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War—which includes the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and the Cold War—like earlier epochal wars, was fought over a fundamental constitutional question: which sort of nation-state—communist, fascist, or parliamentary—would lay claim to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by the imperial state-nations of the nineteenth century
.

MCMXIV
     
    Those long uneven lines
    Standing as patiently
    As if they were stretched outside
    The Oval or Villa Park
    The crowns of hats, the sun
    On moustached archaic faces
    Grinning as if it were all
    An August Bank Holiday lark;
    And the shut shops, the bleached
    Established names on the sunblinds
,
    The farthings and sovereigns,
    And dark-clothed children at play
    Called after kings and queens,
    The tin advertisements
    For cocoa and twist; and the pubs
    Wide open all day—
    And the countryside not caring:
    The place names all hazed over
    With flowering grasses, and fields
    Shadowing Domesday lines
    Under wheat's restless silence;
    The differently-dressed servants
    With tiny rooms in huge houses,
    The dust behind limousines;
    Never such innocence,
    Never before or since,
    As changed itself to past
    Without a word—the men
    Leaving the gardens tidy
,
    The thousands of marriages,
    Lasting a little while longer;
    Never such innocence again.
     
    —Philip Larkin

CHAPTER ONE
     

     

CHAPTER TWO
     

     

The Struggle Begun: Fascism, Communism, Parliamentarianism,
1914 – 1919
     
    W E SHOULD REGARD the conflicts now commonly called the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, as well as the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, and the Cold War as a single war because all were fought over a single set of constitutional issues that were strategically unresolved until the end of the Cold War and the Peace of Paris in 1990.
    The Long War (as I shall call it) was fought to determine what kind of state would supersede the imperial states of Europe that emerged in the nineteenth century after the end of the wars of the French Revolution (a war that also appeared as a series of engagements and discrete wars until the Congress of Vienna resolved the fundamental questions at issue). These states dominated Europe and eventually the world until the collapse of the European system in 1914. The Long War was fought to determine which of three new constitutional forms would replace that system: parliamentary democracy, communism, or fascism.
    What propelled this cataclysm? What put these three particular alternatives in play? It was the instability of two states, Germany and Russia, within whose domestic societies these three options furiously contended. Once Germany and Russia were taken over by one of the radical alternatives to the parliamentary systems outside these states, Germany and the Soviet Union attempted to legitimate their regimes by making their systems the dominant arrangement in world affairs. As we shall see in Part I, the legitimacy of the constitutional order we call the nation-state depended upon its claim to better the well-being of the nation. Each of these three constitutional alternatives promised to do so best. Within every state, these alternatives contended, but it was the triumph of the radical alternatives intwo Great Powers that led to the Long War. To understand this it is necessary to begin with the German struggle to create a nation-state.

CHAPTER THREE
     

     

CHAPTER FOUR
     

     

May 24, 1980
     
I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages
,
carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters
,
lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis,
dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles
.
From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly
width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty
.
Quit the country that bore and nursed me.
Those who forgot me would make a city
.
I have waded the steppes that saw