7: The Great War - 1914-1919

This is where the world has ar­rived, these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone. – W.E.B. Du Bois 

In 1914, Europe had been officially “at peace” for nearly a century. However, the official peace covered a growing tension that was beginning to flare up into military conflict. The unification of Germany in 1871, after the Prussian-led victory over the French, had created a new nation with imperial aspirations in the middle of Europe. Bismarck’s new nation competed with neighboring countries in industry, agriculture, and overseas empire-building. The existence of a strong, united Germany ended the careful balance of power created by the Congress of Vienna in its effort to reset the clock and redraw the map after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. France and Germany were enemies and sought alliances against each other. Russia was at odds with the Japanese Meiji government over control of the Korean peninsula and Manchuria. By 1914, most governments in Europe were preparing for an eventual war between these groups of allied nations, although no one knew what incident would bring the continent to battle. But, as early as 1888, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had predicted that “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” could initiate a wider European conflict. He was proven correct on the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

During World War One, the principal members of each of these alliances were the “Central Powers”, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire against the “Allied Powers”, which at the beginning of the war was called the “Triple Entente” after the original allies, France, Great Britain, and Russia. Russia left the war in 1918, Italy joined the allies in 1915, and Japan was an additional ally on the French side. The United States entered the war to support the allies in 1917. The very way we talk about the First World War is a reflection of the power structure that existed at the time. So often that discussion focuses on the primacy of a small group of “Great Powers” who shaped the world to their whims. But this was every bit a world war and one that cannot be fully understood without taking a global view and bringing in the perspectives of a diverse group of actors whose lives were irrevocably altered by the events of 1914-1918 and their aftermath.

The underlying causes of World War One were nationalism, an increasingly competitive industrial-capitalist world economy, racial paranoia, and simmering rivalries between the Great Powers that were exacerbated by a set of interlocking treaties between and among the various nations. Since 1815, the Great Powers had largely avoided major conflicts with each other. Of course, the relative peace in Europe stood in contrast to the tremendous violence European colonial armies inflicted across the world. While European statesmen patted each other on the back for peaceably dividing  Africa among themselves at the Berlin Conference in 1885 or establishing “Spheres of Influence” in China to regulate trade, such maneuvers did not seem so high-minded to the populations subjected to them. This is all to say that we should not see the outbreak of violence in Europe as anomalous, but rather as the outcome of a modern world that they had constructed. Or as famed African-American historian and intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois observed about the First World War, “This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe…”  

The fact that competition among European states led to the eruption of war is not itself odd. After all, such moments have not been particularly rare in world history. It was unprecedented, however, for one small region of the world to amass as much wealth, power, and influence as was held by the nations of Europe in 1914. As a result, the blundering of European statesmen not only dragged Europe into a calamitous war but the entire world. The impact of that war would reverberate throughout the globe for decades to come.

Thumbnail: "Five Australians, members of a field artillery brigade, passing along a duckboard track over mud," James Francis Hurley, in the Public Domain.