As part of our current theme on extremism and violence, SEN Journal: Online Exclusives is thrilled to present an original article by Dr. Bill Kissane. He has recently edited a new book, entitled Reconstructing National Identity after Europe’s Internal Wars, 1918-2011, which is forthcoming.

There are many words that creep into the social science vocabulary from the real world without sufficient critical analysis. One of these is  ‘reconstruction’. Commonly used with reference to places, events, and objects of art, its place within the social science lexicon is very specific. It denotes  large-scale projects of social and political engineering after the experience of war and/or natural disaster, events that are of such magnitude that either the state or international organisations play a major role in restoring the status quo ante. The first such experiment was of course the Reconstruction era following the American Civil  War. Yet the importance of such episodes in contemporary European history has been so marked that one recent study of democratic theory in the twentieth century summarised (and praised) the era of ‘Reconstruction Thought’  that followed the Second World  War [1]. As opposed to the ideological zeal of the 1920s and 1930s, in this period radical visions of mass politics were tempered by the experience of disaster and war between 1939 and 1945. Reconstruction, like much else, comes ‘after the fall’.

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