rwar period was a mere truce is largely a matter of arguing from hindsight. "In the late 1920s, it appeared to contemporaries in Western Europe that peace was at length returning to the troubled Continent." The Locarno agreement of 1925 seemed to place the peace of western Europe on a firmer base than the Versailles accord, the defects of which were by that time widely recognized. Internal stability was returning as well, with a subsiding of the revolutionary threat that had hung over Europe after 1917.
But if the Second World War was not simply a delayed conclusion to the First, then a separate origin must be found for it. Theories of a separate origin fall broadly into the "Hitler's War" category. While Bell critiques this theory in its simplest form--that all events were driven by Hitler's grand timetable--he is at pains to draw forth a fundamental respect in which the Second World War differed from its predecessor: ideology. Although ideological differences had existed in 1914 between, say, liberal England and France and conse
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