SINCE 1871, the "German problem" has been the focus of Eurpoean diplomacy. With the founding in that year of the Second German Reich, most of the vast German population of Europe was for the first time organized within a coherent political structure -- a structure which allowed it to compete for markets, power, and prestige with the traditional Powers, as a nation among nations. The "German problem" has been that, once organized, she was obviously the strongest of the Powers, and likely to win the competition hands down.

More precisely, the problem has been that she has felt she deserves to win the competition, and has oriented her political and cultural life solely towards making the victory as complete as possible, and establishing an intellectual and moral justification for this victory. The state-structure and the bizarre Volk--idealogy of the Nazi regime were only extreme instances of this 75-year attempt.

The Nazi regime, in fact, was the ad absurdum of this history. The seven years of its success (1933-), however, are not merely a tribute to the logic of history, or--as has been more widely supposed--to the power-mania of Adolf Hitler.

As A. J. P. Taylor argues in his how study, Hitler's successes were the result of the Western Powers' failure to deal with German grievances realistically and consistently, rather than the consequence of an aggressive and war-bent policy of Hitler's. Hitler took advantage of the West's vacillation and indecision; he did not seek limitless Lebensraum or resolve upon a war for war's sake. "The war of 1939," says Taylor, "far from being premeditated, was a mistake, the result on both sides of diplomatic blunders."

But The Origins of the Second World War is not a polemical tract; it is an excellent and fair-minded study of inter-war diplomacy. If Taylor offers an interpretive argument, he arrives at it deductively, after an impressive examination of documents and motives.

ONLY a brief precis of Taylor's account of the period's tragic diplomacy is possible here. From the Versailles settlement of the First World War right to the failure of Western negotiations with the Soviet Union in early 1939, the West sought to make sense out of the conflicting claims of a still strong Germany, the ideals of Versailles, and its own interests and fears. Like most historians of the last fifteen years, Taylor is inclined to be critical of Versailles. It was, of course, not quite the Diktat German politicians (and many others) considered it. But it was a bad job: designed to settle a War which had been fought to make explicit the changes in the European order since the mid-nineteenth century, its effect was to muffle those changes. The problems that produced the First World War were not settled by the inconclusive War itself; and an inconclusive treaty didn't make matters any better

So there survived into the new pre-war period the diplomatic problems of the old pre-war period. But the assumptions of Versailles also survived, in the minds of Western statesmen (and, in a negative sense, in German minds too). And this was a tragedy; for as Germany proceeded fitfully toward recovery between 1919 and 1933, the Treaty's provisions became increasingly irrelevant. The best proof of this -- and one which Taylor discusses brilliantly -- is the reparations wrangle. If Germany were to "pay for her war," she could not recover, and a "recovery" (in the sense of achievement of a new status quo) was what the West wanted.

The persistence of the "war-guilt" idea had the same frustrating effect on inter-war diplomacy. It was obvious that the New Europe which the war to end all wars had been meant to create was a fiction. But the war-guilt clause, precisely because it was unpredecented and, indeed, a revolutionary conception in European diplomacy, made even the restoration of the old Europe impossible.

Nonetheless, most diplomats probably wished for such a restoration. But they pursued it very erratically. For the first 14 years of the period they tried to normalize the European power balance by (grudgingly) abandoning the reparations and disarmament clauses; then, after Hitler's rise, they fell all over each other in their efforts to revolutionize the continent by giving Germany anything it wanted. In both phases, they allowed themselves to be driven by fear and mistrust (often mutual, as well as of Germany). And in both phases, a curious mixture of attempts to implement Versailles, and thoughtless improvisations produced frustrations and disorder.

The so-called "policy of appeasement," as it operated to allow German expansion into the Rhineland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, was the final explosion of inter-war diplomatic confusion. Under Hitler, Germany achieved sufficient strength to demand serious and thoughtful consideration of her status. The West, wanting to settle the First World War once and for all, but feeling that this could not possibly involve another war, convinced itself that Hitler was justified in almost all his claims. Or, that resistance was pointless, for it could only cause further disruption of orderly diplomacy.

Indeed, Taylor suggests that Hitler might have gotten Danzig and escaped war over Poland, had it not been for a series of blunders on his part in the negotiations over the free city.

