968 in western Europe were more diffuse than those of Dubcek and his supporters, and they faced opponents in power who were more tolerant and respectful of liberal-democratic norms.
• Even 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 800-381-0266 The Communist Party leaders in France had little sympathy for the student rebels.

• Student-rebel mockery of communist officials was as much as it was for those in leading posts of government and education.

• The revolutionaries of the European past were more interested in theory than the Western rebels of 1968.
• There was a connection with the revolutionary mystique, but it was more with the anarchist wing.
• Herbert Marcuse, a German-born thinker, was one of the most influential intellectual influences on the youthful rebels in Europe and the United States.
• He was one of the Marxist theoreticians in Germany in the 1920s, after he participated in the abortive Spartacus Uprising as a twenty-year-old.
• He was an academic in the United States after fleeing Germany because of his Marxist beliefs and because of his Jewish origin.
• Marcuse argued that ethnic minorities and youth would have to destroy the one-dimensional societies that had arisen in Europe and America.

• Marcuse's often demanding writings can be doubted, but he still spoke to an emerging mood of diffuse discontent with the fruits of postwar capitalism.
• The clash of different sensibilities was an underlying issue of 1968.
• The huge popularity of The Beatles throughout Europe, even in the Soviet Union, was more suggestive of the mood of the time than Marcuse.

• The lack of realism in Dubcek's expectations became obvious, but his program of Communism with a human face was still relatively tangible, linked to concrete measures, in ways that the demands of youthful rebels in western Europe were not.
• Dubcek and other reformers in the soviet bloc have been the object of sympathetic analysis more often than the student radicals, who have been dismissed by many critics as little more than the antics of a spoiled generation.

• Conflicts between generations can be worked out in many ways.
• Even if the focus of the unrest is uncertain, the likelihood of unrest in a given society is great if a bulge is composed of young people.
• Youthful energies can be used to overthrow tyranny, but they can also be used to move in destructive directions, like with the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.
• When the members of a population bulge grow older, the results might be positive, as the number of workers in their most productive stages of life increases.
• Many economies have not developed institutions that can tap these workers' potential productivity.
• The burden on the rest of the population is caused by the fact that productive workers become elderly and less productive as retirees.
• Long-range planning is needed to deal with population bulges.
• The necessary decisions are likely to be unpopular and thus difficult to put into effect.
• Few states have done it well.

• The enthusiasm of youth in the late 1960s is not to suggest that there wasn't a legitimate cause for unhappiness in the institutions of higher education.
• The Vietnam War was seen by young people in Europe as a pointless conflict that was supported by an older, blinkered generation that was beholden to the United States.
• In France from the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the number of students in universities more than tripled, without a corresponding expansion of libraries, classrooms and course offerings.
• Students were expected to be angry.
• The extent to which their protests and disruptions caught fire with the rest of the population was not expected.
• Poor decisions by those in authority, linked to overreactions by the forces of order, sparked indignation from other parts of society.

• The events of May are known in France as "the events of May" and are similar to the opening stages of revolutions in the past.

• 10 million workers went on strike in less than a day after a general strike was declared on May 13, 1968.

• The Bolsheviks were able to take over after the tsar and other potential successors for power were unable to rule because of the failure of existing political leadership.
• The French Communist Party was not as similar to the Bolshevik Party of November 1917.
• The students, their sympathizers, and the millions of strikers didn't recognize a single leader, organization, or program, while President Charles De Gaulle resembled the weak Nicholas II or the vacillating Alexander Kerensky.

• The policy of divide and conquer was quite effective.
• The initial sympathy for student protesters proved to be ephemeral.
• Conservatives and moderates were worried that a new Popular Front government of socialists and Communists could descend into anarchy.

• In the elections, De Gaulle's party won its greatest victory, giving him a solid majority in the chamber.
• De Gaulle's famous retort, when meeting student protesters, had its own kind of symbolism: A dignified and revered military hero in his late seventies, facing down rowdy, long-haired rebels in their teens and twenties.

• Student protests over university conditions in Italy began in 1967, and would reach a violent climax in 1969.
• In Germany and many other countries, students clashed with authorities over a number of issues, but nowhere by the early 1970s was it possible to speak of anything approximating a substantial victory for student rebels, if for no other reason than "victory" for most of them had no.
• The expression of terrorism in Italy and Germany was caused by those who believed in the necessity of immediate radical change.

• It seemed to represent a nihilistic, adolescent rejection of authority more than any genuine belief that radical change would emerge from terrorist actions.

• Slow progress and ups and downs of the Woman Question have been traced in previous chapters.
• A quantum leap in feminist thought and action took place in the late 1960s.
• The major isms of the nineteenth century were challenged by feminism as noted in Chapter 4.
• The Enlightened goals of equality and justice for women were difficult to agree on because of the wide range of practical applications.

• By the eve of the twentieth century, growing numbers of males, both on the right and on the left, had been won over to extending the vote to women, in the case of conservative males, because of evidence that women could be expected to vote conservatively.
• After World War II, the Christian Democrats and Gaullists supported giving women the vote.
• In the immediate postwar elections, women voted disproportionately for Christian Democrats, Gaullists, and other conservatives.
• Napoleon III and Disraeli were popular with a large percentage of the poor and lower-middle class.

• Conservative males continued to be wary of feminist agendas as they looked to expand equal status beyond the vote - in the home, in the workplace, in education, in legal relations, and in sexual matters.
• The first discussions of the Woman Question focused on education, civil equality, and gaining the vote, but later on issues of reproductive rights and equal pay came to the fore.
• There were issues between women.
• At this time, feminist activists said that they wanted to be different from their mothers, or that they were determined to reject subordination and compromises.

• In areas where Fascist, Nazi, or other authoritarian regimes came into power, the slow progress in recognizing women's rights seemed to be halted if not reversed.
• Women in Europe during the first postwar decades were more concerned with survival than with gender equality.
• By the late 1960s, the general mood of liberation seemed to be in favor of feminism.

• The young rebels were disappointed if not shocked by the attitudes they encountered in young male rebels, who were often male chauvinists.

• For many women, "consciousness-raising" experiences became much more frequent.

• De Beauvoir was a woman of great intelligence, beauty, and independence.
• Her father exclaimed that she thinks like a man after she said she wanted to become a nun.
• She went on to win many academic distinctions after abandoning her Catholic faith and embracing a number of love affairs with both men and women.
• The kind of fame usually limited to movie stars was achieved by de Beauvoir's intellectual partnership and unconventional love life.
• There was a lot of feminist thought and action.

• The material conditions of women in Europe had already changed by the 1970s, but there were still many institutions under which they lived.
• The situation in the Communist world was vastly different from that in the capitalist West.
• Women in the Soviet Union enjoyed equality in the workplace.
• Most of the unskilled labor force that worked on street sweeping and garbage collection in the Soviet Union was female, despite the fact that the medical profession was three-quarters female in the postwar period.

• The reality in the Soviet Union was that women would take up roles previously dominated by men because so many men had died in the war.

• In the Soviet Union and most eastern European countries, women continued to have primary responsibility for child care and household chores.

• In the United States and northern Europe, the issue of sex roles in the domestic realm was not a big deal until the 1980s.
• When both spouses had full-time jobs, the ideal of sharing domestic tasks and child-rearing with complete equality, especially when both spouses had full-time jobs, did not come to widespread consideration until the twenty-first century.
• Establishing norms that guaranteed equal pay for equal work was a challenge for women who entered the workforce in ever greater numbers.
• Sexual harassment issues were largely hidden.

• By the 1980s, women in western Europe lived on average five years longer than men, and even longer than in the Soviet Union, as a result of material changes for women by the 1960s.
• The availability of birth control made it possible for women to have more access to higher education.
• Women of European origin had more free time as they entered their middle years because of longer lives and fewer children.
• There was a long-range trend for smaller families.
• Women came to live alone or serve as the head of the family.
• The rising divorce rate reflected what happened when women sought to exercise their freedom and control.

• Like many "progressive" changes in history, liberated women had their share of consequences.
• The birth rates of most established European populations dropped below replacement levels by the 1970s, while most non-European immigrants came from cultures where female subordination was more strict than it had been in traditional European.
• The demographic realities posed new, often unexpected, problems for the European future in the area of gender relations as well as much else.

• Feminism never became an organized mass movement in the way that working-class movements did.
• From the early 19th century, those concerned with the Woman Question shared a general conviction that the women faced injustices, but their differences in regard to methods and ultimate goals remained, or even grew in importance.

