I don't care if you take me seriously. I just want you to give me a book to read, if you know so much about it, because between you and Polanyi I'm inclined to give Polanyi the benefit of the doubt. If you're going to insult my academic competence, I've no use in talking to you.

I think you're a little too fixated on "there exists a war."

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 05:50 GMT

#4223

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Penguin-History-Europe-J-Roberts/dp/0140265619

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 05:52 GMT

#4224

Great, thanks. I still think you're missing the point.

edit: wait, that's a one-volume history of europe since the stone age? I'll pass

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 05:53 GMT

#4225

Also if you're seriously suggesting a work from 1944 might be the final word on a historical matter then I don't know where to begin. When writing papers at university the first thing you do when drawing on other academic works is put them in their context and address the changes in academic thinking in the field since that time. I have no idea why you'd even read a book that outdated if you wanted to find out why something happened, let alone read it and then think you had a grasp on the subject. Maybe read it to see why people in 1944 thought things were happening but don't read it and then accept it as gospel.

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 05:53 GMT

#4226

On March 05 2013 14:52 sam!zdat wrote:
Great, thanks. I still think you're missing the point.

edit: wait, that's a one-volume history of europe? I'll pass

Clearly you already did. That's why you thought Europe was stable throughout the 19th Century. It's simply not factually true.

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 05:55 GMT

#4227

I think you might be even more insufferable than I am. we're a match made in heaven

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 05:59 GMT

#4228

The only real difference between the war of 1870 and the war of 1914 is duration and that's simply because military thinking following 1870 was trying to fix the issues that the rapid defeat of 1870 had highlighted. Polanyi's argument that "the wars were short so they don't count" does not make the case for a stable Europe at peace with itself, especially when he follows it with "excluding the following wars which weren't short". The fact that Prussia quickly achieved overwhelming victories over first Austria and then France does not imply that Europe was stable because the wars didn't take long, it implies that Europe is massively unstable because Prussia keeps rolling people. Likewise the fact that the French were quickly able to defeat Austria, which was in decline, does not mean that the system was stable, it means that Austria was in decline which was the cause for a fundamental shift in the balance of European power.

The 19th Century probably saw the biggest changes in the balance of power in Europe of any modern period, it saw the decline of the old Austrian and Ottoman Empire, the eclipsing of France and Britain and the emergence of Italy, Germany and Russia. All of these transformations were punctuated with warfare between the great powers. From 1870 to 1945 and the emergence of Soviet Europe there is a great deal of continuity as Europe dealt with the German question, looking at 1815 to 1914 is meaningless and characterising it as a period of stability is nonsensical, the players at the end of the period were completely different to those at the start, it doesn't even look a little bit stable.

Basically if you go "Austria imploded and Prussia formed a new German superpower but the war itself didn't take very long so that counts as a stable system" then you're fucking retarded.
If you go "the new German superpower steamrolled one of the old powers and completely upended the balance of power in Europe but they did it quickly so the system is probably stable" then you're fucking retarded.
If you look at a period which started with Britain, France, Austria and the Ottoman Empire being the big European powers and ended with two of them as irrelevant, two of them eclipsed by a newcomer with another great power emerging too and conclude that things pretty much stayed the same because the wars through which it happened were decisive then you're fucking retarded.

oneofthem

Cayman Islands24199 Posts

March 05 2013 06:01 GMT

#4229

prussia was ahead of the curve with the massively organized military state metagame. they rolled some fools. then the rest of the dudes caught up so when they tried that shit again it got stalled into ww1.

especially with the british getting hidden expos all over the map

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 06:05 GMT

#4230

is the whole 18 months vs. 60 years of warfare thing basically right, though? Are you putting all this in perspective of comparison to previous centuries of European history?

I mean, I think Polanyi's point is that the international economic system was stable throughout all of this. "peaceful" doesn't mean "the gates of Janus were closed"

edit: I think we really just have different ideas about what "peaceful" means.

dAPhREAk

Nauru12397 Posts

March 05 2013 06:09 GMT

#4231

so, is anything actually happening with occupy wall street?

