David Priestland is worried. Towards the end of his recently published book Merchant, Soldier, Sage, he warns:
‘[The crash of] 2008 has set the world on a course towards potential conflict, and the domestic and international forces that brought us the violence of the 1930s and 1940s are with us today – albeit still in embryonic form.’
It is fashionable, especially in heavily indebted Europe, to compare the uncertainties of the present with those of the 1930s. The Second World War is passing out of living memory and entering popular historical consciousness. Angela Merkel appeals to this when she warns that only the European project can guarantee peace; and Greek protesters who equate her with the Nazis assert the opposite view.
Priestland, an Oxford history don specialising in communism, asks how history might guide us through this precarious moment. The question, ‘What does history teach us?’, demands that we understand which forces impel historical change.
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