The European Civil War

To both eyewitnesses and later historians, the World War One and Two periods seemed to go far beyond “normal” conflicts. The ideological intensification and violence even behind the front lines was something the Old Continent had not experienced on such a scale since the French Revolution. Nor had it previously been so prevalent—note that between the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty-Year War, and 1789, war had become, as Arnold Toynbee called it, the “sport of kings.” Conflicts were waged on a relatively small scale,² in part for economic reasons: the premodern state apparatuses could not give long-term support to vast armies. The rulers, in turn, operated within a complex system of mutual dependency—there could be no attacking other sovereigns, unless the other monarchs agreed, receiving their share as well.³ Events like the partition of Poland might be seen as an example of this diplomatic balancing-act, where even the mightiest states could not afford to work independently. After 1815, this model was partly restored and even the clashes between superpowers (the Crimean War) did not cause its collapse.

In this context, 1914–45 truly did usher in a new, cruel aspect. To better understand this epoch, the concept of a European civil war is sometimes used. This is variously conceptualized, and even the dates are a matter of dispute. Winston Churchill joined the two world wars as “another thirty-year war” to show the structural ties between the two world conflicts.⁴ German historian Ernst Nolte has highlighted the year 1917, seeing the clash between communism and fascism as the axis defining the whole period.⁵ Nolte is sometimes accused to attempting to “whitewash” and take away responsibility from Germany, but left-wing historians (Enzo Traverso, Eric Hobsbawm) also basically subscribe to this interpretation, though they accentuate different things. A French historian, in turn, has pointed out that this period can be interpreted as a civil war between three ideologies: liberal democracy, fascism, and communism.⁶

The fall of the Weimar Republic, the Spanish civil war, and the outcome of the Second World War seem to fit this vision. In all these theaters, extra-national ideologies were competing and many placed loyalty to them above their own countries—this went not only for the communists, who openly supported internationalism. They did not spare civilians, and were less concerned with defeating an enemy army than exterminating their opponent. Stalin said in private: “This war is not as in the past. Whoever occupies a territory imposes on it his own social system. Everyone imposes his own system as far as his army has power to do so.”⁷

There are, after all, many arguments that make us doubt if the “European civil war” is the best intellectual tool for understanding what happened in those years.

Despite the partisans’ significance, World War Two was essentially a clash between regular armies maintained by complex economies.⁸ Attempts to place the Holocaust in the framework of a clash between Nazism and Bolshevism can also lead us astray. Both the aforementioned Ernst Nolte and Jewish historian Arno Mayer⁹ have been accused of depreciating the historical dimension of the Holocaust for just this reason.¹⁰ American scholar Michael Seidman also stresses that we can speak both of revolutionary anticommunism represented by Hitler and of conservative anti-communism, exemplified by Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle. These two statesmen also fit the model of conservative antifascism. Revolutionary antifascism, in turn, was personified by Joseph Stalin.¹¹ Recent decades have also brought a reassessment of the history of interwar diplomacy—it is increasingly stressed that the Second World War, even if it logically grew out of the First, need not necessarily have resulted from it.

As we can see, clear interpretations can sometimes turn out to be deceptive or too far-ranging in their implications. Yet even if we ought to approach the concept of a European civil war with great caution, it can be helpful in understanding the specifics of the interwar epoch.