Europe Since 1870 [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONThe hundred years of European history since 1870 have been filled with such dramatic and rapid changes, social, economic, cultural and political as to make it almost impossible to write about them in a single volume. Yet these have been years in which certain historical experiences were common to Europe as a whole, and in which European developments were sharply differentiated from those in most other parts of the world; and they were also years in which the course of European history profoundly affected society in countries outside Europe. It is with these common experiences that this book attempts to deal.While it tries to describe and analyse the great mass movements which have provided the main themes of the history of the past century - liberalism, imperialism, fascism, socialism, communism - these movements have been described in their historical and chronological context. History is concerned with actual men in actual situations; and for this reason it is important to remind the reader of the sequence of events in which these general movements have been embodied, to provide him, so to speak, with a chart with which he can begin to navigate in these stormy seas.This is a period in which the impact of political events on the lives of individuals has been particularly strong, and while it is valuable, as many social and economic historians now try to do, to write history with the politics left out, in terms of wage rates, the cost of living or the incidence of unemployment, as being the historical factors which condition the experience of the ordinary man, such studies make sense only within a political and ideological framework, and it is this which in outline I have tried to provide.While history can be written in terms of vast global movements or of economic cycles in which events such as the Second World War only cause a momentary tremor on the instrument readings, the precise form in which changes occur is determined by the actions of individuals. It would be unrealistic, in writing about a period which starts with Bismarck and in which Lenin and Hitler, to say nothing of Churchill or de Gaulle or Freud or Einstein, are leading figures, to deny the impact of personality on historyXI