Second World War, The
put together. Rather, it entails a sometimes minimal,
sometimes substantial reorganization of the whole
variety, where the balance of the various factors
approaches the balance characteristic of the target
language successively.
(c) Learner varieties are not imperfect imitations of
a ‘real language’ (the target language), but systems in
their own right. They are characterized by a particular
lexical repertoire and by a particular interaction of
structural principles. Fully developed languages, such
as Spanish, Chinese or Russian, are only special cases
of learner varieties. They represent a relatively stable
state of language acquisition—that state where
learners stop learning because there is no difference
between their variety and the variety of their social
environment, from which they get input.
Thus, the process of language acquisition is not to
be characterized in terms of errors and deviations, but
in terms of the twofold systematicity which it exhibits:
the inherent systematicity of a learner variety at a
given time, and the way in which such a learner variety
evolves into another one. If we want to understand the
acquisitional process, we must try to uncover this two
fold systematicity, rather than look at how and why a
learner misses the target.
See also: First Language Acquisition: Cross-linguistic;
Foreign Language Teaching and Learning; Language
Acquisition; Language Development, Neural Basis of
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Birdsong D (ed.) 1999 Second Language Acquisition and the
Critical Period Hypothesis. Erlbaum, Mahwah, NJ
Braidi S M 1999 The Acquisition of Second Language Syntax.
Arnold, London
Corder P 1981 Error Analysis and Interlanguage. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, UK
Dietrich R, Klein W, Noyau C 1995 Temporality in a Second
Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam
Ellis R 1994 The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford
University Press, Oxford, UK
Epstein S, Flynn S, Martohardjono G 1997 Second language
acquisition. Theoretical and experimental issues in contem-
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the Second Language. Benjamins, Amsterdam
Klein W 1986 Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, Cambridge, UK
Klein W, Perdue C 1997 The basic variety, or couldn’t natural
languages be much simpler? Second Language Research 13:
301–47
Lenneberg E 1967 Biological Foundations of Language. Wiley,
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Mitchell R, Myles F 1998 Second Language Learning Theories.
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(Temporality in second language). De Gruyter, Berlin
W. Klein
Second World War, The
1. The Second World War: A Narrati
e
World War II was an event of massive significance.
For at least fifty years after its end in 1945 it continued
to condition societies and ideas throughout the world.
Much of the politics of the second half of the twentieth
century can be read as occurring in an ‘after-war’
context. The war exacted a death toll of at least 60
million, and probably tens of millions more than that
(figures for China and the rest of Asia are mere guesses
and the USSR’s sacrifice has risen from seven to 20 to
29 or more million as time has passed, circumstances
varied, and the requirements of history altered). A
majority of the casualties were civilians, a drastic
change from World War I when some 90 percent of
deaths were still occasioned at the fronts. Moreover,
the invention of the atom bomb during the war and its
deployment by the USA at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
(August 6 and 9, 1945) suggested that, in any future
nuclear conflict, civilians would compose 90 percent or
more of the victims. When this apparent knowledge
was added to the revelations of Nazi German bar-
barism on the eastern front and the Nazis’ massacre of
European Jewry, either in pit killings or when de-
liberately transported to such death camps as
Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno,
Belzec, and Majdanek, another casualty of the war
seemed to be optimism itself. Certainly at ‘Auschwitz’
and perhaps at Hiroshima, ‘civilization,’ the mod-
ernity of the Enlightenment, the belief in the per-
fectibility of humankind, had led not to hope and life
but instead to degradation and death.
This more or less open fearfulness, with its auto-
matic resultant linking of a pessimism of the intellect
to any optimism of the will among postwar social
reformers, may be the grandest generalization that can
be made about the meaning of World War II. Big
history, however, should not lose sight of micro-
history. Actually World War II was fought on many
fronts, at different times, for different reasons, and
with different effects. In this sense, there was a
multiplicity of World War II’s.
