On 28 June 1914 a 19-year-old Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophia at Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, then under Austro-Hungarian rule. Convinced that the assassin had the secret backing of the kingdom of Serbia, on 28 July, regardless of Serbia's willingness to make concessions, Austria declared war. The incident at Sarajevo provided Austria with the excuse it sought to crush rebellious Serbia and end Russian meddling in the Balkans once and for all.
The next day Russia mobilized in support of the Serbs. As mother of the Slavs, she had no choice; especially as she had given in to the Austrians over an earlier Balkan crisis in 1908-9.1 On 1 August Germany declared war on Russia. Faced by the possibility of fighting both France and Russia, and having already given its word to Austria that in the event of war between Russia and Austria it would come to Austria's aid, Germany dared not delay. In a highly industrialized, mechanized Europe, the whole time sequence of war had changed. How troops were moved into battle before 1870 was secondary; after 1870 it was primary; mobilizing and committing to battle millions of men depended on intricate movements of troops by road and rail, which could not be stopped and started at will - at least not if one hoped to win the war.2 On 3 August, Germany declared war on France. On 4 August, German troops having invaded Belgium, Britain declared war on Germany; almost instantaneously, Britain's dominions rallied to its support.
Like a Greek tragedy, no one was able to stop the madness. Enthusiasm among the common people of Europe to go to war was unbounded. All ran to meet their fate, convinced that their cause was just and true, and that they were fighting to defend themselves and the world. 'The lamps are going out all over Europe,' said Sir Edward Grey (1862-1933), British Foreign
Secretary, 'we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.' Pax Britannica, established during the long reign of Queen Victoria (b. 1819, reigned 1837-1901), was about to end.
Although the war burst upon Europe out of a clear summer's sky, it had been long in forming. It was the culmination of all that was dangerous in Europe's excessive nationalism. Caesar and Christianity had brought unity to Europe, nationalism brought discord. Two nationalist wars, the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, involving Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania,3 Albania and Turkey, had preceded it. Although the war of 1912 had largely expelled the disintegrating Ottoman Empire from Europe, neither war had provided a permanent solution to the rivalry between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. On the contrary, egged on by Russia, Serbia (whose national territory had doubled as a result of the recent wars) had begun to exert even greater pressure on the already weakened Austro-Hungarian Empire. Britain, France and Germany were not directly involved in the 'Greater Serbia Question' - the basis of Austria's antagonism to Serbia's and Russia's intrigues in the Balkans4 - but their allies were.
The problem of Serbian national aspirations had become insoluble except by war. It only required the Archduke's assassination to kindle the flame of war again. Monumental stupidity, cowardice, existing alliances, propaganda, miscalculations, impulsiveness, mobilizations and ultimata did the rest. If one adds the less visible but much more deadly forces of hysteria, honour, patriotism, nationalism, passion and glory, then war was certain.
With war declared, the military alliances agreed upon earlier between the powers came into effect (Map XIII). Germany was committed to supporting Austria-Hungary and Italy (the Triple Alliance of 1882). France was committed to supporting Russia (the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894). Britain was committed to France (the Anglo-French Entente of 1904), and to Russia and France (the Triple Entente of 1907). The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (1914) because the Turks were the traditional enemies of the Russians; the Bulgarians joined in 1915 because they had lost territory to the Serbs in the Balkan War of 1913. Later, Italy (1915), Romania and Portugal (1916), and Greece and the United States (1917) would join the Allies. The Japanese entered the war against Germany because they were committed to do so under the Anglo-Japanese treaties of 1902 and 1905, and because
They hoped to obtain the German-held Shantung province of China and the German Mariana, Caroline and Marshall islands in the Pacific (Map IX). Japan would be responsible for bringing China into the war on the side of the Allies in 1915.
Although Italy5 (unified between 1859 and 1870) was committed, under the Triple Alliance of 1882, to go to the aid of Germany and Austria, it held back. Austria's action against Serbia, it argued, was an offensive action incompatible with the Triple Alliance. Instead, in May 1915 - after the Allies had made all kinds of secret promises - Italy switched sides (as it would do in the Second World War) and threw in its lot with the British, the French and the Russians. By then war had engulfed the western world. In Europe, only Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Spain remained neutral.
