Chapter 25 - The Beginning of the Twentieth-Century Crisis: War and Revolution
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. This event precipitated the confrontation between Austria and Serbia that led to World War I.
In the first half of the 19th century, Europe had a strong sense of nationality and they had peace.
The second half was filled with competition and rivalries over colonial and commercial interests. Soon each state was motivated by its own self-interest and success. They each had their own military and government.
Not all ethnic groups had achieved the goal of nationhood. Slavic minorities in the Balkans and the Austrian Empire, for example, still dreamed of creating their own national states. So did the Irish in the British Empire and the Poles in the Russian Empire.
The growth of large mass armies after 1900 not only heightened the existing tensions in Europe but made it inevitable that if war did come, it would be highly destructive.
European military machines had doubled in size between 1890 and 1914.
With its 1.3 million men, the Russian army was the largest, but the French and Germans were not far behind with 900,000 each. The British, Italian, and Austrian armies numbered between 250,000 and 500,000 soldiers.
The way Europe was set up, war was inevitable, and the decision that European leaders made in the summer of 1914 directly started it.
Due to the assassination in 1908 Russia was determined to support Syria. The Russian General Staff informed the tsar that their mobilization plans were based on a war against both Germany and Austria simultaneously. They could not execute partial mobilization without creating chaos in the army.
The Russian government ordered full mobilization of the Russian army on July 29, knowing that the Germans would consider this an act of war against the War was declared on August 1st.
On August 4, Great Britain declared war on Germany, officially over this violation of Belgian neutrality but in fact over the British desire to maintain world power, and now, all the great powers of Europe were at war.
Before 1914, many political leaders had become convinced that war involved so many political and economic risks that it was not worth fighting. Others had believed that ‘‘rational’’ diplomats could control any situation and prevent the outbreak of war.
At the beginning of August 1914, both of these prewar illusions were shattered, but the new illusions that replaced them soon proved to be equally foolish.
Almost everyone in August 1914 believed that the war would be over in a few weeks.
The illusion was also bolstered by another illusion, the belief that in an age of modern industry, war could not be conducted for more than a few months without destroying a nation’s economy. Then they thought the war would end by Christmas.
Finally, some believed that the war would have a redemptive effect, that millions would abandon their petty preoccupations with material life, ridding the nation of selfishness and sparking a national rebirth based on self-sacrifice, heroism, and nobility.
All of these illusions died painful deaths on the battlefields of World War I.
As a response to the stalemate on the Western Front, both sides looked for new allies that might provide a winning advantage.
The Ottoman Empire had already come into the war on Germany’s side in the autumn of 1914.
Russia, Great Britain, and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in November.
Although the forces of the British Empire attempted to open a Balkan front by landing forces at Gallipoli, southwest of Constantinople, in April 1915, the entry of Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Central Powers and a disastrous campaign at Gallipoli caused them to withdraw.
The Italians, as we have seen, entered the war on the Allied side after France and Britain promised to further their acquisition of Austrian territory. Italian military incompetence forced the Allies to come to the assistance of Italy.
Because the major European powers controlled colonial empires in other parts of the world, the war in Europe soon became a world war.
In the Middle East, the British officer T. E. Lawrence incited Arab princes to revolt against their Ottoman overlords in 1916.
In 1918, British forces from Egypt and Mesopotamia destroyed the rest of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The British mobilized forces from India, Australia, and New Zealand.
The United States tried to remain neutral in the Great War but were unable to. But after the German and British naval forces engaged in direct combat—at the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916, when the Germans won an inconclusive victory, and unrestricted submarine warfare that brought the US to the war.
By 1916, there were numerous signs that civilian morale was beginning to crack under the pressure of total war.
The first two years of the war witnessed only a few scattered strikes, but after, the strike activity increased dramatically.
In 1916, 50,000 German workers carried out a three-day work stoppage in Berlin to protest the arrest of a radical socialist leader.
In France and Britain, the number of strikes also increased.
