Abstract
Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War, Volume I, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2014; 771 pp.; 9781107660588, £99.99 (hbk)
Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War, Volume II, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2014; 802 pp.; 9780521766531, £99.99 (hbk)
Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge History of the First World War, Volume III, Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 2014; 779 pp.; 9780521766845, £99.99 (hbk)
In July 1916 Randolph Bourne, a Progressive intellectual, wrote an article for The Atlantic, entitled ‘Transnational America’. An opponent of American entry to the war, Bourne set out a vision of the United States as an alternative model to the European order. The war, he argued, showed the fatal consequences of ‘fiercely heightened pride and self-consciousness’. He was concerned with the ‘melting pot’ project, the efforts to Americanize the hyphenated populations, and to promote a form of patriotism as potentially belligerent as European nationalisms. In his terms, ‘transnational America’ allowed different immigrant groups and their descendants to retain their identities, to interact peacefully, and to create the ‘first international nation’. ‘We can at least make the effort’, he argued a few months later, in ‘The Jew and Transnational America’, ‘to show that a democratic civilization founded on peace is a possibility in this portentous twentieth century’. 1 So the concept of the ‘transnational’ began its career as a suggestive alternative to the violence of First World War. Bourne, who suffered ill health throughout his short life, died in December 1918, one of the victims of the Spanish flu. ‘Transnational’ disappeared until the late 1960s, when political scientists adopted the term to analyse the role of non-state actors in international politics. 2 And now ‘transnational’ looms large in historical scholarship, defining what Jay Winter, the editor of the three volumes discussed here, describes as the fourth generation of historians of the First World War.
Recalling the antecedents of the current vogue for transnational does not mean that the concept must be used in the ways Bourne articulated during the war or international relations theorists had prescribed during the Cold War. Nonetheless, on both occasions the term transnational challenged conceptions of monolithic political blocs, be it the nation state or the Cold War alliance systems. Its use today echoes its roots, providing a way of looking beyond the state, borders, and territorially-bounded communities. Transnational history, Winter argues, departs from a state-centric approach, taking ‘multiple levels of historical experience as given, levels which are both below and above the national level’. The global perspective, often linked in practice to the transnational, should lead historians to raise their gaze from the western front, the dominant framework for Anglophone, French, and German historians, to examine the character of the war in eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. ‘By a global war’, Winter writes, ‘we mean the engagement in a conflict of fifty months’ duration of the world’s great empires and industrialized or industrializing economies’. 3 These approaches offer new perspectives on well-worn themes such as war finance, the world of work, and diplomacy, while also opening up topics such as refugees and prisoners of war, that did not fit easily into national histories.
These approaches make the war more familiar to us. As Christopher Clark suggested in The Sleepwalkers, the world of 1914 is not so remote from our own – global communications, commerce, migration, and the exchange of ideas were important features of daily life and international politics, then as now. 4 Yet the generation of Cold War historians could also make the world of 1914 look familiar to them – arms races, alliance blocs, and war scares. 5 If history, as John Horne writes, is about seeking out what is new and unfamiliar about the past, that search often starts with questions derived from the preoccupations of the present. Although presentism may result in distorted emphases, it can also invigorate a subject, as is evident from the three volumes under review.
The transnational approach diverts attention from the staple debates of particular national historiographies – the war guilt debate in Germany, the performance of the military leadership in Britain, and the relative importance of coercion and consent in mobilizing French society. While Winter stresses that writing history takes place as a dialogue with previous generations of historians, each generation has its own debates and disagreements. The main lines of debate in the era of transnational historical writing focus on explaining the place of the war within metanarratives, such as the escalation of violence in the twentieth century, decolonization, the growth of the state, globalization, and social and political emancipation, to name but a few.
