Out of the ashes: Europe's rebirth after the Second World War, 1945-1949
Journal: Journal of the British Academy
Year: 2015

This lecture seeks to explain why the Second World War, the most destructive conflict in history, produced such a contrasting outcome to the First. It suggests that the Second World War's maelstrom of destruction replaced a catastrophic matrix left by the First -of heightened ethnic, border and class conflict underpinned by a deep and prolonged crisis of capitalism -by a completely different matrix: the end of Germany's great-power ambitions, the purging of the radical Right and widescale ethnic