Understanding Europe, by Christopher Dawson

This is an outstanding analysis of Europe and Western civilization.  The book is divided in two parts.

In the first part, Dawson describes what Europe is: a society of peoples whose culture was shaped both by Christianity and the Greco-Roman heritage.  Through comparisons, he explains what differentiates it from Asia, describes the special case of Russia, and discusses the regional differences among the different peoples.  These were produced by the splintering of Christianity during the Reformation and the different styles of government in the different regions, contrasting the parliamentary governments that sprung up in Western Europe with the large military empires that developed in Central and Eastern Europe.  He also devotes two chapters to Europe's overseas colonies: the dual nature of European colonialism and how each nation's colonial effort differed in character from one another.

The second part of the book is about the decline of Western culture and the revolt, starting in the eighteenth century, against the ideas and norms that used to unify Europe.  He describes the rise of the large totalitarian and authoritarian states, how the ideas behind this style of government originated in Hegelian philosophy, and how the two world wars came about.

For a relatively short (230 page) book, he covers a lot of ground, and it's definitely a book that you have to read more than once in order to properly digest the material.  It's best to have a reasonably good general knowledge of the history of the various European countries in order to appreciate this book properly.

The Judgment of the Nations, by Christopher Dawson

This book is my introduction to British historian Christopher Dawson, and I think it's brilliant. Definitely going to be reading more of his work. He finished this in 1942, so he was working on it when WW2 broke out and in those tense and depressing years leading up to it. His purpose in writing it was to offer some reasons why the countries of the West, whose culture and values were formed by Christianity and the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome ended up fighting two horribly self-destructive world wars. 

He discusses the tensions that began to develop between nations as their styles of government diverged (constitutional vs. autocratic monarchies, nation-states vs. multilingual multiethnic empires, fundamentally civilian vs. military states), and as Christianity splintered into multiple denominations. Differences in belief do cause differences in worldview, which have practical ramifications. He also expounds on the Enlightenment, the scientific materialist world view that came with it, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, and of the Socialist movements of all stripes that aspired to bring the rapidly growing economies under state control.