While the Archduke's assassination brought affairs in the Balkans to a head, it was not the sole cause of war. Stimulated by the ongoing decline of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, tensions between the great powers had been growing since the turn of the century. Nothing irked the British in the 20 years before 1914 as much as Germany's naval challenge. With the annihilation of most of the Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5, only Germany could challenge Britain at sea. (The US fleet was not feared.) 'Germany's future,' Kaiser Wilhelm II had declared, 'lies on the water.' The German fleet had moved from sixth to second place - immediately behind the British Royal Navy. The Germans were also outstripping the British in the size of their merchant marine and in shipbuilding. The fundamental concept of British foreign policy had always been control of the seas around its shores. It was a policy that had been applied with equal vigour against Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon and now the Kaiser. In challenging British mastery on the seas and oceans of the world, Germany was trying to change something which the British thought had been settled in 1805 at Trafalgar. The Germans were also excelling in the production of textiles, synthetic dyes, coal, iron and steel, automobiles (available since the 1890s) and in the volume of world trade.6 Rising German exports to Britain in the 1890s had caused a lot of criticism in the British press. In commerce and finance, especially in investment banking, the Germans had little to learn from the British.
What really upset the British was that the Germans were challenging what the British regarded as their God-given right to rule the world.7 Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) expressed it best in 1914 when he said:
We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us.8
Little wonder if in August 1914 the British Cabinet showed a reluctance to go to war. It wanted nothing of Europe except peace.
Germany resented the world's destiny being determined by Britain alone. For most of the nineteenth century Germany had been a federation of petty states, which under Bismarck's leadership had united. Germany was not a 'Johnny-come-lately'.9 The Germans, having overwhelmed Denmark (1864) Austria (1866) and France (1870), had formed their Second Empire in 1871. In building a large fleet to defend its seaways and its shores, in exercising military and industrial power, in claiming an ever-growing share of world trade, in demanding its place in the sun, the German Empire was doing what the British Empire had done. But what was right for Britain was wrong for Germany.10
Britain bore its responsibilities as the world's superpower too lightly. To be able 'to float downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat hook to avoid collisions', which is how Lord Salisbury (1830-1903) had described British foreign policy, may be an enviable way of conducting foreign affairs, but it does not say much for Britain's sense of responsibility as the world's leading power. When the crisis came in June 1914, Britain acted as a bystander rather than a leader of world affairs. By the time Sir Edward Grey proposed a conference, Austria could not turn back without humiliation. Britain entered the fray because she feared that Germany would overwhelm France and Belgium and reach the Channel ports. If Germany reached the Channel, Britain would be imperilled. Only Germany could unseat Britain as a leading power in Europe. Germany's alliance with Turkey also threatened one of Britain's chief arteries to the East. Self-interest dictated British action.
In Germany's violation of Belgian territory on 4 August 1914, Britain found the necessary moral pretext to make war. The basic problem between Britain and Germany, however, was not the violation of Belgian territory, but a much more all-encompassing struggle for European and world power. The wars of 1864, 1866, 1870 and 1914 were essentially about Germany's position in Europe and the world. For Germany to obtain more power meant that Britain would have less, and on that point Britain would not compromise. A country like Britain, which was already losing ground in production and trade, had little to gain by reducing its power still more. In any event, a change in the status quo has always been resisted by the leading power of the day.
France11 (whose economic and military power in 1914 was far inferior to that of either Britain or Germany) had even more reason to fear Germany. It had never accepted its overwhelming defeat by Prussia in 1870, which had destroyed the European balance of power established at Vienna in 1815. Nor was it prepared to lose for good the mineral-rich territories of Alsace-Lorraine. Although Germany's military and industrial power exceeded that of France,12 another struggle with the Germans was considered inevitable. In preparation for such a struggle, in 1894, France compromised its principle of republicanism by allying itself with tsarist Russia. To foster better relations with the British, it accepted British power in Egypt (1904) and, unlike Germany, deliberately remained neutral (in word and deed) while Britain fought the Boer War (1899-1902). If Britain could be committed to France and Russia (as it was in the Triple Entente of 1907), Germany must become the common enemy. For France to survive, Britain had to be committed. On that all else depended. At the outbreak of war, France had no choice but to follow where its Russian partner led. France, not Serbia was at stake. It was now or never; either the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia) intervened, or Germany would dominate the continent and perhaps the world.
