Publisher's Synopsis
This book summarizes the main issues relating to war, peace and social change in 20th-century Europe. In the first section, on the nature and causes of war, it discusses how far total war differs from other kinds of war, what the relationships are between international war, civil war and internal war, and between war and revolution, and whether there were basic causes of war in the 20th-century or if the origins of the two wars were different.;The next section is on the processes of change and asks whether long-term needs were such that the social developments of the 20th-century would have been much the same even if there had been no wars. The final section of the book summarizes and analyzes the debates over exactly what effects the two world wars have had on both geopolitical and social developments in the 20th century.