• The disappointing results of gaining the vote in Europe were felt by many feminists.

• It became clear that many steps beyond political action were necessary, even though female suffragist still appeared an obvious first step.

• The "gender feminists" concluded that the differences between masculine and feminine identities were not created by culture.
• The "equity feminists" denied or minimized the differences and thus entertained larger hopes for cooperative and harmonious gender relations in the future, working in cooperation with men who recognized the justice of the feminist cause.

• The destructive impact on women of the differences between the sexes was one of the reasons why gender feminists were less optimistic.
• Discoveries about the operation of the brain and the role of hormones in sexual identity, if often of dubious scientific rigor, added fuel to the controversy about the role of culture vs. inherent attributes.
• The discussion of how environment and genetic factors subtly worked on each other, in ways not previously understood and still to be explored by scientists, was most interesting.

• Margaret Thatcher, the first woman to become a British prime minister, was a hard-line Conservative.
• She had worked her way up through the ranks of the Conservative Party and, as prime minister from 1979 through the 1980s, led an aggressive campaign against what Conservatives saw as the nanny state.
• The states of the day were ruled by aggressive masculine individualists, but in the 19th century the liberal left and some socialists believed that the state would become more caring and cooperative once women gained the vote.

• John Stuart Mill had predicted that once women became political power, they would guide their countries away from reckless military adventures and toward international reconciliation.
• The war against Argentina that Thatcher launched in the spring of 1982, formally over ownership of the Falkland Islands - but more deeply over national prestige - not only enhanced her popularity but also proved crucial to her survival in power, after a decidedly unpromising start.
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• She was an independent, capable, and self-assured person, which was an important element of the feminist ideal.

• By the last decade of the twentieth century, European women had achieved "becoming visible", a slogan associated with the feminist movement, and Thatcher contributed to that visibility.
• The representation of women continued to vary from country to country and arena to arena.
• Only a small percentage of parliamentary seats and leadership posts in Europe's political parties and trade unions were held by women.
• Moderate-to-conservative women were more likely to rise to prominent political positions than feminist women were.
• Germany's first woman chancellor was a Christian Democrat namedAngela Merkel.
• She was the first woman to lead a major European country.
• Segolene Royal was a major figure in the Socialist Party and vowed to run again after losing the French presidential election.

• Francois Hollande, who became the Socialist candidate for president in the elections of spring 2012 - and who defeated Sarkozy, opening new directions for the country in a time of economic crisis and multiple other challenges - was her long-time companion.

• Literature about Europe from 1968 to 1989 is vast.
• The Cold War, which began in the late 1940s and ended in the 1960s, was mostly abipolar and involved a series of sometimes dramatic confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union.
• The 1970s have generally been considered a decade of detente because of the German Chancellor's conciliatory initiatives.

• Tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union worsened during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, and then worsened again when Ronald Reagan became president.
• Both Carter and Reagan moved away from President Richard Nixon's amoral "realism," and exerted moralistic or Wilsonian pressures on Soviet leaders, especially over issues of human rights and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.

• Reagan's initial hard line was softened in opposition to the advice of many of his advisers, to a willingness to compromise with Communist leaders.
• The weakness of the Soviet side was more obvious to the American side when Gorbachev took over.
• He instituted fundamental changes in the way the Soviet Union was ruled because he was willing to compromise.
• His reforms were not enough to preserve Communist leadership of the Soviet Union.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The formation of the European Union in 1991 and the expansion of it to include many countries of the former Soviet bloc made the European Communist world less dramatic.

• The treatment of Soviet Jews became an issue in the late 1970s.

• The Jewish Question in the Soviet Union became important at this point due to the fact that Communist rule was incompatible with the human rights and popular rule that were defined in the Helsinki Accords.
• The Accords were used by dissidents to expose and humiliate Communist leaders in nearly all Communist-ruled countries.

• The Soviet Union's intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979 to bolster a pro-Soviet regime became the Soviet Union's version of the American intervention in Vietnam.

• The withdrawal of American athletes from the Moscow summer Olympics in 1980 was one of the most resented of which was taken by Carter, who retaliated by boycotting the summer 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.
• Carter had to aid the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, but he initiated a massive expansion of the United States' military expenditure.
• Reagan and his advisers calculated that the expenditures in Afghanistan would hurt the Soviet Union's economy.

• The 1970s were the most troubled decade in the United States.
• Nixon's first term as president was followed by a landslide victory in the elections of November 1972, but his second term ended with his impeachment and resignation in August 1974.
• The Vietnam War ended in 1973.
• Nixon's downfall and the scandals associated with his presidency caused a worldwide decline in American prestige.
• After the failure of a daring military effort to rescue the hostages in Iran, Carter's presidency was marred by acrimony and national humiliation.

• Even though the American economy was stronger than that of the Soviet Union, the Vietnam War affected it as well, and the "guns and butter" promised by President Lyndon Johnson simply could not be provided in equal measure.
• The rapid economic growth of the postwar decades in Europe and the United States had begun to show fault lines by the late 1960s, but their economies were hit by the Arab-led oil embargo of 1973.
• There was a strong link between the Jewish Question and major developments in Europe.

• After the war of 1948, the Arab-Israeli conflict worsened.
• The Six-Day War of 1967, launched by Egypt and Syria in order to regain control over the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, reflected the continued refusal of the leaders of virtually all.
• Israel's ambitions to expand the borders established in 1948 remained unclear and the cause of increasing suspicion in following years, since the Israelis differed about how much they wanted to expand.

• In 1973, the Arab states were unable to translate their huge population advantage into a military victory.
• They had a potent weapon in their control of oil resources that they used to place an oil embargo on the United States to punish states that aided Israel in the war.
• By the end of the 1970s, the price of oil was ten times that of 1973.
• The implications were ominous: The price of a commodity essential to modern industrial production - and one that most European nations lacked - rose with a suddenness never before experienced, with a ripple effect on all economies that depended on OPEC oil.

• The price of oil was accompanied by a new phenomenon and a new word: "stagflation."
• Economic depression, with its declining or deflated prices, was thought to be opposite of the inflationary pressures that accompanied rapid economic growth.
• State expenditures to "prime the pump" used to counter depression, but they now seem to increase inflation without remedying the depressed state of the economy.
• For the rest of the century and into the next, Margaret Thatcher's program was a mixture of arcane economic issues and a new emphasis on market incentives.

• The 1970s and 1980s have come to be seen as less economically burdensome than Europeans thought.
• There was a decline in the annual rate of economic growth from 4.5 percent in the 1950s and 1960s to 2 percent in the 1970s and 1980s, but not an absolute decline.
• The rate of growth did not decline as much as it did in the 1880s.
• Europeans adjusted in different ways to the oil embargo.
• New discoveries of oil fields in the North Sea helped to make Britain and Norway exporters of oil.
• There were more positive economic developments.

• Britain joined the Common Market in 1973.
• Europe was a relatively prosperous area despite the slower growth of the 1970s and 1980s.

• At the same time, Europe's economic relationship with the United States was changing in ways that would have been unimaginable at the end of World War II.
• Competition between the United States and Common Market countries became a major concern for the United States in the early 1970s, as the United States was running a trade deficit of 10 billion dollars.
• Europeans, at least those in the most advanced European economies, were beginning to enjoy greater material welfare than were the Americans.
• Economic tensions between Europe and the United States were managed fairly, since both areas continued to recognize their common economic interests, shared values, and enemies.

• The economic difficulties of the 1970s and 1980s became more severe because of the deep-seeded historical antipathies within the Soviet bloc countries.
• The various economies of the Bloc had evolved in substantially different directions, but, even where there was a slowly rising standard of living, many in the soviet bloc were left dissatisfied.
• Hungary, which was brutally repressed in 1956, evolved in relatively liberal directions without major objections from the Soviets.
• "Goulash Communism" provided more consumer goods and intellectual freedom than the Soviet Union.

• If Germany turned into one of the most efficient secret-police states in history, it made considerable economic progress.
• The independent foreign policy of the Communists of Romania was resented by the Soviets because of the poor state of the country.
• Since the early years of the Cold War, Yugoslavia has had independence from the Soviets.

• Almost all of Europe's states, as well as the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union, signed the Accords in 1975, promising economic cooperation and mutual aid.
• In order to solve their economic problems, western Europe and the United States provided loans, investments, and other forms of economic aid to the Soviet Union.
• That tendency meant a rising foreign debt and a dependence on the West.

