The Shadow of the Twentieth Century

After having finished a monumental volume on European history since 1945, Tony Judt shifted his focus to reflecting on the impact of the twentieth century on 21st-century politics and how it views the history of the past century. The central question he asks is: what have we learned, if anything, from the twentieth century? He reflects at length on this question in a soon-to-be-released book called Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. In an essay in the current issue of the New York Review of Books (May 1st, 2008), he gives us a snapshot of his ideas.

One of his premises is that America and Europe (and, by extensions, the rest of the world) have differing views on the utility of war because of their very different experiences with it over the course of the 20th century. So, even if the US suffered or faced defeats in Vietnam and currently in Iraq, it has never experienced invasion from abroad or outright occupation. As a consequence, says Judt,

"...the United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today. Politicians in the US surround themselves with the symbols and trappings of armed prowess; even in 2008 American commentators excoriate allies that hesitate to engage in armed conflict. I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance."

In turn, this experience (as a perspective on history and the role of war), combined with what Judt calls "the abstracting of foes and threats from their contexts" would make it all to easy to repeat the mistakes of the 20th century.

In an era in which, pace prof Hanhimaki, cold war studies are increasingly being seen as a "thing of the past" with little if anything to teach to a post-September 11 world, Tony Judt wants to demonstrate that the twentieth century has in fact much to teach us in the 21st, no matter how distant a memory the fall of the Berlin Wall is already becoming.

How do you look at this historiographical issue? Do you think Judt is right about the differences in impact that war has had both in America and Europe in the 20th century, and that seen from that perspective, it's the inhabitants of the 'Kantian paradise' (i.e, Europe, in Robert Kagan's words) who are more realist(ic) about the consequences and potential utility of warfare? And what about the link between an appetite for war and the use of anti-democratic means (such as torture of suspending habeas corpus) to wage the 'war on terror'? Is this indeed a consequence of the 'abstracting' of the enemy? Judt adds on this point that "if Osama bin Laden were truly comparable to Hitler or Stalin, would we really have responded to September 11 by invading...Baghdad?" So, if the lessons from twentieth-century history do not stop us from waging war on abstract nouns, can they at least help to prevent us from employing the same means as were used by some of the most vicious regimes of the past 100 years? If anything, the lessons to be drawn from the past century have not been exhausted in the least. And that's not even to talk about understanding and acting upon them...