In September 1939, a war broke out between Nazi
Germany and authoritarian Poland. The liberal demo-
cratic leadership of Britain and France intervened
13771
Second World War, The
saying that they would defend Poland, although in
practice they made do with ‘phoney war’ until the Nazi
forces took the military initiative, first in Denmark
and Norway, and then in the Low Countries and
France in April–May 1940. In June 1940, Fascist Italy
entered the war as had been envisaged in the ‘Pact of
Steel’ signed with its Nazi ally in May 1939. War now
spread to the Italian empire in North and East Africa
and, from October 1940, to the Balkans. Italian forces
botched what they had hoped would be a successful
Blitzkrieg against Greece and the effect over the next
year was to bring most of the other Balkan states into
the conflict. Often these fragile states dissolved into
multiple civil wars, the most complicated and the one
of most lasting significance began in Yugoslavia from
March–April 1941.
On June 22, 1941, the Nazi Germans invaded the
Soviet Union, commencing what was, in some eyes,
the ‘real’ World War II, and certainly the one that was
inspired by the most direct ideological impulse and
which unleashed the most horrendous brutality. In the
course of the campaign in the east it is estimated that
the Germans sacked 1,710 towns and 70,000 villages.
During the epic siege of Leningrad from 1941 to 1944,
a million or so of the city’s inhabitants starved to
death. In their invasion, the Germans were joined by
an assortment of anticommunist allies and friends,
including military forces from authoritarian Romania
and Fascist Italy. Many Lithuanians, Latvians, and
Estonians, and quite a few anti-Soviet elements within
the USSR (Ukrainian nationalists, people from the
Caucasus, and others) acted an auxiliaries of Nazi
power. The Nazis were even embarrassed by a
‘Russian’ army under General A. A. Vlasov, willing to
fight on their side against Stalin and his system.
Volunteers also came from pro-fascist circles in
France, and from Spain and Portugal, states ruled by
clerical and reactionary dictators who hated com-
munists but were not fully reconciled to the radical
thrust of much Nazi-fascist rhetoric and some Nazi-
fascist policy.
On December 7, 1941, the war widened again when
the Japanese airforce attacked the American Pacific
fleet at anchor at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In the
following weeks, the Japanese army and navy thrust
south and east, dislodging the British from Singapore
by January 15, 1942. They went on to seize the
Philippines and Dutch East Indies (later Indonesia)
and were in striking distance of Australia before being
checked at the Battle of the Coral Sea in June 1942.
They simultaneously continued the terrible campaign
that they had been waging in China since 1937 (or
rather since 1931, when they had attacked Manchukuo
or Manchuria). In their special wars, the militarist
Japanese leadership tried to throw off what they called
the imperialist yoke of US capitalism and the older
‘white’ metropolitan empires. The purity of their anti-
imperial motives was damaged, however, by their own
commitment to empire and by their merciless killing of
13772
Asians. Moreover, as in Europe, their invasions often
touched off varieties of civil war provoked by the
highly complex stratification of society in the region.
At the forefront of such campaigns were often local
nationalists who imagined communities subservient
neither to European powers nor the Japanese.
On December 11, 1941, Germany and Italy, loyal to
the terms of the anti-Comintern pact, had also
declared war on the USA, somewhat ironically so,
given that Japan, checked by military defeats in an
unofficial war against the USSR at Khalkin Gol and
Nomonhan in 1938–9, had now engaged with other
enemies. The Italians would find out the implications
in North Africa, the Germans after the Allied invasion
of France on ‘D-Day’ (June 6, 1944), as well as in Italy
from September 8, 1943 (the Fascist dictator, Benito
Mussolini, overthrown on July 25, was thereafter
restored as a sort of German puppet in northern Italy;
allied forces moved slowly up the peninsula from the
south, liberating Rome on June 4, 1944 but only
reaching Milan at the end of the war in late April
1945). Of the participants in the war, the USA, once
fully mobilized, possessed the biggest and most pro-
ductive economy, and was therefore of crucial im-
portance in the eventual defeat of the anti-Comintern
powers. The campaign the Americans fought with the
most passion, and with an evident racism of their own,
was the war against Japan. In another sense, the USA
had a relatively soft war, not disputed on its own
territory and not requiring the sort of physical or
spiritual sacrifice obligatory from most other com-
batants. The USA’s special World War II was not
really a visceral one.