• In a more subtle way, the detente of the 1970s opened eastern Europe to Western influence, however much the Soviet and Eastern Bloc leaders continued in their clumsy efforts to limit cultural "contamination" from the West.

• In the 70s, Communism would "bury" the other, but on the Communist side there were growing signs that its members were closer to the grave.
• The American president became the most popular Republican in the United States since Eisenhower and also a hero to many in the Soviet bloc.

• Communism was far from living up to expectations even if capitalism was having a difficult time.
• The collapse of Communist rule in eastern Europe was influenced by developments in Poland.
• Poland, as the largest of the soviet bloc countries, was watched with special concern by the soviets, who were hesitant to invade it since it promised to be more bloody than the invasion of Hungary in 1956.

• When Gomulka assumed power in 1956, he was relatively popular and made a number of concessions to Polish reality, such as allowing private ownership of land by peasants and giving considerable latitude to the Catholic Church.

• He faced angry demonstrations when he increased the price of food in December 1970.
• Hundreds of demonstrators were killed by the Polish forces.
• Edward Gierek, the new Communist leader, was another disappointment.

• There was no doubt that the Polish workers were working and looking for a new leader.

• Solidarity is a new trade-union movement.
• Solidarity's leading figure, lech Walesa, came to rival Dubcek in the extent to which he was regarded as a heroic figure, lionized inside Poland and out, and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
• Walesa was a practicing Catholic and a confirmed Polish nationalist.

• In the summer of 1980, Poland's workers lost faith in Communist rule and ran out of patience as a result of a series of events.
• The communist authorities in Poland doubted that it was possible to violently suppress the strikers since both Polish soldiers and police had begun to fraternize with them.

• After over a year of complex maneuvers and negotiations with strike leaders, the Polish army suddenly arrested them and declared martial law.
• In order to prevent a Soviet invasion, rule by the Polish military was necessary according to Jaruzelski.
• Walesa and other strike leaders were alarmed by the possibility of an invasion.
• Military dictatorships had characterized the past in Poland and much of eastern Europe.
• Communism wasn't working in this broader sense.

• The Christian Democrats and the SPD formed a "grand coalition" in West Germany in 1966.
• From 1957 to 1966 the leader of the Social Democratic Party was a popular mayor of Berlin and became foreign minister under the grand coalition.
• He became chancellor in 1969 after allied with the Free Democrats.
• The office of chancellor has been held by a Social Democrat since 1930.
• The country led for over two decades by Christian Democrats is not known for their openness to change, especially in foreign policy.

• Many Germans, especially the younger generation, were inspired by Brandt's life story.
• On the eve of the Nazi takeover, Brandt was an active member of the left wing of the SPD.

• He spent most of the war years in exile.
• He hoped to reduce Cold War tensions and enhance West Germany's image as a peace-loving country by 1969 after firmly establishing his anti-Communist credentials.

• The Christian Democrats had an uncompromising stance towards the Communists in East Germany.
• In 1970 a picture of Brandt kneeling before a monument to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto became an icon.

• He was chancellor for five years.

• There is a monument to the Jewish dead in Warsaw.

• The appeasement of the Nazis was similar to that of the communists.
• The German right wing was more likely to fault him for leaving his country during the Nazi period and taking up Norwegian citizenship than for enhancing the image of the anti-Nazi "good German".

• Critics simply believed that any offers to cooperate with Communists were inherently dangerous and better to "bury" them in order to continue a hard-line policy of competition and confrontation.
• They were among the millions of Germans who were expelled from Poland and other areas in eastern Europe and still wanted to return to their homes.

• The non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union was one of the achievements of Brandt's office, as well as pacts with East Germany and Poland that recognized the Oder- Neisse boundaries with Poland.
• The end of World War II, the recognition of European borders, and the agreement to settle international disputes peacefully were all achieved by Brandt's foreign-policy initiatives.

• Since the creation of the Federal Republic, Brandt has become Germany's most popular chancellor.
• The domestic reforms he could entertain were limited by his alliance with the Free Democrats.
• The Christian Democratic Party was replaced as Germany's largest party by the SPD, but it still fell short of an absolute majority of popular votes.

• In 1974 the term as chancellor came to an abrupt halt.
• One of his advisers was a spy for East Germany, and he felt obliged to resign.
• He had been accused of infidelity, problems with alcohol, and bouts of depression.
• The spy scandal seems to have led to his resignation.
• He was no saint in his personal life, he had worked himself to a state of exhaustion in his foreign-policy initiatives, and the mounting economic repercussions of the oil crisis of 1973.
• After he resigned as chancellor, he retained his seat in the Bundestag.

• Brandt was replaced as chancellor by a younger man who was closer to the political center of the party but also a more capable manager.
• His hard work and efficiency were appreciated even by his opponents, despite his sharp tongue and sometimes patronizing tone.
• He was in office for eight years and gave West Germany competent leadership.
• German social democracy's high point has been the years in which Brandt and Schmidt were chancellors.
• Its domestic achievements were more in the direction of effectively managing modern welfare capitalism, as opposed to the older social-democratic goals of fundamental economic reorganization and social egalitarianism.
• Germany made it through the 1970s in better economic shape than other countries where socialist parties had been in power because of the management skills of Schmidt.

• The rising percentage of the country's gross national product going to social services, as well as the power of trade unions, came to be a focus of complaint in Britain.
• The Conservative and Labour Party prime ministers of the 1970s were frustrated with Britain's trade unions and wanted to rein them in to improve the country's economic performance.
• By the end of the 1970s, anti-union sentiment had spread to parts of the population that had previously been sympathetic to Labour, which is why voters turned to the Conservative Party and Margaret Thatcher in 1979.

• The appearance of a remarkable personality had implications that appeared decisive, making possible what previously had been considered unthinkable.
• Brezhnev ruled for eighteen years, longer than any other Soviet leader.
• The Era of Stagnation was the name of most of his rule from 1982 to 1985.
• How a man like Gorbachev could assume power in such a country has intrigued many observers.
• After a long day in New York, Gorbachev and his wife Raisa are still smiling as they attend a reception in their honor.

• Gorbachev had an assertive, fashionably dressed "modern" wife, who was also an intellectual companion to him, in striking contrast to the spouses of Soviet leaders since Stalin's time.
• Both professed to be followers of Leninism, yet both put the principles of party rule into question.

• Gorbachev was the youngest member of the politburo when he was chosen to lead it in 1985.
• Most of the other top members were in poor health.
• Communism was supposed to be out-produced capitalism, but the United States and most western European nations were steadily increasing the distance of their already significant lead in production and productivity.
• Industrial pollution in the Soviet Union was reaching catastrophic levels.

• The nuclear accident at the Chernobyl plant, in Soviet Ukraine, in late May 1986 - a year after Gorbachev had assumed power - took on great importance.

• Millions of people were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation because of the initial cover-ups surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power accident.
• The Chernobyl catastrophe was the result of the lack of it.
• Free thought and open access to information for the general population had long been dismissed by party leaders as naive and even dangerous, as was "formal" majority rule unguided by Leninist leadership.
• Free expression of opinion within the higher party ranks had long been circumscribed.
• After Stalin's death and Khrushchev's reforms, the party operated bureaucratically.
• The routines and work habits of generations of ordinary Soviet citizens were disrupted by it.

• Gorbachev believed that glasnost would increase popularity for Communist rule and that perestroika would improve its economic performance.
• His beliefs were found to be wrong on both counts.
• The enthusiasm for greater openness detracted from the support for Communist rule.
• The initial enthusiasm for reforms got out of control like Dubcek's Communism.
• The peoples of most non Russian Soviet republics preferred independence from the Soviet Union when offered a genuine free choice.
• In Russian-speaking areas, the Communist Party was unable to get a majority in open elections and a free press.

• By the late 1980s, the Soviet Union was facing severe shortages of basic food supplies, and Gorbachev's economic reforms proved less effective than Khrushchev's.

• "openness" meant not only open discussion of current affairs but also filling in the many " blank spaces" of Soviet history, as Gorbachev termed them, and that was a large order.
• It meant going back over the show trials and mass arrests of the late 1930s, as well as the murders of Polish officers during World War II, which Khrushchev had dubbed the crimes of the Stalin era.
• There was a lot of blank space in the history of the Soviet Union that did not correspond to what was being done by the Germans, French, or Italians by the 1980s.