Recent single-author interpretations of the war divide between those who emphasize an emerging international order, based on new ideas about self-determination, international organization, and law, and those who view the war as fragmenting political order and ushering in a logic of violence that culminated in the Second World War. 6 Of course, no historian denies either the violent or peaceful consequences of the war. The difference is one of emphasis, often based on the particular geographical unit of study. Indeed, rather than seeing order and violence as two polar opposites, historians might explore the relationship between these two concepts, how the experience of violence created a desire for order, how the far-reaching peace projects justified the escalation of war, and how war and peace defined each other, becoming conceptual repositories for the political, economic, social, and cultural projects and transformations that occurred in the era of the First World War.
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First and foremost the war was about the survival of the state through victory. Georges Clemenceau’s rallying cry that his war aims were to win encapsulated the stakes of the conflict. The primacy of the state was also linked to a particular view of international relations, dominated by an emphasis on the anarchy of great power politics, the search for territorial and military security, and the articulation of war aims. This historiographical approach reached its zenith in the debate over German war aims, triggered by the work of Fritz Fischer. Historians showed how vibrant domestic debates shaped foreign policy objectives, how national interests were constructed, and how events such as the American entry and Russian revolution reshaped the international order. 7 Georges-Henri Soutou’s study, L’or et le sang, published in 1989, recast interpretations of international politics, by emphasizing the relationship between economic interdependence and the state’s foreign policy interests. 8 Soutou’s chapter in these volumes expands our understanding of the stakes in the war. The war was, he argues, ‘a modern ideological crusade’, in which the belligerents’ aims went beyond territorial security, to encompass ‘political beliefs, juridical norms, [and] economic interests’. 9
Various contributors offer a constructivist perspective on the remaking of the international order. The pursuit of power was both an end in itself and also a handmaiden to the establishment of a new normative environment for the conduct of international politics. Although the origins of the war is the subject of only one specific chapter, other contributors show how rival interpretations of the origins of the war shaped visions of the future world order. The ‘conflict was framed by law from its outbreak to its conclusion’. A war, which began with a ‘flagrant violation’ of international law, was fought to strengthen juridical norms. 10 Atrocities violated existing laws of war, but this dialectic between norm and violation shaped the moral stakes of the war and became a primary theme in propaganda. 11 These arguments highlight the ‘paradoxical character’ of the war: a war fought to establish a lasting peace. 12
An alternative way of thinking about international politics involved rethinking empire and nation as conceptual ways to organize both domestic and international society. As Nicola Labanca’s chapter shows, nation was pitted against empire, not just in terms of the two belligerents, the multi-national Habsburg empire and the Italian nation-state, but also in terms of rival principles for organization of the European and global orders. ‘Nation’ was not the exclusive principle of the Allies, nor ‘empire’ the sole property of the Central Powers. The Central Powers promoted the principle of nationality in eastern Europe. The Polish proclamation in 1916 and the establishment of six independent nation states in the treaty of Brest-Litovsk were attempts to reconcile the dominant position of the Central Powers, particularly Germany, with the nationality principle. 13 The nationality principle posed a challenge to European empires and informal domination around the globe. In Asia the transfer of ideas between four different societies in very different conditions – India, Vietnam, China, and Japan – gave rise to a variety of national and imperial visions. Japanese leaders had their own imperial ambitions, while the concept of the nation came to dominate politics in the other three societies. 14 The violent, genocidal process of making nation states out of the former Ottoman empire in the Middle East also resulted from the tensions between national and imperial imperatives. The First World War, and in particular the Armenian and Syriac Christian genocide, marked the ‘lethal culmination of the imperialism of the modern nation states and the end of the great dynastic land empires that dated from the Middle Ages’. 15 In other instances, notably in the Dominions in the British empire, nation and empire were even mutually dependent.
Examining the ideological scope of the international conflict enables us to view issues often framed within the domestic political and social sphere with a fresh perspective. For example the gendering of space, the feminization of the home front and the masculinity of the fighting front, shaped more intimate war aims, notably the protection of the family and the ‘innocence’ of women. Gender speaks to the apparently paradoxical relationship between peace and violence. Defence of the feminized nation justified violence, but the idea of motherhood, for example, provided empathetic resources to rebuild peace between former belligerents.
