Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy from 1453 to the PresentBy Brendan SimmsBasic Books, 2013Brendan Simms’ big new book Europe comes to readers girded with fiercely impressive antecedent, the author’s fantastic 2007 volume Three Victories and a Defeat, and it also comes shadowed by one hell of a competitor, Norman Davies’ enormous 1996 book, also called Europe. The whole subject is understandably charged; the relatively small acreage of Europe, which Simms chronicles from the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453 to the medias res of the Obama administration, has played a role in world history far out of proportion to its size or location. For the 550 years covered by Simms’ ambitious and utterly engrossing door-stop, Europe called the tune to which the rest of the West – and often the rest of the world – danced. The study of how and why is endlessly magnetizing.It has the danger of also being as dull as iron filings, which adds a thrilling element of peril to the sheer size of these volumes. At 1300 pages, Davies’ book is twice as long as Simms’, and it’s a far more antic and diverse affair, full of sidebar features and the author’s customary iconoclastic posturing. There’s nothing like such entertainment in Simms’ book, which makes its shorter length a godsend but was never its intent in the first place. Simms quotes legendary U.S. statesman John Hay saying a century ago that “The storm center of the world has shifted to China … whoever understands that Empire … has a key to world politics for the next five centuries,” but Simms keeps his storm center squarely over the West, taking readers on a (believe it or not) fairly brisk tour of major events in European history. All the familiar kings and queens make their predictable procession, all the compacts are made and broken, with Simms’ narrative sharpening as it approaches the modern era. He swoops in and slows his paces when he reaches something of sordid or epic status, as when he tries to untangle the tensions of the Boer War during the Victorian era:

The hatchet with France was slowly being buried, but there were still serious differences to be ironed out over North Africa. Russia remained a huge threat, and it was against her that Britain’s first major diplomatic initiative of the new century, the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902, was directed. The main worry, however, was Germany, which had shown unconcealed sympathy for the Boers and whose naval ambitions were seen as a direct challenge to British maritime supremacy.

That direct challenge has a horrible blossoming in the First World War, which in its turn sends shockwaves through all the monarchies of Europe and the East, setting faction against faction inside nations from Ireland to the Caucasus:

Just as the ‘Austrian’ Marie Antoinette became the scapegoat for the strategic failures of her cuckolded husband, so was Nicholas’s inability to defend the true Russian national interest attributed to the machinations of a courtly clique of ‘Germans’.

Even a stand-offish reader might detect a similar note in both passages, and they’ve certainly been warned: on Simms’ first page, he hastens to bring up “the centrality of Germany as the semi-conductor linking the various parts of the European balance.” And he finds plenty of agreement from the big names in his story. A wary President Wilson notes (with of course no knowledge of what the hell he’s talking about), “German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world only because the German people … were allowed to have no opinion of their own.” Later Simms, in assuring us that the object of the Nuclear Partial Test Ban Treaty “had its origins in the containment of Germany,” quotes wily President Johnson: “The object was to keep the Germans with us and keep their finger off the trigger.”Simms follows this red brick road right up to historically immediate decades, analyzing, for example, Germany’s decision to involve itself in the conflict in Bosnia:

The government itself was anxious to become more involved in order to reduce the growing instability on its southern flank, restore the credibility of the Atlantic alliance and underline Germany’s claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council … The Bosnian War, in other words, began the re-militarization of German foreign policy.

By which point it will startle nobody when Simms concludes his long account with a thinly veiled warning: “The German Question, eclipsed for more than a decade after unification, was back.”In a scholar of Simms’ caliber (his long and detailed end-notes are a tour de force) this cannot be caprice, although it sure looks like it. On the surface, his narrative seems to want to turn those 550 years of Western history into a scene from a Pirandello play – a collection of sober burghers in tall hats, chirping back and forth to each other about corn prices, periodically interrupted by a brawny, gap-toothed gate-crasher who blunders into the room, overturns the table, knocks off the tall hats, and needs to be restrained, pleaded with, bribed, and somehow shown out of the room so the chirping can continue. But there’s more going on here; this isn’t just Germany and Europe. As in Three Victories and a Defeat, Simms is concerned here with lynchpin-factors, whatever they may be, and he has an exquisitely fine sense for them and for the forces that create them. Germany is just the loudest of such factors in Simms’ estimation, and if that estimation sometimes seems a bit nervous, a bit jumpy, well, two world wars (and six - or was it seven? - full-dress rehearsals) will do that.