‘The Barbarians Have Not Come’ - Europe’s Twentieth Century
As we approach the true end of the century, Peter Waldron argues that those who describe Europe’s experience of the last hundred years as bleak and dark are missing part of the story.
The dying years of the twentieth century have not been kind to its memory. Historians and commentators almost universally judged the period an unmitigated disaster for Europe and the wider world. ‘The most terrible century in Western history’ in the words of the polyglot philosopher Isaiah Berlin; ‘the most violent century in human history’ – the novelist William Golding; ‘a century of massacres and wars’ – the French scientist René Dumont, while historian Mark Mazower titled his recent book on the twentieth century, Dark Continent. I want to argue, however, that this gloomy view of the last hundred years is misleading and fails to take into account the huge advances that have benefited the lives of ordinary people in this time.
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