Abstract
This paper looks at major European twentieth-century narratives and interpretations that have seen it as an age of violence, terror and genocide. Using examples from historiographical debate and the analysis of specific historical processes (including the debates on genocide, concentrationary systems, civil wars and the Holocaust), it addresses both the characteristics of those narratives and some of their limitations and conceptual edges. Finally, the conceptual proposal put forward seeks to analyze, through historical contingency, continuities and discontinuities in the history of European collective violence.
Highlights
The very notion of the twentieth century is not totally clear cut, at least where this issue is concerned, and if we analyze the origins, in chronological terms, of the rise in violence defined in the contemporary way (in wars, against civilians, motivated by power and identification of the enemy on racial, economic, political or identity grounds)
It is obvious that the twentieth century cannot be interpreted exclusively in terms of violence and terror, it is hard to imagine any analysis of the last century without these variables
The war that continued until 1923 between White and Bolshevik Russians, counter-revolutionaries and revolutionaries on the basis of the criteria generated in 1917 (Payne, 2011), made it necessary to design the seizure and maintenance of revolutionary power in an armed context, putting to the test the space which both contenders reserved for political purges, cleansing, repression and the exploitation and/or elimination of the adversary (Figes, 2000: 690; Swain, 1996; Brovkin, 1994; Mayer, 2001; Mawdsley, 1987). This war is of key significance when constructing a cosmovision of twentieth-century Europe focused on the politics of violence implemented in its states: the Russian Civil War was the context which gave rise to the Red Terror and to institutions like the Cheka and the Gulag
Summary
The very notion of the twentieth century is not totally clear cut, at least where this issue is concerned, and if we analyze the origins, in chronological terms, of the rise in violence defined in the contemporary way (in wars, against civilians, motivated by power and identification of the enemy on racial, economic, political or identity grounds).
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