These new perspectives on war aims, with their emphasis on the ideological as well as the territorial, military, and economic stakes of the conflict, owe much to the concept of ‘war cultures’. Originally used to explain the mobilization of the domestic war effort and the cohesiveness of war societies, war cultures open new perspectives on international politics. It connects the meanings given to war experiences with war aims. Intellectuals played a central role in shaping these meanings. 16 How far these ideas penetrated popular understandings of the war remains unclear, but intellectual discourses often echoed – or stimulated – elite political rhetoric. 17
The transnational approach that analyses the transfer of ideas between different civil society groups and across state borders, even across the barbed wires that separated belligerents, is particularly useful in identifying the emergence of new norms and the reworking of existing ones. Recently Peter Jackson analysed the evolution of French thinking about security, what the term meant and how it could be achieved. He offers a model for historians seeking to connect ideas, agents, and political decisions. His assessment of French reactions to the emergence of a new normative environment in late 1916 and early 1917 shows how popular protests, the Russian revolution, and American entry to the war required political leaders in Paris to articulate war aims, using a language that went beyond narrow material national interests to reflect broader principles for the re-ordering of the world. 18 In December 1916, when Woodrow Wilson issued his peace note, he suggested that the publicly declared aims of both sets of belligerents were ‘virtually the same’ – the principle of nationality, international law, and the search for security. And despite the outrage that greeted this part of the note, Wilson had a point – there was a ‘transbelligerent’ (as we need a neologism with the prefix trans) exchange and degree of public consensus about the principles of the new world order. 19 Of course, there were two significant obstacles to peace. First, both sides interpreted the application of principles in different ways, though these principles also exercised a restraint against the most radical demands. Second, domestic and allied war cultures, in which each side regarded itself as the embodiment of international morality and its enemy as the embodiment of barbarism, rendered a negotiated settlement highly unlikely.
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War cultures, according to Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau, emerged in 1915, the year in which belligerents became ‘societies-for-war’. 20 The concept of war cultures is rooted primarily in a debate amongst historians of France about social mobilization during the war. 21 One school, best represented perhaps by the work of Collectif de Recherche International et de Débat sur la Guerre de 1914–1918 (CRID), argues that a coercive state sustained the war effort through oppression and the threat of violence. 22 The other school, represented by scholars associated with the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Peronne, claims that societies self-mobilized on the basis of patriotism, extreme hostility to the enemy, and self-censorship, which left little space for the possible expression of dissent. 23 These interpretive differences also reflect different methodological emphases. Scholars adopting the ‘war cultures’ approach pay close attention to representations, meanings, and discourse, whereas scholars associated with CRID argue that ‘war cultures’ privilege elites and intellectual abstractions over the more prosaic concerns of citizens and soldiers. As these volumes were put together by the editorial committee at the Historial, there is clearly an emphasis on war cultures and self-mobilization. These different approaches are not necessarily antagonistic – editors of these volumes, Jay Winter and John Horne, started their careers with important works rooted in social history approaches – but the specific debate about mobilization in the First World War has become charged and does not get a full airing in these volumes.
Different sections emphasize a variety of ways in which societies mobilized and sustained the war effort: cultural constructions of the meaning of the war, state support for particular groups, the violent repression of internal enemies, and, perhaps most importantly, the availability of economic resources shaped the possibilities and experiences of mass mobilization.
