Can improvements of technology explain the horrendous violence of the twentieth century or are there other reasons? (Discuss with reference to two genocides).

Indeed, as Sir Isaiah Berlin expressed it, the twentieth century was the most horrible century of Western history. Eric Hobsbawm characterizes it as the Age of Extremes, “a sort of triptych or historical sandwich: a quarter of a century of a ‘Golden Age’ between two, equally long periods of catastrophes, decomposition and crisis” (Hobsbawm, 1994: 1, 6). Mark Mazover gave the provocative title Dark Continent to his book on Europe’s twentieth century, which “brought new levels of violence into European life, militarizing society . . . killing millions of people with the help of modern bureaucracies and technologies” (Berend, 2006: p. 1). The strict regulations and planning of the war economy taught valuable lessons. Regulated markets became the norm in the interwar decades. Authoritarian regimes, mostly Mediterranean dictatorships, went further with economic dirigisme, establishing state sectors and economic targets to be achieved by state planning and assistance. The less developed European periphery, Russia and Central and Eastern Europe, went even further. Regimes in this region eliminated private property and market prices, and6 introduction introduced a centrally planned, non-market system, because they believed that backwardness could be eliminated by central state policy. Modernization dictatorships subordinated unions, oppressed all kinds of resistance, and, behind the shield of dictatorial regimes, implemented rapid, forced industrialization to catch up with the advanced West.Two examples: One refers to mortality and life expectancy, and the relations in this respect between Western and Communist East-Central Europe. According to Tomka’s own tables (pp. 26-28), between 1930 and 1960 the gap of life expectancy (and of infant mortality) between Austria, on one hand, and Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, on the other, narrowed substantially, and in the case of Czechoslovakia was actually reversed, with Czechoslovaks in 1960 living longer than Austrians and having fewer babies die. Then the tide turned again, sometime in the second half of the 1960s, showing up in Tomka’s tables in 1970. A similar Eastern postwar catch up followed by falling back in the last two decades of Communism holds for Eastern-Western Europe as a whole (Tomka, 2013, p. 43).Ferguson describes the twentieth century as a period of political and economic transformation: national states, overseas expansion, commercial revolution -- Intellectual transformation: the scientific revolution (Ferguson, 1969: p. 1).Calvocoressi discusses wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sudan; the accelerating emergence of India and China as major powers; the major political developments in Latin America;the march of globalisation and the popular protest movements against; the expansion eastwards of the European Union; instability in the Middle East and the question of oil and energy supply.(Calvocoressi, 2009: p. 1).Carter discusses a broad range of subjects—economic, social, political, artistic, scientific, and military—to convey a fully rounded understanding of the contemporary world (Carter, 2011, p. 12).The dominant social class in most societies in 1900 or 1914 was still the landed aristocracy. By the early-21st century, the aristocracy is almost gone, replaced by a new kind of professional middle class. This social class thinks of the world more in industrial than in agricultural terms, more in urban terms than in rural, and more in managerial structures than in terms of private land ownership. In 1900 or 1910, the world’s major political regimes were predominantly monarchies or empires, but these systems are largely gone in the early-21st century. The contemporary period offers a new set of challenges to older cultural beliefs; these challenges come from communism, a greater mass appeal of nationalism, consumerism, and science and these cultural options do not entirely agree with one another. By the early-21st century, these options had not fully succeeded in displacing the old. The cultural map of the contemporary period is complicated; we cannot say for sure that the older patterns have been vanquished. World War II gave birth to the capability to end human existence with nuclear weapons. Even worse that among the new themes of the contemporary era were the tightened organizational capacity in war, societies’ insistence on total surrender as a result of their investment, and the threat of devastating and fearsome new technology. These technologies offer unprecedented opportunities and, in some ways, pose unprecedented threats and challenges to the identities of individual societies. However, the violence is in the people’s minds.Bibliography:Berend, I.T. Economic History of Twentieth Century Europe. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2006.Calvocoressi, P. World politics since 1945. Pearson Education: Harlow, 2009.Carter, V.F. Twentieth-Century World. Wadsworth: Belmont (CA), 2011.Ferguson, W.K. A Survey of European Civilization. Houghton Miffin: Boston, 1969.Goff R., Moss V., Terry,J., Upshur J-H. The Twentieth Century: A Brief Global History. McGraw Hill: Boston, 2002. Hobsbaum, E. Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991. Abacus: London, 1995.Reynolds, D. One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945. Penguin: London, 2000.Reynolds, D. From World War to Cold War Churchill, Roosevelt, and the International History of the 1940s. Oxford Univ. Press: Oxford, 2006. Stearns, P.N. A Brief history of the World. The Teaching Company, 2007.Tomka, B. A Social History of Twentieth Century Europe. Routledge: London and New York, 2013.Twentieth Century Europe: A Brief History, 1900 to the Present. Wiley-Blackwell: Somerset, 2014.