The Limits of Demobilization: Global Perspectives on the Aftermath of the Great War

One hundred years ago, the European powers plunged into a soon-to-be global conflict that has been aptly described as ‘the great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth-century. ¹ Given the scope of the horrors which Europe and the wider world experienced between August 1914 and November 1918, this verdict seems more than justified: estimates of the casualties among the roughly 65 million mobilized soldiers range between eight and 10 million dead combatants and between five and six million killed civilians – excluding the hundreds of thousands of men who were permanently disfigured or mentally traumatized. ²

The body of scholarship devoted to this first ‘total war’ in history is appropriately large, but its coverage uneven: while the political events and diplomatic entanglements that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, the developments on the Western Front or the Paris Peace Treaties have received sustained attention ever since the end of that war, Eastern European and global historians have only more recently begun to explore the full economic, political and cultural consequences of the First World War. ³ Even less attention – with the exception of Germany and Russia – has been paid to the global paths of transition from war to ‘peace’ that followed the conflict. ⁴

A notable exception to this general neglect was published some 45 years ago: in 1968 the Journal of Contemporary History published a special issue on the transition ‘from war to peace’ in 1918–19, a series of stimulating essays on the primarily political challenges faced by formerly combatant societies across the globe when the guns fell silent on the Western front in November 1918. Remarkably enough, many of the assumptions and interpretations articulated in that special issue have stood the test of time, but nearly half a century later, with the centenary of the First World War upon us, it seems worth asking if – in the light of new empirical evidence and novel methodological approaches – our perception of the pivotal transformations that occurred in 1918–19 is in need of amendments (if not general revision). The rise of cultural history, for example, has shifted the focus of historical enquiry away from the political and diplomatic decisions that led to war in 1914 or the search for a lasting peace in 1918–19. Instead, historians today are much more concerned about the people affected by these decisions: the roughly 60 million mobilized men who were altogether absent in the 1968 special issue of this journal. Secondly, the advent of comparative and transnational history has opened new ways of approaching the very question that was raised by this journal in 1968: how did societies exit this first total war in modern history and what were the consequences of the peculiar nature of that transition from a devastating war to an unstable ‘peace’? ⁵

While the 1968 special issue showed the way towards a more international consideration of the transition to peace, much of the scholarship since then has focused on the national case studies of Germany or Russia, largely in search of the historical roots of the two major totalitarian dictatorships of the twentieth century. The transformation in 1918–19 of an inter-state war into pogroms, revolutions and civil wars in the collapsed Romanov, Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the rise of fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, and, not least, the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust during the Second World War, convinced many that the Great War had unleashed furies which could not be contained by the peace treaties of Paris. This ‘brutalization thesis’, most famously developed for Germany in George Mosse’s 1990 classic Fallen Soldiers, ⁶ has recently been extended to Eastern Europe, ⁷ and even to the European continent as a whole: historians associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre, the history museum established at Péronne in the Somme in 1992, have been particularly prominent in reflecting on the transformation of violence occasioned by the First World War. ⁸ Following Mosse, a former editor of this journal, they have suggested that the ‘totalization’ process at work in the First World War generated a ‘brutalization’ both of war and society by establishing new and unprecedented levels of acceptable violence which prepared the way for, and were only surpassed by, the horrors of the Second World War, during which the number of killed civilians exceeded that of combatants. ⁹ Other historians, such as Michael Geyer, have used the concept of the ‘militarization’ of European society in this period to account for the ways in which the organization of violence permeated societies before 1914, helping to make possible its vertiginous escalation in the ensuing war, which in turn destabilized the postwar period. ¹⁰

The ‘brutalization thesis’ of the 1990s, however, has not remained uncontested. After all, the ‘war experience’ itself (that is the experience of killing and being killed), was not fundamentally dissimilar for German, Hungarian, Russian, British, French or ANZAC soldiers. Hence, it does not explain why some societies experienced much more postwar violence than others in ways that neither ‘war cultures’ nor the battlefield violence of wartime account for. Even within those societies most often cited as brutalized by the war, the empirical reality is considerably more complex than sometimes assumed. ‘Textbook accounts of Europe between the wars’, David Englander noted as early as 1994, ‘often seem blithely unaware that the propensity towards political violence affected a very small minority of ex-servicemen’. ¹¹ More recent empirical studies on Germany, too, suggest that the vast majority of soldiers returned to peaceful civilian lives. ¹² First attempts at comparative study of the war’s impact also show that generalized statements about the war’s brutalizing effect cannot be sustained. Indeed, in some places, such as Britain (minus Ireland), the war seems to have led to a decrease in the level of violence in politics, while other societies, such as France, were able to contain whatever violence there was within existing structures, traditions and rituals. Once removed from the military context, most soldiers became regular civilians and behaved as such. ¹³

