The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, c. 1914-1949

Project Information

CivilWars

Grant agreement ID: 101054647

DOI

10.3030/101054647

EC signature date 27 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 940,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 940,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN, NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, DUBLIN
Ireland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CivilWars (The Age of Civil Wars in Europe, c. 1914-1949)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2025-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In the first half of the 20th century, Europe experienced an unparalleled pandemic of civil wars, from Finland in the North and Ireland and Spain in the West, to Russia in the East and Greece in the South.

While individual civil wars have received significant attention, notably from the 1990s onwards, it is striking that few systematic comparative studies exist that might offer important insights into the similarities, differences, and connections between them. In contrast to the rich political science literature on the civil wars which occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, and the equally well-developed comparative literature on post-colonial Africa in particular, comparative investigations of Europe’s civil wars in the first half of the twentieth century remain a remarkably neglected area of historical enquiry.

If systematically comparative studies of Europe’s civil wars are rare, there exist even fewer studies that investigate connections between civil wars in different settings. There clearly remains a reluctance to see civil wars as anything other than national. This, however, is to neglect the transnational dynamics of these conflicts. While most civil wars were fought within states, they rarely had defined borders. Moreover, as the numerous cases of foreign military or humanitarian interventions demonstrate, they frequently drew on external ideas and personnel. The geographical scope of the project requires six core team members (five postdoctoral fellows for three years each and the PI) with complementary linguistic abilities and expertise in studying different civil wars. Collectively, the project will enable us to offer meaningful insights into the distinctiveness of certain civil wars, but also about what they have in common and what connections exist between them.

CivilWars proposes to take on that challenge and to undertake the first systematically comparative analysis of the origins, forms, and legacies of five civil wars in this period: the civil wars that occurred in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain and Greece. The project will enhance our understanding of what caused this near-simultaneous and historically unprecedented proliferation of civil wars in Europe, how they were experienced and remembered across different European societies, and what the direct connections between them were in terms of ideas and personnel. It will therefore explore civil war as a recurring, widespread and multi-layered phenomenon (with regional and national variations). In the age of the two world wars in particular, civil wars were not so much national as transnational; not so much wars as multi- layered episodes of violence; and not so much distinct phenomena as part of Europe-wide ideological, socio- economic, cultural, ethnic and international conflicts.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Following the set-up of the full project team and website (www.civil-wars.eu) in 2022, the team conducted primary research on the comparative and entangled history of European civil wars in the first half of the twentieth century. Primary research on the key themes of the project have been carried out by the core team members in archives across Europ and further afield, notably in the US (Library of Congress, the archives of Russian emigration at the Hoover Institution, in Stanford, California, and the Bakmheteff Library at Columbia University).
Some of the key conceptual issues regarding the question of how one can write such an entangled history of civil wars were addressed in a first special journal issue, co-edited by Robert Gerwarth and Martin Conway, was published by the Journal of Modern European History in late 2022. In addition, seven international workshops have been held in the context of the CivilWars Project to date, each of them focused on themes that affected all of the key case studies – the civil wars that occurred in Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain, and Greece: these themes ranged from Humanitarianism in civil wars, to the Spanish Civil War as a connector between events in Russia and those in Greece, the role of Political Commissars in each of these conflicts and the connections that existed between European civil wars and some of the civil wars that occurred outside Europe, namely in Mexico and China. Some of these workshops solely organized by the PI and his team, others in close cooperation with partner institutions in Barcelona, Belfast, and Athens, and Thessaloniki. The selected proceedings of each workshop will be published as a special journal issue.

The main objective of the CivilWars project is to explore the interconnectedness of civil wars in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, notably through the circulation of ideas, people, concepts and practices.
We set out to explore, from a comparative perspective, the types and patterns of violence that characterized Europe’s civil wars in this period and whether there are patterns that go beyond individual national cases. This is a running theme for all our workshops in which we bring together experts from all over Europe and further afield in an attempt to bring different national historiographies into conversation with each other. We also strive to explore this objective through primary research in archives across Europe. We also explore comparatively how civil wars begin and end, with particular reference to the case studies of Russia, Finland, Ireland, Spain and Greece.
Apart from our publications, the core team members have given a significant number of talks at conferences, many of them public-facing.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

At this stage of the project, the focus has been on primary research and on bringing experts on individual national case studies into conversation with each other through thematic workshops while most of the publications will be coming out in the later stages of the project. However, the primary (archival) research to date has generated new empirical data on connections between different instances of civil wars which will be reflected in those publications.
Our workshops have brought together researchers in the fields of the Russian/Finnish/Irish/Spanish/ Greek civil wars that were previously unconnected and largely unfamiliar with each other’s work.
Of our publications to date, the special issue of the Journal of Modern European History (2022) was important in terms of setting out the research questions. The next three thematically focused special journal issues that are scheduled for publication in 2025 will be indicative of our empirical work. Their focus is, respectively, on Humanitarianism in Civil Wars between 1917 and 1949, the transnational phenomenon of political commissars in civil wars, and the transnational and global connections of the Spanish Civil War.

By working closely with research communities in the countries affected by these instances of civil war, we have been able to transform the ways in which such civil wars are contextualized and interpreted. The novelty of our methodological approach lies in first bringing into conversation with each other scholars focusing on different civil wars that occurred in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, thus bridging the gaps between highly nation-centric research and secondly by exploring connections between the instances of civil wars, be they in the form of ideas, people, or practices. These key innovations and methodological approaches are reflected in all our publications and workshops.