The violence that erupted in Ireland when members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Citizens Army occupied government buildings in Dublin on April 24 in 1916 was even worse.
Total war made a significant impact on European society, most visibly by bringing an end to unemployment.
The withdrawal of millions of men from the labor market to fight, combined with the heightened demand for wartime products, led to jobs for everyone able to work.
Labor benefited greatly from the war and created new roles for women. With so many men off fighting at the front, women were called on to take over jobs and responsibilities that had not been open to them before.
These included certain clerical jobs such as chimney sweeps, truck drivers, farm laborers, and, above all, factory workers in heavy industry.
Sadly many men were against this and saw this only as a temporary replacement for themselves.
At the end of the war, governments moved quickly to remove women from the jobs they had encouraged them to take earlier.
By 1919, there were 650,000 unemployed women in Britain, and wages for women who were still employed were also lowered.
By 1917, total war was creating serious domestic turmoil in all of the European belligerent states.
Most countries were able to prop up their regimes and persuade their people to continue the war for another year, but others, such as Russia were coming close to collapse.
Russia actually experienced the kind of complete collapse in 1917 that others were predicting might happen throughout Europe.
However, out of Russia’s collapse came the Russian Revolution, whose impact would be widely felt in Europe for decades to come.
Even though the revolution attempt in 1905 had failed, WWI had magnified all of Russia's problems and was given another shot.
At the beginning of March, a series of strikes broke out in the capital city of Petrograd.
Here the actions of working-class women helped change the course of Russian history.
On March 8, a day celebrated since 1910 as International Women’s Day, about 10,000 women marched through Petrograd shouting ‘‘Peace and bread’’ and ‘‘Down with autocracy.’’ Soon many other workers joined them too and they succeeded in shutting down the factories on March 10th.
Between 1918 and 1921, the Bolshevik Army was forced to fight on many fronts.
The first serious threat to the Bolsheviks came from Siberia, where a White force under Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed westward and advanced almost to the Volga River before being stopped. Attacks also came from the Ukrainians in the southeast and from the Baltic regions. In mid-1919, White forces under General Anton Denikin, probably the most effective of the White generals, swept through Ukraine and advanced almost to Moscow.
At one point in late 1919, three separate White armies seemed to be closing in on the Bolsheviks but were eventually pushed back. By 1920, the major White forces had been defeated, and Ukraine was retaken.
Russia withdrew from the war in 1918 and Germany saw hope in that for them. Their forces succeeded in advancing 40 miles to the Marne River. On September 29, 1918, General Ludendorff informed German leaders that the war was lost.
Ludendorff demanded that the government sue for peace at once, but allies were unwilling to make peace. By September 1915, as many as one million, and possibly more, Armenians were dead, the victims of genocide.
As war-weariness took hold of the empire, ethnic minorities increasingly sought to achieve. national independence, a desire encouraged by Allied war aims that included calls for the independence of the subject peoples.
By the time the war ended, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been replaced by the independent republics of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and a new southern Slavic monarchical state that eventually came to be called Yugoslavia. Other regions clamored to join Italy, Romania, and a reconstituted Poland.
President Wilson submitted to the US steps for lasting peace.
He soon found, however, that other states at the Paris Peace Conference were guided by considerably more pragmatic motives. The secret treaties and agreements that had been made before the war could not be totally ignored.
At the Paris peace conference, 27 nations were represented, but Wilson made the most important decisions. Wilson was determined to create a ‘‘league of nations’’ to prevent future wars.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George were equally determined to punish Germany.
In the end, only compromise made it possible to achieve a peace settlement. Both states pledged to help France if it was attacked by Germany.
The final peace settlement of Paris consisted of five separate treaties with the defeated nations—Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire.
The Treaty of Versailles with Germany, signed on June 28, 1919, was by far the most important. This treaty ordered Germany to pay reparations for all the damage that the Allied governments and their people suffered as a result of the war.
On June 28, 1914, the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, was assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. This event precipitated the confrontation between Austria and Serbia that led to World War I.