The idea that war-induced brutalization may be temporary and dependent on the context of war itself is not new. It was first formulated by Sigmund Freud in his ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ (1915). Reacting to a fear widespread among his contemporaries, the psychoanalyst queried the notion that the war had destroyed civilized man, reverted him to an earlier stage of his development, and barbarized or brutalized him. The ‘brutality shown by individuals whom, as participants in the highest human civilization, one would not have thought capable of such behaviour’, he noted, was disillusioning. But it was also just that: ‘the destruction of an illusion’. Civilization had not, he maintained, replaced the primitive impulses with higher ones. Rather, both levels of human development coexisted, and in many cases civilization was but a veneer of hypocrisy enforced by society. ‘In reality’, he noted, ‘our fellow-citizens have not sunk so low as we feared, because they had never risen so high as we believed’. Yes, he continued, wartime experience might well lead to permanent regression into barbarism. More likely, however, such involution was temporary: ‘We need not deny susceptibility to culture to all who are at the present time behaving in an uncivilized way, and we may anticipate that the ennoblement of their instincts will be restored in more peaceful times’. Once the environment enabling killing was abandoned, once soldiers returned to their families, civil life would resume:

When the furious struggle of the present war has been decided, each one of the victorious fighters will return home joyfully to his wife and children, unchecked and undisturbed by thought of the enemies he has killed whether at close quarters or at long range. ¹⁴

Joanna Bourke’s influential study of face-to-face combat stands in the tradition of Freud’s reflections. The widespread ‘assumption that men trained to kill in war would carry on killing after the war’, she noted, ‘was based on a false notion of the “killer personality”’, which ignored that under the right circumstances, quite ordinary people ‘delighted’ in killing fellow human beings. Once these circumstances changed, once the ‘external props of the “theatre of war” were removed’, she continued, ‘only a tiny minority of men could continue exulting in the slaughter’. For Bourke, what happened after a war had come to an end was more important than the experience of combat, however savage. The relatively high incidence of ‘disturbed, angry, and aggressive veterans’ after the Vietnam War, for example, stemmed not from any ‘habit of violence’ acquired on the battlefield, but ‘from the feeling of having been “fucked over” by military and civilian society on the return home’. The process of demobilization itself played a central part in this failed transition to civilian life. Rather than the ‘leisurely process’ of prolonged demobilization aboard troop ships typical of the two world wars, American veterans of the Vietnam War returned very fast and as a rule alone, often facing a hostile reception as baby killers rather than a hero’s welcome. ¹⁵

The articles assembled in this volume build on this line of enquiry and demonstrate through empirical case studies that the ‘brutalization’ of formerly combatant societies in and after 1918 was indeed anything but a foregone conclusion. Unlike in the works of Freud and Bourke, however, it is not brutalization as an individual psychological process which is under investigation here. Instead all essays assembled in this special issue focus on larger social entities such as generations, violent subcultures, or even an entire society. None explores ‘killer personalities’. As far as the level of analysis is concerned, then, the contributions to this issue stand in the tradition of Mosse rather than Freud.

The analyses brought together in these pages indicate that it were not the ‘storms of steel’ which led to the dictatorships of the twentieth century. The brutalizing moment, we suggest, was not the war itself, but the experience of the transition to peace. ¹⁶ In some of the cases under investigation – notably in the White settler societies and the French and British empires – the violence of war never led to a substantial increase in political violence. Where it did, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe, the continuation of violence had clearly identifiable causes. Four factors in particular, so we suggest, were decisive in this process: First of all, the intensity of postwar violence appears to have depended on the strength of the state to which the former combatants returned. Where the state monopoly of violence was successfully upheld, violence by non-state actors was unlikely. Secondly, violence was particularly intense where pre-existing conflicts along class or ethnic lines had been intensified by the war. Where, third, long-existing class and inter-ethnic tensions were coupled with the (real or perceived) threat of a Bolshevik revolution, violence took its most extreme forms Finally, the over-spilling of wartime violence also depended on the degree to which veterans could be reintegrated into civilian life, either through material or symbolic compensation, the latter of which proved much easier in the victor states of the Great War.

A brief look at the geography of postwar violence and non-violence shows the centrality of this causal cluster. The epicentre of postwar conflict was the Central and Eastern European ‘shatterzone’ created by the defeat and disintegration of the vast European land empires. ¹⁷ In this shatterzone – explored in the articles by Jochen Böhler and Tomas Balkelis – we find the most far-reaching state breakdown, and with the transformation of war into civil war the deepest brutalization of postwar life. Similar (though less extreme) forms of violence occurred in the new and disputed borderlands of Italy and defeated Germany, where the state monopoly of violence was quickly restored after several months of revolutionary turmoil. Germany and Italy constitute telling case studies as future fascist societies in which the postwar period was overshadowed by fantasies of state breakdown and Bolshevik violence, both of which played a crucial role in the genesis of the Fascist and National Socialist movements. ¹⁸

Similarly intriguing for an investigation of how societies around the globe exited the First World War are the cases in which wartime brutalization failed to lead to an increase in postwar political violence similar to the defeated states of Central and Eastern Europe: the white settler societies, the United States of America, France or Britain.

