Part 3 Complete Time Period Review

Chapter 12

Period 6: 1900 C.E. to the Present – Complete Time Period Review

World War I

Long-Term Causes of WWI

• Nationalism: After the national unifications of Italy and Germany by 1870, other ethnic groups, such as the Poles, Czechs, and southern Slavic peoples, hoped for nations of their own. The difficulty was that these groups lived within multinational empires that would not agree to their own dissolution. The map of Europe had been redrawn before, and could be again, but this was usually done through revolution and war.
  
• Alliances: The European balance of power had long depended on alliances, defensive plans that would protect a nation in the event it was attacked. But by 1914 the major powers found themselves committed to support their allies even in conflicts that did not threaten their own interests. Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy had mutual agreements, and France and Russia were allied if Germany were to attack either one.
• Imperialism: Tensions stemmed from imperialism both in Europe and in the world at large. As the Ottoman Empire weakened and withdrew from its Balkan lands in southeastern Europe, the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires competed to acquire or dominate the area. At the same time Britain, France, Germany and Italy engaged in competition for overseas colonies, like those in Africa.
• Militarism: The belief that warfare was an honorable and even desirable way to settle conflicts, militarism led to constant threats, arms races, and ultimatums over minor disputes. For example, the naval arms race between Germany and Britain caused friction between two nations that had previously been allies. 

Immediate Causes of WWI

World War I began when all four factors—nationalism, alliances, imperialism, and militarism—violently intersected. During a tour of a Balkan province in the summer of 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were assassinated by Slav nationalists who wanted the province united with other southern Slavic nations. Austria-Hungary accused Serbia of supporting the terrorists and declared war. Russia sided with its Slavic client Serbia, while Germany pledged support for Austria-Hungary, its close Germanic ally. When Germany declared war on Russia, France honored its alliance and joined Russia. Great Britain, with no alliances, was the last major European power to enter the war, when German forces violated Belgium’s neutrality on their way to attack France.

The Great War

World War I, originally referred to as the Great War, was largely fought in Europe, but because of European economic and imperial dominion in much of the world at the time, there were secondary fronts in Africa, Asia, and on all the world’s oceans. Other factors made this war the greatest and worst the world had yet seen. Industrial progress had greatly increased the killing power of weaponry; artillery, machine guns, and mass-produced ammunition led to casualties in the millions. Armies were stalemated and took to trenches to survive, leading to a long cruel war of attrition to simply exhaust the enemy. The heroic notion of war was gone, and in crucial ways that played out over the rest of the century, Europe lost its self-assurance of being the world’s superior civilization.

This first total war mobilized entire nations. Civilians were crucial to the war effort, as industrial workers labored to provide armies with supplies. With so many men on the front lines, many women entered the workforce. Aircrafts bombed cities, and submarines tried to cut off food shipments. Governments controlled industry and agriculture and used propaganda to paint the enemy as evil.

In the end, Germany and the other Central Powers were unable to hold out against British, French, and American economic and military pressure, even after Russia had left the war and conceded eastern Europe to the Germans. Germany sued for an armistice in November, 1918.

The Treaty of Versailles

The peace conference to settle the issues stemming from the war was held near Paris at the Palace of Versailles. The leading Allied powers—Italy, Great Britain, France, and the United States—were labeled the “Big Four.” The European victors looked to increase their power at the expense of the defeated enemy. In contrast, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson entered the Versailles meetings with his plan, called the Fourteen Points. In it, he called for self-determination of nationalities, peace without victory, disarmament, fair treatment of colonial peoples, and the establishment of the League of Nations, a multinational organization for maintaining world peace.

In the end France, supported by Britain, would not allow the generous peace that Wilson had envisioned. Instead, the treaty laid down harsh terms to which Germany had to agree: one-sided blame and heavy reparations that would cripple the entire European economy. The map of Europe was redrawn at the expense of the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian Empires. New nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Yugoslavia were all created in 1919 by the peace settlement. Although most of Wilson’s ideas were rejected, the League of Nations was approved. Ironically, the U.S. Congress opposed it and the United States did not join the idealistic new international order. The League was established in 1921, but without the great powers of America, Russia, or Germany (before 1926) as members it struggled to keep the peace when tensions arose.

The Treaty of Versailles was deeply flawed, as critics saw even at the time: it left many conflicts unresolved or even made worse. The imposition of war guilt and one-sided reparations on Germany, the economic powerhouse of central Europe, practically guaranteed a crippled recovery from the war’s devastation. Many colonized peoples complained that Wilson’s “self-determination” only applied to nations dominated by the defeated Central Powers. The worldwide British and French Empires continued to rule over millions of Africans and Asians. 

