The fact that the Brest-Litovsk negotiations were the first, in the history of international relations to be conducted in the open, with the world press receiving each session's proceedings within a few days, meant that the rhetoric emanating from the green table received an immediate response throughout the region aptly described by Ivan T. Berend as the "crisis zone of Europe." Thus, the brief duration of the settlement notwithstanding, Brest-Litovsk helped to condition the nature of the second phase of the continuum of violence in East Central Europe in important ways, ways which had lasting implications for twentieth-century European history as a whole. From the Introduction Book jacket.