Conflict of national images of World War II in the context of sociology of world wars

The article presents a macrosociological approach to understanding world wars based on the world-system paradigm of social science in the form of a scientific essay. It supports the controversial thesis that in the history of modern and contemporary times there have been not two world wars, but significantly more. It is proposed to call world wars armed conflicts that are waged on a planetary scale, are characterized by large scales and, most importantly, have a strong influence on global world history. With this approach, the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century can be considered the “Zero” World War, and the events associated with the Central Military District in Ukraine can be considered the “Third”. These conflicts occur periodically, since they are caused by the power competition of nation-states for leadership in the core of the modern world system. Russia’s increasing participation in these global conflicts, aimed at increasing its geopolitical independence, is due to the paradoxical combination from the 18th century to the present day of its economic backwardness from the West with high military force. This approach allows us to reject the opinion that World War II was supposedly a manifestation of a centuries-long conflict between Russia and the West, since in this, as in previous world wars, Russia fought against some Western countries in alliance with others. An overview of the strong differences in the memory of World War II in Russia, China and the West is given: all national images of history have deviations from the “academic” historical reality, but in different aspects. The world-system approach allows us to explain the modern struggle against the “falsification of World War II” as a clash of different national versions (images) of history, the differences between which are mainly not opportunistic, but objectively determined – in particular, a certain “bias” of all national versions of historical memory and its different significance in different countries-civilizations.

world wars, World War II, World War III, world-systems analysis, historical memory, geopolitical competition