The most explicit engagement with the development of war cultures comes in Part V of the third volume, edited by Nicolas Beaupré and Annette Becker. The editors argue that ‘we must consider the ensemble of representations of millions of people trapped in the conflict’, which requires ‘understanding from within the way each person perceived, internalized, refracted, and thereby represented the exceptional nature of the war’. 24 Aside from the objection that a person’s representation of an event may not necessarily demonstrate their perception of that event, it is impossible to recover the views of every last person. Nonetheless, representations contribute to the construction of ‘broader social imaginaries’, so in the absence of charting each individual’s imaginary, historians of the First World War are in the fortunate position of being able to make generally sound arguments about different social groups. The objection of scholars such as Nicolas Offenstadt is that these representations are derived from a relatively narrow group of intellectuals. 25
While we should be wary of slipping from sources centred on elite cultures to generalizations about ‘the immense investment’ of war societies in particular understandings of the conflict, the study of cultural and intellectual elites remains important. After all, their writings have done much to shape the subsequent academic debate about the war. Moreover, as already suggested, the connections between intellectual and political elites were important in shaping the high politics of the war.
The transnational approach shows simultaneous trends across belligerent societies – the regret of ageing intellectuals that they could not fight, their mobilization of the pen, the claims of soldier-poets to authenticity, and the transmission of cinema techniques between Allied societies, for example. The transnational approach also raises the issue of the relationship between claims to universal values and the evident patriotism that informed the particular iterations of these claims. Artists volunteered as ‘a commitment to a life-or-death struggle between good and evil. Patriotism became a mystique of loyalties understood along absolute national lines’. 26 The articulation of universal claims reflected the pre-war intellectual’s internationalist milieu, as well as the civilizing mission of European (and American) imperialism that braided the national and the universal into a single thread. The universal claims of civilization came most easily to British, French and later American writers, perhaps owing to revolutionary traditions and the imperial claims of the civilizing mission. The impact of these universal claims on national remobilizations in 1917 and 1918 remains unclear. It permitted transnational remobilization in the Allied states by facilitating the exchange of shared values. Wilson figured prominently in the renewal of the aspirations of Allied societies. 27 On the other hand, belligerent societies became vulnerable to the universal claims, centred on varieties of peace settlements, that issued from both Russian revolutions.
Throughout the volumes, the importance of cultural resources in mobilizing and maintaining social cohesion is evident. Nation played a central role, though unlike religion or gender, it is not the subject of a distinct chapter or section. Just as the nation was accommodated with the great abstractions of the war, it was also rooted in the quotidian and intimate. Family provided a link between the personal and national, while children imbibed war cultures in the classroom and at play. 28 In these volumes the role of nation in mobilization comes through more clearly in sections dealing with societies beyond Europe as Jennifer Keene shows in the case of North America and Guoqi Xu in Asia. Within Europe, the reworking of the relationship between empire and nation had multiple vectors. ‘Correct nationality’, Panikos Panayi suggests, could make a national minority ‘invisible’, less vulnerable to persecution, more able to win concessions. 29 Religion provided a distinct meaning to the war, but it could also overlap with national claims. The Christian language of ‘repentance, redemption, and revival’, derived from notions of sin and God’s punishment, had their echoes in nationalist denunciations of material indulgence and the redemptive powers of sacrifice. 30 Other religions receive less attention. Islam provided some ballast for Ottoman mobilization, but the hopes of Ottoman leaders for an Islamic revolt against European empires were sorely disappointed. 31
The study of cultural mobilization has transformed our understanding of the war, but these volumes show that the most important factor in sustaining social cohesion was material resources. In addition to the challenges of sustaining intimacy in the context of long-term separation, distance, and the risk of death, relationships suffered from material deprivation. The Central Powers were particularly vulnerable, owing to problems of food supply. Economic conditions cannot provide a singular explanation for the erosion of the emotional resources of belligerent supplies. Wealthier members of society also complained of deprivation even though their circumstances were considerably more secure. Nonetheless, the fracturing of social cohesion, evident in soldiers’ fears about the deterioration of the home front they were fighting to defend, was more evident in Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany than in Britain and France. 32
