Cataclysms: A History of the Twentieth Century from Europe’s Edge

This book’s contents belie its subtitle. Diner, a professor of modern European history at the Hebrew University, is focused less on Europe’s “edge”—“from the Baltic over and above the Black Sea to the Aegean”—than on the diplomatic dynamics among the continent’s four major powers (Great Britain, Germany, France and Russia, later the U.S.S.R.) and, increasingly, the U.S. Diner tries to make this history conform to his thesis that a “universal civil war” (Ernst Jünger’s phrase), marked by struggle between the forces of “freedom” (the democratic West) and those of “literal equality” (the fascist and communist powers), dominated the century. Yet Diner repeatedly notes that this antipodal view doesn’t always apply; for example, France’s chief concern in Indochina in the early 1950s “was not struggling against Communism but maintaining control over a substantial part of its colonial empire.” Still, the book does have some highly worthwhile sections on Europe’s “fringe,” particularly on the political and interethnic roots of the Turks’ 1915 annihilation of the Armenians. (He notes that four legions of non-Turkish Armenians in the Russian army served as a pretext for Turkey’s charges of Armenian “disloyalty.”). Yet generally, Diner’s thesis is flawed and his presentation of historical developments highly uneven. (Jan. 5)