Great Power Policies Towards Central Europe 1914 1945

This book provides an overview of the various forms and trajectories of Great Power policy towards Central Europe between 1914 and 1945. This involves the analyses of diplomatic, military, economic and cultural perspectives of Germany, Russia, Britain, and the USA towards Hungary, Poland, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia and Romania. The contributions of established, as well as emerging, historians from different parts of Europe enriches the English language scholarship on the history of the international relations of the region. The volume is designed to be accessible and informative to both historians and wider audiences. Contributors: Sorin Arhire, Ivan Basenko, Agne Cepinskyte, Oleg Ken, Tamás Magyarics, Halina Parafianowicz, Alexander Rupasov, Ignác Romsics and Artem Zorin.

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

By the time the First World War ended in 1918, eight million people had died in what had been perhaps the most apocalyptic episode the world had known. This Very Short Introduction provides a concise and insightful history of the 'Great War', focusing on why it happened, how it was fought, and why it had the consequences it did. It examines the state of Europe in 1914 and the outbreak of war; the onset of attrition and crisis; the role of the US; the collapse of Russia; and the weakening and eventual surrender of the Central Powers. Looking at the historical controversies surrounding the causes and conduct of war, Michael Howard also describes how peace was ultimately made, and the potent legacy of resentment left to Germany. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability.Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the earlytwentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization.The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. Indeed in the early 1940s both Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill referred to a 'thirty years war'.Why did so many crises rage across the continent from 1914 until the end of the Second World War? Why did the winds of destruction affect some regions more than others?The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in widerregional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.

Paul Kennedy's classic naval history, now updated with a new introduction by the author This acclaimed book traces Britain's rise and fall as a sea power from the Tudors to the present day. Challenging the traditional view that the British are natural 'sons of the waves', he suggests instead that the country's fortunes as a significant maritime force have always been bound up with its economic growth. In doing so, he contributes significantly to the centuries-long debate between 'continental' and 'maritime' schools of strategy over Britain's policy in times of war. Setting British naval history within a framework of national, international, economic, political and strategic considerations, he offers a fresh approach to one of the central questions in British history. A new introduction extends his analysis into the twenty-first century and reflects on current American and Chinese ambitions for naval mastery. 'Excellent and stimulating' Correlli Barnett 'The first scholar to have set the sweep of British Naval history against the background of economic history' Michael Howard, Sunday Times 'By far the best study that has ever been done on the subject ... a sparkling and apt quotation on practically every page' Daniel A. Baugh, International History Review 'The best single-volume study of Britain and her naval past now available to us' Jon Sumida, Journal of Modern History

How and why did Europe spawn dictatorships and violence in the first half of the twentieth century, and then, after 1945 in the west and after 1989 in the east, create successful civilian societies? In this book, Volker Berghahn explains the rise and fall of the men of violence whose wars and civil wars twice devastated large areas of the European continent and Russia--until, after World War II, Europe adopted a liberal capitalist model of society that had first emerged in the United States, and the beginnings of which the Europeans had experienced in the mid-1920s. Berghahn begins by looking at how the violence perpetrated in Europe's colonial empires boomeranged into Europe, contributing to the millions of casualties on the battlefields of World War I. Next he considers the civil wars of the 1920s and the renewed rise of militarism and violence in the wake of the Great Crash of 1929. The second wave of even more massive violence crested in total war from 1939 to 1945 that killed more civilians than soldiers, and this time included the industrialized murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the Holocaust. However, as Berghahn concludes, the alternative vision of organizing a modern industrial society on a civilian basis--in which people peacefully consume mass-produced goods rather than being 'consumed' by mass-produced weapons--had never disappeared. With the United States emerging as the hegemonic power of the West, it was this model that finally prevailed in Western Europe after 1945 and after the end of the Cold War in Eastern Europe as well.

"A superb book.…Mearsheimer has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the behavior of great powers."—Barry R. Posen, The National Interest The updated edition of this classic treatise on the behavior of great powers takes a penetrating look at the question likely to dominate international relations in the twenty-first century: Can China rise peacefully? In clear, eloquent prose, John Mearsheimer explains why the answer is no: a rising China will seek to dominate Asia, while the United States, determined to remain the world's sole regional hegemon, will go to great lengths to prevent that from happening. The tragedy of great power politics is inescapable.

"In 'The Lights that Failed', Steiner challenges the assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war and provides an analysis of the attempts to reconstruct Europe during the 1920s"-OCLC