Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- I SOCIAL FORCES, INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION, AND CONFLICT IN EUROPE'S NINETEENTH-CENTURY MARKET SYSTEM
- II THE INTERREGNUM
- III THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
- 8 The Post–World War II Order
- 9 The Great Transformation and the Eternal Return: “Globalization” Reconsidered
- Appendix 1 Europe Defined
- Appendix 2 A Sample of Europe's Class, Ethnic, and Imperialist Conflicts, 1789–1945
- Appendix 3 European (Regional and Extraregional) Wars, Insurrections, Rebellions, Revolutions, Uprisings, Violent Strikes, Riots, and Demonstrations, 1789–1945
- Works cited
- Index
8 - The Post–World War II Order
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Tables
- Preface
- INTRODUCTION
- I SOCIAL FORCES, INDUSTRIAL EXPANSION, AND CONFLICT IN EUROPE'S NINETEENTH-CENTURY MARKET SYSTEM
- II THE INTERREGNUM
- III THE GREAT TRANSFORMATION
- 8 The Post–World War II Order
- 9 The Great Transformation and the Eternal Return: “Globalization” Reconsidered
- Appendix 1 Europe Defined
- Appendix 2 A Sample of Europe's Class, Ethnic, and Imperialist Conflicts, 1789–1945
- Appendix 3 European (Regional and Extraregional) Wars, Insurrections, Rebellions, Revolutions, Uprisings, Violent Strikes, Riots, and Demonstrations, 1789–1945
- Works cited
- Index
Summary
Thrones have been overthrown, ancient and entrenched aristocracies have been dispersed, feudal dominions shattered, old privileges abolished; statesmen and politicians who had dominated events have disappeared into retirement, exile, or the grave; the old parties have split, coalesced, transformed themselves, died out or blossomed exceedingly; new men, new parties, new ideas have emerged from the coulisses of history and filled the centre of the stage…. The habits and traditions of a millennium have been revolutionized in a decade.
Betts 1950: 196Europe's nineteenth-century market system collapsed in the course of the world wars. Karl Polanyi tracks its collapse through the dissolution of its central institutions. He begins with the dissolution of the balance-of-power system. Europe, he assumed, had enjoyed an unprecedented one hundred years' peace as a result of this system. After 1900, however, it began to dissolve, and when, in 1914, it finally broke down, it unleashed a war of monumental proportions. But as Polanyi rightfully points out, this would not be the war to end all wars. World War I was part of the old nineteenth-century system, “a simple conflict of powers unleashed by the lapse of the balance-of-power system” (1944: 30). It did not, as World War II would, form “part of the world upheaval” that marked the great transformation. The end of the international political system nonetheless set the stage for the demise of the other institutions of Europe's nineteenth-century market system.
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- War and Social Change in Modern EuropeThe Great Transformation Revisited, pp. 235 - 268Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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