Impact of the War on the Allies

• Though victorious, Great Britain was profoundly weakened by the Great War. It had lost a significant percentage of its youth, and its economy was worn out. After the war, it was in debt to the United States and its great empire became more and more of a burden. Imperial dominions like Canada and Australia became more independent, Ireland broke free, and native movements for independence in Africa and Asia grew in strength and credibility.
• France was devastated by the war. The Western Front was fought on its territory, with huge casualties and destruction of property. Also in debt to the United States and aware that it had only won with the help of its allies, France adopted a conservative and defensive outlook on the future.
• Italy was one of the leading Allied nations and had been promised large pieces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when the Allies won. It received some, but not all it had hoped for. Postwar politicians continued to press for more concessions and to look for other imperial projects to distract the nation from its continuing weakness and internal divisions.
• The United States was elevated to world-power status by the war, but its traditional isolationism died hard. Most Americans remained detached from foreign conflicts, being repelled by Europe’s vengeful peace and inability to pay its debts. Conservatives won the White House in 1920, focusing on industrial expansion and retreating from European affairs.
  

Impact of the War on the Central Powers

• Germany was economically, politically, and socially devastated. Although its territory was spared from battle, it had lost millions of men in the fighting and was now, by the terms of the Versailles treaty, forced to pay huge reparations to the Allies. In addition, it lost its army and navy, all of its overseas empire, and the productive provinces on its eastern and western borders. The Kaiser abdicated and out of the chaos of democratic, socialist, and communist uprisings, a weak parliamentary-style government was assembled in Weimar in 1919. Within a few years hyperinflation devastated the middle class and angry ex-soldiers promoted the myth that Germany had not been defeated militarily, but had been “stabbed in the back” by traitors on the home front.
• Austria-Hungary dissolved as the war ended, and the Versailles treaty confirmed the independence of new nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the small new German state of Austria. Each of these states was individually weaker than the old Empire had been, however. The area promised to be the seedbed of future conflicts over nationalism and renewed imperial control by greater powers for the rest of the century.
• The Ottoman Empire, which had fought with the Central Powers, collapsed in 1918. Turkey declared itself a republic and, under the leadership of Ataturk, instituted a program of modernization and Westernization. Freed from Turkish domination, Arab nationalism rose, inspired partly by Wilson’s call for national self-determination and partly by Allied promises made in return for help in defeating the Ottomans. Instead, their land was carved into French and British zones of imperial control, called “mandates.” Palestine was a center of tension, where Arab nationalists competed with Jewish Zionists for control of land they had both been vaguely promised by the British.

Impact of the War on Other World Powers

• Russia was in a state of complete disorder. A liberal revolution had overthrown the Czar in 1917, and a Communist coup seized power a few months later. The Communists withdrew from the war and signed a desperate peace treaty with Germany in early 1918. Civil war broke out almost immediately and for five years, the forces of the left, led by the Bolsheviks (Reds), and the right, both liberals and supporters of the czar (Whites), fought to control Russia. Bitter fighting and the deaths of as many as a million Russians ended with a Red victory and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922. The Bolsheviks, instinctively anti-capitalist and angered by Western intervention in the Russian civil war, withdrew from European diplomacy while promoting communist revolution wherever they could, adding to the instability of the postwar world order.
• Japan had fought with the Allies during the war and received Germany’s Asian territories afterward. At Versailles it proposed a Racial Equality clause for the League of Nations, hoping to be recognized as an Asian world power fully equal to Europe and America. The Western powers refused, and Japanese resentment and nationalism were further inflamed.
• When Japan gained Germany’s concessions in China through the Versailles treaty, there was a surge of nationalism in China, beginning with riots and leading to the cultural and intellectual May Fourth Movement. This marked a shift toward a more populist political base and away from the intellectual elites of the former imperial governing class. Both Chinese Nationalism in the 1920s and 30s and Chinese Communism in the latter half of the century drew on this growing populism.
• India fought loyally as part of the British Empire in World War I, in the hopes of gaining more independence after the war. When the fighting ended, Britain introduced some minor reforms and liberalization but maintained complete control. This led to a surge in Indian nationalism under the leadership of the Congress Party as well as the charismatic Mohandas Gandhi, who demanded full independence. As with other parts of the colonial world, Indians saw Europeans in a new light after the self-destructive maelstrom of the Great War.