- The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945
- List of contributors
- Introduction: Europe’s Age of Catastrophe in Context
- Belle Époque: Europe before 1914
- Societies at War, 1914–1918
- Total War: Family, Community, and Identity during the First World War
- The Left and the Revolutions
- The Economics of Total War and Reconstruction, 1914–1922
- The New Diplomacy and the New Europe, 1916–1922
- Nation States, Minorities, and Refugees, 1914–1923
- Remaking Europe after the First World War
- The Great Depression in Europe
- ‘A Low Dishonest Decade’?: War and Peace in the 1930s
- Interwar Crises and Europe’s Unfinished Empires
- Rural Society in Crisis
- Interwar Democracy and the League of Nations
- The Political ‘Left’ in the Interwar Period, 1924–1939
- Fascism and the Right in Interwar Europe: Interaction, Entanglement, Hybridity
- Social Policy, Welfare, and Social Identities, 1900–1950
- Discipline, Terror, and the State
- The Nationalization of the Masses
- Political Violence and Mass Society: A European Civil War?
- European Sexualities in the Age of Total War
- ‘America’ and Europe, 1914–1945
- European Integration, Human Rights, and Romantic Internationalism
- Wartime Economies, 1939–1945: Large and Small European States at War
- Axis Imperialism in the Second World War
- Everyday Life in Wartime Europe
- The Holocaust in European History
- Europe’s Civil Wars, 1941–1949
- Nation-Building and Moving People
- Europe, the War, and the Colonial World
- Power Relations during the Transition from Nazi to Post-Nazi Rule
- The Memory of Europe’s Age of Catastrophe, 1914–2014
- Index
Abstract and Keywords
Europe’s mid-century crisis of the 1940s destabilized power relations due to the simultaneous expansion and erosion of state power relative to society. This in turn unleashed a process of paramilitarization that eroded the state’s monopoly over the use of force. Ferocious struggles for power broke out at a local level between a wide range of gangs and armed bands. Paramilitarization reached a high point during the chaotic transitional period between Nazi and post-Nazi rule when the day-to-day authority of the state broke down almost completely. In order to gain an advantage over their rivals, actors on the ground established client–patron relationships with one or other of the great powers. Local struggles in Europe thereby became internationalized, which in turn contributed significantly both to the course of the Second World War and to the outbreak of the Cold War.
Keywords: Cold War, irregular warfare, occupied Europe, political violence, power relations, state and society, Second World War
University of Adelaide
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- The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945
- List of contributors
- Introduction: Europe’s Age of Catastrophe in Context
- Belle Époque: Europe before 1914
- Societies at War, 1914–1918
- Total War: Family, Community, and Identity during the First World War
- The Left and the Revolutions
- The Economics of Total War and Reconstruction, 1914–1922
- The New Diplomacy and the New Europe, 1916–1922
- Nation States, Minorities, and Refugees, 1914–1923
- Remaking Europe after the First World War
- The Great Depression in Europe
- ‘A Low Dishonest Decade’?: War and Peace in the 1930s
- Interwar Crises and Europe’s Unfinished Empires
- Rural Society in Crisis
- Interwar Democracy and the League of Nations
- The Political ‘Left’ in the Interwar Period, 1924–1939
- Fascism and the Right in Interwar Europe: Interaction, Entanglement, Hybridity
- Social Policy, Welfare, and Social Identities, 1900–1950
- Discipline, Terror, and the State
- The Nationalization of the Masses
- Political Violence and Mass Society: A European Civil War?
- European Sexualities in the Age of Total War
- ‘America’ and Europe, 1914–1945
- European Integration, Human Rights, and Romantic Internationalism
- Wartime Economies, 1939–1945: Large and Small European States at War
- Axis Imperialism in the Second World War
- Everyday Life in Wartime Europe
- The Holocaust in European History
- Europe’s Civil Wars, 1941–1949
- Nation-Building and Moving People
- Europe, the War, and the Colonial World
- Power Relations during the Transition from Nazi to Post-Nazi Rule
- The Memory of Europe’s Age of Catastrophe, 1914–2014
- Index
