Dr Pierre Purseigle

University of Warwick

Farewells to Arms? War in Modern European History, 1815-2015

In the early twenty-first century, many commentators argue that European societies have broken politically, military, and culturally with a past long shaped by wars and military conflicts. Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the ensuing transatlantic dispute, many US conservative commentators argued with Robert Kagan that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus” (Of paradise and power. America and Europe in the New World Order, 2003).

In this view, Europeans would now be both both unwilling and incapable of using war and military power to ensure their security. More recently, historian James Sheehan invited us to rethink modern European history as the painful, cruel, and costly process whereby European societies redefined their relationship to war as an instrument of policy (Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe, 2008).

These debates, like the history of warfare, raise a series of ethical, political, and intellectual issues of continuing import and relevance. This first-year optional module will introduce students to the history of war and conflicts in modern European history (1815-2015). It will consider how war, its conduct and experience, shaped states and societies in Europe. It will also investigate how the transformations of warfare reflected the evolutions of European societies.

The lectures will provide a brief outline of the military conflicts that shaped the experience of Europeans throughout the period. Most importantly however, in conjunction with weekly seminar discussions, they will help students understand how wars affected – and were transformed by – political ideologies and regimes, cultures, understandings of race and gender, economic systems and international relations and institutions.

 

Lectures

Seminars

Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

The wars of German unification

The birth of industrial warfare

Pacifism in the nineteenth century

Colonial warfare

The causes of modern wars

The First World War and the totalization of warfare

Home fronts and social mobilization in WWI

Warfare and welfare in interwar Europe

Regulating and preventing war (1899-1939)

The Spanish Civil War

The Second World War: a “thirty years’ war”?

War and genocide in Europe (1915-1945)

Resistance, collaboration, and the aftermath of WWII

The Cold War

Pacifism after Auschwitz and Hiroshima

Wars of decolonization

The dividends of peace

Yugoslavia and the return of war in Europe

Writing the history of wars

War and the nation-state

The Russo-Japanese war

Is war good for business?

War and demographic anxieties

Explaining the outbreak of WWI

How to fight on the Western Front (1914-1918)

Gender in wartime

Remembering the First World War

War and the emergence of international law

Fascisms and war

Economic mobilization

Was the Holocaust an act of war?

Violence and the transition to peace

The meaning of deterrence

The CND in Britain

The war of Algerian independence

The Euromissiles crisis

Liberal interventionism in the twenty-first century

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