To be sure, the war’s total mobilization of resources and manpower strained all combatant states. Even in those winner states like France or Britain that managed to exit the war without facing serious postwar unrest or revolutions, the period after 1918 was filled with economic uncertainty and political disenchantment. While the majority of veterans returned to peaceful civilian existences, many of them still felt alienated by broken political promises, unemployment, estranged wives and children. Reabsorbing millions of men into civilian life was thus a daunting proposition even for the victor states. In Britain, hastily demobilized soldiers flocked home to their pre-war jobs, exacerbating what was already a dangerously overheated postwar boom. Nevertheless, these problems did not lead to a serious challenge of the state’s monopoly on violence. Ultimately, the reintegration of veterans into civilian life proved successful, and violence was transitory or absent altogether. Indeed, in metropolitan France and Britain and their empires, the war had the opposite effect: as Richard Fogarty and David Killingray argue, it strengthened the state and indeed the empire (a point also made by Stephen Garton with reference to empire nationalism).

In Russia, by contrast, the war acted as a ‘forcing-house for the seeds of revolution’. ¹⁹ The exertions of wartime disintegrated state power, releasing the forces of revolution and civil war, a transformation explored in Dietrich Beyrau's article. ²⁰ In Germany, meanwhile, the temporary collapse in the Revolution of 1918 was quickly countered by the new, Social Democratic rulers, in alliance with what elsewhere would have become warlords – the Freikorps. Once the latter had put down the competing agents of violence, the newly emergent state rebuilt a monopoly of force strong enough to emancipate itself from the right-wing groups. Throughout the 1920s, the Weimar state was well capable to put down any paramilitary challenge to its legitimacy, as Wolfgang Kapp in 1920 or Adolf Hitler in 1923 learned the hard way.

One of the most convincing explanations for the uneven distribution of postwar violence lies in the mobilizing power of defeat. ²¹ We deal here not just with the problem of military subjugation, but also with a state of mind, a ‘culture of defeat’. A lost war always de-legitimizes the existing political, social and cultural order and encourages processes of learning, reform or revolution. ²² While after the Second World War defeat was so total that the vanquished could not but ‘embrace’ a total destruction of the institutions responsible for causing the war in the first place, the same was not true for the Great War. ²³ Even here, however, the extent to which the crisis of defeat translated into a crisis of state power varied. Red October in Petrograd was the most extreme case. 1917 saw the Bolshevik seizure of power in the name of the legitimacy (and violence) of a class revolution. ²⁴ In the victorious USA, meanwhile, the war-induced politicization (or radicalization) of all sectors of society led to both violent and peaceful paths, as Jennifer Keene’s article demonstrates.

While the Russian case was both extreme and specific, once extant, it changed the field of play for all other warring nations. The effects of Russia’s revolution and its swift descent into the chaos of civil war was immediately felt elsewhere, even in countries like Britain and France, or even in the USA ²⁵ or Australia, where a Bolshevik revolution was highly unlikely. The largely fantastic fear of a Bolshevik take-over of the entire old world exerted a powerful influence on the political imagination of Europeans after Lenin came to power in Russia. Partly propaganda and partly a genuine concern of those who had more to lose than their chains, Bolshevism quickly became synonymous with the elusive threats and underhand enemies that apparently menaced postwar societies. The morbid fantasy of encirclement by nihilistic forces of disorder inspired conservative and counter-revolutionary politics across the globe, but it played out in different ways. Where victory in the Great War had strengthened the state and its institutions, anti-Bolshevik mythology also served to stabilize the existing system by rallying those prepared to defend it against ‘chaos’. In the loser states of Europe, anti-Bolshevism offered a convenient explanation as to why the war had been lost, why the old regimes had been toppled and why chaos ruled over much of Eastern and Central Europe. Anti-Bolshevism – usually coupled with antisemitism – gave paramilitary responses a direction and a goal; it helped to make the illusive enemy identifiable, drew on familiar resentments against the urban poor, the Jews and ‘disorder’ more generally.

