The Dark Continent by Mark Mazower - Book Report/Review Example

However, implicating the "dark" perspective on European history can only serve as a motivation for the systematic work and research of what future Europeans have inherited. As evidenced through the circumstantial hypocrisies and even ignorance to numerous bodies rotting in the European soil is to actually justify any similar action in the future and to side with the most radical of Machiavellisms (Vladanovi, 2005). According to Mazower's thesis, Nazism, Communism and democracy are in no way different as we might think they are.

Under the banner of each idea, political superstructures in 20th-century Europe forced to whack away one true and abiding social issue: namely, the proper relationship between the individual and the collective. Of the three, Mazower believes that Communism derived the closest to a satisfactory solution, not only in theory but even in practice. In the first chapter, Mazower deemed that one of Hitler's unintended achievements was to persuade many Europeans of the attraction of democracy, and Mazower explicitly delved on why this proved more lasting than after the First World War.

He argues that an ability to deliver social welfare was important, and that it bonded the populace to democracy tar more than the rhetoric of democrats. Mazower does not address adequately the critics of the mixed economy and the welfare state, and at times his own conviction politics intrude a little too obviously, but, on balance, his is a fair account of the postwar world. The Stalinist terror is not disguised. The Cold War is seen as bringing time for stability and regeneration; Communism as achieving a desire to break with peasant life in Eastern Europe; and many aspects of society, west and east of the Iron Curtain, as reflecting a continued authoritarianism.

Communism is portrayed as falling because of Gorbachev's attempt to deal with its inner contradictions, not thanks to popular protest. Now, both West and East, the relationship between capitalism and democracy is the problem.Mazower makes some surprising observation that in the 1930s the parliaments are inexplicably following the pace led by previous monarchies they despised. He writes: The Left had been vanquished or forced onto the defensive nearly everywhere west of the Soviet Union, and all the key political debates were taking place on the Right.

Only on the continent's northern fringes did effective parliamentary rule survive. "We are living in a period when the most courageous face moments of profound discouragement, when the hopes for social and international appeasement salvaged from the wreckage of the World War, seem sadly illusory," wrote an analyst of the "current reaction against democracy" in 1934. As early as 1925 the German legal scholar Moritz Bonn had talked of "the crisis of European democracy"; Eustace Percy in 1931 saw "Democracy on Trial" while H. G. Wells looked forward to "After Democracy.

" "Is this the end of liberty" asked Salvador de Madariaga in the midst of the Spanish civil war. Professor William Rappard wrote from Geneva that the "crisis of democracy" had taken "civilized mankind completely unawares, following the apparent triumph of democracy in the modern world." (p. 4)Furthermore, Mazower unveils fresh ideas on how the disintegration of democracy, or "bourgeois" democracy after World War I came be realized. He cites that there was no agreed upon or viable definition of democracy in Europe. To