Second Thirty Years War

When [French] Marshal Foch heard of the signing of the peace treaty of Versailles he observed with singular accuracy: "This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years."

— Winston Churchill, 1948

The Second Thirty Years' War is a historiographic concept popular among Marxists which asserts that World War I and World War II were both part of one phenomenon which lasted from 1914 to 1945 and that resembled, in many ways, the pan-European Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648. While many Marxists consider the historical Thirty Years' War to be the direct result of the growth of absolutism in 16th-century Europe, the First World War in 1914 was the culmination of a century of European and Asian imperial rivalry.

In addition, fighting between and within the great powers hardly ceased in the period between 1914 and 1939. Conflicts during the period include the Russian Civil War ending in 1923; the French occupation of the Ruhr during 1923–5; the Japanese war in China beginning in 1931; the Spanish Civil War from 1936–9; continuing political violence, labor unrest, and coup attempts in Weimar Germany; and the Irish Civil War.

The political situation of the interwar period contrasts sharply with the outcome of the Second World War, in which the Axis powers were exhausted, occupied, mandated, and even partitioned by the victors and made effective vassals of the new Western (mainly British and American) bloc. In addition, the era of capitalist great power struggle gave way into a period of collapse for the global colonial order in Africa and Asia.

See also

• Short Twentieth Century
• Interwar period