In the first half of the 19th century, Europe had a strong sense of nationality and they had peace.
The second half was filled with competition and rivalries over colonial and commercial interests. Soon each state was motivated by its own self-interest and success. They each had their own military and government.
Not all ethnic groups had achieved the goal of nationhood. Slavic minorities in the Balkans and the Austrian Empire, for example, still dreamed of creating their own national states. So did the Irish in the British Empire and the Poles in the Russian Empire.
The growth of large mass armies after 1900 not only heightened the existing tensions in Europe but made it inevitable that if war did come, it would be highly destructive.
European military machines had doubled in size between 1890 and 1914.
With its 1.3 million men, the Russian army was the largest, but the French and Germans were not far behind with 900,000 each. The British, Italian, and Austrian armies numbered between 250,000 and 500,000 soldiers.
The way Europe was set up, war was inevitable, and the decision that European leaders made in the summer of 1914 directly started it.
Due to the assassination in 1908 Russia was determined to support Syria. The Russian General Staff informed the tsar that their mobilization plans were based on a war against both Germany and Austria simultaneously. They could not execute partial mobilization without creating chaos in the army.
The Russian government ordered full mobilization of the Russian army on July 29, knowing that the Germans would consider this an act of war against the War was declared on August 1st.
On August 4, Great Britain declared war on Germany, officially over this violation of Belgian neutrality but in fact over the British desire to maintain world power, and now, all the great powers of Europe were at war.
Before 1914, many political leaders had become convinced that war involved so many political and economic risks that it was not worth fighting. Others had believed that ‘‘rational’’ diplomats could control any situation and prevent the outbreak of war.
At the beginning of August 1914, both of these prewar illusions were shattered, but the new illusions that replaced them soon proved to be equally foolish.
Almost everyone in August 1914 believed that the war would be over in a few weeks.
The illusion was also bolstered by another illusion, the belief that in an age of modern industry, war could not be conducted for more than a few months without destroying a nation’s economy. Then they thought the war would end by Christmas.
Finally, some believed that the war would have a redemptive effect, that millions would abandon their petty preoccupations with material life, ridding the nation of selfishness and sparking a national rebirth based on self-sacrifice, heroism, and nobility.
All of these illusions died painful deaths on the battlefields of World War I.
As a response to the stalemate on the Western Front, both sides looked for new allies that might provide a winning advantage.
The Ottoman Empire had already come into the war on Germany’s side in the autumn of 1914.
Russia, Great Britain, and France declared war on the Ottoman Empire in November.
Although the forces of the British Empire attempted to open a Balkan front by landing forces at Gallipoli, southwest of Constantinople, in April 1915, the entry of Bulgaria into the war on the side of the Central Powers and a disastrous campaign at Gallipoli caused them to withdraw.
The Italians, as we have seen, entered the war on the Allied side after France and Britain promised to further their acquisition of Austrian territory. Italian military incompetence forced the Allies to come to the assistance of Italy.
Because the major European powers controlled colonial empires in other parts of the world, the war in Europe soon became a world war.
In the Middle East, the British officer T. E. Lawrence incited Arab princes to revolt against their Ottoman overlords in 1916.
In 1918, British forces from Egypt and Mesopotamia destroyed the rest of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The British mobilized forces from India, Australia, and New Zealand.
The United States tried to remain neutral in the Great War but were unable to. But after the German and British naval forces engaged in direct combat—at the Battle of Jutland on May 31, 1916, when the Germans won an inconclusive victory, and unrestricted submarine warfare that brought the US to the war.
By 1916, there were numerous signs that civilian morale was beginning to crack under the pressure of total war.
The first two years of the war witnessed only a few scattered strikes, but after, the strike activity increased dramatically.
In 1916, 50,000 German workers carried out a three-day work stoppage in Berlin to protest the arrest of a radical socialist leader.
In France and Britain, the number of strikes also increased.
