As the title indicates, editors Donald Bloxham and Robert Gerwarth have compiled several offerings that examine the subject of political violence in Europe during the twentieth century. They claim that this is the first and only effort to compact this weighty and broad issue within the confines of one volume. A collaborative project, they have engaged five other scholars as co-contributors. Whereas most historical anthologies bring together article-length micro-studies of specific topics of limited scope about a central theme that would have difficulty finding a venue for publication other than specialized scholarly journals, this publication analyzes extremely broad and complex aspects of the central theme in five ambitious chapters. These analyses are not meant to be autonomous entities, each contributing to the central theme, but each team of historians closely ties its presentation to the others, thereby depicting the subject of European political violence as a diverse but interconnected phenomenon. This is not a historical narrative on political violence and the European twentieth century, but rather a thorough and thematic analytical historiographic discussion that presumes considerable familiarity with the subject on the part of the reader.

In the “Introduction,” the editors chart the course and set the overall tenor of the book in a thorough preview and conceptualization of what will follow. They identify four “expressions of political violence,” the violence of military conflicts, of genocide and ethnic cleansings, of terrorism and state repressions, and of revolution and counterrevolution. The participants, all sporting impeccable and impressive credentials, present these forms of violence mostly in “transnational and comparative contexts.” The collective emphasis is on a “distinctively . . . European pattern of political violence” (p. 5). Narrative gives way to the examination of and commentary on finely defined constructs and concepts.

In writing the first chapter, “Europe in the World: Systems and Cultures of Violence,” essentially an extended introduction that elaborates the main themes to follow, historians Martin Conway, A. Dirk Moses, and Klaus Weinhauer join the editors in declaring, “we share the assumption that the phenomenon of political violence in the twentieth century cannot be ascribed to the coincidence of particulars alone; it is possible to observe patterns and logics to its occurrence. Ours, then, is not a simple narrative of politically violent incidents in chronological order, but an attempt to conceptualize the broader logics of violence in the period” (p. 13). The contributors then proceed to conceptualize the project in clearly defined categories of “violent interaction with the wider world,” “forms of state structure within Europe,” and so forth. The conversation begins with the premise that much of the violence was ideologically based, a clash of “diametrically opposed New Orders,” such as liberalism, Marxism, and National Socialism. The discussion then proceeds to connect European developments and factors to the wider world by way of colonialism and imperialism. Competing and diverse notions and promotions of races, civilizations, and cultures set the stage for a global conflict of Europe versus the non-Western.

An exception to the analytical and interpretive offerings of the aforementioned contributors stands the lengthy section on “War,” a posthumously published writing by James McMillan. In the lone single-authored piece, the late professor McMillan discusses the sequence of European wars, emphasizing the evolution of limited war to “apocalyptic” total war. Written in more of a narrative style, McMillan dissects World War I, its causes, nature, and consequences and moves on to World War II and its extreme “brutalization.” He draws a distinction between the violent era of 1914–1945 and the ensuing Cold-War era, which avoided conflict by remembering the preceding violence of the “European Civil War.”

In the next section Bloxham and Moses combine to write “Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing,” averring, “The burgeoning scholarly literature on genocide and ethnic cleansing . . . rarely explores extensive causal or contextual interconnections between different cases” (p. 87). The authors remain true to the theme of interconnectivity of developments, stretching back into the colonialism of the nineteenth century as an incubator for ethnic and racial hatred in Europe itself. They go on to discuss instances of genocide, including the Holocaust. Although on target on most points, occasionally they err, such as the statement (p. 120) that the genocide of Hungarian Jews ended in August 1944. Indeed, in Budapest it continued until the city fell to the Russians months later.

In “Revolution and Counter-revolution,” Conway and Gerwarth inform the reader that “in the context of studying revolutionary violence, this chapter emphasizes the way in which dynamics of violence internal to Europe have been reinforced by the refraction back into Europe of imperial forms of behavior, and perhaps most especially by the intervention in European politics of the 1960s and 1970s of new forms of revolutionary ideology and actions which originated in the maelstrom of non-European post-imperial conflicts” (p. 141). And in “Terrorism and the State,” Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Klaus Weinhauer adhere to the course set throughout the book, placing a strong emphasis on the relationships between Europe and the former colonial world. During the twentieth-century, terrorism, both in Europe and abroad, assumed a more active role in the instigation and perpetration of violence, while the state became at first reactive, then preemptive in its exercise of violence.

Because of its nature as a venue for discussing scholarly interpretations and approaches to the subject of violence and not as a narrative history of the same, this book would not appeal to the general reading public. Indeed, it would be appropriate for only the most knowledgeable scholars of the subject, including advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in the particular issues and relevant interpretations and analyses offered here. One of the more valuable features of this work appears in the endnotes, which collectively offer a comprehensive and nearly exhaustive—but not annotated—catalog of scholarly works on political violence.