The Crisis of European Civilization After 1918

Abstract

In Europe the intellectual response to the First World War was a heightened sense of crisis. In the 1920s, in many books and articles, Europe’s predicament was regarded not solely in political, economic or military terms, but as something that touched the very heart of European life. Often it was referred to as a crisis of civilization. A study of the debate reveals that the period was marked by a high degree of conceptual disorientation. Books and articles appeared all over Europe with such telling words in their titles as ‘decline’, ‘decadence’, ‘catastrophe’, ‘sickness’, and ‘helpless’; they offered widely differing diagnoses and cures, which in itself contributed to the sense of crisis. In this respect, the interwar years may be said to resemble our own age in which notions such as globalization and postmodernism are besieging existing concepts of civilization, nation and culture. After 1918, and again after 1989, Europeans were preoccupied with self-analysis and self-criticism. This chapter aims to examine the interwar crisis debate and its use of the notion of European civilization, and to consider its relevance for the debate on Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.KeywordsEuropean UnityWestern CivilizationWorld StateEuropean CivilizationNegative ForceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.