Introduction
The second edition
Since publication of the first edition of International History of the Twentieth Century in 2004, world events have evolved rapidly. The search for al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the efforts to destroy his power base and cut off his finances led to the US and its Allies attacking Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003.
However, they failed to destroy, or even contain, al-Qaeda; instead, al- Qaeda-inspired terror spread. In 2002 suicide bombers targeted Bali, in 2003 Jakarta, in 2004 Madrid, and in 2005 London. As unsuccessful as the global war on terror were efforts to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict. The second Palestinian intifada continued unabated and after the death of Yasser Arafat the already existing rivalry between different Palestinian factions descended into internecine fighting. In 2007 Hamas took over the Gaza Strip while the Palestinian Authority continued to govern the West Bank. The situation along Israel's northern border also heated up, culminating in Israel's Second Lebanon War in 2006, which like the first one was a complete failure. In South-East Asia Indonesia consolidated its democracy and ended the conflict in Aceh in 2005 while in Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra was ousted in a bloodless military coup in 2006; and in 2007 Buddhist monks in Burma tried to achieve regime change in what became dubbed the Saffron Revolution.In order to incorporate all these new events it was necessary to change the title to bring the book into the twenty-first century. Like the first edition, the second edition offers the benefits of a cohesive view of world history by four specialists with regional expertise. It also offers the benefit of having received considerable feedback from lecturers and students using the book on their courses. In light of their excellent suggestions we have updated all chapters, reorganized some, and added two new chapters: one on European integration and the other on the global war on terror.
We have expanded the material on the Middle East to include a more detailed discussion of the second intifada, the 2006 Lebanon War and post-2000 attempts at resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict. We have also added illustrations to each chapter and included additional web links to primary resource sites which students can link to from the support website at www. routledge.com/textbooks/9780415438964.Introduction to the twentieth century
globalization
The cultural, social and economic changes caused by the growth of international trade, the rapid transfer of investment capital and the development of high-speed global communications.
Great Powers
Traditionally those states that were held capable of shared responsibility for the management of the international order by virtue of their military and economic influence.
In the twentieth century the history of international relations revealed four powerful trends. The first, and the one that received the greatest attention at the end of the century, was that the years between 1900 and 2000 witnessed a shrinking world in which the rapid growth of trade and finance created a truly global economy, while advances in communications and transport radically reduced the boundaries of time and space. Moreover, this trend towards globalization was reinforced by the fact that closer contacts and interdependence between political communities spurred on the formation of permanent intergovernmental institutions as well as a mushrooming of non-governmental organizations. Linked to this trend was a second major theme, which is that the twentieth century was a period defined by the quest for modernization and the perfection of modernity. Accordingly, more than any previous century, its course was shaped by ideological innovations and confrontation, ranging from the progressive utopianism of communism to the outwardly nostalgic visions of political Islam. Another major trend was that the century saw the steady diffusion of power away from Europe, which had dominated the world in 1900.
At the level of Great Power politics, Europe was eclipsed by the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union, but this change to the international order also had another vital element, the proliferation of new nation-states in Asia and Africa, which acquired sovereignty as the European colonial empires broke up. These dramatic transformations in the world led to the fourth trend, the century's all-too-frequent tendency to descend into conflict, fed by ideology, nationalism, and advances in technology and institutional administration. No previous century can claim the violent death toll of the twentieth, in which lives were lost not just in war, but also in barbarous acts of organized state violence.Our purpose is to offer students a single-volume, clear and wide-ranging account of the twentieth century and to explain why world politics followed this complex and often violent course. Such an exercise contains the danger that, in explaining long-term historical developments, the historian can, if not careful, erase the fundamental variable in all human affairs — contingency. There was no overriding reason why the past century had to be plagued by war, economic upheaval and political turmoil, for other routes to the future were open as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth. Indeed, many on the cusp of that transition, such as Norman Angell in his 1910 book, The Great Illusion, foresaw a new age of perpetual inter-state harmony ushered in by the rise of industrial economies and new technologies. Unfortunately, however, these prophets of peace proved to be wrong, and thus the history that we have to account for is defined by the violent dissolution of the old order dominated by Europe and the emergence of a titanic struggle between two hostile coalitions that possessed enough firepower to extinguish all human life completely.
