Throughout the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, Balkan bestiality has often been contrasted with "European" values. These are never clearly defined but often invoked in the company of words like "democratic" and "civilised". A century ago, British newspapers, less constrained than now by political correctness, could dismiss Balkan behaviour not just as bestial but specifically as Asiatic.
The implication reinforced time and again was that other cultures, in particular Asian and African, tolerated - indeed revelled in - a tradition of gratuitous cruelty that stretched back to Ghengis Kahn and Tamburlaine. Europeans, by contrast, had long ago overcome these primitive urges. "European" values emerged from a lineage that resonated with mighty cultural influences - Beethoven, Voltaire, Goethe, Shakespeare and back to the Renaissance.
Today, the European Union and the US, its partner in the Enlightenment, are the political embodiment of these values that seek to spread democracy and human rights through the world. There are still large parts of Europe that are clearly European in a geographical sense, but have yet to qualify for Europe in moral terms.
The European Union emerged from one of modern history's most remarkable political developments: Franco-German reconciliation. After the consolidation of this startling alliance, the West European trading bloc began to spread its largesse. Cosseted by financial and social benefits, those countries lucky enough to win admission to the club have divested themselves of painful domestic histories. Ireland, Spain and Portugal are today unrecognisable from the backward, oppressive societies of two or three decades ago. Greece, too, is now discarding ideological and nationalist division in favour of, well, "European" values.
Two recent phenomena account for the apparent permanence of these values which many West Europeans now take for granted. First, western and central Europe has not witnessed war for over half a century, a dramatic break in what had been an obvious pattern until 1945. Second, the Cold War and the division of Germany enabled west European and American capitalism to embark on an unprecedented expansion that, for the first time, distributed its fruits to a majority of their citizens.
Of all imaginable opiates, full stomachs and the possibility of upward social mobility have proved the most effective in the long term. From the 1960s onwards, the peoples of western Europe and the US accustomed themselves to the luxury of burgeoning wealth, expanding rights and the absence of war. Other more ignoble European traditions have been slowly dissolved in the fog that has descended on our longterm historical memory.
At the turn of this century, however, a number of historians are engaged in an admirable attempt to lift that fog. By devoting his latest book to the 1930s, Piers Brendon is the latest to join a distinguished group which includes Mark Mazower and the venerable Eric Hobsbawm. His rivetting narrative makes it crystal clear that this decade was one of the bleakest episodes in the history of the European great powers and their overseas companions, the US and Japan. The "European" values on show here are very different from the EU's gospel of compassionate community sung to Beethoven's rousing Enlightenment melody, Ode to Joy.
The period has often been dismissed as a mere breathing space between the first and second World Wars. But Brendon's broad, yet detailed, examination of the decade highlights the monumental destruction wrought by a set of values that have since been largely forgotten. This code included greed, wild ambition, and a philistinism so profound that it sought to appropriate great culture to justify the most inhumane of actions.
Nazism, Stalinism and Japanese militarism represent the dystopian climax of the decade. But Brendon, quite correctly, seeks their origin elsewhere. In the early part of his book he examines the consequences of the Paris Peace Conference, one of the most disastrous diplomatic circuses of all time. The totalitarian regimes in Italy, Germany and Japan were all able to exploit perceived and real injustices perpetrated in Paris in order to defeat their democratic opponents. Indeed, the very birth of fascism in Europe, the theatrical administration of Gabrielle D'Annunzio in the Croatian port of Rijeka/Fiume in the autumn of 1919, was a direct result of the incompetence and indolence of Britain, France and the US in Paris.
The vengeance meted out to Germany on France's insistence at Paris was not, however, sufficient to destroy the delicate Weimar Republic and spawn Nazism. Probably the single most important event in triggering the genocidal mania of the second World War was the Wall Street Crash of October 1929. Again Brendon is right on the mark here. This event came closer than anything to obliterating liberal capitalism, including in its heartlands of the United States, Britain and France.
Germany fell prey to Hitlerism with relative ease (although Brendon dismisses by implication the powerful arguments of German historians like Karl Dietrich Bracher that Hitler was compelled to resort to a coup d'etat in order to seize power). Japan's military lobby grasped the total confusion in which America and Europe found themselves in the early 1930s to grab Manchuria.
Brendon takes us on a Grand Tour of world politics, leaping with an easy confidence from Japan to America, from Italy to Germany, and from Britain to France. Stalin's Russia stands grimly as the sole alternative to capitalism, but one which hardly offered alternative values to the heartless regimes of its competitors. The most entertaining parts of this highly readable book deal with the groggy attempts by the British, American and French elites to hang on to their traditions of supremacy as the rest of the world sank into the despair of threatening dictatorship.
The book begins with an introduction that protests too much. "Mine is a landscape with figures," the author advises (although he could comfortably have said "men", because women only appear as mistresses or movie stars), "a peopled panorama limned in microscopic particulars." His introduction grates by managing to be both self-seeking and defensive at the same time. In the text proper, some of the details of his historical characters were unnecessary. This long book could have been shortened with judicious editing. It includes errors of fact (Linz and Tiflis, for Hitler's and Stalin's home towns, should read Branau and Gori) but these are insignificant given the narrative sweep.
When Brendon succeeds in blending his portraits of individuals with the fate of the miserable peoples under their rule, his writing is breathtaking. The Spanish Civil War is the crucial experience around which his decade revolves. Here fascism, appeasement and Stalinism come together in an orgy of immorality. "Whether the inhabitants prayed or screamed, fled or cowered," he writes about Guernica, "they were pursued by flights of fighters which `like flashing dancing waves on shingle', machine-gunned them from as low as 200 feet. These mechanical harpies also attacked surrounding farmsteads, which burned `like little candles in the hills'. From the hills, said one witness, it was like `having a preview of the end of the world' ".
This is a salutary book. The European values of tolerance and compassion only made it through the 20th century by the skin of their teeth, and never did they look more vulnerable than in the 1930s. Despite occasional stylistic blips, The Dark Valley explains why - with a page-turning panache that should be treasured by the academic and general reader alike.
Misha Glenny's most recent book The Balkans 1904-1999: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers is published by Granta Books