Europe's Age of Civil Wars? An Introduction

In the first half of the twentieth century, Europe experienced a wave of civil wars, unparalleled since the French Revolution, from Finland in the North and Ireland and Spain in the West to Ukraine and Russia in the East and Greece in the South. This list can easily be expanded if we include, as some historians do, the violence that occurred in many areas of occupied Europe during and after the two world wars – most notably in Poland after 1918 and in the Balkans, but also in Italy and France during the final stages of Second World War – as a form of internal war frequently induced and catalyzed by occupying external forces.