THE HISTORIANS’ VIEW: HOW GREAT WAR CHANGED THE WORLD
Agence France Presse
February 20, 2014 Thursday 4:08 AM GMT
PARIS, France, Feb 20 2014
How did the Great War change the world? Historians John Horne of
Trinity College, Dublin, Gerd Krumeich of Duesseldorf University
and Annette Becker of Paris-Ouest Nanterre University offer their
explanations.
JOHN HORNE: “The first World War was the initial catastrophe that
kickstarted all the revolutions of the 20th century. It upset the
world’s entire ideological landscape. Russian Bolshevism, Italian
Fascism, German Nazism and Wilsonian democracy were all born of the war
and would polarise the world for a long time to come. The United States
made its entrance on the world stage, and the world ceased to revolve
around Europe — even if many Europeans would take time realising it.
Outside Europe, the war lit the spark of decolonisation. The
colonial world’s sense of the importance of its contribution to
the war effort of victorious nations, the principles of national
sovereignty and self-determination defended by US president Wilson, the
anti-imperialist and universalist ideas of the Bolshevik communists:
all drove people in the colonial world to seek independence.
The modern-day Middle East, with its deep-seated conflicts, was born
of the division of the Ottoman Empire between France and England,
who stalled on promises of independence made to their Arab supporters
during the war, while Britain supported Jewish emigration to Palestine.
In societies mourning millions of dead, the war was perceived as a
fall, after which the world would never look the same again. In 1919,
people imagined the violence and scale of the conflict would give
rise to a new, better world that would somehow justify the suffering
endured. But the Great War created more problems than it solved.”
GERD KRUMEICH: “The Great War invented and experimented with all sorts
of gigantic killing machines. It terribly reduced the respect for
human life. When you start counting the dead in hundreds of thousands
and millions, the life of an individual is no longer worth much.
In that sense the totalitarian ideologies of the after-war period are
direct descendents of World War I. There was also the new phenomenon
of putting millions of prisoners behind barbed wire, foreshadowing
the concentration and extermination camps that were to become the
shameful mark of the 20th century.
Politically, the Great War dismantled multinational empires, reduced
Europe’s weight in the world, and paved the way for the rise of
the American superpower. At the same time, the Bolshevik revolution
heralded the world’s division into two antagonistic ideological blocs.”
ANNETTE BECKER: “The biggest change was that war became total.
Whatever their scale, cruelty or brutality, up until then wars
were mostly limited to those waging them. From that point onwards,
war reached everywhere. During World War I there were still pockets
untouched by violence — even in the warring countries — something
that would no longer be possible in World War II. But total war was
a reality in the German-occupied territories in Belgium, northern
France, the Balkans or on the eastern front, where civilians were
enrolled as forced labourers by the enemy.
Civilian also faced internal violence, in Russia for instance where
the population was forcibly evacuated from vast areas of the front.
These evacuations were essentially deportations that affected millions
of people. Then there was the Ottoman Empire, where total war was
expressed through the Armenian genocide but also the systematic
killing of war prisoners, notably Indians and British, in horrific
“death marches” that foreshadowed the practises of German, Soviet
and Japanese forces in World War II.”