• By the late 1980s, few observers expected Communist rule to fall so quickly.
• Even though support for Gorbachev waned inside the Soviet Union, he gained his greatest popularity outside it.
• He became known as "Gorby" and was awarded the peace prize.
• Few recipients deserved it more than he did.
• History has rarely seen such profound changes with so little violence.
• Gorbachev was not willing to preserve Communist rule with brute force.
• The days of Communism's rule in the soviet bloc countries were numbered since he made it clear that they could introduce reforms without fear of soviet military intervention.
• In some countries, such as Czechoslovakia, a significant part of the population had at least initially been open to the idea of Communism, but that attitude had not lasted, and in many other areas, such as Poland, a strong majority of the population had always detested Communism.

• There were Westernstyle elections in the Soviet Union that allowed non-Communist parties to run and they proved to be the beginning of the end.
• Part of the population was attached to the ideals and practices of Communism, but a larger portion wanted to be free of them.
• The freedom and prosperity offered by Western-style democracy became more apparent as the Communist parties in western Europe continued to survive.

• A man falling into a deep slumber in 1945 and waking up in 2012 would have been more confused than Rip Van Winkle was.
• Europe recovered in 2012 beyond anyone's expectations.
• Europeans had a level of material prosperity envied throughout the world, even if that prosperity seemed threatened after 2007.
• There was a European Union that encompassed twenty-seven countries, seventeen of them under a common currency.
• The chancellor of Germany was a woman.
• The president of the United States had appointed a woman as his secretary of state.
• One of the major issues being considered by the European Union was whether Islamic Turkey would be allowed to join it.

• After a decade of sleep, anyone would have been surprised by the changes.
• One of the major turning points of European history was 1989 and it was a year of miracles.
• The year from late 1989 to late 1990 had a low level of violence, even while events of enormous import were taking place, such as the fall of Communism in eastern Europe and the unification of Germany.

• The attacks of September 11, 2001 symbolized the new threats and an unfamiliar world.

• Europe's economic future began to look shaky within the next decade.

• The area's progress toward unification ran into obstacles.

• The "Arab Spring" of 2011) started the destruction of dictatorships in much of the neighboring Arab world, with highly uncertain implications for Europe's long-range future, to say nothing of international relations more generally.

• The challenge of fashioning new economic and political institutions in the former Communist lands was overwhelming and celebrations were more short-lived than in the West.
• The citizens of the former German Democratic Republic were the most fortunate since they were taken over by a prosperous West Germany and became part of a united Germany.
• Germany's status as the economic powerhouse of the European Union made it the most populous country in Europe.

• The transition in other areas was torturous.
• After the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, liberal-democratic institutions did not last in areas that had little previous experience of them.
• The successor states to the Soviet Union were often corrupt and inefficient and reverted to authoritarian rule.
• The Orange Revolution of 2004-5 in Ukraine, in which popular demonstrations led to the reversal of previously rigged elections, was one example of the variety in the experiences of the formerly Communist areas.

• The transformation of the Soviet Union into the Russian Federation took place by January 1993.
• The transformation of Russia from tsarist to Communist rule, from 1917 to 1921, was nothing like this process.
• The Russian Federation, with 80 percent of its population ethnic Russian, still extended beyond the Urals into Siberia and included around eighty-five federated areas, with widely varying ethnic mixes, borders that were repeatedly being renegotiated, and different degrees of autonomy being recognized.
• The Russian Federation was officially recognized as taking over the state responsibilities of the Soviet Union, including its treaties with other nations and its seat in the UN Security Council.
• The fall of the Soviet Union was described by large numbers of people in various polls as a tragedy, and many of them would be happy to see it return.
• The events of 1991 were not considered a genuine victory for democracy by a majority of the people surveyed.

• In 2000 when a former KGB official, Vladimir Putin, became president, many still yearned for strong leadership, which they got when he oversaw extensive reforms and impressive economic growth.
• His popularity was real and he was not like Stalin.

• The Cold War was over because one side of the war, the Communists, had splintered from the other side, the liberal democracies, remained relatively strong and stable.
• The area of the former Soviet Union had previously unimaginable changes regardless of the various dissatisfactions with developments there.
• The break up of the Soviet Union was more than an end to the dream of world revolution; it was also the end of the Russian empire.
• The Russian Federation was still the largest country in the world with a half a billion people compared to 300 million in the United States.
• The new Russia did not challenge the United States as a major power, but it still has long-range potential for economic growth because of its rich natural resources.

• The reunification of Germany in the 1980s was swift and peaceful.
• The idea of a united Germany was opposed by non Germans immediately after World War II, and even by the 1980s there was little enthusiasm for it outside Germany.
• By 1990 a united German nation was no longer believed to pose the kinds of threats it had in the past, which is why effective countermeasures did not emerge.
• The new Germany was 25 percent smaller than the Reich, and Germans showed no signs of expansionist or revanchist designs.
• The demolition of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989 was one of the most stirring events of 1989.
• Some of the members of the military and police in East Germany joined in the festivities.

• Many years passed before the wall was torn down, in a physical sense but also in a symbolic one.
• The integration of the two economies and societies proved to be more difficult than anticipated and a lot of Germans from both sides regret reunification.
• Some people believed that life under Communism was more tranquil and less materialistic.

• The multiethnic areas once ruled by the Habsburgs were ethnically cleansed from 1939 to 1945, and then "sovietized" in the immediate postwar years.
• The Czechs and Slovaks split into separate republics in 1993 after being artificially joined in 1919.
• The Czechs could claim that liberal democracy worked well in their republic, whereas the Slovakian Republic got off to a more uncertain start.
• Slovakia joined the European Union in 2004.

• Yugoslavia was a merger of ethnic groups that failed to establish a sense of common national identity.
• The brutal conflicts there in the 1990s were the exception to the generally non-violent transitions from Communism.
• In neighboring Romania, where the fall of Communism cost hundreds of lives, and where the country's Communist leader was put to death within a few days, there was an exception.
• Ceausescu was a brutal megalomaniac whose violent end came as no surprise, nor was it the cause of much regret thereafter.
• In Austria and Hungary, as well as in Poland, parliamentary democracy functioned better than it did during the interwar years.
• Poland and Hungary had little or no nostalgia about their Communist past, whereas Austria had a lot of amnesia about its Nazi past.

• There was no sudden or miraculous change in western Europe in 1989.

• In the 1990s, European economic integration made steady progress.
• Financial support from the United States helped overcome the obstacles to economic integration that had arisen in the postwar years.

• The Common Market should include communist countries.
• Most former Eastern Bloc countries joined in the next two decades, despite the fact that the answer from existing members was hardly enthusiastic.

• With international power relationships as well as patterns of trade shifting so extensively after 1989, it was natural to ask if Europe's relationship with the United States should remain the same.
• The answers ranged from "Maybe" to "mostly," but the earlier tensions between Europe and the United States, which had been largely contained because of the Cold War, were bound to take on new meaning given the American nation's status as the only superpower.

• In 1993 the Common Market became the European Union, a name change that indicated some ambitious projects economically, prominent among them a single currency and more fully integrated banking policies.
• The European Union moved in the direction of establishing more powerful political institutions.
• The introduction of a single currency, known as the euro, had many positive economic results, but before long it also exposed the challenges and dilemmas of including areas that were much less developed economically and culturally.
• The euro's introduction diminished the control of individual states over their economies in ways that exposed deep anxieties about the diminution of the sovereignty of individual nations in the European Union.

• Ireland, Spain, and Slovakia are some of the newer countries that have joined the European Union.
• The initial reservations about the new members were revived after 2007.

• Margaret Thatcher was one of the political leaders who had reservations about the European Union.
• She was wary of German unification, but she and other British leaders were most concerned about the implications of adopting the euro, which Britain finally refused to do.

• Many of the details of the evolution of the European Union became difficult to evaluate, which is one of the reasons that popular support for the European Union remained passive rather than passionate.

• For most of the time between 1989 and 2007, Europeans were enjoying unprecedented levels of material comfort and personal security, despite the acrimony associated with the evolving European Union.
• Over a half-century had passed and Europeans had avoided killing one another by the millions; their various quarrels had mostly to do with arcane issues of economic management.
• The war between Europe's states seemed to have ended.