Owing to the state’s dominant role in mobilizing war economies, chapters generally take a comparative history approach, rather than a transnational one. These chapters also tend to focus on Europe, particularly the western front. As liberals had predicted before 1914, war transformed the relationship between the state and civil society, though with different patterns across the belligerent states. Existing pre-war bureaucracies, varying access to material resources, and differing ideas about political economy shaped the range of choices. Within these conditions, the state’s role in mobilizing the economy was often ad hoc, driven by reactions to particular problems. A myriad of choices and paradoxes arose in determining the allocation of manpower between the army and industry. In France, a civilian government introduced the Dalbiez law in August 1915, subjecting workers to military discipline at the same time as releasing some skilled labour from military service. In Germany, the federal structure and role of district military commanders complicated manpower distribution until the December 1916 Auxiliary Labour Act, a bargain between the Supreme Command, trade unions, and business leaders. As states ran out of financial reserves, they departed from the Gold Standard, with Britain the last to depart from the pre-war global financial rules. All states tended to draft in businessmen to manage the war economy. In weak states, such as Italy and Russia, this often resulted in ceding control over the war economy to businessmen, who set strategic economic goals. 33
Economic mobilization diverted scarce resources, concentrated wealth in certain sectors, and exacerbated deprivation amongst other social groups. States intervened to alleviate the pressures of economic mobilization, but intervention was shaped not only by actual economic conditions, but also by the wartime moral economy and political calculation. These chapters, assessing the operation of war economies, show how a combination of material resources, cultural predispositions, and contingent political choices shaped the evolution of war economies. Distinctions between consumers and producers became sharper and tenser. While historians have charted fault lines between urban and rural communities, these chapters show the potential splintering of national and imperial communities under the pressures of war. Tensions between Austria and Hungary, Ziemann points out, owed much to perceptions on both sides of unfair food distribution, while Goebel’s global perspective illustrates how choices to feed, say, London caused food inflation in other cities, such as Melbourne and Calcutta. 34
Social cohesion also entailed the violent repression of dissent and opposition to the war. War cultures required, as Heather Jones and Laurence van Ypersele put it, a ‘quasi-ontological loyalty to the state’ – ontological security, an important theme in international relations theory, means the security of identity, which is embedded in relationships with other actors and the establishment of a coherent narrative, which endows meaning. 35 The relationship between certain domestic social groups and external enemies posed a particularly potent threat to the ontological security of states. The concept of the transnational, as developed by Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane in the late 1960s, emphasized how relations between non-state and state actors transformed domestic and international politics. In the context of the First World War, the failure of belligerents to use potentially friendly groups within their enemy’s society was striking. Nonetheless, the perception of the threat was often sufficient to bring about repression, most catastrophically in the case of the Armenian genocide. Throughout Europe, German minorities faced persecution, especially in Russia. 36 The movements of armies meant that millions of people suddenly found themselves living in an alien state. ‘Captive civilians’, prisoners of war, minorities, and many refugees were vulnerable to state and popular violence. Representations mattered, as states reordered populations and territories through concentration camps, deportations, and killing.
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Explaining victory and defeat have always been politicized issues. The ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth, that undermined the legitimacy of the Weimar republic, heightened the politically charged nature of historical debate, making it difficult to look beyond the failings of the German army and its leadership as the primary explanation of the outcome of the war. 37 Therefore it is welcome to read Jay Winter’s and John Horne’s statement: ‘For the Central Powers, defeat on the home front was just as decisive as defeat on the battle front in determining the outcome of the war’. 38 Lest the reader get the wrong idea, neither Winter nor Horne propose a revival of the ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth! Indeed, they emphasize the advantage of democratic states in sustaining the war effort and arriving at better decisions. Other contributors emphasize the importance of economic factors and military performance. Evidently there is no single cause, but it may be possible to establish the relative weight of different factors. While treatments of individual armies, states, or economies provide vital building blocks, assessing the outcome of the war requires, as David Stevenson’s work testifies, comparative study. 39 The sections on political power and the sinews of war in volume II bring together a vast range of scholarship in a comparative approach.
