The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933 (Oxford History of Modern Europe)

The Independent a dazzling account This combination of human drama and a broad international perspective, shifting between western, eastern and Atlantic viewpoints, is a governing strength of the narrative, at once providing fascinating detail, balance, and vivid variety of pace and content.

Steiner's long, wise view of international relations during the last epoch when western Europe confidently believed itself the centre of the world is compelling reading for anyone concerned with the continent's past - or future. FT Magazine Read more You may have already requested this item. Please select Ok if you would like to proceed with this request anyway.

The Lights that Failed: European International History, - Zara S. Steiner - Google Книги

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• The Lights That Failed. European International History, – | Reviews in History.
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English View all editions and formats Summary: In The Lights that Failed: European International History , part of the Oxford History of Modern Europe series, Steiner challenges the common assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war.

In a radically original way, this book characterizes the s not as a frustrated prelude to a second global conflict but as a fascinating decade in its own right, when politicians and diplomats strove to reassemble a viable European order. Steiner examines the efforts that failed but also those which gave hope for future promise, many of which are usually underestimated, if not ignored.

She shows that an equilibrium was achieved, attained between a partial American withdrawal from Europe and the forced and self-imposed constraints which the Soviet system faced when exporting revolution. International historians have been waiting a long time for this book.

The good news is that the volume has been worth the wait; the bad news is that the wait is not quite over, for volume two covering the years from to is still in production. Researching and writing international history on this scale demands patience from the author and her audience as it is a considerable undertaking.

The Lights that Failed draws on a variety of archival materials housed in four countries and on a literature published in at least six different languages.

While it eschews a recent pre-occupation of the field with the cultural aspects of international diplomacy with its predominate focus on economic and political relations, the array of countries, personalities, themes and events covered is enormous. So too did nations that wielded considerable economic power, such as the United States, or strategic influence, such as Japan.

Scandinavia, particularly the contribution of Norwegian diplomats, Fridtjof Nansen and Christian Lange, and the central and eastern European countries of Poland, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Greece, to give but a few examples, receive far greater attention than they have been given in previous international histories of the period. The book is divided into two unequally sized parts: The book brings together the latest scholarship in the field, an impressive achievement given the length of its gestation and the range of topics addressed.

The lights that failed : European international history, 1919-1933

The overview of recent historiography in the book makes it invaluable for anyone teaching or studying the period. The chapters on the work of the League of Nations, the failure of disarmament negotiations and the economic diplomacy of the Great Depression best illustrate the thematic and technical range of the book. The importance of disarmament, however, is not ignored. Indeed, anyone who has struggled to understand the significance of the Geneva Protocol, armament ratios and conference diplomacy need look no further. In common with other recent studies of the s, she has sought to draw out that the period is more than pure prelude to the Second World War: After the First World War, the range of economic, social and political challenges combined with the emergence of new national frontiers and power relations forced statesmen, and very occasionally women, to find new solutions to the task of reconstruction.

At the same time, many clung to the traditional ideas and diplomatic methods of the past and this often undermined their best efforts. The phenomenon is best illustrated through the history of League of Nations which was seen to be on the ascent until Before the First World War states alone were considered to be subject to international law. But the creation of the League inaugurated a new kind or organisation based on international law which, though neither a state nor a federal union, was a legal entity with rights, obligations, institutions, a permanent staff and a budget of its own.

It was also open to all nations of the world that met its criteria for membership. There certainly had never been a world body like it before, although the League gathered together a lot of ideas and practises from the past. There was novelty too in the fact that so many problems formerly deemed to be solely of national concern were now considered fit for international discussion.

National delegates came to Geneva to consider a huge variety of questions and the hope of League enthusiasts was that national delegates would begin to look beyond the strictly national perspective and act as members of a wider transnational community of global citizens. It would have been interesting to hear how far these positive developments shaped diplomacy beyond the s in, for example, the reconstruction decades of the s and the s.

It would have been valuable too, particularly from a teaching perspective, for Steiner to have placed her account within the established historiography. Her sensitivity to the worlds, imagined and real, within which statesmen and nations operated, to the transnational communities of government advisors who influenced governments, and to questions of gender and ethnicity, identify this book clearly as a product of the twenty-first century. There is also awareness that international encounters are a reflection of domestic social conditions and ideologies.