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 06:09 GMT

#4232

On March 05 2013 15:09 dAPhREAk wrote:
so, is anything actually happening with occupy wall street?

occupy wall street is invading crimea

oneofthem

Cayman Islands24199 Posts

March 05 2013 06:10 GMT

#4233

most of the capitalist driven conquests during that time was overseas, in the colonial world.

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 06:11 GMT

#4234

On March 05 2013 15:10 oneofthem wrote:
most of the capitalist driven conquests during that time was overseas, in the colonial world.

right, that's part of the point

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 06:20 GMT

#4235

On March 05 2013 15:05 sam!zdat wrote:
is the whole 18 months vs. 60 years of warfare thing basically right, though?

No, not really.
The era before saw France as the European superpower (for complicated reasons) establishing itself and smashing faces across Europe in the same way that Prussia later would. The duration of the wars argument is simply a consequence of the way they were fought, Napoleon's campaigns were not especially long compared to those waged by Prussia when you compensate for the changes in the logistics. It only becomes a century of warfare when you count the Napoleonic wars as constant warfare because he couldn't cross the channel and you count skirmishes across the empire as constant warfare.
As near as I can tell the only reason the idea that 1815 to 1914 was this long glorious peace exists is because of an anglocentric bias in the history books. It's nonsensical to place the rise of the first modern nation state and the dramatic change in the balance of power it caused in one era and then, as the system spread across Europe and the balance of power completely collapsed, put those in another.

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 06:21 GMT

#4236

Also by your definition of peaceful I think the entire of history pretty much qualifies.

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 06:21 GMT

#4237

Will you stop talking about the Napoleonic Wars. pretend those are 18th century. 19th c = 1814-1914

you have a good point about anglocentric bias

On March 05 2013 15:21 KwarK wrote:
Also by your definition of peaceful I think the entire of history pretty much qualifies.

do you deny that the 19th century was relatively more peaceful than previous european history?

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 06:24 GMT

#4238

On March 05 2013 15:11 sam!zdat wrote:

Show nested quote +

right, that's part of the point

Except when they happened in the 18th Century you still counted them as European conflicts for the purpose of creating a big divide between the two when one was peaceful and the other violent. It's a nonsense.

sam!zdat

United States5559 Posts

March 05 2013 06:25 GMT

#4239

Alright, I'll note that Kwark disagrees violently that there is any difference in the relative level of conflict between 19th c and previous European history.

This is obviously a question I will have to investigate further.

edit:
on topic: "Down with the Empire"!!! rabble rabble rabble

KwarK

United States43971 Posts

March 05 2013 06:28 GMT

#4240

On March 05 2013 15:21 sam!zdat wrote:
Will you stop talking about the Napoleonic Wars. pretend those are 18th century. 19th c = 1814-1914

you have a good point about anglocentric bias

Show nested quote +

do you deny that the 19th century was relatively more peaceful than previous european history?

I'm not saying the Napoleonic War is 19th C violence. I'm saying that the 19th C is a continuation of the same fundamental struggles and that to categorise one as being really violent and the other as peaceful when one is the French nation state destroying the European balance of power and rolling over Prussia and Austria and the other is the German nation state destroying the European balance of power and rolling over France and Austria is nonsensical. It's an absurd line to draw when the issue is the balance of power being overturned by the rise of the new nation states, especially if the core of your argument is not that there weren't a series of wars that fundamentally changed Europe but rather than the wars were won so decisively that they didn't take very long.
Total years spent at war is a very, very stupid thing to build a case for stability on, especially in a century of extremely dramatic change. There was no issue in 1914 that hadn't been present in 1870, it was simply that in 1870 the German army was able to achieve a quick and decisive victory. The struggles were fundamentally the same across the 18th and 19th C, and indeed the first half of the 20th C, and were only really resolved by the sidelining of the issue by two new superpowers and the subsequent creation of the EU.