Some writers, such as the non-Marxist J. A. Hobson (whose book Imperialism: A Study, appeared in 1902) and the Marxist Vladimir Lenin13 (whose book Imperialism, the Highest Stages of Capitalism was published in 1917), saw the march to war before 1914 as springing more from economic than political roots. They thought that the search for privileged spheres of foreign trade and investment in the decades preceding the First World War - the economic jostling and undercutting going on between the powers in Europe and the world - stemmed more from the changes taking place in the structure of the western industrial economies than from politics. The scramble for parts of Africa and Asia after 1870 by the European powers was the logical and inevitable outcome in the development of western capitalism trying to escape from its own inner dilemma. Imperialism was an essential part of capitalism. The armaments race that preceded the war was simply a profitable substitute for more peaceful forms of manufacturing, such as railroads, the demand for which had declined.
While the economic explanations of Hobson and Lenin have much to recommend them, it is difficult to separate the economic from the political factors. If we must deal with the economic factor apart from the political, then it is evident that the great powers had more to lose than gain by going to war. In 1913, next to India, Germany was Britain's best customer. Britain also bought more from Germany than from any other country except the US. Austria-Hungary's best markets were in the British Isles. As for the growing friction among the powers in Africa and Asia, European colonial trade and investments (while they might have been a matter of life and death to the colony itself) played only a minor role in world commerce and international investment. Trade and investment have not necessarily followed the flag. In any event, the strong commercial links that existed prior to 1914 did nothing to prevent war or alter the alignment of the belligerents.14
Europe's leaders seemed bent on war in the early years of the twentieth century with or without the aid of political or economic factors. Except for Britain, conscription had been introduced in most western countries by 1914. France, Germany and Russia had standing armies of about a million men. Governments outdid each other in their preparations for war. Most of Europe's scientific and industrial talent was increasingly absorbed in the war industries. Since the invention in 1846 of pyroxylin by the German scientist Christian Friedrich Schonbein (1799-1868), the manufacture of explosives had been revolutionized. In 1846 nitroglycerin had been discovered by the Italian Ascanio Sobrero, and (building on the work already done by Russian chemists and artillery officers) from 1862 was manufactured on a large scale by the Swede Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833-1896). Five years later Nobel invented dynamite. European civilization had come to be measured not by art, learning or religion, but by a country's ability to win a war. The people who would eventually be sacrificed were not consulted. It was taken for granted that, as in all the other wars of the nineteenth century, there would be no shortage of men willing to fight.
In the decades prior to 1914, every aspect of sea and land warfare was revolutionized. The best battleships existing in the 1880s would have been a match for the entire British fleet existing in the 1870s. The use of steam and oil had raised the speed of 6 knots in the 1870s to 36 knots in the 1880s. In due course, oil not 'blood and iron' would be the key to victory. Armour-plating, first introduced in the 1850s, had by 1905 reached a thickness of 24 inches. The Dreadnought battleship, which Britain first launched in 1906, with its 18,000 tons of steel, its 21 knots, and its ten 12-inch guns, mesmerized the world. World power in 1914 rested as never before or since on the capabilities of a nation's battle fleet.15 Paradoxically, the vessel that came closest to cutting Britain's lifeline with the world - the submarine - was the most neglected of all when the war began. Germany did not have enough submarines to launch a major U-boat campaign against British shipping until 1917.
