Recalcitrant parliaments and freshly expanded electorates exerted pressure on Western leaders as never before. International relations by this period can no longer be analysed as a chess game played by aristocratic and bureaucratic elites in isolation from domestic politics. Steiner stresses the novelty of the 1920s. The focus of research on international history has now shifted towards the Cold War, and investigation into the interwar decades has slackened, which is another reason this synthesis is likely to last. Steiner has done her share of archival digging, in Britain, France, Germany and in the League of Nations files at Geneva, but essentially her book distils the fruits of a generation of academic inquiry. This is not said as a criticism – The Lights that Failed is undeniably a very long book, but its author does not waste words – rather it is a comment on the outpouring of specialist literature since the opening of the relevant European archives (few of the secondary texts cited predate the 1970s).
This initial instalment alone devotes eight hundred pages of text to a span of 14 years, whereas Taylor and Schroeder dealt with seventy or more. Although The Lights that Failed has been some twenty years in the making, it is only the first of two volumes (the second, The Triumph of the Night, will continue from 1933 to 1941). Zara Steiner’s new history will inevitably be measured against these distinguished predecessors, and it stands up to the comparison: considered as a monument to scholarly stamina, it is even more impressive. The series is now fullest in its coverage of international relations, Taylor’s volume having been complemented by Paul Schroeder’s Transformation of European Politics 1763-1848.
Even so, the formula has generated a number of classics, which have remained in print for decades. As yet they include only tsarist (not Soviet) Russia, and there is nothing on Austria or Italy. Individual volumes cover Germany, France from 1848 to 1945, Spain, the Low Countries, Romania and the European Jews. Half a century later its two founding fathers, William Deakin and Alan Bullock, are dead, and their project remains incomplete.
Taylor’s The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848-1918, appeared in 1954. The Oxford History of Modern Europe belongs to a more leisured era.
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