• National unification in the 19th century faced enduring resistance from various parts of the population and provincial areas, but that resistance had been overwhelmed by "events" (wars, mostly), by rising nationalist intoxication and by charismatic leaders.
• The formation of national identity involves many factors, among them powerful myths and associated heroes, but the European Union produced no leaders comparable to Napoleon I.
• The European Union after 1993 experienced no threats like those faced by individual European nations in the 19th and early 20th century.
• The slowly evolving constitution of the European Union, reaching a crucial point with the Lisbon Treaty of December 2009, was highly detailed and conceptually sophisticated, but few if any observers described it as a document that inspired self-sacrifice.
• Most European audiences did not know the words to the anthem of the Union, the "Ode to Joy", even though it was widely recognized for its beauty.

• European unification had many cerebral and material attractions, but it lacked the power of nineteenth-century nationalism and the context of nationalist competition.
• The "faceless bureaucrats in Brussels," or "Eurocrats," were not embraced with much enthusiasm by Europe's population at large, even though they were respected in some quarters for their technical competence.
• Few Europeans were willing to risk their lives to defend the European Union, and no war was fought to establish it.
• They were never asked to do that.

• Europe was entering an era in which the memories of 1914-45 were not as important to European identity as they used to be.
• The memories that were pulled in many directions were fading because of a cluster of new memories and new issues.
• The extent to which Europe's tragic past had been truly "mastered" by 2010 must remain meaningless, but there were some inescapable new realities by that date: Most Europeans who had been adults during World War II were now six feet under.
• The youths of 1968 were joining the worn-out and retiring, facing the angry rebukes of newer generations for a variety of new problems.
• The ironies of history.

• The large relative numbers of that retiring generation were among the problems.
• By the early twenty-first century, the "age bulge" of those born in the years immediately after World War II was Europe's most daunting challenge as they entered into non- productive retirement.
• The issue seemed more ominous due to the declining birth rate of native Europeans and the rising numbers of immigrants with higher birthrates.

• There was a growing proportion of Europe's population that was non-European and non-Christian in recent origin.
• The extent of the population's integration to European values remained unclear.
• The values of those with Christian and European-born forebears were likely to be substantially different.

• The immigrants and their offspring represented another age bulge, since they felt less obliged to master Europe's past of 1914 to 1945.
• They focused on different aspects of that past, especially its racist attitudes to non Europeans.
• Europe's wars and their related horrors weren't important to which recent immigrants had guilty consciences.
• They didn't feel any responsibility for the Holocaust.
• Most of the Arabs believed that Arab Palestinians had paid a terrible price for Europe's Jewish problem since the state of Israel was established on what they considered to be Arab land.

• The books recommended in the Further Reading section for Chapter 25 are relevant for Chapter 26 as well.

• I.D.
• is one of the more recent studies of Gorbachev.

• The understanding of which has been enhanced by many penetrating works of history can be found in the years 1943-89.
• As the recent past nears the immediate present, it presents more problems of perspective and historical understanding.
• Modern historical understanding is constantly changing because of things happening in the present and the recent past, which is why professional historians are leery of large-scale conclusions about the meaning of the recent past.

• Complete consensus about the meaning of the past, remote or recent will never be achieved, even among professional historians, because the meaning is constantly changing.
• We cannot ignore the pasts of our nations because we cannot resist trying to make sense of them, and it may seem futile at times.
• In both cases, "identity" gradually emerges, whether based on mythic self-flattery or on more honest efforts to grapple with the often painful evidence before us.
• Identity is a mixture of both scientific and ungainly for most people and most countries.

• The Preface and many subsequent chapters have referred to the problematic issue of "the lessons of history," which so often have been revealed as false - mostly because those lessons have been crudely constructed or are blatantly self-interested - often leading to tragedies even worse than those that the lessons of history We must be wary of iron-clad or simplistic lessons, but an informed awareness of the past can at least engender a more sophisticated approach to present problems and dilemmas.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The final chapter may be considered a modest effort to arrive at an evaluation of the last two centuries of European history, revisiting the major themes of the book in the process.
• The chapter takes note of some of the key developments since the early 1990s, but it is especially aware of the danger of misjudging the longrange importance of events close to the time of writing.

• Europe's once-powerful individual nation-states were obliged to recognize their diminished power in relation to the two emerging powers.
• The idea of the absolute sovereignty of the European state was put into more serious question than ever before.
• The League of Nations represented an effort to limit sovereignty, but it was a notable failure, and it was not clear whether the United Nations would be more effective than the League in preventing war.
• The issue of the absolute sovereignty of the people in the nation-state was raised in the trials of Nazi leaders who claimed that they were following the orders of Hitler.

• Even though John Stuart Mill was worried about the tyranny of the majority, he had not anticipated how difficult it would be in practice.
• After 1945, there was no consensus about goals or means.
• The first successful steps toward greater unity in Western Europe turned out to be cautious and long-range, focusing on economic integration, based on the belief that countries with economies integrated with one another would not be able to wage a modern war against one another.
• The nature of the integration had to be more extensive, because that argument had been used before 1914.

• "Not Asia" and "not America" were among the most succinct responses, but they were not really adequate ones.
• The question is now in order.
• The question of how much European identity retained is still unanswered over the course of two hundred years.
• One way to address the question is to compare the early nineteenth century with the early twenty-first.

• Europe in the 19th century was in the midst of a population explosion and an unprecedented expansion of economic productivity.
• The number of people of European origin as well as their percentage of the world's peoples expanded throughout most of the century.
• The power of those Europeans grew fast.
• After the signing of the Treaty of Lisbon in December of 2009, the number of children that women of European descent were having was less than it had ever been.

• In the twenty-first century, the percentage of Europeans in the world's population seemed destined to shrink even more.

• Europeans and others of European origin took over the world in the 19th century and the evolving identity of Europeans was bound to be influenced by their extraordinary power.
• By the second half of the twentieth century, Europe's empires were being dismantled and the assumed superiority of Europeans was being challenged.
• Europeans were declining in influence and prestige in the rest of the world by the beginning of the twenty-first century.
• The rise of Europe in the 19th century and the rise of the United States in the second half of the 20th century were both examples of the rise of world power.

• By the mid-nineteenth century, demographic and economic shifts were bound to affect the way that European identity changed, from arrogant to cautious in the twenty-first century.
• Europe's secularization and near abandonment of its Christian identity were related to a fundamental shift.
• Such was the case in the most economically advanced and otherwise modern areas, as evidenced by the empty churches, the declining numbers of weddings, births, and deaths officiated by Christian clergy, and the plummeting numbers of young Catholic men interested in becoming priests and (especially) young women who aspire to be Even if secularization was affecting Islamic immigrant communities, the mosques were full and new ones were being constructed.

• Europeans had reason to retain a sense of pride in their civilization despite Europe's relative decline.
• Modern Christianity was more tolerant and humane than modern Islam for Europeans who remained practicing Christians.
• Secular Europeans saw modern Christian values as more advanced and civilized than those of non- European Islam.
• Europe's identity, that sense that Europe was an area where human freedom and creativity were unique, took on many expressions in the next two centuries, and of course experienced some appalling reverses.
• European liberty and creativity were closely associated with notions of the independent sovereignty of Europe's many nations, their productive interplay, and a commitment to prevent the establishment of a single European empire.

• At the time of the Congress of Vienna, the idea of a balance of power among European nations had a range of meanings.
• Europeans thought of themselves as distinctly freer, more creative, and more tolerant than any other people on the planet, with the exception of the extensions of European civilization in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

• Asia relied heavily on European and American inventiveness as well as on their ideological models, even in the realm of economic innovation, because the Orient and most other non-European areas offered little competition in the realm of freedom and toleration.
• Marxism came from Europe, but it had lost much of its meaning in China by the early twenty-first century.
• Even if the Arab Spring suggested the possibility of free, it wouldn't fit most of the Islamic world, and neither would "free" or " tolerant" be the first words used to describe rule by the Chinese Communist Party.
• The extent to which immigrants brought up under Islam had completely different attitudes to mores cherished by Europeans was underscored by the repeated flare-ups over such issues as whether Mohammed could be graphically represented or the extent to which women should be obliged to cover parts of their bodies.

• In terms of a range of measurable standards, Europe in the early twenty-first century was still a more "reasonable" and comfortable place than it had been.
• The ways in which the six questions of the early nineteenth century had been addressed would have disappointed the European visionaries.
• Negative reactions would likely be countered by many positive ones.

• The Irish Question, if it could be solved, would be called substantially solved by the early twenty-first century.

• The horrors of the 1840s and 1850s had little in common with those problems.