Democracies, it is suggested on several occasions, were better than autocracies at waging war. Democratic states enjoyed more legitimacy and distributed sacrifice more effectively. In particular the overweening position of the military in German politics proved disastrous, as the Supreme Command’s remobilization from late 1916 demonstrated an inability to understand the functioning of a wartime economy and society. 40 Yet authoritarian tendencies were evident in each belligerent. Parliamentary power was curtailed in all belligerents, including Britain and France. For large periods of the war, military leaders dominated Allied strategic decision-making, while civilian control could also lead to repressive, authoritarian measures, such as the Treason Act in the United States. 41 Strong leaders emerged in Britain, France, and Italy between late 1916 and late 1917, with similar attitudes to harnessing national support, suppressing dissent, and controlling the military. 42 War eroded the legitimacy of regimes, leading to revolutions in the defeated powers. The absence of revolution in the western allies owed much to victory, managing food supplies, and greater popular participation in politics. Yet the suspension of wartime elections (not in the United States, though it narrowly missed having to hold a single national wartime election) and draconian repression of dissent limited possibilities for popular politics in the western allies. 43 Democracies won the war, but their victory owed more to military performance and economic resources than the particularly democratic virtues of their institutions.
The volumes challenge enduring stereotypes of German tactical and operational excellence and Allied ineptitude. Ferdinand Foch had much clearer operational goals in the final months of the war, following the French counter-offensive against overstretched German forces in mid-July 1918. 44 Allied generals became more effective at managing the war and using new tactics and technologies. Ludendorff’s storm troop tactics in 1918 ‘bear a desperately old-fashioned look’, argues Robin Prior, whereas the Allied generals mastered the bitter lessons of attritional warfare. 45 Audoin-Rouzeau offers a more positive interpretation of German infiltration tactics, developed since 1916, but concludes that they failed to solve the strategic problems of dense trench systems and what was effectively a form of siege warfare. 46 The comparative approach of these volumes to military performance confirms that no army had a decisive advantage over their opponent in terms of operational and tactical practice. Even the final weeks of the war did not witness a decisive battle – as Audoin-Rouzeau comments, the traditional notion of the battle came to lose its meaning.
Differences in the performance of political and military institutions reflected relative economic strength. Ultimately ‘the war was also won in the factories, the ports, and the transport systems’. 47 From the outset the war became an economic conflict. Pre-war planners recognized that economic warfare would be ‘slow-acting’, but Allied planners believed that their superior economic resources and access to global markets would ensure victory. 48 Throughout the volumes, contributors return to the issue of food supply, as scarcity and inequitable distribution undermined states’ legitimacy and provoked revolution. Alan Kramer disputes the thesis that the Allied blockade was responsible for hunger in the Central Powers. Instead Germany’s invasion of its neighbours, from which it imported supplies, created food shortages. The autarchic logic of military power – that only through possession of territory could Germany achieve security – stood in direct and disastrous contradiction to Germany’s position in a pre-war interdependent global economy. 49 Although German military victories between the outbreak of the war and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk opened up new potential economic resources, exploitation was patchy and counter-productive. Deported civilians and prisoners of war provided new sources of labour to the Central Powers, but the use of deported labour shocked fragile local economies as well as international opinion. The Allied states had access to a global labour supply, imported from the colonies and allies, such as China. 50 The Allies, largely through Britain, could import industrial goods, raw materials, and finance from around the world.