If the war was fought in many different ways, it is
equally true that the variety of conflicts did not all end
at the same time and in the same way. The Nazi armies
surrendered on May 8, 1945, the Japanese on August
15. But matters were more complicated than that.
France’s special World War II would commemorate
‘victory’ from the date of the liberation of Paris on
August 25, 1944 (and General Charles De Gaulle
would firmly proclaim that Paris and France had liber-
ated themselves). In most of Nazi-fascist occupied
Europe and in parts of Asia, partisan movements had
never altogether accepted defeat. Communists were in-
variably prominent in such resistance, even if quite a
few still envisaged themselves as fighting as much for
the Soviet revolution as for the liberty of their own
nation state. Every successive ‘liberation,’ in Europe
most frequently coming after the military victory of the
Red Army, and in the Pacific that of the USA, had its
own special character. Yugoslavia and China were two
especially complicated places where the resistance was
very strong but where it was contested, not only by the
Nazi-fascists and the Japanese but also by local anti-
communist and nationalist or particularist forces. The
effects and memory of their wars were by definition
to be very different from such societies as the USA,
Australia, and the UK which did not endure foreign

occupation, though the last, with its severe experience
of bombing, was itself different from the other two.
In sum, World War II was not just an enormously
influential event but also an extraordinarily com-
plicated one. Its complexity has in turn stimulated
many passionate and long-lasting debates about its
historical meaning.
2. The Causes of War
For many years it was customary to argue that World
War II as compared to World War I had a simple
cause. This was ‘Hitler’s war.’ Mainstream analysis
continues to ascribe to the Nazi dictator great re-
sponsibility for the invasion of Poland and for the
spreading of the war thereafter, and especially for the
launching of Operation Barbarossa against the USSR.
Nonetheless, from the 1960s, the course of histori-
ography, especially as exemplified in the rise of social
history, did not favor a ‘Great Man’ view of the past
and tended to urge that even dictators had limits to
their free will. As early as 1964, English radical
historian A. J. P. Taylor (1964) argued in a book
entitled The Origins of the Second World War that the
several crises which led up to September 1939 and
what he sardonically called the ‘War for Danzig’
needed to be understood in a variety of contexts,
including the peace settlements at the end of World
War I, the course of German political and social
history, the institutionalization of the Russian rev-
olution, with its victorious but feared and paranoid
communist and then Stalinist regime, and the lights
and shadows of democratic liberalism in Western
Europe.
Taylor wrote with a flaunted stylistic brilliance and
practiced a brittle historical cleverness. He was des-
tined to be misunderstood and often gloried in the
misunderstanding. His book thus produced an enor-
mous controversy, the first of many to be sparked by
attempts to define the meaning of World War II. At
the same time, Taylor’s idiosyncrasies ensured that his
work could easily enough be dismissed by those
mainstream historians who liked to feel the weight of
their commitment to Rankean principles and to make
their liking evident.
Nonetheless the issues raised by Taylor did not go
away. In West Germany, the so-called ‘Fischer contro-
versy,’ sparked by the Hamburg liberal historian Fritz
Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht, a massively docu-
mented study of German aims during World War I
and also published in 1961, raged through the decade.
Although Fischer, then and thereafter, wrote almost
exclusively about World War I and about imperial
Germany, he was read as commenting on World War
II and, indeed, on Germany’s divided fate in its
aftermath. Two issues were prominent. Was imperial
Germany an aggressive power in a way that bore
comparison with the Nazi regime during the 1930s?
Second World War, The
Was the motive of the German leadership as much
domestic as foreign—did they seek foreign adventure
and even world war in order to divert the pressure
building for social democracy? Was the appalling
conflict from 1939 to 1945 caused by the ‘German
problem,’ which may have begun as early as 1848 and
may have continued after 1945?
