Dark Continet

As the world entered the twentieth-century Europe stood as sentinel to the world. Notable for its blossoming in the humanities and sciences, Europe was poised to assume a role as a model for the world. Protecting themselves from Communism and Nazism, and from the eminent danger of expansionism by the powers of Germany and Russia (Mazzeno) was, instead, what Europe would spend the first half of the twentieth-century managing.
(The seemingly interminable state of war in Europe, internally between nations and ethnic groups and externally with the World Wars, contends Mazower, was ideologically descended from Europe’s roots in colonialism.)
Framing the political analysis of his alternate history in Dark Continet: Europe’s Twentieth Century through
The result was a disillusionment with democratic institutions that were deemed to be too weak, with leaders unable to maintain stable relations with the new, aggressive, agenda driven, political parties emerging from their neighbors. The general global endorsement of democracy never guaranteed it a place in the political organization of a Europe emerging from World War I. For the northern states on the continent still holding on to liberal democracy, the backing of the United States almost certainly rescued them from the overpowering encroachment of other forms of
Mazower’s mission to expose the untold stories of history resulted in a study that revealed shrewd historical insight into the dynamics of ever shifting political landscapes of the time. Following World War One, Europe was left economically in chaos. Currencies were devalued and inflation skyrocketed, “prices everywhere were hundreds or thousands of times higher than before the war.” (104) Four years of total war had completely destroyed the traditional monetary foundations of nineteenth-century bourgeois confidence and economic stability. (105) Europeans were tired, they wanted to be left alone, wanted to focus on themselves, and most of all they wanted economic security, they wanted to be able to feed their families, and they wanted the jobs that enabled them to do those things. Democracy, Mazower contends, probably wasn’t even the first place the people looked for leadership. How economic stability would return to Europe wasn’t necessarily of the most concern to a public who were war weary and embittered by the less than stellar initial attempts at