ABSTRACT
The actuality or the threat of war was by far the most important influence on international relations in the twentieth century. Its outcomes reshaped societies and enforced regime changes, added and deleted states to and from the geopolitical map, and accelerated the long process of global decolonization. Warfare, its memories, legends and consequences of all kinds, virtually defined the European experience in the century. Two total wars dominated the first fifty years, while the threat of a potentially total nuclear war overhung, even dominated, all but ten of the second.
