Introduction to Volume II

Richard J B Bosworth; Joseph A. Maiolo

doi:10.1017/CHO9781139524377.001

Introduction to Volume II

Richard J B Bosworth, Joseph A. Maiolo

War Studies

University of Oxford

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

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Abstract

The editors of Volume II of The Cambridge History of the Second World War accept as a starting point Carl von Clausewitz’s famous definition of war as a continuation of politics by violent means. While the unbound savagery and destruction of the war may have appeared like violence for its own sake, the opposite was true. Why war came and expanded, the way the war was fought and its world-dividing consequences can only be understood if we accept that politics guided thought and action. It is sobering to reflect that across the globe so much inhumanity was done for human purposes. What determined those purposes? In earlier periods, religious conflict, dynastic glory, state interests and imperial expansion defined the reasons for battle, but the twentieth century was distinctly the time of ideological war. Although the First World War began as a typical geopolitical struggle between the great powers of East Central Europe over the Balkans, its unforeseen duration, magnitude and intensity transformed international relations and domestic politics and blurred the distinction between them. Industrial total war destroyed empires and sparked revolutions. War waged with increased implacability recast existing ideas of national political, economic and social order, which had shaped the identity of states before, but which now became central to the way in which political leaders and elites understood the world. Ideological affinity or antipathy became the way to identify friends and foes. Of the ideologies that configured the great conflicts of the twentieth century, from 1914 to the end of the Cold War in 1990, conservatism, liberalism and socialism had roots in the nineteenth century, but fascism emerged from the political, social and cultural trauma of the First World War. Its rise would be an explosive ingredient in the making of the Second World War, and its legacy would pervade the Cold War.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	The Cambridge History of the Second World War
Editors	Richard Bosworth, Joseph Maiolo
Pages	1-10
Number of pages	10
Volume	II
ISBN (Electronic)	9781139524377
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139524377.001
Publication status	Published - 1 Jan 2015

Publication series

Name	Cambridge University Press

Access to Document

10.1017/CHO9781139524377.001

Cite this

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Introduction to Volume II

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