Ulrich Beck, German Europe, translated from the German by Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, England, and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press, 2013) ("everyone knows what that risk is but to utter it is to violate a taboo. That fact is that Europe has become German. Nobody intended this to happen, but, in the light of the possible collapse of the euro, Germany has 'slipped' into the role of the decisive political power in Europe. Timothy Garton Ash summed up the situation in February 2012. 'In 1953 the novelist Thomas Mann appealed to an audience of students in Hamburg to strive for "not a German Europe but a European Germany." This stirring pledge was endlessly repeated at the time of German unification. Today we have a variation that few foresaw: a European Germany in a German Europe.'" Id. at vii-viii.).
R. M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven & London: Yale U. Press, 2012) ("Immediately after the Second World War, the victorious Allies carried out the largest forced population transfer--and perhaps the greatest single movement of peoples--in human history. With the assistance of the British, Soviet, and U.S. governments, millions of German-speaking civilians living in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the parts of eastern Germany assigned to Poland were driven out of their homes and deposited amid the ruins of the Reich, to fend for themselves as best they could. Millions more, who had fled the advancing Red Army in the final months of the war, were prevented from returning to their places of origin, and became lifelong exiles. Others again were forcibly removed from Yugoslavia and Romania, although the Allies had never sanctioned deportations form those countries. Altogether, the expulsion operation permanently displaced at least 12 million people, and perhaps as many as 14 million. Most of these were women and children under the age of sixteen, the smallest cohort of those affected were adult males. These expulsions were accomplished with and accompanied by great violence. Tens and possibly hundreds of thousands lost their lives through ill-treatment, starvation, and disease while detained in camps before their departure--often, like Auschwitz I, the same concentration camps used by the Germans during the Second World War. Many more perished on expulsion trains, locked in freight wagons without food, water, or heating during journeys to Germany that sometimes took weeks; or died by the roadside while being driven on foot to the borders. The death rate continued to mount in Germany itself, as homeless expellees succumbed to hypothermia, malnutrition, and other effects of their ordeal. Calculating the scale of the mortality remains a source of great controversy today, but estimates of 500,000 deaths at the lower end of the spectrum, and as many as 1.5 million at the highest, are consistent with the evidence as it exists at present. Much more research will have to be carried out before the range can be narrowed to a figure that can be cited with reasonable confidence." "On the most optimistic interpretation, nonetheless, the expulsions were an immense manmade catastrophe, o a scale to put the suffering that occurred as a result of the 'ethinic cleansings' in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s in the shade. They took place without any attempt at concealment, under the eyes of tens of thousands of journalists, diplomats, relief workers, and other observers with access to modern communications, in the middle of the world's most crowd continent. Yet they aroused little attention at the time. ..." Id, at 1-2. "Probably the most damaging consequences of the expulsions, though, were the aspects that could not be quantified. In each of the expelling countries, the removal of the Germans had made necessary the suspension of any concept of human rights and the rule of law. Arbitrary decrees had proclaimed entire categories of people top be, as a group of American critics put it, 'men without the Rights of Man.' By administrative fiat, individuals were deprived of property, bodily integrity, liberty, and life itself. The exercise of 'surplus cruelty' in the accomplishment of the goal of national cleansing--even against the most helpless or unresisting of victims--was deemed a positive good, a demonstration of patriotic commitment, or a necessary catharsis. Knowledge if these abuses was concealed or denied, not just by the state but by ordinary citizens,,who in this way assume a degree of complicity, however remote, in what was being done in their names. The culture of the lie, as a means of assuaging or deadening individual consciences no less than as an instrument of official policy, was allowed to prevail. And even after the supposed defeat of the totalitarian heresy epitomized by the Nazis, entire societies continued to be reinforced in the belief that immensely complex political and social problems, developed over centuries, could be banished at a stroke by the adoption of radial solutions involving massive amounts of violence. The supposition that all these things could be directed against a single group of perceived enemies and them never again resorted to for any other purpose, that afterwards it would be possible to return to a peaceful ordered existence in which individual rights would once more be upheld and respected, would prove to be the mot delusional aspect of the entire tragic episode." Id. at 227-228. Please read this book! It rips the mask off our faces and exposes our potential for rationalizing our evilness.).
Brendan Simms, Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 2013) ("This book shows that the principal security issues faced by Europeans have remained remarkably constant over the centuries. The concepts, if not the language, of encirclement, buffers, balancing, failed states and pre-emption; the dream of empire and the quest for security; the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balances; the balance between liberty and authority; the tension between consultation and efficiency; the connection between foreign and domestic policy; the tension between ideology and reason of state; the phenomena of popular hubris and national performance anxiety; the clash of civilizations, and the growth of toleration--all those themes have preoccupied statesmen and world leaders (insofar as these were not one and the same) from the mid fifteenth century to the present. This book, in short, is about the immediacy of the past." Id. at xxvii-xxviii. "This book began with the call to rally 'Christendom' in the mid fifteenth century as it struggles to meet the Ottoman challenge. It argues that Europeans have only ever experienced that unity in the face of an external or internal threat, for example against Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler or Stalin. It follows that only a major external threat will unite Europeans today. Will this take the form of a confrontation with Mr. Putin's Russia, perhaps over the Baltic states, Belarus or Ukraine? Will it be a showdown with the Islamist caliphate in the Middle East or on the 'home front' of western societies? Or will it be with China as it expands into areas of vital interest to Europe and becomes an ever more severe ideological challenge? Will the Union meet thee threats by expanding east and south until it hits natural geographical or impermeable political borders. Will the 'lands between', in Ukraine and Belarus, be absorbed to end instability and pre-empt their subversion by Moscow. Above all, will the European Union become a more cohesive international actor, particularly in the military sphere. Will its army and navy serve as the 'school of the Untion'? Or will Europeans duck these challenges, retreat into themselves and even split apart? If that happens, history will judge the European Union an expensive youthful prank which the continent played in its dotage, marking the completion rather than the starting point of a great-power project." Id. at 533-534. Well worth the read!).
