Introduction

Europeans lived in relative peace in the nineteenth century, although the recent upheavals that had racked the continent loomed large. After the revolution of 1789, France had exploded with a seemingly unbounded potential for ideological war and after 1804 Napoleon had harnessed this power to destroy the inde­pendence and security of the Great Powers and to make France the master of all continental Europe.

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.

As a consequence, by the end of the century, Europe dominated the globe. Of course other factors played an essential part: Europe possessed the population size, the machine power and a massive organizational and technological edge over its rivals. But stability at home permitted the impulses of the so-called ‘new imperialism' to translate steam engines, machine guns and administration into supremacy abroad. In the 1880s and 1890s, these impulses ushered in not only the ‘scramble for Africa', but also competition to extend empire in Persia, South­East Asia and the Pacific.

A war that uses all resources at a state's disposal including the complete mobilization of both the economy and society.

The policy or doctrine of isolating one's country by avoiding foreign entanglements and responsibilities. Popular in the United States during the inter­war years.

Unfortunately, the legacy of one century proved to be short lived in the next. If 1815—54 and 1871—1914 are the conspicuous features of the nineteenth century, then the two world wars and the Cold War blot the twentieth. Europe lost its capacity to contain inter-state violence just when the process of modernization handed Europeans an unprecedented capacity to wage total war. The killing machine of1914—18 was the result. Between the wars, the European system lurched forward slowly, as political isolationism and revolution preoccupied America and Russia. The coming of Hitler's war finally extinguished the European system, and with it European world primacy. The Soviet Union and the United States emerged as superpowers. Their ideological, strategic and economic rivalry began in Central Europe but quickly spread beyond, drawing in revolutionary China and the newly independent states of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The German question disturbed the peace intermittently, but only as one front in a global Cold War. Until 1989, Germany, like the European continent as a whole, remained split between the two hostile coalitions. Europe enjoyed another ‘long peace', but not on its own terms. Only after the USSR collapsed did Europeans begin to reshape the political landscape without the boundaries drawn by the world wars.

To understand why the European era of international politics came to an end requires an answer to why the nineteenth-century states system broke down in the first decade and a half of the twentieth. Before addressing this question, however, it will be helpful to set out some of the terms and concepts essential to an understanding of the history of Great Power relations.