The fundamental differences between the democracies and the dictatorships, National Socialist, Fascist or Communist, in the second world war can be seen in their diplomacy as in their military strategy. The conciliation of neutrals, the maintenance of smooth relations between allies, a realisation that in the long run national claims must take account of the interests of other powers, all these features of a prudent diplomacy were far more evident on the side of the democracies. German policy since Bismarck, whether under William II or under the Weimar Republic, had never been remarkable for a sense of limits. Hitler exaggerated the faults of earlier régimes; the crude maxims set out in Mein Kampf really represented the sum of his political ideas just as the Blitzkrieg, a sudden and overwhelming deployment of superior force, was his favourite method. He carried out important diplomatic moves mainly by personal interviews in which he could use his tactics of bluster and cunning. He paid little attention to his professional advisers—indeed he regarded the German Foreign Office as politically unreliable—and rarely tried to get the free, wholehearted assent even of his allies. At his meetings with Mussolini Hitler did nearly all the talking; his Foreign Minister Ribbentrop, who reflected his master's qualities as far as his limited ability allowed, was no less domineering at his interviews with Ciano, and the German military chiefs hardly troubled to hide their contempt for the Italians. There was no German-Italian liaison at a high level corresponding to the Anglo-American Combined Chiefs of Staff at Washington.

The half century between 1559 and 1610 must assuredly rank as one of the most brutal and bigoted in the history of modern Europe. The massacre in Paris on St Bartholomew's day in 1572; the calculated savagery of the duke of Alba's Council of Blood and the wild atrocities of the Calvinistic Beggars in the Netherlands; the persecution of the Moriscos in Spain—these were merely the more spectacular barbarities of an age unsurpassed for cruelty until our own day.

Yet what, in the history of the later sixteenth century, is just as striking as man's inhumanity to man is man's impotence before events, his inability to control his circumstances or to dominate his destiny. Thus in the political field the greatest monarch of his time, Philip II of Spain, was unable to conquer a weak England or a disunited France; could hold only half his rebellious Netherlands; and ended his reign, as he had begun it, in bankruptcy. His noblest opponent, William the Silent, died knowing that a union of his beloved fatherland upon a basis of mutual toleration between rival religions was a dream as remote as the hopes that Sir Edward Kelley and Marco Bragadino cherished of transmuting base metals into gold. With others the gap between aspiration and achievement was narrower only because they pitched their ambitions lower, and indeed for the most part the rulers of this time did pitch their ambitions much lower than those of the preceding generation. Was not one of the most successful of them, Elizabeth I of England, renowned above all for her chronic indecision and her dexterity in avoiding action?

Two new means of action, or instruments of warfare, that became prominent in the first world war were the principal causes of military discussion and controversy during the interval that followed —the aircraft and the tank. In those twenty years they met more doubt and criticism than recognition of their potentialities. Yet when the second world war came they largely dominated its course—especially in the opening stages.

Another new instrument, a naval one, was of earlier origin, but was allowed no adequate chance to prove its powers until the first world war. This was the submarine. Only after the surface duel between the battle-fleets had clearly become barren, by the middle of the war, was the submarine given such a chance—in the hands of the inferior naval power, Germany. But then, in 1917, it became dominant in struggle at sea, and by its potency in blockade brought the superior naval power, Britain, to the verge of defeat by starvation. Yet after that war it soon fell into neglect, and the possibility of a revival of its threat was discounted by the bulk of naval opinion, which clung to the illusion, and faith, that the battleship was again the mistress of the seas—so that when the next great war came in 1939 even Germany had only a handful of submarines. But these soon became an important factor, and, as their numbers increased, a vital one— even though their effect was never quite so great as in the previous war.

The distinction between ‘religious’ and secular thought is probably unreal and certainly difficult. The first half of the twentieth century seems, in retrospect, to fall, in this respect, into two contrasting periods—before 1914 and after 1918—the first characterised by a close relation between philosophy and religion, the second by a tendency to fall apart, influential philosophers holding that metaphysical statements are meaningless and theologians that Revelation needs no support from human reason. At the opening of the century Herbert Spencer was still alive and his agnostic theology of the ‘Unknowable’, which he derived from the Anglican Dean Mansel, was under fire from the rising school of Idealists. Positivism, of the Comtist type, was widely held as a philosophy which harmonised with the scientific outlook, and the proposition that the only genuine knowledge is scientific knowledge was widely accepted. About this time the word ‘Naturalism’ came into use as a general term for a scientific metaphysic which, with more or less emphasis, rejected the idea of God. Since this controversy on Naturalism was about the nature of truth and the limits of knowledge, it concerned many thinkers who would not have claimed to be theologians. The institution of the ‘Gifford Lectures’, which were explicitly devoted to the consideration of belief in God in the light of reason without resort to authority or alleged revelation, secured that the great themes of God, Freedom and Immortality were continually being examined from many points of view.

