The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919-1933 (review)

Zara Steiner's massive and long-awaited study of European international history from 1919 to 1933 represents only the first instalment of a projected two volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe series dealing with the period between the twentieth century's two world wars. It is an impressive, almost awesome synthesis of a vast range of secondary and primary sources in English, French, Italian, and German, and also utilizes works drawing on sometimes newly opened Russian, East European, and Asian sources.

Steiner's account of the often convoluted and tortuous diplomacy of the post–First World War years is deft, perceptive, and nuanced. Rather than treating the entire period as the prelude to World War II, she rightly argues that this was for the most part a postwar period, stating: "The 1920s must be seen within the context of the aftermath of the Great War and not as the prologue to the 1930s and the outbreak of a new European conflict." This was a time, she suggests, when "the management of international affairs developed a character of its own distinct from that of both its peacetime predecessor and the one that followed" (p. 602), when post–World War I Europe tackled, with considerable success, the problems of postwar reconstruction. In her view, the 1920s "emerge as a period of continuous adaptation and experimentation" (p. 609). Only after 1929 did the political and economic structures put in place during that decade buckle under the strain of the Great Depression and the nationalist forces it encouraged, a process she recounts in three chapters covering the economic situation, the collapse of disarmament efforts, and the failure of the League of Nations to resolve the 1931 Manchurian crisis.

Steiner's account begins with the Treaty of Versailles, which she considers a flawed but not unreasonable settlement, given the difficult political circumstances and constraints, domestic and international, facing its three chief negotiators, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and French Premier Georges Clemenceau. Refreshingly, she breaks with the long accepted popular belief that the Treaty of Versailles bore within it the seeds of the next conflict, absolving it from responsibility for the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the rise of Adolf Hitler, and the outbreak of World War II, most of which she ascribes to the impact of the Great Depression and the failure of the great European powers and the United States to tackle the latter's consequences. She accurately reminds the reader that the peace terms imposed upon the other defeated enemy powers, Bulgaria, Austria, Hungary, and Turkey, were substantially harsher than those Germany faced, and that, unlike the Versailles settlement, with the exception of the Turkish treaty these did not generate ferocious demands for revision.

The book's primary focus is relations between Great Britain, France, and Germany, especially France's fears of a revived Germany, and British—and American—reluctance to provide the security guarantees that might have won French acquiescence in German rehabilitation. As Steiner describes this problematic trilateral relationship: "If the Franco-German problem was at the heart of the failure to achieve a European settlement, France's search for a British guarantee and the latter's reluctance to provide one was a fatal leit motiv of . . . the whole interwar security problem" (p. 772). France's fundamental problem was, she correctly stresses, that it was substantially weaker than Germany, something that contemporary British and American statesmen failed to recognize, and the major reason why France tried, albeit largely unsuccessfully, to retard the process of revision of the Versailles settlement. "Any substantive revision in the [Versailles] treaty's terms in the German direction meant a loss of security for France" and "increased France's dependency on Britain," which was not "willing to shoulder the burden of great-power adjustment" (p. 489). Deftly and lucidly, in chapters that will undoubtedly become standard accounts, Steiner guides...