Fischer’s work was more directly influential than
Taylor’s and the issue of the relationship between
Innenpolitik and Aussenpolitik fitted neatly into the
preoccupations of new social historians who, by the
1970s, were scornfully dismissing the work of ‘old
fashioned diplomatic historians.’ For all that, special-
ist works on the causation of World War II continued
to privilege the power of Hitler and acknowledge the
ideological thrust of Nazism. English independent
Marxist, Tim Mason, may have tried to pursue a
Fischerian line in asking how much the diplomatic
crises of 1938–9 were prompted by the contradictions
of Nazi economic and social policy, but his essays
remained at the periphery of most analysis. Rather
such firmly Rankean historians as Gerhard Weinberg
and Donald Watt assembled evidence which, in their
eyes, only confirmed that the war was caused by
Hitler. The newest and most authoritative English-
language biographer of the Fu$ hrer, Ian Kershaw,
despite his background in social history, does not
disagree. Hitler may have been erratic as an executive.
Nazi totalitarian state and society, contrary to its
propaganda about militant efficiency and a people
cheerfully bound into a Volksgemeinschaft, may in
practice have often been ramshackle. But the dictator,
Kershaw argued, did possess power. Indeed, so all-
embracing was his will that Germans strove to ‘work
towards’ their Fu$ hrer, to accept his ideas and im-
plement his policies before he had fully formulated
them. For a generation in the wake of the Fischer
controversy, scholarship on Nazism had separated
into ‘intentionalists’ (advocates of Great Man history)
and ‘functionalists’ (those who preferred to emphasize
the role of structures and contexts and who were
especially alert to the ‘institutional darwinism’ of the
Nazi regime). Now Kershaw, often a historian of the
golden mean, seemed to have found a way to resolve
and end that conflict.
The only major variants on this reaffirmation that
Hitler had provoked the war came from certain
conservative viewpoints. Some anticommunist his-
torians focused on the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact
(August 23, 1939), placing responsibility for the war
on ‘Stalin’ and the Russian revolution in what seemed
to others a highly tendentious effort to blame the
victim. More common was the view expressed most
succinctly by Zionist historian Lucy Dawidowicz that
the whole conflict was in essence a ‘war against the
Jews.’ In this interpretation, German nationalism,
German anticommunism, German racism towards
Slavs, Nazi repression of the socialist and communist
left, none in any sense equated with Hitlerian anti-
13773
Second World War, The
Semitism. Hitler (or, in the variant recently made
notorious by Daniel Goldhagen, the Germans) wanted
to kill Jews; that was the purpose of the Nazi regime;
that was the aim of its wars.
In other ex-combatant societies, further examples of
local focus are evident. In England, fans of appease-
ment still existed, the most prominent being John
Charmley. For him, the problem with the war lay
simply in Britain’s engagement in it. As far as the
British empire was concerned, Nazism did not need to
be fought and the USSR should never have been an
ally. Worst of all was the fact that the USA had
dominated the post war world. Charmley has never
quite said so, but implication of his work is that the
‘real’ World War II for Britain, and the one it most
dramatically lost, was implicitly fought against its
American ‘cousins.’
The Asian-Pacific conflict has similarly been subject
to historical revision. In the 1960s Gabriel Kolko and
other American ‘new leftists’ applied a Marxian model
to their nation’s foreign policy, being very critical of
the gap between its idealistic and liberal theory and its
realist and capitalist practice. They were in their turn
duly subjected to withering fire from more patriotic
and traditional historians. Nonetheless a consensus
grew that, at least in regard to the onset of the
American–Japanese war, US policy makers carried
some responsibility. By the 1980s, liberal historian
John Dower was even urging that the two rivals had
been ‘enemies of a kind,’ neither of them guiltless of
racism and brutality.
