It has been only two years since the start of another world crisis thought to mark a new era.
Earlier this year, a student asked me how I thought historians would characterise the period of world history he believed had just begun with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. I couldn’t resist replying: “I have no idea. I just hope they won’t be calling it the ‘prewar period’.”
Historians themselves, though, have never had a single, obvious, agreed-on way of slicing up history into distinct segments, and they quarrel endlessly about how to do so. Some speak of a “long 18th century” that stretches from 1688 to 1815 and others of a “short 18th century” that runs only from 1715 to 1789.
But at the time, most Europeans expected what became World War I to last no more than a few months and for it not to cause regime change. It was the end of the war in 1917-18, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian empires, that,Mayer, marked the clear end of one era and the start of another. A similar point could be made about the end of the Cold War in 1989-91.
Of course, historians do need ways to organise their material chronologically. The pie does need to be sliced. But premature expostulations about how a new era has started all too often amount to nothing but empty rhetorical gestures, reflecting what can only be called “Fukuyama envy”. Worse, they flatter the egos of dictators such as Vladimir Putin, who want nothing more than to be seen as world-historical figures, bending the course of human events to their superhuman will.
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