Since 1918 Europe has been host to the most bloody and destructive war in human history, and to the longest period of continuous peace. This is less paradoxical than it looks. The Second World War of 1939-45 was a watershed in the history of European warfare. That conflict generated weapons capable of obliterating the continent; nuclear weapons might threaten wars of unimaginable horror, but they also kept the peace. The Second World War pushed European society to its material and moral limits, and the long years of peace that followed, longer still than the ‘Long Peace’ that followed Napoleon’s fall, reflected a profound desire never to reach the awful threshold of atomic destruction.
None of this was expected in 1918. The Great War was the ‘war to end all wars’, what President Wilson called the ‘final war for human liberty’. The scale and ferocity of the conflict shocked European opinion. When it was over the yearning for something like perpetual peace was widespread. In June 1917 the French Chamber voted overwhelmingly in favour of a League of Nations to organize European peace. When the victorious powers, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, met in January 1919 to decide on the terms of the peace settlement with Germany and her Allies, there was almost unanimous agreement that war should be outlawed and peace enforced. The Treaty of Versailles
Imposed on Germany committed all signatories to the establishment of a League of Nations to uphold what was called ‘collective security’, and called on all states to begin a programme of disarmament.
The League was set up in Geneva in 1920. It remained a pale shadow of the original idea. The French call for a League army to compel peace was rejected. Nor did the League include all the major states: Germany and the Soviet Union were deliberately excluded, while the United States rejected the settlement and returned to isolation. Disarmament was patchily promoted. It was possible to compel Germany to disarm. The peace settlement restricted Germany to an army of 100,000, with no general staff and no offensive weapons, no fortifications or aircraft. An Allied Control Commission oversaw the dismantling of German military facilities and the physical destruction of factories capable of producing weapons. But for the other League members disarmament was voluntary. Though Britain and France scaled down the high levels of military spending at the end of the Great War, they remained throughout the 1920s the most heavily armed states. Military reductions were a function not of moral pressure but of financial necessity. Not until the onset of the Great Slump after 1929 did pressure mount for a serious disarmament effort. In 1932 a Disarmament Conference met at Geneva to blunt once and for all any threat of European war. Little was achieved.
For Europe’s armed forces the 1920s were lean times. They faced shrinking military budgets and popular pacifism. The collapse of the Russian, German, and Habsburg empires undermined the special position enjoyed by the military in authoritarian, monarchical states. Finally the Great War itself compromised the traditional role of European armed forces. In 1914 they had expected a brief conflict, won in decisive encounters between the forces to hand. The war turned into a conflict of vast mass armies, and the mobilization of whole societies, soldier and civilian alike. General Ludendorff, the mastermind behind Germany’s war effort between 1916 and 1918, christened the new kind of warfare ‘total war’, for it called on the material, moral, and psychological resources of the whole nation. Such a war could only be prosecuted in co-operation with civilian authorities and with the goodwill of the civil population. From the experience of 1914-18 it seemed that war was no longer the monopoly of the armed forces, and indeed could not be adequately fought by relying only on the professional military.
World History