In Japan, by contrast, an officially sponsored silence
long hung over everything to do with the war. The
Ministry of Education was particularly anxious that
schoolchildren not be exposed to worrying facts about
such terrible events as the massacre in Nanking in
1937, the practice of germ warfare, the exploitation of
‘comfort women,’ and the many other examples of
Japanese murder, rape, and pillage in Asia and the
Pacific. Nonetheless, a stubborn undercurrent of
opinion exemplified in the work of historian Ienaga
Saburo continued to contest the Ministry line and, by
the 1990s, the Japanese leadership had gone further
than ever before in admitting some of the misdeeds of
its militarist predecessors. Fully critical history may
still not be especially appreciated in Tokyo. But, by the
end of the 1990s, Japan was not the only society to
behave that way in that world in which the ideology of
economic rationalism had achieved unparalleled he-
gemony backed by what American democratic his-
torian Peter Novick has called ‘bumper sticker’ lessons
from the past.
3. The Course of the War
In the preceding paragraphs it has not always been
possible to keep fully separate discussions about the
13774
coming of World War II from what happened after
hostilities commenced. In any case, military history in
the pure sense, just like diplomatic history, after 1945
soon lost ground professionally. To most eyes, the
military history of the war can swiftly enough be told.
Of the anti-Comintern states, Germany and Japan but
not Italy, won rapid initial victories, exulting in their
respective Blitzkriegs. But their triumphs were always
brittle. Germany and its allies may have been good at
getting into wars, but their ideologies made it difficult
for them thereafter to contemplate any policy except
the complete liquidation of the enemy. Hitler and the
Japanese imperial and military leadership thus made
no attempts to offer compromise from a position of
strength, and Mussolini’s occasional flirtation with the
idea always involved Nazi sacrifice in their wars,
especially that in the east, rather than Italian loss.
Nor did the anti-Comintern states make the most of
the huge territories, which they had conquered, and
the immense material resources that they therefore
controlled. Nazi Germany is something of a case study
in this regard. In the West, where the war was always
gentler, the Nazis found plenty of direct and indirect
collaborators. They were thus, for example, able to
harness a very considerable proportion of the French
economy to their cause. They also started to construct
a new economic order that was not utterly unlike some
of the developments, which would occur in Western
Europe after Nazi-fascism had been defeated. With
extraordinary contradiction for a state built on an
utter commitment to racial purity, Nazi Germany,
already before 1939, needed immigrants to staff its
economy. Once the war began, this requirement
became still more pressing. One partial solution was to
import workers by agreement with its ally Italy and by
arrangement with the friendly Vichy regime in France.
Not all such French ‘guest-workers’ came unwillingly
and not all had especially bad wars. In Germany they
joined other, more reluctant, immigrants from the
east, who were often little more than slave laborers.
Poles and Soviet prisoners of war constituted the
majority of these; at first they were frequently worked
to death. However, as the Nazi armies turned back
and the war settled into one of attrition and retreat, as
symbolized by the great defeat at Stalingrad
(November 1942–January 1943), the Germans began
to treat even laborers from the east in a way that
allowed some minimum chance of their survival and
which also permitted some tolerable productivity from
their labor.
The exception was, of course, the Jews, who, from
September–October 1941, became the objects of the
‘Final Solution,’ a devotion to murder confirmed by
officials who attended the Wannsee conference in
January 1942. In terms of fighting a war, the adoption
of the policy of extermination was, of course, counter-
productive in many senses, among which was the
economic. In staffing and fueling the trains, which
transported the Jews to the death camps, in the low

productivity of these and the other camps, the Nazis
wasted resources needed at the front. Saul Friedlander
will write elsewhere in this volume about the debates
about the meaning of the Holocaust. It is worth noting
in this segment, however, that each combatant society
has argued about its particular experience of being
visited by the Nazi war machine and therefore of being
exposed to collaboration with it. Two important
examples occurred in France and the USSR.
