E.H. Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis is a classic work in International Relations. Published in 1939, on the eve of World War II, it was immediately recognized by friend and foe alike as a defining work in the fledgling discipline. The author was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. The issues and themes he develops in this book continue to have relevance to modern day concerns with power and its distribution in the international system. Michael Cox's critical introduction provides the reader with background information about the author, the context for the book, its main themes and contemporary relevance. Written with the student in mind, it offers a guide to understanding a complex, but crucial text.

The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. This work examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world.

The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities. Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

The liberal order is decaying. Will it survive, and if not, what will replace it? On the eightieth anniversary of the publication of E.H. Carr's The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1919-1939, Philip Cunliffe revisits this classic text, juxtaposing its claims with contemporary debates on the rise and fall of the liberal international order. The New Twenty Years' Crisis reveals that the liberal international order experienced a twenty-year cycle of decline from 1999 to 2019. In contrast to claims that the order has been undermined by authoritarian challengers, Cunliffe argues that the primary drivers of the crisis are internal. He shows that the heavily ideological international relations theory that has developed since the end of the Cold War is clouded by utopianism, replacing analysis with aspiration and expressing the interests of power rather than explaining its functioning. As a result, a growing tendency to discount political alternatives has made us less able to adapt to political change. In search of a solution, this book argues that breaking through the current impasse will require not only dissolving the new forms of utopianism, but also pushing past the fear that the twenty-first century will repeat the mistakes of the twentieth. Only then can we finally escape the twenty years' crisis. By reflecting on Carr's foundational work, The New Twenty Years' Crisis offers an opportunity to take stock of the current state of international order and international relations theory.

This Seminar Study takes the reader through the tumultuous, uncertain years of the inter-war period, and examines why, in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States, and the Balkans, dictatorships came to supplant democracy, as the world slid into war once again.

This book offers a reassessment of the international monetary problems that led to the global economic crisis of the 1930s. The author shows how policies, in conjunction with the imbalances created by World War I, gave rise to the global crisis of the 1930s.

The region between the Baltic and the Black Sea was marked by a set of crises and conflicts in the 1920s and 1930s, demonstrating the diplomatic, military, economic or cultural engagement of France, Germany, Russia, Britain, Italy and Japan in this highly volatile region, and critically damaging the fragile post-Versailles political arrangement. The editors, in naming this region as "Middle Europe" seek to revive the symbolic geography of the time and accentuate its position, situated between Big Powers and two World Wars. The ten case studies in this book combine traditional diplomatic history with a broader emphasis on the geopolitical aspects of Big-Power rivalry to understand the interwar period. The essays claim that the European Big Powers played a key role in regional affairs by keeping the local conflicts and national movements under control and by exploiting the region's natural resources and military dependencies, while at the same time strengthening their prestige through cultural penetration and the cultivation of client networks. The authors, however, want to avoid the simplistic view that the Big Powers fully dominated the lesser players on the European stage. The relationship was indeed hierarchical, but the essays also reveal how the "small states" manipulated Big-Power disagreements, highlighting the limits of the latters' leverage throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

The inter-war years were, at the time, perceived to be years of crisis across the world. The First World War, ‘the war to end all wars’, had solved nothing and its legacy was a world full of unresolved disputes and manifest ambiguities. Overy examines the Russian Revolution and its aftermath, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the subsequent economic crisis which struck at the very foundations of the capitalist world, and seeks to explain why dictatorships came to supplant democracy in Italy, Spain, Germany, the Baltic States and the Balkans, and why the world slid into war once more in 1939.

The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability. Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the early twentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization. The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in wider regional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.

The interwar period has left a deep impression on later generations. This was an age of crises where representative democracy, itself a relatively recent political invention, seemed unable to cope with the challenges that confronted it. Against the backdrop of the economic crisis that began in 2008 and the rise of populist parties, a new body of scholarship - frequently invoked by the media - has used interwar political developments to warn that even long-established Western democracies are fragile. Democratic Stability in an Age of Crisis challenges this 'interwar analogy' based on the fact that a relatively large number of interwar democracies were able to survive the recurrent crises of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this book is to understand the striking resilience of these democracies, and how they differed from the many democracies that broke down in the same period. The authors advance an explanation that emphasizes the importance of democratic legacies and the strength of the associational landscape (i.e., organized civil society and institutionalized political parties). Moreover, they underline that these factors were themselves associated with a set of deeper structural conditions, which on the eve of the interwar period had brought about different political pathways. The authors' empirical strategy consists of a combination of comparative analyses of all interwar democratic spells and illustrative case studies. The book's main takeaway point is that the interwar period shows how resilient democracy is once it has had time to consolidate. On this basis, recent warnings about the fragility of contemporary democracies in Western Europe and North America seem exaggerated - or, at least, that they cannot be sustained by interwar evidence. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterized by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu The series is edited by Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston, and Jonathan Slapin, Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Zurich.