World War I, originally referred to as the Great War, was largely fought in Europe and the Middle East, 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. Technologically advanced weapons led to casualties in the millions. The heroic notion of war died in the trenches. In crucial ways that played out over the rest of the century, European civilization lost its self-assured sense of superiority.
While both the Taiping Rebellion and the American Civil War had seen instances of total war, World War I applied the doctrine to modern industrialized states. Whole nations were mobilized. Economies were reordered to support the military. As men left for the front, women entered the workforce. The waging of total war has militarized civilian life in countless ways ever since World War I. New media such as posters, radio, and cinema extended governments’ ability to propagandize their wars. The logic of total war made the “home front” a legitimate military target. It also made endless sacrifice in the name of national defense an accepted aspect of modern life. Aircraft bombed cities, and navies cut off food shipments to starve whole populations into surrender. From this point forward, no conflict, no matter how small, has excluded civilians from being targets.
In the end, the 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 in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Germany sued for an armistice in November 1918.
The peace conference for World War I 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. 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.
France, supported by Britain, would not allow the generous peace that Wilson had envisioned. 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 laid down harsh terms to which Germany had to agree: accepting sole responsibility for starting the war and paying heavy reparations that would cripple its 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.
The Russian state collapsed. A liberal revolution overthrew the tsar in 1917, but a communist coup seized power months later. The communist government withdrew from the war and signed a desperate peace treaty with Germany in early 1918. A multisided civil war broke out almost immediately. The two biggest factions were leftists led by the Bolsheviks (Reds) and a “big tent” anti-communist alliance (Whites). Over a million Russians died before the final Red victory and the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in 1922. Ideologically anti-capitalist and angered by Western intervention in their civil war, the Bolsheviks withdrew from European diplomacy while promoting communist revolution wherever they could, adding to the instability of the postwar world order.
Great Britain lost a significant percentage of its young men. Economically exhausted, it owed billions in loans to the United States. Imperial dominions like Canada and Australia had developed stronger nationalistic identities due to wartime, Ireland revolted and won independence, while independence movements in Africa and Asia grew in strength.
France suffered worse. The Western Front was fought on its territory, with huge casualties and destruction of property. Swaths of the French countryside remain poisoned into the present day. French colonial troops returned to their native countries, with their experiences helping to fuel independence movements. France was also in debt to the United States.
Italy, one of the leading Allied nations, had been promised large portions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It received some but not all it had hoped for. Postwar politicians continued to press for more concessions, looking for other imperial projects to distract the nation from its internal divisions.
The United States was elevated to great power status by the war, but the failure of Wilsonian internationalism disillusioned Americans. Its traditional isolationism persisted, as the United States shunned “foreign entanglements” like the League of Nations, which might require it to become involved in foreign conflicts. Conservatives won the White House in 1920, focusing on industrial expansion and retreating from European affairs.
Japan received Germany’s Asian territories. 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, further inflaming Japanese resentment and nationalism.
Germany was economically, politically, and socially devastated. It had lost millions of men in the fighting and was now 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. The Treaty of Versailles confirmed the independence of new nations like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, and the small new ethnically 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, was partitioned after the war. 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. A rump Ottoman Empire briefly survived, until Turkey declared itself a republic and, under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, instituted a program of modernization and westernization. In the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the Young Turk government undertook the systematic genocide of the Armenian people.
Chinese nationalism surged after Japan gained Germany’s concessions in China. Beginning with riots and continuing with the cultural and intellectual May Fourth Movement, World War I marked a shift toward a more populist political base and away from the intellectual elites of the former imperial governing class. Both Chinese nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s and Chinese communists 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. While Britain introduced some minor reforms and liberalization, it maintained complete control over the Raj. 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.
Many colonized peoples complained that Wilson’s “self-determination” only applied to nations dominated by the defeated Central Powers. The British and French Empires continued to rule over millions of Africans and Asians, and they would continue to do so until after the next World War.