Despite Allied economic superiority at the outset of the war, victory was not pre-determined. The loss of highly industrialized territories to German occupation, the financial crises of 1916, and the Russian revolution showed the fragility of Allied economic superiority. However, the western Allies had both the political and economic resources to withstand these shocks. American economic and financial support proved crucial. One calculation shows that the United States spent twice as much as the French government on the war effort. 51 Across a range of economic indices, the western Allies held important advantages. Their logistics systems were more effective in supplying the front-line troops, their adoption of mass industrial production enhanced their material advantages, and governments mobilized scientists in a ‘military-academic-industrial complex’. 52 The volumes go beyond raw measures of economic resources to show how war economies operated. The combination of the weight of resources and the sophistication of their economies were the primary factor in the victory of the Allies and the United States on the western front over Germany.
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In military terms, the Western front proved the decisive theatre of the war. However, the global perspective of these volumes invite us to reconsider the legacies of the war, both to amplify and qualify what that gifted wordsmith and arch-pessimist, George Kennan, called the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Kennan coined the phrase at the height of the second Cold War in the 1980s. In part an elegy for Bismarck’s post-1871 European order, the phrase suggests that the experiences of the First World War cast off the restraints of nineteenth-century European politics and led to the rise of brutal dictatorships, a second global war, genocide, and the threat of nuclear war. The war revolutionized what people imagined was possible. Several years after Kennan’s pithy description, George Mosse in Fallen Soldiers argued that the brutalizing effects of trench warfare seeped into the violent radical politics of inter-war Europe. 53
Since then, further studies have refined our understanding of the trajectories of violence during and following the First World War, though important differences of emphasis remain in accounting for changes in codes of personal behaviour. One starting point, set out by Joanna Bourke, was the proliferation of ‘increasingly ferocious’ stories aimed at boys in the late nineteenth century. These promoted a vision of masculinity centred on violence and dominance of the domestic sphere. The war enabled the realization of these violent fantasies. An alternative account, argues Richard Bessel, locates the rupture in the ‘erosion of norms of civilized behaviour’ during the war. This resulted from the everyday hardships and deprivations, as well as the immediate experience of violence. A final account, put forward by Robert Gerwarth, downplays the significance of the war itself, suggesting that the decisive transformation in European politics occurred not between 1914 and 1918 but between 1917 and 1923, as the First World War drained into a series of national and social revolutions. The collapse of multi-ethnic empires, the trauma of defeat, and the Bolshevik revolution and its threatened spread cast off ‘normative moral restraints’. 54 The variations are partly explained by differing methodologies and geographical interests. High levels of inter-personal violence occurred in specific circumstances and the restoration of state order by the mid-1920s greatly reduced the scope for this kind of violence. Norbert Elias, who served on the western front, did not believe that the ‘civilizing process’ had been derailed by the experiences of war. 55
The industrialization of violence was also a feature of the First World War. Artillery caused more casualties than rifles, machine guns, and hand-to-hand combat. The organization of violence also included the establishment of camps. Again there are different emphases. Heather Jones and Annette Becker argue that the internment of millions of prisoners of war and captive civilians anticipated the concentration and extermination camps of the 1930s and 1940s. Schaepdrijver is more cautious, noting that most plans for ethnic cleansing of territories ‘never left the blueprint stage’, so that the war expanded imaginative horizons rather than creating prototype institutions and processes for later mass murder. 56 The differences rather than the similarities between the scale of violence against civilians and prisoners of war in the two world wars seem much more striking, so that developments in the 1920s and even more so in the 1930s were more significant in shaping mass killing in the Second World War. 57
A third and related trajectory concentrates on the legacies of war cultures and the difficulties of cultural demobilization. ‘The living’, John Horne notes in a brilliant aphorism, ‘had to decide not only what the war meant but also when – or even whether – it was over’. 58 The hatreds engendered by the war made cultural demobilization a ‘slow and stuttering affair’. In intellectual and scientific life, ‘the cultural remobilisation at the end of the conflict made demobilisation impossible’. 59 One vector of war cultures may have been children, orphaned during the Great War, who then, in defeated societies, turned to the politics of revenge. 60 The outcome of the war, rather than the war itself, determined the different meanings inscribed into war experiences. The ‘lessons learned’ from the war informed later strategic fantasies, especially in the German empire in eastern Europe and Russia. 61
