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The Long Shadow is the best modern history book I have
read in years. Intelligent, challenging and very insightful, I would
thoroughly recommend it to anyone with a serious interest in 20th century
history. The Long Shadow is not, directly at least, a history of
the First World War. Its aim is to examine the affect the war had on
subsequent generations across the century. Reynolds recognises that that
affect varies in time; so, for instance, the war is remembered very
differently in 1930 compared to 1960 or 1990. He also looks at those effects
across a range of countries, including Britain, Ireland, Germany, France,
Russia and the US. So the 1930s saw an increase in nationalism and militarism
in many countries, but a more pacifist response in others. He examines not
only the harder political questions, such as readiness for war, economics and
wealth, but also cultural and artistic influences. These
revaluations are highly insightful. For instance, he points out at an early
stage that the ‘interwar years’ were not inter-war at the time;
the First World War was indeed the Great War until the second came along, a
war in which there was no ‘Western Front’. The whole way in which
we remember the war is inevitably coloured by the Second World War, our
attitude to leaders and indeed other countries. Conservative reluctance to
get close to Europe through greater integration through the EU is an
understandable reaction to those of Thatcher’s generation who automatically
distrusted the Germans. By setting the Irish Free State against the backdrop
of other European nations struggling with the new nationalism, a particularly
difficult ‘British’ problem becomes much more understandable. In
many ways Ireland was more in line with post-Great War Europe than the rest
of the UK. Reynolds is
clearly irritated by the First World War poets. He devotes an entire chapter
to showing that most of the poets were pro-war, and that in the decades after
the war no-one was interested in them. Their role as identifiers of the
horrors of the First War did not emerge until the late 60s, a product of
passionate editing and good marketing combined with the blockbuster success
of Oh What a Lovely War. His
analysis of the other arts, in particular painting is more balanced and
intriguing, showing how the war artists were set apart from the artistic
norms of the period. But his main
thrust is about US Wilsonianism. President
Wilson’s sincere belief in the efficacy of enhancing democratic
movements across the world, his support for fledgling democracies and
contempt for the empires of Europe is a massive theme across the 500 pages.
The initial failure of his ideas, the constant resurges through the century
to the dominance that this view has in US politics and democracy is very much
a lasting product of the war. The Long Shadow is not an easy read, and his
hard-hitting narrative and fundamental right wing views made it at times
discomforting; but like any seriously good book, it certainly calls for a
re-evaluation of what you thought you knew and thought you believed. A seriously
good book. |
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Blog #30 |
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If you
would like to comment on any of these Blog pieces please email me on: bjc@briancreese.co.uk