The Shaken lands: violence and the crisis of governance in East Central Europe, 1914-1923

ENThis book deals with one of the most violent periods in modern European history, which lasted almost a decade: from the start of the Great War in 1914 until 1923 when Europe, finally, achieved peace after a series of civil conflicts and interstate wars. The violence unleashed during this period transformed the political landscape of the continent beyond recognition. This change was especially drastic in the vast East Central European region stretching from the White to the Black Seas and from Germany to Soviet Russia. By 1918, four major European empires were in ruins as they were replaced by a number of new nation states and the revolutionary Soviet state. Today there is a growing consensus among historians not to seek a traditional caesura between the Great War and the postwar conflicts that have swept the region after 1918, but to consider the whole period as a single “continuous cycle of violence,” variously described as the “Greater War,” an international civil war, and even the second Thirty Years War. Contributors to this volume support this paradigm. We seek to explain how the Great War transformed itself into the “Greater War” by focusing on the relationship between violence and the crisis of state governance in East Central Europe. [From the Introduction]