As for land warfare, by 1914 the western powers had devised mechanized slaughter. The intensity, range and accuracy of side arms shoulder arms and artillery had all undergone sweeping change. In the war against Austria in 1866, Prussia had used a breech-loading gun (in contrast to Austria's muzzle-loading gun) with deadly effect.16
Few doubted that the war, like most wars after 1865, would be swift and sure. Despite the fact that both civil and military indices of power pointed to French weaknesses, the French plan called for an attack on the entire front with unprecedented speed. Bravery and strategy were what mattered. The danger of a German attack on the exposed left French flank, which eventually took place, was wished away. With a complete disregard for the evidence before them, the German General Staff (under the Schlieffen Plan) intended to end the conflict in six weeks. Again, morale and dash would settle matters. 'Paris for lunch, St Petersburg for dinner,' the Kaiser said. By 1914, with war clouds gathering, the Europeans had begun to assemble great armies for the coming fight.17 If the worst came to the worst, war was still an acceptable way of settling a dispute. Increasingly, the question asked in the chancelleries of Europe was not 'Will there be war?' but 'When will there be war?'
The preparations for war in Europe in the 20 years before 1914 did not go unchallenged. In 1910 the English writer Norman Angell published his influential book The Great Illusion. The economic and financial complexity of the modern world, he argued, made a major war between the powers obsolete; it was a message that growing numbers of Europeans found consoling. War was unthinkable. Following the German Navy's show of force at Agadir on the Atlantic coast of Morocco in 1911, which heightened tensions between the European powers, the Socialist International18 (which by 1912 had nine million members) swore it would oppose a capitalist war with every means at its disposal. The English pacifist Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and the French socialist Jean Jaures (1859-1914), were only two of the many influential voices raised against the growing danger. In an attempt to stem the mill-stream race to war, the Tsar Nicholas II, called the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 'to discuss ways to make the world a peaceable kingdom'; the Olympic Games were resumed; a universal language, Esperanto, was introduced; students were exchanged; commerce and travel were encouraged. None of these efforts succeeded; the war clouds grew. Oddest of all, when war came it was not treated as the scourge it proved to be, but as the hope of European civilization. At the outset idealism prevailed; through sacrifice, the world would be saved. The only fear most European males felt in 1914 is that they might reach the front after the war had ended.
Alas, the war did not end in six weeks, or six months. This time there was to be no repetition of the swift, decisive, military victories obtained by Prussia against Austria in 1866, and against France in 1870. Instead (the Germans having been halted at the Marne outside Paris) the war turned into a deadlock of trench warfare. For three years on the western front the battle line hardly moved. There ensued a seemingly endless, exhausting, dogged struggle similar to some of the drawn-out European wars of the eighteenth century, and the American Civil War of the nineteenth century. The mobilization of financial,19 material and human resources was on an unprecedented scale. Government powers and government propaganda grew as never before.
The men did not come home for Christmas. Millions of them never saw their homes again. For four terrible years the war continued to consume the best that Europe had to offer. In one day, in August 1914, the French lost 27,000 men. One million men died on the western front in the first year. In 1916, for a few square miles of shell-torn ground on the Somme, 600,000 Allied lives were sacrificed; on 1 July 1916 the attacking British suffered
60.000 casualties - 60 per cent of the officers, 40 per cent of the men. Nothing was gained. Ten months of struggle at Verdun, also in 1916, cost the French and the Germans 800,000 dead. The battle of Passchendaele (July-November 1917) fought in a sea of mud, in which there were 300,000 casualties, was not a tragedy so much as a crime. Casualties on such a scale were unprecedented; in battles such as Passchendaele and Verdun they were unforgivable. The 'red sweet wine of [Europe's] youth'20 drenched the earth. Old men's errors were redeemed with young men's blood. Western society was stunned. This was war of decimation.
Although the eastern had been much more fluid than the western front, the cost to Russia was equally great. After the Russians' initial success against the Austrians in Galicia and Serbia, which caused German troops to be withdrawn from the western front, enormous casualties were inflicted upon them by the Germans at Tannenberg in August 1914 (in two days the Russians suffered
100.000 casualties). Another dreadful defeat was inflicted upon them at the Masurian Lakes in September; in great disorder, the tsar's army was driven back into Russia. The wonder is that Russia was able to fight as well as it did for three more years. Joined by Bulgaria in 1915, the Germans, Austrians and Hungarians recovered Galicia from the Russians and eliminated Serbia.
