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I think in time, the 20th Century will be looked at like we look at the Hundred Years War. Instead of being a series of independent conflicts, future historians will look at WWI, WWII, The Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, Aghanistan, and all those little brushfire wars as just a century-long conflict to establish a new proder on the ashes of the old. WWI saw the beginning of the end of colonialism and European Monarchies, WW2 shifted the major players from England and German to the West and the East, the Cold War finished colonialism and then the Soviets fell apart. It was 75 years of open and covert hostilities all about determining who was going to be king of the hill.
At the very least, there is pretty good reason to consider the period from 1914-1945 as a sort of new Thirty Years' War in Europe. Much like the original Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), the fighting was not constant, but went through different stages and sporadic waves. The Russian Civil War, small-scale war between Greece and Turkey (with some British involvement), ethnic conflict in the Balkans, the fascist takeovers of Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania, the Spanish Civil War... all took place between WWI and WWII. That's not much of an
inter-war period except in a very Anglocentric or Francocentric view of Europe.