Review

Sally Marks' work is a survey of European and world diplomatic relations between 1914 and 1945. The book is divided into five parts. The first part surveys World War I and the Russian Revolution, including pre-war diplomacy and the course of the war and revolution. The second part narrates the Versailles conference and the treaty it produced. Part three is a country-by-country look at the diplomatic actions of all the non-European countries of the world in the period in question. The last two parts cover the European crisis of the 1930s and the course of the Second World War. Finally, there is with an epilogue on the post-war world.	1
The book is written at an undergraduate level, albeit an advanced one. Marks occasionally uses somewhat esoteric terms such as "irredentism" without explanation, but on the whole the book reads smoothly, and is free of jargon. She also does a good job of offering a basic primer on the terms and methods of international diplomacy in a prologue. However, there are many times that she assumes a fairly advanced knowledge of geography, government structures, historical events or even political parties on the reader's part. The book's main strength lies in the fact that it offers a quite coherent and accessible narrative of Europe's fall from world domination and the ways that national competition and shortsighted leadership contributed to this result. Marks is particularly adept at explaining strategy and thought-processes in diplomatic maneuvering. The middle section of country-by-country summary is impressively encyclopedic, and occasionally intriguing because it offers a kaleidoscopic survey of competing aspirations and strategies of a multitude of minor, and often overlooked, players in world diplomacy.	2
In spite of these strengths, the book has several weaknesses. While Marks is excellent at description, she offers little analysis of why events took the course they did, other than the implicit explanation of human miscalculation. This is perhaps unavoidable, since the reasons for Europe's decline ultimately lie not in diplomacy alone. Marks, of course, could not have included detailed studies of Europe's economic, social, cultural, military and political crises, but her focus on diplomacy often leaves the impression that Europe's weakness was simply inexplicable, or at least unexplained. This impression is reinforced by the fact that, with a few exceptions like the coverage of Japan and the United States, Marks offers little evidence of an awareness of how cultural differences, values, and worldviews influence national behaviors and diplomatic goals. A further weakness of the book lies in its structure. The sections on Europe's diplomacy in the world wars form a fluid and coherent whole, but the middle section on the rest of the world often seems completely unconnected to the European chapters. The sections on minor countries are frequently so short—a page or two to cover a particular nation over the entire period—that the reader is left floating on a sea of disjointed diplomatic maneuvers and treaties with little structure. Most importantly, this section often fails to offer any evident connection between the actions of the rest of the world—outside of the United States—and Europe's decline.	3
The final weakness is somewhat disturbing. Marks is quite persistent in borrowing the European imperialist metaphor of colonies and new nations as children "maturing" into "adult" states under the tutelage of European "parents." While this metaphor is to a certain extent unavoidable, given the widespread use of it in European thinking, Marks seems to embrace it with relish and returns to it often in extended metaphorical analyses of American adolescent behavior, or African "immaturity." This is exacerbated in a few places when Marks makes the metaphor gender specific, with powerful nations as masculine adults, and Holland, for instance, portrayed as a weak old woman. Overall, these metaphorical turns give the troubling impression that Marks shares the fundamental condescension of European colonial powers to the rest of the world's people, or at least that she sees a single path of "maturation" for national cultures based on the European model.	4
In the end, this book is well written and often fascinating, but it is far too Eurocentric for use in a world history course, and too disjointed and global for use as a text in a European course. Hence, while I might consider using parts of it in upper level college courses in either European or world history, I think it might be most useful for instructor preparation, or as a resource for advanced undergraduates working on diplomatic history.	5
Northland College, Ashland, Wisconsin Paul Schue

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