The 9-10 million21 who died at the front far surpassed the total of those lost in all European wars since the outbreak of the French Revolution. Of the 65 million mobilized 8.5 million died; 21 million were wounded; many others were taken prisoner, or died from sickness and privation. The US lost a remarkably small percentage of the 1.2 million 'doughboys' (infantry) who saw action in France.
The war took the monstrous toll it did because of the revolution in weaponry. The machine-gun, capable of firing 600 bullets a minute, had made defence systems almost impregnable. The war of movement and manoeuvre, in which the military leaders had been trained, had become impracticable. Moreover, as those giving the orders were 'chateau generals', too far away to witness or be affected by the carnage, the killing was repeated the next day, and the next, and the next, for month after ghastly bloody month. An adequate battle plan to control mass armies in action had still to be worked out. Marlborough, Washington, Napoleon and Wellington, who had shared the perils of battle with their troops, would never have permitted such endless, pointless killing. Only when widespread mutiny threatened, as it did in 1917, did the politicians order the staff to halt the slaughter. But the killing was soon renewed, with no visible effect on the war. Whereas all the European wars since 1815 had been short and decisive, this war dragged on.
In an effort to break the stalemate, everything was tried. In 1915 the Germans used poison gas (outlawed at The Hague Conference of 1907); they also bombed from the air. The first German Zeppelin raids on Paris and London in 1915 were condemned as barbaric.22 The British soon stifled their sense of outrage and bombed back again. In an attempt to knock Germany's ally Turkey out of the war, in April 1915 British, Australian and New Zealand troops made a desperate but disastrous attempt (36,000 Allied troops were killed) to force the Dardanelles at Gallipoli and seize Constantinople. Early in 1915, under secret negotiations, the Allies persuaded Italy to attack its former ally Austria-Hungary, in return for which Italy was promised the Turkish Dodecanese Islands, as well as the southeastern and western coasts of Turkish Asia Minor, and territory in the Middle East. Greek claims to Smyrna and to part of Turkey were to be recognized. In June 1915 Italy attacked Austria-Hungary, but was repulsed. Italy was decisively defeated in October 1917.
Under other secret agreements between the Allies - revealed by the Bolsheviks after the Revolution - Russia had been promised Constantinople (Constantinople Agreement, April 1915) and parts of Turkish Asia Minor. The Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 showed that while the Allies were promising the Arabs independence after the war, their true intentions were to enrich themselves at Arab expense. Arab hopes that their revolt against the Turks - which culminated in the destruction of the Turkish Army in the Middle East - would result in a united Arab kingdom with the Sherif of Mecca at its head, were sacrificed to western interests. The Arab world was subsequently divided between Britain and France on terms that suited the western powers.
In 1916 Britain introduced compulsory military service. In May of that year the British Navy fought an inconclusive battle with the German Navy off Jutland. In 1917, equally inconclusively, the British attacked at Cambrai on the western front with a new weapon, the 'tank'.
Although it carried with it the risk of bringing America into the war, in February 1917 the Germans again resorted to unrestricted submarine warfare,23 which had been abandoned after the sinking of a British trans-Atlantic liner the Lusitania24 in May 1915. By May 1917 the German U-boats were sinking British ships faster than they could be replaced. In the first three months of that year more than 400 British vessels were sunk, leaving the United Kingdom with only six weeks of food and supplies.