The spring of 1940 brought disaster to the Third
French Republic. Now was the time of what Marc
Bloch, one of the founders of the great structuralist
historical school of the Annales, a patriotic Frenchman
and a Jew, called the ‘strange defeat.’ Military his-
torians have demonstrated that France was not es-
pecially inferior in armament to the invading
Germans. Rather, France lost for reasons to do with
morale and the domestic divisions of French society.
As a result, by June 1940 the French state and empire
had collapsed. During the next four years, the in-
heritance of the Third Republic was disputed between
the Vichy regime headed by Marshal Pe! tain within the
rump of French metropolitan territories, the ‘Free
French’ under General Charles De Gaulle, resident in
London, and there, however reluctantly and chur-
lishly, dependent on Allied goodwill and finance, and
a partisan movement which gradually became more
active in the occupied zones. This last was typically
divided between communists and other forces, some of
which disliked communists as much as they hated the
invaders. The years of Axis occupation were thus also
the time of the ‘Franco-French civil war,’ with killings
and purge trials extending well beyond liberation.
The meaning of war, occupation, and liberation in
France has been much disputed after 1945. It took a
film maker, Marcel Ophuls in Le Chagrin et la pitieT
(1971), and an American historian, Robert Paxton, to
break a generation of silence about the troubling
implications of this period of national history, al-
though Socialist President Franc: ois Mitterrand
(1981–95), with his own equivocal experience of Vichy,
was scarcely an unalloyed advocate of openness during
his term in office. Historian Henry Rousso has
brilliantly examined the ‘Vichy syndrome’ and done
much to expose some of the obfuscations favored by
many different leadership groups in post-1945 French
politics. Perhaps his work does not go far enough,
however. With its fall, and then with decolonization
after 1945, France had lost its political empire,
promising to become just another European state.
However, this loss was curiously compensated by the
rise and affirmation of French culture. In almost every
area of the humanities, such French intellectuals as De
Beauvoir, Braudel, Barthes, Foucault, Le! vi-Strauss,
Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Nora, charted the way to
postmodernity. They did so sometimes invoking the
pro-Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger and almost
always without much reckoning of the collapse of the
French nation state in 1940. The intellectuals of France
Second World War, The
were much given to forgetting their nation’s fall, the
better to affirm their own rights to cultural imperium.
If France provides a case study of the transmutation
of defeat into victory, the USSR offers the reverse
example of a victor whose people would eventually
learn that ‘actually’ they had lost. The nature of the
Soviet war effort is still in need of research. Sheila
Fitzpatrick, a historian of Soviet social history, has
depicted a population by 1939 brutalized and de-
pressed by the tyranny, incompetence, and contra-
dictions of Stalinism. Her work does not really explain,
however, how that same populace fought so stub-
bornly ‘for the motherland, for Stalin.’ No doubt the
absurd murderousness of Nazi policies gave them little
alternative. No doubt the aid which eventually flowed
through from the USA was of great significance. But
something does remain unexplained about how
‘Stalin’s Russia’ won its ‘Great Patriotic War.’
4. The Consequences of the War
By now very clear, however, are the consequences of
the war for the USSR. In the short term the war made
the Soviet state the second superpower, the global
rival to the USA, and gave Stalin, until his death in
1953, an almost deified status. However, as the
postwar decades passed, it became clear that the USSR
and its expanded sphere of influence in Eastern Europe
were not recovering from the war with the speed being
dramatically exemplified in Western Europe and
Japan. Indeed, the history of the USSR, at least until
Gorbachev’s accession to the party secretaryship in
1985 and, arguably, until the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the collapse of communism (1989–91), should best
be read as that of a generation who had fought and
won its wars (including the terrible domestic cam-
paigns for collectivization as well as the purges of the
1930s). Leaders and people were unwilling or unable
to move beyond that visceral experience. After 1945,
the USSR became the archetypal place ‘where old
soldiers did not die nor even fade away.’ Brezhnev,
Chernenko, and their many imitators further down
the power structure were frozen into a past that had an
ever-diminishing connection with a world facing a new
technological and economic revolution.