Yet there was a considerable way to travel between the two global wars of the first half of the twentieth century. Once we move away from the standard markers of Europe’s catastrophic twentieth-century history, we can direct our gaze to other outcomes of the war, in particular the rejection of violent conflict. Zara Steiner’s work reminds historians that people in the 1920s concentrated on reconstruction, epitomized in the optimistic rebuilding of cities. 62 Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, representatives of vindictive war cultures, were able to change the meaning of the war in the mid-1920s, to view it as a European tragedy. Grief was often channelled into pacifist politics, as well as vengeance. 63 Although the peace cultures of the 1920s were swallowed up and lost from view by the late 1930s, they represented a vibrant and realistic basis for the reordering of European politics after 1918. Without ignoring the weaknesses of the Paris peace settlements, historians also pay attention to the humanitarian work at the end of the war, to ‘the collective hopes for a profound change in international relations’. 64 Changes took place not simply in inter-state relations, but in the texture of international relations. Again the term transnational proves useful in describing the dense networks that emerged after the war, from international veterans’ associations to humanitarian organizations such as Save the Children, an academic echo of Bourne’s original hopes when he coined the term transnational. 65 War, rather than particular societies, became the enemy. This was one result of the war to end all wars – the working out of the paradoxical relationship between violence and peace. These aspirations, plans, and half-completed projects provided a ‘warning and inspiration’ to those involved in European reconstruction in the 1950s. War was no longer regarded as an absolute sovereign right. 66
From the global perspective, many contributors view the First World War as the apotheosis of European imperialism. 67 Sometimes those outside the maelstrom had a clearer view of the significance of events. Saúl Taborda, an Argentinian intellectual, noted: ‘Europe has failed. It is no longer up to her to guide the world’. 68 If the beginnings of decolonization can be traced back to the First World War, its impact lay primarily in the erosion of Europe’s moral claims to global leadership and the emergence of a new generation of national leaders in the colonies. This process took place on several levels, from the intellectual to the quotidian. For example, daily encounters between Chinese and Vietnamese labourers and Europeans challenged perceptions of racial hierarchies and established codes of behaviour. 69 Others argue that the war strengthened empire. According to Bill Nasson, Africa was more firmly ‘locked’ into empire after the war. 70 In the Middle East, British and French imperialists asserted control over the fragments of the Ottoman Empire. Tracing decolonization from the First World War through to the 1960s requires further research in the biographies of anti-colonial leaders, in the reworking of the language of self-determination from Wilson to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, and in assessing how the war reshaped global power politics. 71
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The global perspective on the war, represented in these volumes, adds further layers of complexity to our understanding of this foundational moment in modern history. The conjunction of early twentieth-century patterns of globalization and industrialized great power war was singular, distinguishing it from earlier European conflicts fought across the globe and the Second World War, which followed the collapse of globalization in the 1930s. Although the war marked a rupture, it did not bring an end to globalization. That was a result of the Great Depression and the autarchic inclinations of states and societies in the 1930s. Of course, pre-war networks were permanently altered, but new bonds of transnational solidarity emerged, suggesting that the war diverted, rather than destroyed, processes of globalization. 72 The volumes also emphasize the ideological stakes of the conflict. Words could not be caged within national boundaries, the members of an alliance, or even a continent. A war fought for peace, relying on mass mobilization, fed into ambitious political promises and far-reaching expectations. Ideas were reworked in national and local contexts, but their legitimacy rested on transnational contexts. Bourne’s aspirations for a new form of politics were not still-born. Once historians move away from national frameworks, the consequences of the war appear much more open-ended, varied, and dependent on later contingencies. The war cracked the global order of the late nineteenth century, ending empire within Europe, and opening up new possibilities, but creating few path dependencies.