The threat of a civil war in Europe

The term "European civil war" is part of a historiographic current that understands the period between the two world conflagrations (causing more than one hundred million dead) as part of the same conflict, a single event with continuity and common causes. One of the historians who seems to agree with that analysis is Paul Preston, who has come to assure that "the collective consequence was that, between 1914 and 1945, the energies of Europe wer…