In approaching our task, we have emphasized the international politics and the ideological doctrines of the past century.
This approach may strike some as old- fashioned, especially as the historical discipline now considers the ways in which cultural, gender, social, economic and scientific factors, as well as the actions of non-governmental bodies, have influenced international affairs. We do not dismiss the influence of these factors on the structure and character of international politics, but nevertheless we had to make choices about what should be included in a singlevolume book designed to cover the whole of the century and much of the globe. As this book is aimed at history, international relations and politics undergraduates, we agreed that it should provide a solid foundation in international politics, for it is only by understanding such a framework that students can make sense of the diversity and complexity of the twentieth century.Our intended audience also influenced the choices we made about structure. We rejected a thematic approach on the grounds that in our experience students find the study of events over time the most rewarding way to learn history. Hence the book is divided into twenty-two chapters arranged in a roughly chronological manner, with the origins and course of the world wars and the Cold War providing the core of the book. This overall structure introduces the tricky issue of periodization. It has recently been common in history texts to talk of the artificiality of centuries as objects of study; for example, historians of eighteenth-century Europe tend to end their studies in either 1789 or 1815. Similar objections can be made to analysis of the twentieth century. Arguably the century really began in terms of its broad themes not in 1900 but in 1914, when the outbreak of the First World War destroyed the Concert of Europe that had arisen in the nineteenth century, and did not end in 2000 but with the resolution of the Cold War in 1991. However, the authors felt that the distinct period of hyper- competitive inter-state relations between 1914 and 1991 could not be comprehended clearly unless our study included some discussion of the years both before and after.
Moreover, while the core of the book deals with the major international conflicts of the century, more than half of the chapters examine developments in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the Middle East and raise questions about how far and in what ways the Great Powers have shaped the destinies of these areas.Concert of Europe
The nineteenth-century European system of regulation of international affairs by the Great Powers. Although much of the historical literature argues that the system was successful in keeping the general peace of Europe because it was based on a ‘balance of power', more recent work has stressed the importance of shared rules of conduct, values, goals and diplomatic practices in relations between the Great Powers.
How should this book be used? All the chapters relate to each other in a coherent and chronological manner, and we encourage students to read the book from beginning to end, but each chapter may also be read independently as background before lectures and seminars. Indeed, course organizers may wish to design a full introductory course around this compact text. The book incorporates special features with both beginners and their teachers in mind. Since history is about arguments over causation, continuity and change, structure and agency, values, definition and the limits of historical knowledge, each chapter contains a ‘debates and controversies’ section that discusses historiographical disputes or issues. Our aim in highlighting historiography in this way is to show students that they must learn to identify the main points of contention between different historical perspectives and to locate historians’ arguments within one of the conflicting perspectives. Students fresh to the topic of twentieth-century international history will encounter many key names and terms that will be unfamiliar to them. Certain important names and terms are therefore highlighted in bold the first time they appear in a chapter and a definition also appears in the margin.
So, for instance, in this Introduction, as we are sure you noticed earlier, globalization, the Concert of Europe and Great Powers were rendered in bold with a definition in the margin. We have also included a glossary of key names and terms at the end of this book.While encountering many of the terms contained in this volume for the first time may be bewildering enough, locating all the places, nation-states and shifting frontiers discussed on the pages that follow would be impossible without a healthy supply of maps. Accordingly, you will find twenty-four maps in this book dealing with all parts of the globe. Finally, because no single book, no matter how lengthy or thorough, could cover every aspect of every topic in twentieth-century international relations, readers will find an annotated list of further reading at the end of each chapter. A book of this size covering such a wide expanse of time and range of issues is ultimately a work of synthesis. When writing this book, we have endeavoured to use the latest scholarship and to include up-to-date secondary sources. However, in order not to clutter up the text, we decided not to use footnotes or the Chicago form of citation. Instead, the recommended reading sections may be taken as indicative of the sources that we have used. We strongly urge students to make use of the recommended readings, for a textbook can never be more than a general introduction.