The independence achieved by the states of Latin America in the nineteenth century was political only. These twenty-odd new nations, varying greatly in size, in peoples and in resources, suspicious of their former rulers and of each other, had one characteristic in common: a heavy dependence upon events and movements outside their own borders. As specialised primary producers, they had to rely on foreign markets to dispose of their goods and on foreign investment to develop their resources. As heirs of revolution and often victims of political and financial instability, many of them experienced active foreign intervention. In the nineteenth century the intervening powers were usually European; except for the episode of the Texan war, and the period of impotence during the American civil war, the United States government upheld Latin-American independence. It not only disapproved of European interference and influence; on the whole it refrained from interference itself. In the twentieth century, however, there was to be a dramatic exchange of political roles. European influence declined; North American influence increased; and some of the major Latin-American states began to move haltingly towards a real independence. The process was punctuated and accelerated by two world wars and a world depression of unexampled severity.

In 1898 Spain, after a brief war with the United States, lost the last fragments of a great American empire—Cuba and Puerto Rico. No longer feared and hated as an ‘imperialist’ power, Spain was to become the object of sentimental respect and affection and the centre of Pan-Hispanic feeling. Great Britain, though a colonial power, still by far the largest investor in Latin America, the principal source of manufactured goods and the biggest single market for food and raw materials, showed less and less inclination to political interference, especially since the growing naval power of Germany made it necessary for British governments to court North American friendship.

In every year of the two generations that followed the treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis in 1559 European soldiers were somewhere engaged in battle, skirmish or siege. Few of these actions were on a large scale and none of them was decisive. Christian fought Turk and Catholic power fought Protestant by land and sea; France was distracted by civil wars for thirty years, the Netherlands for forty. Yet when the fighting petered out, the frontiers ran as geography, economic vitality, religion and patriotism dictated, not in patterns cut out by the sword. The costs of war continued to grow, and the sums raised were never enough to release into effectiveness the tactical lessons or the technical advances of the previous period, let alone the flood of advice offered by a new race of military experts. The need for regular pay, increased professionalism and something like a permanent establishment was recognised, but little was done about it. Ambitious plans laid at home were passed to the front in sieves of peculation and inefficiency. It was not a period of achievement, it was not in any real sense a period of transition, yet in no previous age had war loomed so large in men's lives and, through the pulpit, the stage, the fine arts and the press, in their imaginations.

The recurrence of wars was taken for granted. ‘To speak of peace perpetual in this world of contention’, wrote Thomas Digges, ‘is but as Aristotles foelix, Xenophons Cyrus, Quintilians Orator, or Sir Thomas Moores Utopia, a matter of mere contemplation, the warre being in this iron age si bien enracinée qu'il est impossible de l'en oster, si non avec la ruine de l'universe’. But if there was less pacifism than in the first half of the century, there was a greater self-consciousness about the legitimacy of war as such, and a more widespread urge to explain the difference between a just and an unjust war.

At the beginning of the twentieth century control over the vast area of mainland and islands now known as South-East Asia was almost monopolised by the Netherlands, Britain, France and the United States of America. Of the four the Dutch had been established the longest and possessed by far the richest empire. With its centre at Batavia, founded by Jan Pieterszoon Coen in 1619, Netherlands India, the ‘girdle of emerald flung round the equator’, comprised the whole Malay archipelago except the Philippines, newly acquired from Spain by the United States (Treaty of Paris, December 1898), north-western Borneo, the Portuguese half of Timor, and eastern New Guinea, the northern part of which was in German possession, the southern a British colony. The Netherlands Indies stretched for nearly three thousand miles from the north-west point of Sumatra to the eastern limit of Dutch territory in New Guinea, its breadth from north to south was roughly thirteen hundred miles, and it had a total land area of nearly 735,000 square miles. In 1900 the reduction of the whole area to Dutch rule was still incomplete. Much of it had been acquired only in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Achinese of north-west Sumatra, who had been fighting for independence since 1873, were not to be finally brought under control until 1908.