• They were not the same as the civil war between the Irish and political leaders in London.
• By 2012 Ireland had become much more like other western- European countries in terms of material conditions and lifestyle.
• There were serious political problems with Protestant-Catholic relations in Northern Ireland that continued into the 1990s, but a final compromise seemed to be concluded in 1998.
• By 2012 the Irish Question had largely disappeared from the front pages of most newspapers.

• There was more uncertainty about the extent to which the Woman Question had been solved.
• By 2012 women had gained the vote in all European countries, even if they had to wait until 1970 in Switzerland, as well as benefiting from formal civil equality in other regards.
• By 2012 European women, especially those in northern and western Europe, were able to enjoy greater personal freedom, a higher social and economic status, and overall a more equitable position as citizens than women in most of the rest of the world.
• There were signs of change in the arenas that were the most resistant to the entry of women.
• There were indications that the earlier assumptions about male and female identity were undergoing major, often unforeseen alterations in light of scientific discoveries, ones that exposed earlier versions of the Woman Question as decidedly antiquated.

• The original term for The Social Question had come to seem dated as it had developed in many previously unforeseen directions.
• The lower orders of society had a higher standard of living and children had more protection than in the 19th century.
• The movement into Europe of impoverished, unskilled non-Europeans, who could not be transformed immediately into skilled, well-paid workers, had an important role to play in the remaining social problems.
• Since immigrants from areas where the status of women was different were entering Europe in such large numbers, a serious complicating factor was being added to the Woman Question.

• There were competing visions of how the Social Question should be addressed.
• The economies that stressed a large role for the state developed their own set of problems, most alarming in Sovietstyle Communism, but also serious in non-Communist countries.
• The blend of state intervention to address issues of social justice and to control capitalism's destructive proclivities, while limiting "excessive" state power, or at least trying to reduce the self-serving bureaucracy has been a consensus since the 19th century.
• Where to draw the line between the opposing tendencies was not a precise one.
• The issue looked different from other national and cultural perspectives, which is a stumbling block for the European Union in achieving economic integration by the second decade of the twenty-first century.

• In the United States, there was a broad consensus about the need to blend economic freedom and state power, but the line there was generally drawn in the direction of limiting the powers of the central state.
• By the early twenty-first century, the proportion of the elderly in the general European population had something to do with that, but the older left-wing approaches to many economic and social issues were more fundamental.

• The Eastern Question had simply vanished.
• The Ottoman Empire was gone, as were the British, Dutch, French, Habsburg, and Russian empires.
• The areas that had been dominated by the Ottomans in the early 19th century remained major trouble spots in the early twenty-first, and Europeans were drawn into the constant internal crises and conflicts there.
• If a third world war was waiting in the future, it would break out over tensions in the Middle East, because the Arab-Israeli conflict spawned wars about every ten years.
• The European civil war was sparked by the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, where the major empires had clashed a century before.
• The inhabitants of the former Ottoman Empire provided a large proportion of the immigrant mass that became a major issue in early twenty-first-century Europe.

• Europe's inability to master its destructive dynamism was epitomized by the reaction to the rise of Germany.

• By 2012 it was assumed that the German Question had been solved.
• The Germans were counted among the more reasonable of Europe's peoples by the early twenty-first century after seeming tolerant to express racist tendencies.
• Germany was seen as a model of how a country should handle its past.
• Even though Germany's position in the Common Market and the European Union was a cause of concern in some quarters, it was based on the fact that United Germany had the largest population.
• German influence in Europe was not imposed by invasion or Gestapo terror.
• It was not easy to portray the Chancellor as arrogant.

• One of Europe's most attractive and open cities is the German capital.
• The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe was in the center of the building.
• The migration of thousands of young secular Israelis to the German capital city, attracted by its economic opportunities and tolerant atmosphere, was one of the most remarkable developments of the early twenty-first century.

• Europe was at the edge of self-destruction because of the German Question.
• One must wonder if there was a better way to respond to Germany's rise than what was done.
• The German nation still had the largest and most productive even after tens of millions of Germans had been killed and vast swaths of German territory had been bombed.
• If Europe's other major powers reconciled themselves to the inevitability of Germany's rise before 1914, their fortunes would almost certainly have been better than they turned out to be.

• Before 1914, it was not clear which direction German ambitions would take, but the question of whether Germany might have been more productive remains intriguing.
• In the context of global competitiveness, China's rise by the early twenty-first century seems like a similar phenomenon.

• If either Germany before 1914 or China after 1945 are considered absolute evils, then compromise with them has to be considered extremely dangerous.
• The American goal of dividing the Communist world was accomplished by Communist China in the process.
• As the threat of an atomic exchange was lessened, a sigh of relief was produced by Mikhail Gorbachev.

• Europeans had more in common with Americans than they did with other peoples of the world after the end of the Cold War.
• Europeans were "Americanized" during the Cold War in many ways.
• By the second decade of the twenty-first century, a new international situation of multiple powers and highly complex economic relationships was emerging, promising to challenge the United States' position as the sole military superpower and as the first industrial power of the world.
• Europe's future role in this new and volatile configuration remained uncertain because there was no consensus about what "Europe" actually was or should become.
• Even though it has a larger population than the United States, the European Union is still a minor military power.

• Many Europeans didn't like the idea of a united Europe becoming a major military power.
• It remained doubtful that China, India, Russia, or any number of other rising powers were inspired by the European model in that regard, despite the fact that that non-militarist identity might be held up as one of the more hopeful developments of the early twenty-first century.

• By 2012 the European model of "freedom" and its associated parliamentary, liberal democratic institutions did continue to exercise a broad appeal.
• It is obvious that non-European areas have their own conceptions of what a modernizing freedom should involve, which in many instances involved freeing themselves from European or American domination.
• What they work out will be different from what Europeans or Americans have done.
• Depending on the extent to which liberal democracies are seen as successful by the rest of the world and whether any other models achieve greater success.
• China's economic growth is too recent to serve as a model for the rest of the world.
• The Arab Spring is filled with problems.
• Europe and the countries of the world founded by Europeans, if declining relatively, still have quite a head start, and will almost certainly retain prominence among the world's nations long into the twenty-first century.

• Europe's Jewish Question was the most complicated of the six questions, its "solution" being the most tragic and the most enduringly uncertain in significance.
• The initial and most precise form of the question was whether Europe's Jews should be offered civil equality, but by 2012 it was no longer an issue.
• Most European Jews had modernized to a significant degree, fulfilling a broader agenda of the Jewish Question, although the modernized nature of most European Jews reflected the fact that the least modernized, poorest, and most Orthodox Jews suffered far and away the highest mortality rates from 1939 to 1945.

• The Europeans' concern with mastering their past became intertwined with their concern for Israel and its neighbors.
• The area of the previous Palestinian Mandate was the world's most enduring trouble spot from 1948 to 2012 and experienced wars every decade for the next 50 years.
• The entire period was characterized by atrocities by both sides.
• Europeans continued to pay more attention to this tiny area than to other areas larger in area and population, in ways that suggested much about Europeans' evolving identity and the many-sided repercussions of the Holocaust.

• The most successful of Europe's nineteenth-century ideologies was antisemitism.
• The actual goals of antisemites before the Holocaust are difficult to evaluate.
• Post-Holocaust attitudes to Jews were often impenetrable.
• "Eliminationist" hatred had been discredited, but it is doubtful that most of the people who were considered antisemites before the Holocaust actually wanted mass murder.
• The disdain that Jews had faced, in social exclusion or cultural condescension, diminished significantly after 1945, especially in western Europe.

• Extreme expressions of this "longest hatred" continued to find expression in some quarters, but, in their more grotesque varieties, they were found mostly in Arab and Islamic countries.

• The new antisemitism did not appeal to the antiracist, universalist, and anti-imperialist left in Europe, but it did appeal to the nationalist right.
• The growing chorus of mostly conservative Jews decided that the Christian right, even fundamentalists, were now to be considered the Jews' most reliable allies, whereas the left were considered the Jews' most dangerous opponents.
• From the perspective of the previous 2000 years, when Jews viewed Christian doctrine as hostile, this is a new development.

• The shift in Jewish attitudes to Christian conservatives was remarkable.
• It reflected and paralleled rapid changes in most varieties of Christianity regarding their attitudes to Judaism and the Jewish state.
• Many Christian leaders tacitly acknowledged that Christianity bore some responsibility for the Holocaust.
• Changes inside Israel could explain the changing attitudes of Christian conservatives to Israel.
• The country was ruled by the socialist left in the early years of the Jewish state and the memory of the Nazi persecution was still fresh.
• Israel was generally supported by the left in Europe, whereas the right was more skeptical about the new Jewish state.
• As the ruling parties in Israel shifted to the right and Israeli society became less egalitarian, the left in Europe and America criticized Israel more often than those on the political right.