The violence that erupted in Ireland when members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and Citizens Army occupied government buildings in Dublin on April 24 in 1916 was even worse.
Total war made a significant impact on European society, most visibly by bringing an end to unemployment.
The withdrawal of millions of men from the labor market to fight, combined with the heightened demand for wartime products, led to jobs for everyone able to work.
Labor benefited greatly from the war and created new roles for women. With so many men off fighting at the front, women were called on to take over jobs and responsibilities that had not been open to them before.
These included certain clerical jobs such as chimney sweeps, truck drivers, farm laborers, and, above all, factory workers in heavy industry.
Sadly many men were against this and saw this only as a temporary replacement for themselves.
At the end of the war, governments moved quickly to remove women from the jobs they had encouraged them to take earlier.
By 1919, there were 650,000 unemployed women in Britain, and wages for women who were still employed were also lowered.
By 1917, total war was creating serious domestic turmoil in all of the European belligerent states.
Most countries were able to prop up their regimes and persuade their people to continue the war for another year, but others, such as Russia were coming close to collapse.
Russia actually experienced the kind of complete collapse in 1917 that others were predicting might happen throughout Europe.
However, out of Russia’s collapse came the Russian Revolution, whose impact would be widely felt in Europe for decades to come.
Even though the revolution attempt in 1905 had failed, WWI had magnified all of Russia's problems and was given another shot.
At the beginning of March, a series of strikes broke out in the capital city of Petrograd.
Here the actions of working-class women helped change the course of Russian history.
On March 8, a day celebrated since 1910 as International Women’s Day, about 10,000 women marched through Petrograd shouting ‘‘Peace and bread’’ and ‘‘Down with autocracy.’’ Soon many other workers joined them too and they succeeded in shutting down the factories on March 10th.
Between 1918 and 1921, the Bolshevik Army was forced to fight on many fronts.
The first serious threat to the Bolsheviks came from Siberia, where a White force under Admiral Alexander Kolchak pushed westward and advanced almost to the Volga River before being stopped. Attacks also came from the Ukrainians in the southeast and from the Baltic regions. In mid-1919, White forces under General Anton Denikin, probably the most effective of the White generals, swept through Ukraine and advanced almost to Moscow.
At one point in late 1919, three separate White armies seemed to be closing in on the Bolsheviks but were eventually pushed back. By 1920, the major White forces had been defeated, and Ukraine was retaken.
Russia withdrew from the war in 1918 and Germany saw hope in that for them. Their forces succeeded in advancing 40 miles to the Marne River. On September 29, 1918, General Ludendorff informed German leaders that the war was lost.
Ludendorff demanded that the government sue for peace at once, but allies were unwilling to make peace. By September 1915, as many as one million, and possibly more, Armenians were dead, the victims of genocide.
As war-weariness took hold of the empire, ethnic minorities increasingly sought to achieve. national independence, a desire encouraged by Allied war aims that included calls for the independence of the subject peoples.
By the time the war ended, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been replaced by the independent republics of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia and a new southern Slavic monarchical state that eventually came to be called Yugoslavia. Other regions clamored to join Italy, Romania, and a reconstituted Poland.
President Wilson submitted to the US steps for lasting peace.
He soon found, however, that other states at the Paris Peace Conference were guided by considerably more pragmatic motives. The secret treaties and agreements that had been made before the war could not be totally ignored.
At the Paris peace conference, 27 nations were represented, but Wilson made the most important decisions. Wilson was determined to create a ‘‘league of nations’’ to prevent future wars.
Clemenceau and Lloyd George were equally determined to punish Germany.
In the end, only compromise made it possible to achieve a peace settlement. Both states pledged to help France if it was attacked by Germany.
The final peace settlement of Paris consisted of five separate treaties with the defeated nations—Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire.
The Treaty of Versailles with Germany, signed on June 28, 1919, was by far the most important. This treaty ordered Germany to pay reparations for all the damage that the Allied governments and their people suffered as a result of the war.