Middle Eastern history in the first half of the twentieth century may be looked upon as the working out of a crisis in society and politics—a crisis which began towards the end of the eighteenth century and from which in the end no geographical area and no section of society could remain immune. This crisis resulted from the contact between the traditional Muslim society, which seemed devoid of vigour, inventiveness and enterprise, and Europe, which was clearly in the ascendant, militarily superior, and full of complacent self-confidence, energy and reforming zeal. The initial European impact was military. From the first decades of the nineteenth century, Middle Eastern governments were becoming increasingly aware that European arms and military techniques were superior to anything they could command, and they proceeded to remedy their inferiority by the seemingly simple expedient of acquiring European arms and copying European military organisation. In this way they hoped both to parry the threat from Europe and themselves to threaten those of their neighbours who were tardier or more inefficient in adopting the new techniques.

But this exposure to European methods and ideas had many unexpected and disconcerting effects. We may first consider the case of the Ottoman Empire. Selim III (1787–1807) and Mahmud II (1808–39) between them destroyed the traditional Ottoman Army and laid down the basis for a European-model conscript army. Such an army required in turn a European-model centralised bureaucracy to administer it and, to lead it, a new type of officer, trained in European techniques and exposed to European ideas.

The age of the conquistadores was already over when Philip II ascended the throne of Spain and the Indies. The leaders of the great entradas were nearly all dead. Some died prematurely of their wounds and their exertions, some by the knives of jealous rivals. A few—Cortés was one of them—spent their middle age in bored and litigious retirement. Not one was long allowed to administer for the crown the provinces he had conquered. Already by 1558 an administrative service, civil and ecclesiastical, had been created and was rapidly growing in numbers, efficiency and cost. The conquistadores had no successors in their own violent mould. Miguel López de Legazpi, who in 1561 undertook the conquest of the Philippines, had been an official in Mexico; his highly successful entrada was notable for diplomacy and organising ability rather than for skill in war and was, indeed, almost bloodless. Francisco de Ibarra, conqueror of Durango, and Francisco de Urdiñola, who founded Saltillo and settled Coahuila, were typical of the later generation of conquistadores, no strangers to violence on occasion, but entrepreneurs in silver-mining and cattle-ranching, organisers of settlements, rather than conquerors of semi-barbarous empires. There were, in fact, no empires left to conquer. In North America, Coronado's expedition of 1540 had revealed nothing but arid hills and apparently boundless prairies, occupied by great herds of ‘wild cattle’ and a scattering of equally wild Indians; no place for men who lived by their swords or by their wits.

On 25 June 1572 Sigismund Augustus, the last male descendant of the house of Jagiellon which had ruled in central and eastern Europe for nearly two hundred years, died at his favourite country residence at Knyszyn. This monarch of great dignity and exceptional humanity, gifted in languages, a good stylist and orator, a connoisseur of art and a passionate collector of tapestries, left his vast kingdom, largely his life-work, without an heir. This kingdom was a sort of union of various states which had previously been independent or semi-independent but which had been united under the Jagiellon dynasty. It included the kingdom of Poland, the grand duchy of Lithuania with its Ruthenian territories, the duchy of Mazovia, royal Prussia (Danzig Pomerania), ducal Prussia, the duchy of Curland, and Livonia. This vast federation, as well as being called a kingdom, was known as the Rzeczpospolita, a commonwealth of various nations or states, as Sigismund Augustus used sometimes to describe it. This emphasised the fact that the union consisted of several nations differing in creed, race and language, but together making a political unity, under one king, with a central parliament and a common foreign policy. It was obvious that the immediate future would show whether the idea of union which Sigismund Augustus had fostered during his reign, and had bequeathed to his dominions in his will, would survive his death and become a source of political strength in this part of Europe.

In May 1939 the treaty which Mussolini called the Steel Pact was signed in Berlin between Germany and Italy. It was a frankly aggressive treaty which intensified the intimidation of Europe by Hitler and Mussolini. It misled world opinion in a way which suited Hitler in that it concealed the weakness of Italy behind Germany's strength. Almost immediately after the conquest of Abyssinia Mussolini had sent large contingents of Italian ‘volunteers’ to fight for Franco. In its timing the Steel Pact seemed to crown the success of Franco and the Axis powers in Spain after nearly three years' fighting. The Germans had not engaged more than small groups of airmen, but Mussolini had exhausted both his armies and his economic resources. As soon as he had signed the pact he began to be afraid of its consequences. Hitler, however, felt more assured. By now Mussolini had followed his example and introduced anti-Semitic measures into Italy. Beyond the frontiers directly controlled by the Germans, the governments of Hungary, Poland and Rumania were glad to buy favour in Berlin by anti-Jewish gestures. The time of annihilation was not to come for two years yet. But the existence of the scapegoat through which one could curry favour was one of Hitler's weapons in the war of nerves which he manipulated in such masterly fashion. Everyone's life in eastern Europe was affected, what they heard or read or said or saw stimulated anti-Semitism and discouraged tolerance.

