BOOK REVIEW : A Wake-Up Call to the Dangerous Old Nightmares of History : THE END OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND THE END OF THE MODERN AGE, by John Lukacs ; Ticknor & Fields; $21.95; 291 pages

If history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awaken, as James Joyce put it, then “The End of the Twentieth Century” by Paul Lukacs is a wake-up call.

No longer may we lull ourselves with the oddly comforting certainties of the Cold War, historian Lukacs admonishes us. The disintegration of the Soviet Union, the unification of Germany and the re-Balkanization of Europe are not the stirrings of a brave new world. Rather, he suggests, we are witnessing the resurrection of something very old and very dangerous, a recrudescence of what he calls “tribal nationalism.”

“So many new states and statelets arise before our eyes,” Lukacs observes. “I can foresee a bubbling new Levantine world, a sub-civilization ruled by brigands and traders--another reversion to something that existed before the Modern Age.”

The title of Lukacs’ new book refers to his argument that the 20th Century began in 1914 with the outbreak of World War I and ended in the “ annus mirabilis “ of 1989 with the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc: “It was a short century,” he deadpans.

But this is not much more than an intellectual conceit (and perhaps a marketing ploy). The real point of Lukacs’ book, as I understand it, is that the flood tides of war and revolution in the 20th Century can be seen as a momentary diversion of the currents of history. We are back where we started, he seems to suggest; what was old is new again.

“Now, at the beginning of the 21st Century, the most powerful political force in the world is nationalism still,” Lukacs says. “So it was in the beginning of the 20th Century. . . .”

According to Lukacs, the old rivalries between East and West, between capitalism and communism, were a kind of reciprocal mass delusion. What Russia sought, he suggests, was security with its own borders, not world revolution: “It is territory that mattered, not ideology,” he writes. “Communism is gone; Russia will remain.”

For that reason, it is Hitler, not Stalin, who casts the longer shadow over world history--and, significantly, plays a more ominous role in Lukacs’ book: “He was that frighteningly modern phenomenon,” Lukacs writes of Hitler, “the revolutionary nationalist.”

And it is Germany that looms the largest in the uncertain landscape of the geopolitics of the 21st Century: “The retreat of Russia from Eastern Europe . . . leaves large vacuums of power in the heartland of the world,” Lukacs writes. “That vacuum will not be filled by the United States. It will not be filled by a ‘United Europe. . . . ‘ It will most likely be filled by Germany.”

The flags of revisionism are flying in colorful array over “The End of the Twentieth Century.” Lukacs, an elegant and witty observer of history and politics, roams through a couple thousand years of Western civilization, delivering sharp blows to various icons and sacred cows as he goes along. For instance, he suggests that Castro is a not-so-secret admirer of Franco, “and did not even know (or say) that he was a Communist until well after he had marched into Havana.” And he denies that Kennedy deserves any credit for facing down Khrushchev over the Cuban missile crisis--the Russians, he insists, never intended to risk a war with the United States.

“That it took more than 20 years for the time-servers of the Kennedy court to recognize this, let alone admit it, is another story,” he sniffs.

Lukacs was born in Hungary and escaped to the West while still a young man. In a sense, his book is a bittersweet journey across the historical and political landscape of his homeland, and he peppers his work as a historian with intimate passages from his own journals. Along the way, he reveals himself to be deeply ambivalent about what he beholds in the lands that have been liberated from Soviet occupation.

As he watches the departure of the Soviet army from his native Hungary, for example, he worries out loud about what is taking their place: “An underworld of petty criminals, pickpockets, many Arabs, Romanians, Gypsies, mixed with the scouring of the now borderless ghetto of the criminal populace of Budapest; a sinister crowd.”

Lukacs sounds some fairly odd and off-putting notes that are reminiscent of the uglier moments in recent European history. He suggests, for instance, that it is Russia (and not Germany, as Hitler once argued) that may turn out to be the barrier to what he calls “a great Asian tide, rolling westward . . . the breastwork, the shield, the bulwark of Western civilization, of the white race in Europe.”

Lukacs’ book is both urgent and magisterial, intimate in its insights and sweeping in its scope. At one moment, he ponders the importance of “Caesaropapism” in the Stalin era, and a moment later, he is telling us about his own dreams. And he never hesitates to insinuate himself into his discourse: “I am a participant historian,” he writes, “unable to avoid thinking about what is happening now.”

“The End of the Twentieth Century” is both an audacious and provocative re-reading of history and a map to the terra incognita of the 21st Century. But the truly stunning notion here is that we have awakened from a 75-year nightmare to find ourselves in a place that looks strangely and terrifyingly familiar.