Other ex-combatant societies were more open to
change than the USSR but a certain sort of re-
membering and a certain sort of forgetting can readily
enough be located in them, too. Memory proved most
threatening in Yugoslavia. There the victorious par-
tisans under Josip Broz Tito seemed for a time to have
won a worthwhile victory. The special history of their
campaigns against the Nazi-fascist occupiers of their
country allowed them claims to independence from
the USSR, which they duly exercised after 1948. At the
same time the barbarity, during the war, of the
collaborationist Croat fascist regime under Ante
13775
Second World War, The
Pavelic! , whose savagery embarrassed even the
Germans, seemed to suggest that the region was indeed
best administered by a unitary state. The fall of
communism, however, also brought down a com-
munist Yugoslavia in which such Serb leaders as
Slobodan Milosevic, unable to believe in official ideals,
increasingly recalled the nationalism of wartime
Cetniks rather than the internationalist Marxism once
espoused by the partisans. This memory of war and
murder justified new wars and new murders, even if
with the somewhat ironical result that, by the end of
the 1990s, the (Serb) winners of the last war had
become losers and the (Slovene, Croat, Bosnian
Moslem, and Kosovar) losers had become winners.
In Italy, the country with the largest communist
party in the West and a polity which had a ‘border
idiosyncrasy,’ bearing some comparison with Yugo-
slavia’s role in the Eastern Bloc, the inheritance of war
and fascism similarly possessed peculiar features.
Postwar Italy began by renouncing fascism, empire,
and war, in 1946 abandoning the monarchy that had
tolerated the imposition of Mussolini’s dictatorship
and, in 1947, adopting a constitution which made
considerable claim that the new Republic would be
based on labor. In practice, however, Italy took its
place in the Cold War West. Its purging of ex-Fascists
was soon abandoned and both the power elites and the
legislative base of the new regime exhibited much
continuity with their Fascist predecessors. None-
theless, from the 1960s, an ideology of antifascism was
accorded more prominence in a liberalizing society.
From 1978 to 1985, Sandro Pertini, an independent
socialist who had spent many years in a Fascist jail and
been personally involved in the decision to execute
Mussolini, became Italy’s president. Widely popular,
he seemed an embodiment of the national rejection of
the Fascist past.
Once again, however, the process of memory was
taking a turn and a different useable past was
beginning to emerge. Left terrorists in the 1970s had
called themselves the new Resistance and declared that
they were fighting a Fascist-style state—the governing
Christian Democrats were thought to be merely a
mask behind which lurked the Fascist beast. The
murder of Aldo Moro in 1978 drove Italians decisively
away from this sort of rhetoric and, in the 1980s and
1990s, Italians sought instead a ‘pacification’ with the
past in which ex-Fascists had as much right to be
heard as ex-partisans. Among historians, ‘anti-anti-
Fascists,’ led by Renzo De Felice, the biographer of
Mussolini, provided evidence and moral justification
for this cause. Media magnate and conservative
politician Silvio Berlusconi joined those who agreed
that Italy’s World War II had lost its ethical charge.
Among the Western European ex-combatants states
perhaps the UK was the place where the official myth
of the war survived with least challenge. A vast range
of British society and behavior was influenced by
Britain’s war. The Welfare State, as codified by the
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postwar Labor government under Clement Attlee,
was explained and justified as a reward for the effort of
the British people in the ‘people’s war.’ Wartime
conservative Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, de-
spite his many evident limitations, remained a national
icon. British comedies from the Goons in the 1950s to
Dad’s Army in the 1970s and 1980s to Goodnight
Sweetheart in the 1990s were obsessively set in the war.
From the alleged acuteness of their secret service
activities to the alleged idealism of their rejection of
Nazism, the British have constantly sought to preserve
the lion’s share of the positives of World War II for
themselves. The suspicion of a common European
currency and the many other examples of continuing
British insularity in turn reflect the British cherishing
of the fact that they fought alone against the Nazi-
fascists from 1940 to 1941, and express their associated
annoyed perplexity that somehow their wartime sacri-
fice entailed a slower route to postwar prosperity
compared with that of their continental neighbors.