In the last year of the nineteenth century the American people re-elected William McKinley as President. By doing so, they ratified the liberation of Cuba and the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippine Islands. Probably not knowing what they were doing, and certainly unwilling to accept the full implications of their new situation, the American people had moved out on to the world stage, little better prepared for their new role than the Japanese had been when Commodore Perry's ‘black ships’ broke the centuries-old, self-imposed blockade of the island empire.

William Jennings Bryan, who had fought for the economically unfortunate, above all for the angered and impoverished farmer, in 1896, had fought in 1900 against ‘imperialism’. But the sharp edge of discontent had been blunted by the flow of gold from South Africa and the Yukon, by a natural turn in the trade cycle, and the vague issue of ‘imperialism’ was not an adequate fighting theme. Flushed with an easy victory over an impotent Spain, and moving into a new boom period, the American people was convinced that it was living in the best of all possible republics, that it had nothing and no one to fear.

The politicians who felt this mood had no need to worry about re-electing the President and some of them took the chance to get out of the way an obstreperous hero of the brief Spanish-American war, Theodore Roosevelt, who had won the governorship of New York on the strength of his achievements with a regiment of irregular cavalry in Cuba.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (2–3 April 1559) was a belated recognition of the end of the imperial plans of the late Emperor Charles V. The last phase of the war between Habsburg and Valois had been precipitated by the octogenarian Pope Paul IV in his hatred of Spanish dominion in Italy. The principal combatants had fought it almost unwillingly, but the struggle had been as bitter as it was inconclusive and even more costly than previous wars. Now a new era was to dawn with the marriage of Philip II to Henry II's daughter, Elizabeth.

sang the poet Ronsard.

The change was even greater than men realised at the time. In less than ten years from the abdication of Charles V (1555/6) all political problems moved on to a completely different plane. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, the Reformation had been successful only where it had been allied with the state. When it became revolutionary, as it did in the German Peasants' War and in the Anabaptist movements of the Netherlands and northern Germany, it had been easily put down, because it had been supported only by the lower classes in town and country. Now, for the first time and quite suddenly, revolutionary movements became nationwide and included classes, or elements of classes, ranging from artisans to princes of the blood. Determined minorities tried to impose their views on whole countries. They had to build organised parties to match the power of the state.

Post-reformation Europe displayed on the surface a large measure of political diversity. The fragmentation of the universal church, it would appear, completed a process of political fragmentation which had been going on for centuries. With medieval natural law in decline, and the emergence of the modern sovereign state still in the future, the nations of western Europe became locked in conflict within—and with their neighbours—in search of a system of government which would lead them away from confusion and anarchy. Yet the historian who looks at western Europe at the end of the sixteenth century is, in general, impressed not by the diversity of the political systems in the process of formation but by their striking similarity. In the constitutional issues which confronted them, and in the manner of their solution, all the governments of the day had much in common, because the pressures upon them were more or less the same. The general pressure of economic and social forces burst through and flowed beyond the frontiers of the new nation states.

The whole of Europe was at this time, to a greater or less degree, subject to a double upward pressure: of prices and of population. The rise in population far outdistanced the rise in productivity and inevitably commodity prices were driven sharply upwards. In Spain, for example, the 1540s saw a savage rise in prices and the succeeding decades would see a tragic worsening of the whole situation as the Spanish economic system sagged under heavy overseas commitments, a debilitating war in the Netherlands, and a war of attrition at sea.

In Germany towards the end of 1929 employment melted away so rapidly that the prosperous period seemed to have been a mere illusion. In Austria the prosperity had been less convincing in any case, and soon the streets of Vienna seemed crowded with beggars. The Socialist Chancellor of Germany, Hermann Müller, resigned, and Hindenburg called upon the leader of the Centre party, Heinrich Brüning, to succeed him in the spring of 1930. Behind Brüning, and far more than he ever realised, intrigues were concentrating upon plans to make Hindenburg more of a pre-1914 emperor, and to reduce the powers of the Reichstag accordingly: these intrigues emanated from a ‘political general’ called Kurt von Schleicher, a friend of the President's son Oscar. When in July 1930 Brüning failed to get the agreement of the Reichstag to some deflationary measures of his, Hindenburg, encouraged by Schleicher, enforced them by emergency decree. Brüning thought it correct to dissolve the Reichstag, which had been elected in May 1928 in the prosperous period.

