PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This article examines the process of disintegration and reconstitution of political authority in civil war with reference to the Russian (1918–1921) and Greek (1946–1949) civil wars. These conflicts bracket the post-World War I period of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary conflicts that has been the core subject of historical scholarship on European civil strife. Both cases were highly polarised clashes between establishment and revolutionary forces, and much of the relevant historiography has been naturally coloured by this aspect of the conflicts. I argue that the interpretative focus on polarisation obscures a different dynamic that is equally important for our understanding of civil war as a type of military conflict and, crucially, its political aftermath. Civil war in Russia and Greece did not emerge as a result of functioning states splitting into two or more competing authorities. It was rather the product of a multifaceted fragmentation of political power as a result of war and revolution; a shattering of the state into an array of asymmetrical actors competing for control over both its territory and its administrative resources. Polarisation followed this fragmentation, as these disparate actors manoeuvred to form the camps of the civil wars. This form of coalition building was a dynamic process in which armed violence was not only the chief means of resolution of the competing claims to power but also an essential factor in the formation of the sides themselves. A corollary of this is that the process of political reconstruction that follows civil war is determined as much by the imperative to work out a functioning relationship between the various elements of the victors’ camp as by securing victory through the permanent exclusion or reintegration of the vanquished.