Second Thirty Years' War

The "Second Thirty Years' War" is a disputed periodization sometimes used by historians to encompass the wars in Europe from 1914 to 1945. It is used to emphasize the period as a whole.

Just as the Thirty Years' War (1618–48) was not a single war but a series of conflicts in varied times and locations, later organized and named by historians into a single period, the Second Thirty Years' War has been seen as a "European Civil War" fought over the problem of Germany exacerbated by new ideologies such as communism, fascism and nazism.

The concept of a "second Thirty Years War" originated in 1946 with former head of French Government Charles de Gaulle speech in Bar-le-Duc (28 July 1946) evoking "the drama of the thirty years war, we just won", for him the First World War and the Second World War were a single conflict, the Interwar period being just a mere truce. It was echoed, among others, by Sigmund Neumann in his book The Future in Perspective (1946). In 1948 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave the idea a boost when, in the first paragraph of the Preface to The Gathering Storm (1948), he says his books will "cover an account of another Thirty Years War".

Major European conflicts during this period include Balkan Wars (1912–13), World War I (1914–18), Russian Civil War (1917–23), Ukrainian–Soviet War (1917–21), Polish–Soviet War (1919–21), Spanish Civil War (1936–39) and World War II (1939–45).

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