The precise role of anti-Bolshevism thus varied depending on the space and political context in which it occurred. It found its most violent expressions in Central and Eastern Europe between 1918 and 1923. ²⁶ The Revolution had the potential to mobilize people for a civil war without any previous wartime brutalization. The case of Finland illustrates that point. Although not a combatant in the First World War, Finland experienced one of the bloodiest civil wars of the immediate postwar period. Although individual volunteers from Finland had fought in both the German and the Russian armies during the war, the vast majority of the roughly 200,000 men engaged in the subsequent (and, with 36,000 casualties within less than six months, particularly brutal) civil war had no war experience whatsoever. Much more crucial for the rapid escalation of violence was a combination of a severe weakening of governmental authority and the lingering threat that the Russian Revolution might ‘infect’ the formerly Imperial Russian and now newly independent Finnish state. The spectre of revolution was thus as important in bringing about mass violence as the collapse of the state monopoly of violence. ²⁷

The ability of the state to enforce that monopoly on violence is undoubtedly central to any analysis of the interconnection between demobilization and violence, in particular if we deal with the question of the relative success or failure of violent non-state actors to mount a challenge to established authority. A functioning state is usually effective in limiting the over-spilling of violence – be it by concessions to the returning veterans, the provision of a special status for them, their co-optation into the political system, or be it through police and military action. Riots might still emerge, as they also did in Australia, Canada or the United States of America, but they never turned into something comparable to the violence of Central and Eastern Europe. ²⁸

As the majority of our articles make clear, then, revolution and civil war were the exception rather than the rule in the global context. Most belligerents demobilized successfully, not only in a purely military and economic sense, but also politically and culturally. ‘Cultural demobilization’ of course implies a possible refusal or failure to demobilize. The incidence of paramilitarism, and the contexts in which it proved most violent, provide a good means of tracing those states, regions, movements and individuals who found it hardest to leave the violence of war behind, whether they had experienced it directly as combatants or as adolescents on the home front. ²⁹ Flanking the emergent new historiography on postwar paramilitarism, a growing literature addresses demobilization in a more narrow sense, that is, the reintegration of returned soldiers into civilian life. ³⁰ Some historians focus on the role of the family in this process, ³¹ while the majority of scholars working in this field is preoccupied with the problem of veterans’ benefits, the welfare state, or the connected problematic of an organized veterans’ movement. ³² The issue of continued violence, however, is rarely raised in these discussions, ³³ although some approach it from the angle of what kind of a welfare system is more likely to produce veterans loyal to the dominant political order. ³⁴ Conversely, the literature on brutalization rarely addresses veterans’ politics, although some have focused on the political, ideological and organizational connections between organized veterans and fascism. ³⁵

Some of our authors now bring these separate discussions together. Keene, for example, argues that the choice of the American veterans’ movement to lobby for entitlements in the long run ended the violence of the immediate postwar years. In Australia, one of the case studies of Garton's article, the threat of violence, was part of the strategies veterans could use to push for benefits. ³⁶ In both cases, the state’s embrace of the veterans’ cause neutralized their violent potential. These two essays most explicitly link the way demobilization and veterans’ benefits were structured with the extent of the resulting violence, but Fogarty and Killingray implicitly do something very similar. Most of the other articles, however, seem to ignore the discussions surrounding demobilization and veterans’ benefits. In our issue, then, we see the divide in the literature reproduced in an interesting fashion: authors who focus on the ‘counter-examples’ – cases where postwar violence is small or absent, or where all-out brutalization of politics and society seems to be lacking – pay particularly close attention to veterans’ integration and benefits systems for returned soldiers; those dealing with cases in the shatterzone, where war did seem to trigger brutalization, generally ignore the politics of entitlement. Might we have an indication here about a potential link between failed demobilization and the brutalization of postwar societies? Of course, the issue of the state again looms large here, as a functioning state is a prerequisite for a system of welfare for old soldiers.

Whatever the connection between the processes of demobilization and postwar challenges to the established order might be, the violence did not simply emanate from the fog of war. It had its own history, or rather, the different conflicts had their own and specific histories. As Böhler stresses, the violence of the war and postwar years did not appear ‘like a jack in the box.' One could note here the longer term cycle of violence in the Ottoman Empire, which culminated, rather than originated, in the Great War: it started in the 1870s and exploded in the bloody decade of 1912–23. ³⁷ Similarly, as Beyrau points out, in the Russian Empire political conflicts had radicalized since the turn of the century. The brutalization of politics, then, had started well before the war. In the USA, too, racial violence and violent labour conflict did not originate in the war, as Keene reminds us, but was reconfigured and aggravated in the context of total war.

This special issue, then, attempts to engage critically with older notions of the brutalizing effects of the Great War, and to bring together the usually separate discussions about demobilization, postwar violence and non-violence. Appropriately for a journal issue, it is not conceived as a ‘total history’ of the transition from war to peace in 1918–19 but as a contribution to a discussion that is set to intensify as historians and the general public alike continue to reconsider the effects of the Great War after its centenary.