The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II.

• Author: Holm, Michael

Jonathan Haslam. The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II. Princeton University Press, 2021. Hardcover, $ 35.00. Paperback, $ 27.95.

A hallmark of the historian's academic upbringing involves a constant tug-and-pull between agreement and disagreement with existing historiography. Each of us can look back at those encounters with scholarship during our graduate training that pushed us to question convention. In fact, even if we do not agree with every argument or interpretation, it is often the books that challenge norms or force a reckoning with standard explanations that leave the greatest imprint on our intellectual progress. Historian Jonathan Haslam's The Spectre of War is such a book. Haslam, formerly of the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and a Professor Emeritus from Cambridge University, provocatively invites a reexamination of the failure to halt the rise of Nazism and in the process a powerful reconsideration of the causes of the Second World War.

Based on extensive research in a plethora of languages, Haslam's study is satisfying oldschool diplomatic history covering mostly European affairs during the period from the Bolshevik Revolution to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Comprehensive in scope, it explores Western European diplomatic attempts to grapple with the rise of Communism and fascism during this period. His core argument is that scholars have underestimated the fear that Bolshevism instilled in Western policymakers after 1917 and consequently, failed to properly understand the more lenient response to fascism. To fully understand the interwar period, he insists, it is necessary to recognize that the Bolshevik Revolution did not represent a normal change of political power. Rather, it birthed a political ideology that ultimately harbored the goal of destroying the nation state everywhere. Just as the French revolutionaries in 1789 represented nothing less than an existential threat to the existing political order, so too, did the Bolsheviks in 1917. This belief permeated western diplomatic perceptions of Russian policies and in many respects justified the alarm with which capitalist powers viewed Communist revolutionary activities in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Italy, and beyond during the 1920s. The Weimar Republic's feeble political and economic structures, as well as the general chaos caused by the Great War made obvious the danger of revolutions across the...