• The emergence of a new enemy, termed "Islamism" in some quarters, and a new war, in which Israel and Jewish conservatives were seen as allies of Western civilization against Islamic fanatics, was perhaps the most important aspect of these changing attitudes.
• In the early twenty-first century, a new vision of an Enemy was emerging.
• New questions and new ideologies replacing the old had a lot to do with the new Enemy.
• The proliferation of ideologies in Europe in the early nineteenth century had weak parallels with the early twenty-first.
• The public rhetoric of the early twenty-first century largely abandoned the idea of questions.
• The thrill was gone as far as the left-wing mystique was concerned.

• environmentalism made an appearance in the decades immediately after World War II.
• Some people predicted that it would grow into a powerful international movement, but they were wrong.
• Concerns about the environment became a prominent issue, but environmentalism seemed unable to mobilize mass support and work out coherent programs of action to the extent that earlier isms had.
• In Germany and northern Europe, "Green" movements and associated political parties did arise, but by the early 20th century they had not achieved majority status or national rule.
• The Rhine was converted from a near cesspool in the 1950s to a river again alive with fish, but environmental issues tended to divide previous allies and push the other side.

• In the early 19th century there were objections to the environmental and aesthetic price paid for industrialization - the noisy railroad engines violating the tranquil countryside, the "satanic mills" that spawned ugly, unhealthy slums.
• The remedies that were proposed tended to be divisive rather than popular.
• It happened slowly and in ways that didn't prevent permanent damage to the environment when problems were effectively addressed.

• Communism failed more in remedying environmental damage than capitalism did.

• The internationalism of Communism was exposed as fake.
• The Chernobyl disaster made a point of environmental interdependence.
• By the early twenty-first century, global warming promised to endanger the entire planet in even more catastrophic ways than the use of atomic energy, but mobilizing effective measures to counteract it has so far proved to be difficult and divisive.

• Fear of an atomic exchange prevented a third world war.
• It would take more optimism about the future than existed in Victorian times to believe that there will be a consensus around preventative measures to protect the environment.

• The argument for strong states and strong international organizations is enhanced by environmental considerations, but what has been termed "globalism" suggests that it is not in the interest of the nations of the world.
• It would require a lot of faith in human rationality to conclude that nations will act in ways that prevent destructive economic competition.
• Before 1914, a number of observers said that general war wouldn't happen because of the economic interdependence of the major powers.

• Many European countries exported large parts of their population to the Americas in the 19th century.

• In some European countries, demographic pressures were alleviated but not always.
• Immigration from non-western areas after 1945, for all the complex difficulties associated with it, presented less daunting challenges than internal movement of European peoples.
• France received a large number of non- European citizens by the end of the century, making it the most tolerant country in Europe.
• Accepting and integrating large numbers of non-whites and nonChristians presented challenges that were bound to have toxic repercussions.
• The Irish and Italians were the most racist of Europeans in the 19th century.
• The French have not achieved a satisfactory assimilation of their non European populations.

• The record in most European countries by the second decade of the twenty-first century was not reassuring, despite the evidence that immigrants were often beneficial and that many did integrate successfully.
• In the United States, long accustomed to accepting immigrants and to praising them, resentment was rising against the largely non- European immigrants, especially the millions of illegal ones that were flooding the country from Latin America but also other parts of the world.

• Environmental threats, demographic decline, and non-European immigration were worrisome twenty-first century challenges for Europe.
• By 2012 the threat to the environment appeared more ominous in China than it did in Europe.
• Most areas of the world faced grave environmental threats, including the United States, which has been a major contributor to most types of environmental pollution.
• The demographic issues outside Europe were not the same as those in Europe.
• China's "one-child" policy resulted in a generation with many more males than females, which seemed to have dire long-range implications.
• Immigration was a major global issue.
• Europe was worried about mass immigration more than most because so many non-Europeans wanted to enter.
• The countries of Africa, Latin America, and almost any nation with a predominantly Islamic population were not comparable to China or India.

• European traditions of tolerance and the rule of law played an important role in the influx of immigrants to Europe.
• European xenophobia, however, was less violent and lawless than in other areas of the world.

• The European Union faced what some considered Europe's most alarming economic situation since 1945, in the form of the so-called debt crisis, affecting mostly the seventeen nations that had accepted the euro.
• The issue of the lack of a European identity that was stronger than existing nationalist identities was reflected in that predicament.
• In 2012 the European Union recognized twenty-three official languages, but many were resistant to either giving the technocrats in Brussels more power or accepting Germany's dominant role in the Union.

• If ever a united states of Europe like the United States of America is achieved, it will be far off.

• It goes too far to conclude that European unification has failed.

• Liberal democracy was the worst form of government according to Churchill.
• In comparison to other areas of the globe, much the same might be said of Europe.

• Europeans have tried to come to grips with their history in both its successes and its tragedies.

• As noted at the beginning of this chapter, historians tend to be cautious in evaluating the longrange meaning of current events, and it does seem that, the closer they get to the present, the more ephemeral are many of the works published on the European scene.
• The titles of some books that appeared a decade or so ago are more optimistic than the books that have appeared recently.

• Proper names and terms can be found in this volume.
• No reader can be expected to have an adequate sense of how all of them are pronounced, since most of these languages have sounds that do not exist in English, and many give different values to letters of the alphabet than English does.

• Most readers don't know how to pronounce some foreign terms, because they reside in a linguistic no-man's-land.
• The pronunciation guides here try to make it easy for English-speaking readers to understand.
• The International Phonetic alphabet's arcane symbols are not helpful for most.

• Where native pronunciation is similar to intuitive English, pronunciation guides are not provided.
• When first names seem particularly odd or puzzling, guides are given.

• When appropriate, the birth and death dates of major figures are included in parentheses after their names.

• There are references to maps and figures in italics.

• It was published by John Wiley & Sons.

• The assassinations and attempted assassinations of Alexander II and Francois Babeuf.

• Khrushchev's speech was about Leninist issues.

• The role in the Great Depression was challenged by De Gaulle.

