Lecture 3-WWI Flashcards
Why was WWI a world war?
Participation of colonial soldiers from France’s and the UK’s overseas territories
Participation soldiers from the British dominions of Australia and Canada
When in 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), and the war extended to the Middle East
When in 1914 Japan joined the Triple Entente (Russia, France, United Kingdom) and Japan attacked German territories in the Pacific and China
When in 1917, the United States joined the Allied Powers as a response to Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare
The arms race theory
- Intense military build up + comp with eu
-created mutual suspicion and fear
Failing War Plans Theory
- risky all-out war doomed to fail the von Schlieffenplan disaster.
- Go through Belgium to attack France as that’s where they expect it. The least was meant to last six weeks, and then they would invade Russia on the eastern front, but Britain also joined because of their treaty with France. The plan was unrealistic
Weak Aristocrats
- Intentionally starting a war to consolidate positions
- Russia due to plague, 1905 revolution there was large dissatisfaction and it was thought the war could amend this
- seen with Russia vs japan and germany
The Spirit of the times
Happily going to war as it will be short, easy to win and the perfect medicine for the nations rebirth.
Sleepwalker theory
Christopher Clark shows that the European powers were not sleepwalkers because they did not say that war was coming; they were sleepwalkers because they did not see its consequences.
Marching towards the abyss
Domestic factors
Social-economic: Industrialization & population growth induced empire building
Political: Instable autocracies needed empire building adventures to prove their legitimacy and to extract their populations’ attention from internal failures
Cultural: the idea of war as a purgative; as an instrument to reset societies.
Flawed leaderships using outdated war strategies and not able to oversee the consequences of their actions.
International political factors
Collapse Ottoman empire, resulting in a power vacuum on the Balkans where Russia and Austria-Hungary became competitors
Increasing mutual distrust, especially between France and Germany after the German-French war of 1871
And as a result, the establishment of security alliances (Ententes): The league of Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary. And after the start of the war: the Ottoman Empire) versus the Triple Entente or Allied Powers (United Kingdom, France, Russia)
What contributed to Germany’s surrender?
US participation in the war
The failing German Offensive in Spring 1918 and the resulting collapse of the German army
Spanish Influenza pandemic starting in January 1918. German soldiers more susceptible. The pandemic only ended in 1920 and resulted worldwide in far more deadly casualties than WWI: 50/100 million versus 18 million
The wars consequences
It ruined Europe’s image of white supremacism, inducing anti-colonial nationalism in Asia.
WWI introduced the idea of total war. Which
inspired Nazi’s, Fascists and Soviet Communists to introduce totalitarianism as a political ideology.
“A radical dictatorship that exercises complete political power and control over all aspects of society and seeks to mobilize the masses for action.”(Wiesner, p. 891)
Emancipation women in Western democracies and Soviet Union
League of nations
Total war
- Complete economic and military mobilisation, including full military conscription and involvement of all civilians in the war economy
- Directed at total defeat without any room for armistices, peace or compromises
Total war methods not making a difference between soldiers and civilians (and therefore prohibited by international war law): - Sea blockade of Germany; Unlimited submarine warfare, also against civilian ships; Terror bombing of cities like the - German Zeppelin bombings of London
- Total control of the war efforts at all levels by the state (which was easier and faster to realize in imperial Germany than in the parliamentarian democracies of France and the UK)
Without WWI we may not have witnessed the rise of Fascism Nazism, Communism. Give examples
- Without WWI the Germans would not have allowed Russian communist leader Vladimir Lenin to return to Russia from his exile in Switzerland to start a communist revolution
- Without the war no Benito Mussolini. He not only used the fear for socialism among nationalist and conservative elites, but also their frustrations about Italy’s very modest WWI territorial gains to introduce fascism as a violent form of extreme and expansionist nationalism and anti-socialism
- Without the war we probably would not have seen the rise of Adolf Hitler, who used the frustrations among conservative Germans about losing the war and the negative terms of the Versailles treaty to introduce Nazism as a variant on fascism, characterized by extreme racism
- The eagerness with which large groups of people embrace totalitarian ideologies cannot be separated from another consequence of WWI: a search for security in a world with unlimited technological and scientific opportunities and risks
- Totalitarian ideologies did not reject modernity. They used it as an integral element to furnish utopia’s offering political, social and economic security. Communism, Fascism and Nazism promised Charlie Chaplin not to get stuck between the gears of mass industrialization
- Fascism, Nazism and Communism even became a replacement for religion and its promise of an afterlife as the new totalitarian ideologies promised the masses to become part of something bigger and almost eternal as Hitler promised with his message of a secular utopian Thousand Year Empire.
