ABSTRACT
In 1914 the Central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary embarked on a brutal war with the Western powers of Britain and France and the Eastern power of Russia. All five states proclaimed that they were fighting for the sake of civilization, and thought their cause just. At the beginning of the 1890s, when the autocratic and backward Tsarist Empire seemed separated from parliamentary Britain and republican France by a set of opposing values and interests, few would have predicted such a scenario. Yet, in the summer of 1914, ‘East’ and ‘West’ united to align themselves against the ‘Centre’. By then, these three terms, which give shape to the present chapter
concerning the governance of Europe’s leading regimes, were the principal coordinates used in discourse about its political geography. They continued to be applied until the mid-twentieth century, when a bipolar system emerged out of the catastrophe of World War Two. Historically, it was the West that had initiated the process of modernization and industrialization, thus serving as model for the whole continent. This was also where the idea of the nation-state was born and put into practice, linking nationality to state territory with the goal of promoting national integration. The idea of the nation-state was diametrically opposed to the geopolitical realities of the Centre and the East, where there existed the multinational Habsburg and Romanov empires. TheWest was also the cradle of economic progress and of liberal political ideologies, as epitomized by the parliamentary monarchies of Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden and Norway (since 1905 no longer in personal union with Sweden), and by the parliamentary republics of France and Switzerland. In these states, the executive was answerable to an elected body, which alone made the laws. In the Centre and East, there was a more complex picture. Although Germany, Austria-Hungary and eventually Russia possessed parliaments, these states essentially exhibited authoritarian, semi-absolutist, or even autocratic forms of governance.