Fortunately for Britain, help was on the way. A month earlier (April 1917), following the German announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare (which America claimed was a violation of the rights of neutrals), the US had decided to enter the war, not as an ally but as an associate on the side of the Allies.25 The proAllied sentiment pervading Wilson's administration had at last openly declared itself; the world's third greatest navy had entered the fray; two million US volunteers became available. The mobilization and training of the US Army was so painfully slow, however, that a year later, in March 1918 (Germany having forced an armistice upon Russia at the Polish frontier town of Brest-Litovsk),26 the German General Staff felt it could afford to stake everything on a spring offensive in the West. While American troops crossed the Atlantic, German troops raced westward from the eastern front. Although the Americans were not committed to battle until the closing stages of the war in 1918, their presence in France in such numbers was decisive. Despite desperate efforts, the German spring offensive (March-July) failed. With the western front collapsing, the navy mutinying at Kiel in October, and an uprising in Munich in November, Germany was forced to sue for terms. In conditions of growing disorder, Wilhelm II abdicated.
Instead of the 'just and lasting peace', the 'peace without victory', that President Wilson had promised,27 Germany now suffered total humiliation at the Peace Conferences at Paris and Versailles in 1919. Delegates from 27 Allied nations were represented. Russia was occupied with revolution, Germany was not invited except to sign a treaty which it had not negotiated. The 'big three', Woodrow Wilson of the United States, Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) of France and David Lloyd George (1863-1945) of Britain, dominated the negotiations; Italy and Japan were the other 'great powers'.
Germany was charged with sole guilt for the war. In addition to having to disarm and pay enormous reparations, it lost territory to France (Alsace-Lorraine), Belgium (Moresnet and Eupen-Malmedy), Lithuania (Memel), Czechoslovakia (parts of East Silesia) and Poland (parts of Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor to the Baltic Sea, with Danzig [Gdansk] declared a free city). The German military was disarmed to the point where it had only token forces - no tanks, no heavy artillery, no submarines, no aircraft. A plebiscite was planned in Schleswig-Holstein to settle the Danish-German frontier. German overseas possessions in Africa and East Asia were divided between the victors; the League was to supervise the seized (now called mandated) territories. The Saar Valley and the Rhineland (which was to be demilitarized) were to be occupied by the Allies for 15 years. Six million Germans became expatriates (Map XIV).
At Versailles, nationalism, vested interests, chicanery and hatred triumphed over Wilson's vision of a world governed by the rule of law.28 Wilson retreated to his isolated homeland, which refused to ratify the treaty or become a member of the newly founded League of Nations. Of Wilson's vision, only the League of Nations29 remained. 'Hatred and revenge ran through the whole treaty,' said Herbert Hoover (1874-1964), a future president (1929-33) of the United States. It was hoped that a system of collective security would replace a system of special alliances.
Germany's humiliation at Versailles (coupled with the memory of the starving of Germans and Austrians by the Allied blockade after the war had ended) set the stage for the rise of German national socialism and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).30
It is now 80 years since the Great War ended. Yet its sombre shadow continues to haunt European thinking - sometimes even more than the Second World War. It does so because the years 1914-18 have come to be recognized as one of the great watersheds in world history. The bullet that killed the Archduke Ferdinand also helped to kill western supremacy in the world. Nothing equals the First World War in prompting Asians and Africans to rid themselves of European rule. The Europeans could not expect to recruit Africans and Asians to kill Europeans without lowering their own prestige in non-European eyes.
Not least, the war remains alive in the memory of the West because of its terrible irony. It began with unbounded idealism; it ended with cynicism and disgust. At the outset, the English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) thanked God for having
Map XIV EUROPE AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR
.. . matched us with His hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,.. .
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. . .31
Thomas Mann (1875-1955), spokesman of German humanism, looked upon the war as 'a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope. ..' Older, wiser men, who knew these hopes were false, lacked the courage to warn those who were to be sacrificed; the young lacked the imagination to believe.
And so hope died and disillusion took its place. Poets like Wilfred Owen (1893-1918), who himself died in the inferno, wrote not of heroic war but of death:
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.. .32
'It must be all lies', wrote Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, 'and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this river of blood being poured out.'
More than anything else, it was this 'river of blood' which helped to drown Europe's nineteenth-century faith in the future. The spirit of the age changed; the providential nature of progress, which had dominated nineteenth-century Europe, gradually gave way to the feeling of doom expressed in 1918 by Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). Spengler and the war jolted people out of their unreasoning faith in the providential nature of progress. His pessimism matched the mood of the time; yet even his critics had to agree that much of what the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment had bequeathed to Europe - its belief in reason and social justice - had been lost for good in the mud of the western front. In 1918 the word progress sounded like a cracked bell. Europe's belief in reason and the Christian belief in the reverence for life were never the same again.