Document Outline

• A History of Modern Europe: From 1815 to the Present Copyright Contents Preface: The Dilemmas and Rewards of a Concise Historical Overview List of Maps List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: What Is Europe? "Christendom" and Europe Geographical Definitions Europe's Unusual Seas: The Mediterranean and Baltic Europe's Unusual Races European Languages Europe's Religious Mixes The Differing Rates of Growth in Europe's Regions Notes to the Reader A Few Words about the Further Reading Sections National and Thematic Overviews Biographies Historiography and Bibliography Further Reading (to the Introduction) Part I Romanticism and Revolt: The Seedtime of Modern Ideologies, 1815-40 1 The Legacy of the French Revolution France's Preeminence The Changes Made by the Revolution The Revolutionary Mystique The Opening Stages of the Revolution The Causes of the Revolution: Precedents The Ambiguous Ideal of Equality Civil Equality for Jews? The Many Meanings of Fraternity The Revolution: Progressive or Regressive? Further Reading 2 The Congress of Vienna and Post-Napoleonic Europe: 1815-30 A Uniquely European Meeting The Major Powers: Goals and Compromises Napoleon Returns: The Hundred Days The Issue of Poland Other Territorial Settlements Accomplishments of the Congress: Short-Term, Long-Term The Repressive Years in Britain Metternich's Repressions Further Reading 3 The Engines of Change Conceptualizing Historical Change The Industrial Revolution and Its Preconditions The British Model of Industrialization Industrialization in Other Countries Resistance to Industrialization Technological Innovation and Industrialization The Implications of Industrial Change Further Reading 4 The Seedtime of Ideology: A Century of "Questions" Europe's Major "Questions" and Its Belief in Progress The Elusive Genesis and Evolution of Europe's Isms Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism Edmund Burke: The Conservative Tradition and Its Opponents Feminism and the Woman Question The Evolution of Liberal Theory and Practice: Radicalism and Utilitarianism Classical Liberalism Mill on Socialism and Feminism Fourier's Fantastic but "Scientific" Vision of Socialism The "Practical" Socialist, Robert Owen Saint-Simon, Prophet of Modernism The Communist Tradition Romanticism and Classicism Further Reading Part II From the 1820s to the Great Depression of the 1870s and 1880s 5 Liberal Struggles, Victories, Dilemmas, Defeats The Revolution of 1830 in France Unrest in the 1830s Agitation to Repeal the Corn Laws The Great Hunger in Ireland The Darker Vision of Thomas Malthus Again, Revolution in France Reform in Britain: The Chartist Movement Revolutions of 1848 and the End of Metternich's Europe The Republican Provisional Government and the "National Workshops" Rising Class Conflict and the "June Days" The National Question Outside France Growing Divisions among the Revolutionaries Further Reading 6 Nationalism and National Unification Problems of Definition Ideas of German Nationality People, Language, and State: Herder and Hegel Slavic Identities Southern Europe: Latin Identities New Power Relations in Europe: The Wars of Mid-century The Unification of Italy The Unification of Germany Further Reading 7 Mid-century Consolidation, Modernization: Austria, Russia, France The Habsburg Empire The Russian Empire France's Second Empire Further Reading 8 Optimism, Progress, Science: From The 1850s To 1871 The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune The Classic Age of British Liberalism Britain's Social Peace, Political Stability, and Economic Productivity Liberalism, Population Growth, and Democracy The Irish Question Darwin and Darwinism Further Reading Part III From Depression to World War: The 1870s to 1914 9 The Depressed and Chastened 1870s and 1880s The Spread of Marxism: Controversies about the Meaning of Marxism The Development of Social Darwinism and Evolutionary Thinking Russian Revolutionary Movements in the 1870s and 1880s The Appearance of Modern Racial-Political Antisemitism Antisemitism in Germany The Weakness of Antisemitism in Italy and Britain Antisemitism in France: Renan and the Scandals of the 1880s Further Reading 10 Germany and Russia in the Belle Epoque: 1890-1914 A Rising Germany Liberalism Challenged, Mass Politics, and the Second Industrial Revolution The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche New Aspects of the German Question The Evolution of German Social Democracy: The Revisionist Controversy Russia under Nicholas II The Appeals of Marxism in Russia and the Emergence of Leninism The Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5 Revolution and Reaction in Russia, 1905-14 Further Reading 11 France and Britain in the Belle Epoque: 1890-1914 France in Turmoil The Dreyfus Affair French Socialism Edwardian Britain The Boer War The Woman Question Further Reading 12 The Origins of World War I Growing International Anarchy, Hypernationalism, Polarization of Alliances An Inevitable War? The Role of Personality and Chance The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand From Euphoria to Stalemate Warfare Further Reading Part IV The European Civil War: 1914-43 13 World War I: 1914-18 Stalemate Warfare in the West and Expansion in the East 1916: The Battles at Verdun and the Somme 1917: A Turning Point Autumn 1917 to Autumn 1918: The Last Year of War and Germany's Collapse November 1918: The Balance Sheet of War Further Reading 14 Revolution in Russia: 1917-21 A Proletarian Revolution? The March (February) Revolution: Provisional Government and Soviets Lenin's Return: The Paradoxes of Bolshevik Theory and Practice The Mechanics of the Bolshevik Seizure of Power The Constituent Assembly Civil War in Russia: The Red Terror The Failure of Revolution in the West What "Really Happened" in Russia between November 1917 and March 1921? Further Reading 15 The Paris Peace Settlement The Settlements of 1815 and 1919 Compared; the Issue of German Guilt Popular Pressures, "New Diplomacy," Russia's Isolation Wilson's Role: The Fourteen Points The Successor States and the Issue of Self-Determination The Creation of New Nation-States: Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia Dilemmas and Contradictions of Ethnic-Linguistic States Minority Treaties League of Nations Mandates Further Reading 16 The Dilemmas of Liberal Democracy in the 1920s Containing Germany: The Weakness of the League of Nations, 1919-29 The Dilemmas of American Leadership: Isolationism Reactionary Trends and the Woman Question The Negative Impact of the Versailles Treaty: Undermining German Democracy The Evolution of Liberal Democracy in Germany Developments in the Third Republic The Brief Rule of the British Labour Party The Stock-Market Crash, November 1929: The Beginning of the Great Depression Further Reading 17 Stalinist Russia and International Communism Stalin and Stalinism The 1920s: Lingering Dilemmas and the Industrialization Debate Stalin's Victory in the Struggle for Power Stalin and the Jewish Question in the Bolshevik Party Collectivization and the Five-Year Plan The Blood Purges 1939: The Balance Sheet: Paradoxes and Imponderables Further Reading 18 The Rise of Fascism and Nazism: 1919-39 The Origins of Italian Fascism Mussolini's Assumption of Power The Evolving Definition of Fascism: Initial Relations with Nazism The Spread of Fascism Outside Italy, 1922-33 Nazism: The Basis of Its Appeal The Nature of Hitler's Antisemitism Hitler in Power A Moderate Solution to the Jewish Question? Nazi and Soviet Rule: Comparing Evils Further Reading 19 The Origins of World War II and the Holocaust: 1929-39 European Diplomacy, 1929-34 Hitler's Retreats, the Stresa Front The Great Turning Point, 1934-5: Comintern Policy and the Ethiopian War The Popular Front in France, 1935-9 The Spanish Civil War, 1936-9 The Era of Appeasement, 1936-8 Evaluating Appeasement Further Reading 20 World War II and the Holocaust: 1939-43 Appeasement from the East and the Outbreak of World War II The Opening Stages of World War II War in the West, 1940 The War against Judeo-Bolshevism The Turning of the Tide Victories at Stalingrad and the Kursk Salient Further Reading Part V Europe in Recovery and the Cold War: 1943-89 and Beyond 21 Victory, Peace, Punishment: 1943-6 The Problems and Paradoxes of Victory Planning for Victory Personal Diplomacy and Realpolitik Winning the War: Myths and Realities The Ambiguous Peace The Holocaust's Final Stages: Vengeance The Nuremberg Trials Dilemmas and Paradoxes of Punishment Further Reading 22 Europe's Nadir, the German Question, and the Origins of the Cold War: 1945-50 War-time Deaths, Military and Civilian The Unresolved German Question: Germany's Borders Denazification The Two Germanies, East and West Schumacher and Adenauer Social Democrats vs. Christian Democrats Postwar Austria The Origins and Nature of the Cold War Further Reading 23 The Mystique of Revolution: Ideologies and Realities, 1945 to the 1960s The Revolutionary Mystique in the Immediate Postwar Years Democratic Socialism in Western Europe: Great Britain Democratic Socialism in Western Europe: Scandinavia The Revolutionary Mystique, the Cult of Personality, and "Real" Socialism Titoism and the New Show Trials Stalin's Death and Khrushchev's "De-Stalinization" Revolts in Poland and Hungary, 1956 The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 East Germany and the Berlin Wall Further Reading 24 The End of Imperialism, and European Recovery: 1948-68 European Exhaustion and the End of Empire India and the Middle East New Dimensions of the Jewish Question "French" Algeria The Vagaries of Historical Memory: The Role of the Cold War The Establishment of the Fourth Republic in France Restoring Liberal Democracy in Italy European Unification: The First Steps De Gaulle's Vision: The Fifth Republic Further Reading 25 Europe in a New Generation Communism with a Human Face: Czechoslovakia, 1968 Young Rebels in Western Europe France: The "Events of May" Feminism in the New Generation Further Reading 26 Detente, Ostpolitik, Glasnost: A New Europe Shifting International Relationships: Frictions and Contretemps in the Soviet Union and United States The Impact of the Oil Embargo of 1973: "Stagflation" The Restive Soviet Bloc in the 1970s and 1980s Poland and Solidarity West Germany's Ostpolitik: Management of Modern Capitalism Gorbachev and Glasnost, 1985-9 The Disintegration of Communist Rule From Mystique (1989-90) to Politique (1991-2012) From Soviet Union to Russian Federation The Unification of Germany The Breakup of Former Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia Western Europe: From Common Market to European Union Further Reading 27 Europe in Two Centuries: An Epilogue and General Assessment Europe's Evolving Identity European Liberties and Toleration The Irish Question The Woman Question The Social Question and the Role of the State The Eastern Question and the End of Empires The German Question Americanization, Globalization, and the European Model The Jewish Question The New Enemy: Islam Environmentalism under Capitalism and Communism The Demographic Question and European Xenophobia The Sovereign Debt Crisis: The Dilemmas of the European Union Further Reading Index