Welsh Journals

EUROPE, 1880-1945. By John Roberts. Longmans, 1967. Pp. 575. 42s. The period examined in this survey is of epic proportions. It begins at the zenith of European power; it closes with the heart of the continent exhausted and passive, seemingly as clay in the hands of the peripheral powers. To analyze so complex a period during which European and world developments were closely intertwined involves difficult problems of selection and organization. Proportions need to be judged with par- ticular care if due attention is to be given to all aspects of significance while avoiding merely superficial comment. In this Dr. Roberts has succeeded very well and his book, within the limits in which it is set, is both comprehensive and thorough. Dr. Roberts has provided something more than a conventional political history in which Europe is treated as 'several Great Powers' with little or no unity other than geographic. Political history and international rela- tions are certainly not neglected and the internal development of the major states, including Great Britain, is effectively analyzed. Attention is also given to Spain. But this is done against the background of wide-ranging surveys of the economic, social and intellectual forces at work in varying degrees over the continent. These chapters are the most stimulating in the book, written with a refreshing recognition of the tremendous achievement of the liberal bourgeois civilization which, it is justly observed, 'carried the control of violence and unreason in national and international life further than ever before and brought Europe to a previously unmatched level of material and mental achievement by 1914'. The war of 1914-18 is the watershed between the closing years of Europe's golden century and the chaotic period which followed. The war was the catalyst unloosing forces fatal to the conventions which had given stability over most of Europe to political and social life, and opening the way to the period of doubt, distress, fear and aggression culminating in the war of 1939-45 and the apparent end of Europe's significance as the centre of world politics. The seeds of change, as Dr. Roberts makes clear, were already germinating before 1914. The threat to industrial primacy was visible in the emergence of the U.S.A. and in the advance of Russia. Japan's victory in 1905 foreshadowed the challenge to European domination in Asia. Within Europe the sapping and mining of liberalism were well under way. The nature of the new industrial and urban society was, of itself, bringing modification but Dr. Roberts is surely justified in his criticism of the myopic intellectuals whose repudiation, before and after 1914-18, of the values of the society which gave them freedom was to contribute so much to its fall. If liberalism remained the dominant creed before 1914, the doctrines of the future, socialism and nationalism, were much in evidence. The idea of nationality, the most dynamic and destructive political force thrown up in the nineteenth century, was still generally contained