Elections were held on 14 September 1930: the results were like a bombshell for Germany and for Europe. The number of Communist deputies increased from 54 to 77 and the National Socialist Party (Nazis) shot up from 12 in the last Reichstag to 107: they were now the largest party after the Social Democrats. These Nazis were the followers of the Austrian agitator, Adolf Hitler, who had ignominiously failed to seize power in Munich in November 1923.

At eleven o'clock on the morning of 11 November 1918 the cease-fire sounded along the western front. It was the end of the first world war, which had killed not less than 10 million persons, had brought down four great empires and had impoverished the continent of Europe. The defeat of Germany, so long invincible to more than half the world, had been registered at dawn that day in the Armistice of Compiègne. Its heavy terms were in the main those proposed by Marshal Foch, the Allied generalissimo, and lay between the views of the British Field-Marshal Haig, who overestimated the German capacity for continued resistance and advocated more lenient conditions, and those of the American General Pershing, who had argued in favour of refusing an armistice and maintaining the Allied advance. This matched the attitude of the former president Theodore Roosevelt and a popular American demand for unconditional surrender. As it was, one month after the armistice, Ebert, head of the first government of the new German republic, greeted returning German formations at the Brandenburger Tor with the words: ‘No foe has overcome you … You have protected the homeland from enemy invasion.’

No less important in the long run than the terms of the armistice were the preconditions governing its signature. When the German government had applied to President Wilson on 4 October 1918 for an armistice it had adroitly proposed that peace negotiations, and not only those for an armistice, should be based upon the ‘fourteen points’ of his address of 8 January 1918, as amplified in his subsequent pronouncements.

A comparison between the countries round the Baltic and those round the Mediterranean in the middle of the sixteenth century sheds light L on conditions in the north at a time when the political situation was vastly different from the present one. Though in varying degrees, the European countries on the Mediterranean all had an ancient cultural heritage, and during the last few centuries they had evolved a new culture—the Renaissance—in conscious relation to classical antiquity. The former political disunity was partly overcome in France, was on the way to being overcome in the Iberian peninsula, but was still acute in Italy. At the eastern end of the Mediterranean, on the other side of an ‘iron curtain’, lay the cultural world of the Orient. For centuries it had given many impulses to southern Europe. Now the links were broken, and most of Europe's trade with the Far East followed new routes.

Similarly, in the middle of the sixteenth century the eastern and western sides of the Baltic belonged to different cultural spheres in religion, education, language and custom; the main line of demarcation was between Russia on the one side, and her neighbours Sweden-Finland and Poland on the other. But the dissimilarities to southern Europe were enormous. The northern countries were economically and culturally primitive compared with those in the south. The refinement of the Renaissance had as yet left only small traces in northern Europe, primarily in art. The Reformation's programme, however, had quickly and effectively reached northern Germany, Poland and Scandinavia, spreading not so much among the masses as in certain social groups—particularly the middle-class townspeople—and within government circles.

The Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis ended a war that had become, if indeed it had not started as, ‘a race between spent horses’. It was a peace of exhaustion and it endured because for many years to come none of the states of western Europe felt strong enough to risk another general conflict. Yet although all were afraid to strike, some were still willing to wound. And the internal instability that afflicted all of them, bred of exhaustion and fevered by a crisis of conscience in religion, gave to any dissatisfied power repeated hopes of undermining the foundations upon which the 1559 settlement rested.

In that settlement the British Isles occupied a crucial position. For the treaties left one of the two outstandingly great powers of western Europe, France, hemmed in and all but encircled by the territories of the other, Spain. The dominions of Philip II of Spain ran almost all around France—from Spain itself through the Balearic islands, Sardinia, and Sicily to Naples, the Tuscan ports, Parma, and Milan, with dependent Corsica, Genoa, and Savoy-Piedmont linking on to Franche-Comté and the Netherlands. If the British Isles or at least England could be added to these, as during Mary Tudor's marriage to Philip II (1554–8), then the ring would be complete and virtually unbreakable. If, on the other hand, the French could control England as well as Scotland, then the sea route through the Channel and the Straits of Dover could be closed to the Spaniards.