Europe in the Short Twentieth Century: Conflicting Projects of Modernity

Abstract

From the perspective of the twenty-first century the previous century as far as Europe is concerned can be seen as defined by the two world wars and the political systems to which they gave rise. It is now commonplace to observe that 1918 did not mark the end of an era, but the beginning of a new one, which ended not in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany but in 1989, with the break-up of Russian domination in Centra] and Eastern Europe and within a year the collapse of the East versus West divide. This is what Eric Hobsbawm (1994) has termed the ‘short twentieth century’, which can be regarded as the most apt characterization of the century (see also Badiou 2007). Instead of a periodization that sees 1945 as the threshold to a new era in which democracy returned to Europe, a longer view of the century would see the era 1918 to 1989 as constituting a certain unity. From both a global and a wider Europe perspective a conceptualization of the twentieth century is needed. Conceived of in terms of models of modernity, which places any consideration of the twentieth century in the context of a longer-term view, the emphasis is less on the beginning and ending of wars than on the formative moments in the making of modernity. Such moments of great crisis as major revolutions are more significant than the cessation of wars.