European history between the two world wars contains two traps for the unaware. The first is the instinct to read history backwards. Because we know that the period ended in the most destructive war in history, it is tempting to conclude that this outcome was foreordained in events 10 or 20 years earlier. Such determinism often comes with an assumption that there was something inevitable about the collapse of Germany’s democratic Weimar Republic, whose fall in 1933 and replacement by the Nazi dictatorship were major factors in the drift to war.
The second trap is the tendency to make overdrawn comparisons between the interwar era and the troubles of our own times. For sure, authoritarian rulers and demagogic nationalists rose to the fore in the interwar era, as in ours. Economic crises piled up and internationalism fell into discredit. But no two eras are the same. As Paul Jankowski notes: “Aggressive dictatorial regimes and the ideological challenge presented by communism and fascism gave [the 1930s] a unique face, while the spectres of environmental crisis, nuclear proliferation, and the cyberspace jungle confer an unwelcome distinction on our own [decade].”
Jankowski’s All Against All and Robert Gerwarth’s November 1918 are two of the most stimulating histories of the interwar period to have been published in recent years. Jankowski ranges beyond Europe, tracing developments in China, Japan and the US. He shines a valuable, detailed light on less familiar episodes such as the failure of the Geneva disarmament talks and London world economic conference in 1933.