FROM his study of this diplomatic record, Taylor concludes that Hitler never planned or expected a full-scale war. Even German rearmament only proves the Fuehrer's love of machinery and military pomp, and his (or Economic Minister Schacht's) perception that large State budgets end depressions. It does not point to an intention to use the new force aggressively.

The leit-motif of German diplomacy between the wars was not aggression: it was Hitler's perception that the Western Powers would let drop the plums he was after without too much shaking, if he would only be patient. Hitler's genius as a diplomat resided in this incredible patience -- and in such confidence in himself, that he was able to win battle after battle in the war of nerves by out-waiting his opponents. "Right to the end," says Taylor, "Hitler did not make demands; he graciously accepted what was offered by others."

Taylor's book is, among other things, a challenge to laymen and historians whose views of the Second World War rest on a moral judgment of Hitler and the "Nazi idea." It is not easy to accept such a challenge; for there can be no compromise in a democrat's mind with the Nazi regime as it operated within Germany between 1933 and 1945. And it is difficult to avoid extending one's critique of that regime to its performance in the field of foreign relations, and to count Hitler guilty of diplomatic sins just as one condemns his domestic excesses.

Ultimately, of course, the violence of the Reich (its anti-semitism, its insane Odin-ism, its rigidly-controlled economic life are all "violent" in this sense) found its foreign policy equivalent in a war against the whole world. But Taylor rightly treats the period prior to 1939 in terms appropriate to diplomatic history.

The result is neither an attack on appeasement, nor a whitewash of Hitler. It is a successful attempt discuss the central problem of the thirties: the failure of most people to distinguish between the real, the crucial German problem, and the inflated (or otherwise distorted) picture of it. No doubt Hitler's demands were unreasonable; but they reflected the interests of a strong, legitimate Power, run by an arch-opportunist dealing with short-sighted

Taylor's intention as a professional historian is to reclaim the Second World War from the journalist popularizers, sensationalists and memoir-writers who have, with astonishingly few exceptions, provided us with our view of the origins. The concurrent influences their inaccuracies and simplification and the moral revulsion inspired Hitler's domestic order, have been disastrous for our understanding the War, Taylor feels. His book convinces me he is right.

Other professional historians have been no less guilty of contributing to our misapprehensions about the origins of the War. And Taylor study, in addition to contributing a new and convincing interpretation of the relevant documents and the whole period, sets a much-needed example of a serious and tough-minded analysis of those documents. His citations do not equal in the benumbing exhaustiveness Bullock's or Shirer's; but they are much more effective.

THE Origins of the Second World War is a strictly limited work, but the limitations were consciously imposed by Taylor. He has neither interest nor, I think, competence to describe the War's origins in deeper terms which would determine such questions as its "inevitability," sources in the broader cultural of German and Western European history. To "explain" the War in this sense requires a willingness to employ imaginative and intuitive faculties in a manner which Taylor does not, and cannot permit himself.

But ultimately, that is the only mode of description which can suggest why the diplomacy of the Power was as weak-hearted as it was Daladier as a symbolic figure), why Fascism had so widespread a covert appeal (to, for example, the French bourgeoisie) and negotiations with Russia (by in '34-'35, and by the Central European states and England in '38-'39) were doomed to failure.

The book is limited in another important way too; Taylor confines attention to European diplomacy, and does not deal with American (or, to speak of, Russian) policy as origins of the war." The adoption of this format is, in effect, a part of his thesis. For Taylor rightly regards the War that began on 1 September 39 as a European war, and the result of traditional patterns of European diplomacy. The Second World War began when Hitler forgot that his success depended on the isolation of Europe from the rest of the world. He gratuituously destroyed the source of his success. In 1941 he attacked Soviet Russia and declared war on the United States, two World Powers who liked only to be left alone. In this way a real World War began. We still live in its shadow. The war which broke out in 1939 has become a banner of historical curiosity."

This is Taylor's last paragraph, and probably the most important in the book. For Hitler's frenzy did cause the World War (in this sense; Taylor's title is misleading); but that was when he had abondoned the course which produced only the limited explosion of 1939.

In this and other senses, Taylor has, I think, really begun the serious historiography of the War. But one need not therefore consider the book some kind "tenuous first step on the long, hard road to understanding." It is, and will remain, a masterpiece of historical writing.