I am curious about how Historians view WWI and WWII together. When I read history, I see things like the 30 years war, or the Hundred Years War where there long periods of peace interspersed with war and battles. As we are now nearing the 100 year mark to the beginning of WWI, are Historians debating the mentality that WWI and WWII are uniquely different vs. a part of a single large conflict?
I cant speak for everyone, but I very much view them as different Wars.
Its easy to see how WWI resolution lead into WWII, but they are still separate.
Perhaps in the far future we will see it differently, but for the time being they are studied separately.
The standard work on the 20th century (at least in europe) is Eric Hopsbawms "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (ISBN : 0-349-10671-1)"
It considers the period from the start of the first world war to the fall of the soviet block as one period with interlocking processes that cannot be seperated.
That being said Hopsbawm still seperates the actual wars and discusses them individualy (if only for convenience of categorization, but puts a strong emphasis on the developement of a situation in the 19th century that direcly or indirectly caused both the two world wars as well as the cold war and the related decolonialization struggles.
So while the actual wars are discussed seperately the underlying causes are generally seen in concert, and even extended to the cold war. (again at least in the german linguasphere where I went to school)
I had one professor say that the Second World War was, so far, the final conflict in the thousand-year fallout of the partitioning of the Carolingian Empire between East and West Frankia. The territories within Lotharingia had been disputed territories basically ever since gavelkind succession split the empire up.
I view them as separate conflicts, but in a related string of conflicts beginning with the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and the new balance of power in Europe. Every time a country upsets the balance of power, conflict breaks out. Think Revolutionary France, for example. Germany, transformed both by uniting under the Prussian monarchy and with a modern state infrastructure inherited by its time within Napoleonic French influence, suddenly became the most powerful country in Europe. Not only that but after the dismissal of Bismarck, blundered away any friends it had outside of Austria-Hungary. This new-found German strength was mitigated by a coalition of countries that sought to contain it and we all know what happened from there.
I tend to teach my students that because of the treaties that were signed at the end of the the First World War, and the depression that followed these treaties, that WWI and WWII are one war with a half time.
There would be no WWII without WWI. Had Germany not been so stripped down by England and France after the Treaty of Versailles, they would have had no need for strong fascist leadership.