The introduction presents the special issue of the journal that aims at reexamining the notion of «Thirty-Year European civil war». The idea of total and imperial war, the ghost of European decadence and the emergence of new political actors, the attempt of building an «international regime» and the impact of the Great Crash, the clash of ideologies in World War II and the collapse of the empires after 1945 help to interpret this period as a «great historical transition». Therefore, the authors reflect on the effects of the interwar period on the subsequent years of apparent European stabilization, wondering how those events affect our present.
Keywords: Thirty-Year European Civil War, World Wars, Transition, Fascism, Communism