A groundbreaking interpretation of the intellectual origins of the United Nations No Enchanted Palace traces the origins and early development of the United Nations, one of the most influential yet perhaps least understood organizations active in the world today. Acclaimed historian Mark Mazower forces us to set aside the popular myth that the UN miraculously rose from the ashes of World War II as the guardian of a new and peaceful global order, offering instead a strikingly original interpretation of the UN's ideological roots, early history, and changing role in world affairs. Mazower brings the founding of the UN brilliantly to life. He shows how the UN's creators envisioned a world organization that would protect the interests of empire, yet how this imperial vision was decisively reshaped by the postwar reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the unanticipated rise of India and other former colonial powers. This is a story told through the clash of personalities, such as South African statesman Jan Smuts, who saw in the UN a means to protect the old imperial and racial order; Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, Jewish intellectuals at odds over how the UN should combat genocide and other atrocities; and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who helped transform the UN from an instrument of empire into a forum for ending it. A much-needed historical reappraisal of the early development of this vital world institution, No Enchanted Palace reveals how the UN outgrew its origins and has exhibited an extraordinary flexibility that has enabled it to endure to the present day.
How did ministers, journalists, academics, artists, and subjects in the German lands imagine war during the nineteenth century? The Napoleonic Wars had been the bloodiest in Europe's history, directly affecting millions of Germans, yet their long-term consequences on individuals and on 'politics' are still poorly understood. This study makes sense of contemporaries' memories and histories of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns within a much wider context of press reportage of wars elsewhere in Europe and overseas, debates about military service and the reform of Germany's armies, revolution and counter-revolution, and individuals' experiences of violence and death in their everyday lives. For the majority of the populations of the German states, wars during an era of conscription were not merely a matter of history and memory; rather, they concerned subjects' hopes, fears, and expectations of the future. This is the second volume of Mark Hewitson's study of the violence of war in the German lands during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It investigates the complex relationship between military conflicts and the violent acts of individual soldiers. In particular, it considers the contradictory impact of 'pacification' in civilian life and exposure to increasingly destructive technologies of killing during war-time. This contradiction reached its nineteenth-century apogee during the 'wars of unification', leaving an ambiguous imprint on post-war discussions of military conflict.
Salonica, located in northern Greece, was long a fascinating crossroads metropolis of different religions and ethnicities, where Egyptian merchants, Spanish Jews, Orthodox Greeks, Sufi dervishes, and Albanian brigands all rubbed shoulders. Tensions sometimes flared, but tolerance largely prevailed until the twentieth century when the Greek army marched in, Muslims were forced out, and the Nazis deported and killed the Jews. As the acclaimed historian Mark Mazower follows the city’s inhabitants through plague, invasion, famine, and the disastrous twentieth century, he resurrects a fascinating and vanished world.
An unflinching and intelligent alternative history of the twentieth century that provides a provocative vision of Europe's past, present, and future. "[A] splendid book." —The New York Times Book Review Dark Continent provides an alternative history of the twentieth century, one in which the triumph of democracy was anything but a forgone conclusion and fascism and communism provided rival political solutions that battled and sometimes triumphed in an effort to determine the course the continent would take. Mark Mazower strips away myths that have comforted us since World War II, revealing Europe as an entity constantly engaged in a bloody project of self-invention. Here is a history not of inevitable victories and forward marches, but of narrow squeaks and unexpected twists, where townships boast a bronze of Mussolini on horseback one moment, only to melt it down and recast it as a pair of noble partisans the next.
Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize • One of The Economist's top history books of the year From one of our leading historians, an important new history of the Greek War of Independence—the ultimate worldwide liberal cause célèbre of the age of Byron, Europe’s first nationalist uprising, and the beginning of the downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire—published two hundred years after its outbreak As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get. And they got it as Europeans and Americans embraced the idea that the heirs to ancient Greece, the wellspring of Western civilization, were fighting for their freedom against the proverbial Eastern despot, the Turkish sultan. This was Christianity versus Islam, now given urgency by new ideas about the nation-state and democracy that were shaking up the old order. Lord Byron is only the most famous of the combatants who went to Greece to fight and die—along with many more who followed events passionately and supported the cause through art, music, and humanitarian aid. To many who did go, it was a rude awakening to find that the Greeks were a far cry from their illustrious forebears, and were often hard to tell apart from the Ottomans. Mazower does full justice to the realities on the ground as a revolutionary conspiracy triggered outright rebellion, and a fraying and distracted Ottoman leadership first missed the plot and then overreacted disastrously. He shows how and why ethnic cleansing commenced almost immediately on both sides. By the time the dust settled, Greece was free, and Europe was changed forever. It was a victory for a completely new kind of politics—international in its range and affiliations, popular in its origins, romantic in sentiment, and radical in its goals. It was here on the very edge of Europe that the first successful revolution took place in which a people claimed liberty for themselves and overthrew an entire empire to attain it, transforming diplomatic norms and the direction of European politics forever, and inaugurating a new world of nation-states, the world in which we still live.
Throughout history, the Balkans have been a crossroads, a zone of endless military, cultural and economic mixing and clashing between Europe and Asia, Christianity and Islam, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Subject to violent shifts of borders, rulers and belief systems at the hands of the world's great empires--from the Byzantine to the Habsburg and Ottoman--the Balkans are often called Europe's tinderbox and a seething cauldron of ethnic and religious resentments. Much has been made of the Balkans' deeply rooted enmities. The recent destruction of the former Yugoslavia was widely ascribed to millennial hatreds frozen by the Cold War and unleashed with the fall of communism. In this brilliant account, acclaimed historian Mark Mazower argues that such a view is a dangerously unbalanced fantasy. A landmark reassessment, The Balkans rescues the region's history from the various ideological camps that have held it hostage for their own ends, not least the need to justify nonintervention. The heart of the book deals with events from the emergence of the nation-state onward. With searing eloquence, Mazower demonstrates that of all the gifts bequeathed to the region by modernity, the most dubious has been the ideological weapon of romantic nationalism that has been used again and again by the power hungry as an acid to dissolve the bonds of centuries of peaceful coexistence. The Balkans is a magnificent depiction of a vitally important region, its history and its prospects.
Draw ing on an unprecedented range and variety of original research, Hitler?s Empire sheds new light on how the Nazis designed, maintained, and lost their European dominion?and offers a chilling vision of what the world would have become had they won the war. Mark Mazower forces us to set aside timeworn opinions of the Third Reich, and instead shows how the party drew inspiration for its imperial expansion from America and Great Britain. Yet the Nazis? lack of political sophistication left them unequal to the task of ruling what their armies had conquered, despite a shocking level of cooperation from the overwhelmed countries. A work as authoritative as it is unique, Hitler?s Empire is a surprising?and controversial? new appraisal of the Third Reich?s rise and ultimate fall.
The Balkans has long been a place of encounter among different peoples, religions, and civilizations, resulting in a rich cultural tapestry and mosaic of nationalities. But it has also been burdened by a traumatic post-colonial experience. The transition from traditional multinational empires to modern nation-states has been accompanied by large-scale political violence that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the permanent displacement of millions more. Mark Biondich examines the origins of these conflicts, while treating the region as an integral part of modern European history, shaped by much the same forces and intellectual impulses. It reminds us that political violence and ethnic cleansing have scarcely been unique to the Balkans. As Biondich shows, the political violence that has bedevilled the region since the late nineteenth century stemmed from modernity and the ideology of integral nationalism, employed by states that were dominated by democratizing or authoritarian nationalizing elites committed to national homogeneity. Throughout this period, the Balkan proponents of democratic governance, civil society, and multiculturalism were progressively marginalized. The history of revolution, war, political violence, and ethnic cleansing in the modern Balkans is above all the story of this tragic marginalization.
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