Memory after memory, history after history, World
War IIs, in their appalling plenitude, still eddy around.
As the millennium ended, another historian wrote a
major book about the meaning of an aspect of the war,
and about the construction of that meaning. Peter
Novick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999)
daringly wondered whether the privileging of the Nazi
killing of the Jews in contemporary Jewish and even
gentile American discourse is altogether a positive.
Being a historical victim at one time in the past, he
argued cogently, can obscure as well as explain. His
caution is timely. It is probably good that World War
IIs are with us still; it will be better if the interpretation
of so many drastic events can still occasion democratic
debate, courteous, passionate, and humble debate,
and if we can therefore avoid possessing a final
solution to its many problems.
See also: Cold War, The; Contemporary History; First
World War, The; Genocide: Historical Aspects; Holo-
caust, The; International Relations, History of; Mili-
tary History; War: Anthropological Aspects; War:
Causes and Patterns; War Crimes Tribunals; War,
Sociology of; Warfare in History
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R. J. B. Bosworth
Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.
All rights reserved.
Secondary Analysis: Methodology
Secondary analysis refers to a set of research practices
that involve utilizing data collected by someone else or
data that has been collected for another purpose (e.g.,
administrative records). It is used, to varying degrees,
across a wide range of disciplines and throughout the
world. Given this breadth, it is not surprising that it
has taken on numerous forms. It is also conducted for
several distinct reasons. Although not a research
methodology, per se, several features distinguish it
from other research activities. In turn, these features
create opportunities and limitations for the secondary
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
Secondary Analysis: Methodology
analyst. Central issues concern: (a) data availability,
access, and documentation; (b) maintaining confiden-
tiality and privacy pledges made by primary
researchers; and (c) proprietary rights and data own-
ership.
1. Secondary Analysis as a ‘Methodology’
The use of secondary data in behavioral and social
sciences is ubiquitous, appearing in a number of
traditional (i.e., quantitative) and untraditional (i.e.,
qualitative) forms. Despite its rather extended roots in
the social and behavioral sciences, it is not widely
celebrated as a method. As partial evidence of its
relative obscurity, consider the fact that between 1978
and the present, a search of PsychInfo uncovered only
36 articles and books using the keyword ‘secondary
analysis.’ Furthermore, the phrase ‘secondary analy-
sis’ appeared in fewer than half of the article or book
titles. Books on the topic are also relatively scarce;
fewer than a dozen were uncovered through the same
search (e.g., Boruch et al. 1981, Elder et al. 1993,
Hyman 1972, Stewart 1984).
Ironically, the apparent obscurity of secondary
analysis as a methodology is due to its pervasiveness.
That is, the use of secondary data sources is so
commonplace in many fields (e.g., economics, edu-
cation, and sociology) that there is little need in calling
attention to it as a separable methodology. This makes
sense because unlike ethnography, survey research, or
quasi-experimentation which each have distinctive
methodological procedures and practices, secondary
analysis does not involve a new or different set of
tactics. Even from a statistical point of view, there is
little to distinguish it from primary analysis, and
most of the measurement, design, and statistical issues
facing the secondary analyst are largely the same as
those faced by a primary analyst. The obvious ex-
ception is that the secondary analyst is constrained by
scope and nature of the design (e.g., the sample,
sample sizes, attrition, missing data, measures, and
research design) inasmuch as these have been specified
by someone else (McCall and Appelbaum 1991). As
such, secondary analysis boils down to a data resource,
not a methodology, per se. However, the use of
secondary data—especially when micro data records
are used—does involve a unique set of logistical,
ethical and practical considerations.
2. Varieties of Secondary Analysis
Because primary data can assume a number of forms
(e.g., data based on cross-sectional surveys, admin-
istrative records, panel surveys, observations), sec-
ondary analysis has taken on a variety of forms. Two
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ISBN: 0-08-043076-7