Not only did the Great War prove - in starting out with idealism and ending with disgust - to be ironic; for many Europeans it came to be identified with hypocrisy. The glowing promises made by the leaders of both sides were (in Remarque's words) 'downright lies'. Despite the sacrifices and all the fine words, the First World War did not prove to be 'the war to end all wars'; it was presumptive to think that it might. Wars went on. An even greater catastrophe befell the world 20 years later. By then the western world had become callous. Nor did the war 'make the world safe for democracy', a hope born of nineteenth-century optimism. Instead, it fostered the rise of revolutionary communism in Russia, fascism in Italy and national socialism in Germany.
While the Treaty of Versailles, and the treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey that followed, promised (and in some instances gave, at the expense of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria) 'self-determination' to Czechs, Poles,33 Serbs, Montenegrins, Croats, Slovenes,34 Catalonians, Basques, Finns, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians (Romania profited at the expense of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria), it denied it to Asians, Africans and Latin Americans. At Versailles in 1919 when Wilson was arguing for national self-determination, five Caribbean nations were under US military occupation. Indians who had been fit enough to fight for Britain were not thought fit enough to govern themselves. Korea's efforts at the peace conferences to gain independence from Japan also failed. Against Chinese protests, Japan was awarded the Shantung province of China. Appeals for self-determination by Germans absorbed by Italy and Czechoslovakia, or by the Irish35 (who had fought a running battle with the British for centuries), or by the Egyptians, were given equally short shrift. Egypt, however, was not so easily shrugged off; the 1919 revolt against the British led to the creation of the Nationalist Party, the Wafd.
The earlier promises of independence made by Britain to the Arabs (the Hussein-McMahon correspondence of 1915),36 together with the joint British-French declaration of 1918 to the people of Syria and Mesopotamia, 'promising national governments drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of the native populations', were disregarded by the Allies once the war was over. The borders of modern Syria were redrawn. Britain's earlier promise to 'stimulate national independence in the whole Arabicspeaking world' was conveniently forgotten. Except for parts of the Arabian peninsula, the Arab world was placed under European rule. Britain held on to Egypt, Iraq and Palestine (the latter two euphemistically called 'mandated territories'); France took Syria, which included Lebanon. The mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations in 1920, incorporated the ambiguous Balfour Declaration,37 which was Britain's wartime promise to the Zionists that it would support the creation of a national home for the Jews in Palestine 'without prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish people'. For many Arabs of the Fertile Crescent there followed a struggle against Britain and France (and now against Israel and the US) which has gone on from 1920 to the present day.
The economic promises of Europe's leaders proved to be just as hollow as the political. Far from providing 'homes for heroes', most European countries emerged from the war too impoverished to provide food. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans were starving long after the peace had been made. Hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent on the war, and most European treasuries were empty. Britain and France never regained their pre-eminent position in the world. Both nations experienced a relative erosion of their economic strength. In 1926 Britain was in the grip of a general strike. France's economic problems culminated in the repudiation of the French national debt. In 1934 Paris was beset by financial scandals of such magnitude that they resulted in the overthrow of the government. The international system of trade and investment upon which pre-war European economic greatness had been based was impaired. (Between 1928 and 1935 the value of European trade was more than halved from $58 to $20.8 billion.) Britain experienced a dramatic decline in the production of textiles, iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding. In 1931 it was driven off the gold standard.
In contrast to the economic and political malaise that plagued Europe, the war gave a tremendous stimulus to the industrialization of India, China, and Japan. The future of China and eastern Asia no longer rested with the western European nations, but with China, Japan, Russia and the US. Not least important for the outcome of the future struggle for world power, by transferring control of the German Pacific islands - the Mariana, Caroline and Marshall Islands - to Japan, it enlarged the Japanese presence in the Pacific; an outcome which Australian leaders looked upon with more alarm than their British or American counterparts.
