The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933 (Oxford History of Modern Europe)

Challenging the common assumption that the Treaty of Versailles led to the opening of a second European war, Zara Steiner provides an analysis of the attempts to reconstruct Europe during the 1920s. She examines the efforts that failed but also those which gave hope for future promise that are usually underestimated, if not ignored. She also shows that a degree of stabilization was achieved even though it was fragile, incomplete, and did not last through the1929-1933 period when nationalist remedies replaced international strategies on both the economic and political levels of European relations. A second volume,The Triumph of the Night, will examine the period from 1934 to 1941.