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Georgia, where his mother’s peasant family had settled in the nineteenth century. Rudolf Jung, who grew up in the German enclave of Iglau/Jihlava in Bohemia, was only one of many Germans from the borderlands to attain high rank in the SS. Significantly, Breslau/Wrocław in Upper Silesia was one of those places where local Nazis campaigned most overtly for legislation against miscegenation in 1935. Austrians and Sudeten Germans supplied a disproportionate number of anti-Semitic contributions to the newspaper
Der Stürmer.
At least two of the small group of SS officers who ran the Bełżec death camp were so-called ‘ethnic Germans’ from the Baltic and Bohemia.
    Yet Central and Eastern Europe was only the most lethal of the‘killing spaces’ of the twentieth century. As will become clear, there were other parts of the world that shared some of its key characteristics: a multi-ethnic population, shifting demographic balances and political fragmentation. Considered as a single region, the nearest equivalent at the other end of the Eurasian landmass was Manchuria and the Korean peninsula. In the later part of the twentieth century, for reasons explored in the epilogue to this book, the zones of intense conflict shifted – to Indo-China, Central America, the Middle East and Central Africa. But it is on the first two regions that we must focus our attention if we are fully to grasp the peculiarly explosive character of the fifty-year war of the world.
VOLATILITY AND ITS DISCONTENTS
    Why has extreme violence occurred only at certain times? The answer is that ethnic conflict is correlated with economic
volatility
. It is not enough simply to look for times of economic crisis when trying to explain social and political instability. A rapid growth in output and incomes can be just as destabilizing as a rapid contraction. A useful measure of economic conditions, too seldom referred to by historians, is volatility, by which is meant the standard deviation of the change in a given indicator over a particular period of time. Reliable estimates of gross domestic product are unfortunately available for only a few countries for the entire century. However, figures for prices and interest rates are easier to come by, and these make it possible to measure economic volatility with some degree of precision for a substantial number of countries.
    A straightforward and testable proposition is that times of high volatility were associated with socio-political stresses and strains. It is certainly suggestive that, for the seven major industrialized economies (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States) the volatility of both growth and prices reached its highest point between 1919 and 1939 and declined steadily in the post-Second World War period (see Figure I.3 ). Economic historians were preoccupied for a long time with the identification of economic cycles and waves of various amplitudes. They tended to overlook
    Figure I.3
Volatility: standard deviations for inflation and growth, G7 economies, 1880–2004
    changes in the frequency and amplitude of booms and busts. Yet precisely these were and remain crucial. If economic activity were as regular as the seasons, the expectations of economic actors would adjust accordingly and we would be no more surprised by spurt of growth or a crash than we are by the advent of summer and winter. But it was precisely the unpredictability of twentieth-century economic life that produced such strong shifts in what John Maynard Keynes called the ‘animal spirits’ of employers, lenders, investors, consumers and indeed government officials.
    Over the past hundred years, there have been profound changes in the structure of economic institutions and the philosophies of those who run them. Prior to 1914, the degree of freedom in the international mobility of goods, capital and labour was unprecedented and has only recently and partially been equalled. Governments wereonly