American attempts to replace Britain's economic leadership in the world proved to be ill-starred. No sooner had the US provided a measure of economic stability in Europe, through its Dawes (1924) and Young (1929) Plans,38 designed to help Germany pay $33 billion in war reparations, than a speculative frenzy in the
US in October 1929 brought an economic slump (The Great Depression 1929-33)39 to the whole of the western world. Banks, businesses and governments were threatened with bankruptcies. In May 1931 Vienna's leading bank collapsed; others quickly followed. In catastrophic proportions, production plummeted, unemployment rose precipitously. Germany had 6 million, Britain 3 million, and the US 14 million unemployed. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (b. 1882, president 1933-1945) refusal to agree to the stabilization of currencies at the World Economic Conference in London in 1933 resulted in the further disintegration of the world economy. The economic chaos of the postwar years fostered fascism in Italy, national socialism in Germany, and communism world-wide.
The end of the First Great War left Europe physically, emotionally, intellectually and morally exhausted.40 National fears, national pride and national honour had led to international disaster. In place of the earlier romanticism and innocence, a vast fatigue dominated Europe. That is why so many Europeans were carried off in the pandemic of the so-called Spanish influenza (1918-19), which took at least 20 million lives. War-induced sicknesses, such as typhus, typhoid and dysentery, are thought to have claimed another 20 million.41 The war divided two periods of western history - one of optimism, the other of disillusionment. The one bright thing that did emerge was that women's suffrage42 was widely extended.
While it took the devastating economic depression of the 1930s to bring the lesson home, politically and economically, Europe's period of overwhelming ascendancy was over. Temporarily at least, economic and political might had passed to the United States. The war not only pushed America to the front of the world stage; it also made Russia a leading power - one whose example would inspire revolution everywhere. In addition, it stimulated the resurgence of Asia. The five victors involved in the peacemaking at Versailles in 1919 were Britain, France, Italy, the US and (for the first time an Asian power) Japan. The war had provided Japan with an excellent opportunity to develop its industries (especially textiles) and supplant European traders in the East. For those with eyes to see, the shape of world politics, self-evident at the close of the Second World War, were already visible in 1918.
In 1918, at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, while Europe waited in hushed silence, the guns fell silent; an Armistice was signed. The most monstrous war, a war that might have been avoided, ended. Men being what they are, and history being tangential, Serbia and Belgium where the war had started, had long since been forgotten (though before the war was over Serbia had absorbed Bosnia-Herzegovina). The dynastic and imperial rule of the Romanovs, the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been swept away. Politically, little of the old Europe was left.
At the instigation of the Allies, the Ottoman Empire was dismembered in 1920 by the Treaty of Sevres. (Its dismemberment had been secretly agreed upon by Britain, France and Russia during the war.) Territorially, Greece was to be the treaty's chief benefactor. An independent Transcaucasian republic of Armenia was to be created. During a hundred years of persecution this had been the dream of the Armenian people. In 1915, as the first great act of genocide in the twentieth century, between 500,000 and one million Armenians died on a forced march from Turkey to Syria and Palestine. The Turkish government still denies that it ever happened.
The Treaty of Sevres, however, was rejected by Turkish nationalists led by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938). After a successful fight by Turkey against Greece and its allies, it was replaced in 1923 by the Treaty of Lausanne, which recognized the new Turkish Republic as the sole and legitimate heir of the Ottoman Empire. In 1924 the sultanate (the temporal leadership of the Ottoman Empire) and the caliphate (the spiritual leadership of Islam) were abolished. Once more the Armenians were subjects of their Turkish and Russian masters. The Armenians are still fighting and suffering for the independence they had been granted under the Treaty of Sevres.
While Britain and France seemed to have emerged from the war with greater political power, the initiative in world politics had passed to the capitalist US and to revolutionary Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 - which created the world's first revolutionary, socialist government - marked a new era in the world power struggle. From the start, it promised revolutionary support to colonial peoples everywhere.
World History
