The Immediate and Long-Run Historical Consequences of World War I

Lenin and Stalin, 1923


The conflict was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang.”

       Fritz Stern, German-American historian. Cited in The Economist, “Still In the Grip of the Great War,” March 27, 2014. 


DISCONTINUITIES:  THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF WORLD WAR I


The 19th century ended in August, 1914. The 20th century began in November, 1918.

 

World War I was the “seminal tragedy” of the 20th century. If we judge the importance of a historical event by its long-term consequences, then WWI is the most important event of the 20th century. Much of the violence, wars, conflicts, and economic disruptions stem from the consequences of WWI. Every time I think the consequences of WWI are over, sometime else happens - the breakup and genocide in the former Yugoslavia (created as a result of post-WWI treaties), political and military conflict over the Central Europe “borderlands,” violence in the Middle East partly due to the artificial national boundaries drawn by the English and French imperialists during WWI. The continuing conflict between Jews and Arabs  is partly due to the political mess the English left behind when they exited from Palestine.

 

WWI was the last attempt of the ancien regime conservative, reactionary and nationalist ruling classes of Europe to remain in power. Tens of millions of people died during and just after WWI. If we include the long-run effects, hundreds of millions of people died.

 

Many of the old regimes collapsed – tsarism in Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm and Prussian dominance in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The traditional ruling classes of monarchs, royal courts and landed aristocracy – the ruling class in Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary - were swept away. New leaders – the heads of mass movements like Communism, Fascism, Social Democracy, and Labor – rose in their place.

 

At the Treaty of Versailles, new, unstable states were created in Europe partly because of the misplaced idealism of Woodrow Wilson. Wilson, despite talking about “self-determination,” was not able to convince England or France to give their colonies. 

England and France kept their colonial empires, but political elites in European colonies heard the rhetoric of “self-determination” and began to organize anti-colonial movements in their countries. Probably foremost was Gandhi and the Congress Party in India. 

 

Germany lost 13% of its territory and 10% of its population. Austria-Hungary was dismantled, creating new states in Central Europe and the small country of Austria. Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory after conflict with its neighbors. France suffered much physical damage and loss of life; its political divisions became worse after the war. Yugoslavia, under Serbian dominance, was created, leading to future problems and violence in the Balkans. The Ottoman Empire was dismantled and the resulting country of Turkey lost all of the Middle East lands of the former Ottoman Empire. They were arbitrarily divided up as spheres of influence between England and France with no regard to ethnic or religious differences. This was one of the sources of later Middle East conflicts.

 

Europe in the post-World War I period did not get a resumption of economic growth, more trade among nations or new democratic governments. Instead, Europe got Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin and Stalin, and autocratic or Fascists regimes in Spain and most of central Europe. Communist Russia got gulags and Germany and Europe got the Hitler and the Holocaust.

 

The ”concert of nations” of pre-war Europe no longer existed. European dominance became a struggle between Fascist Germany and Communist Russia. After WWII, Europe became a political battleground contested by a Communist Russia and the United States. With the loss of colonies, European influence in the world decreased even more. 

 

Some economic historians believe that the economic and financial disruptions caused by WWI contributed to the American stock market crash of 1929 and to the length and depth of the global Great Depression. The stock market crash and the Great Depression started only 11 years after the end of the war and contributed to global political instability.

 

Pre-war industrialization and rising standards of living for the middle-class did not resume after WWI. Recovery from the massive damage, loss of life and dislocations of the war was slow and difficult over all of Europe. Then came World War II. Western Europe did not start to economically recover until the late 1940s and 1950s, a generation after the end of WWI.


Two countries benefitted from World War I. Both were outside of Europe – America and Japan. 

 

GERMANY

Erich Ludendorff (center) with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders, 1924
From Bundesarchiv


Erich Ludendorff, the commander of the German army, saw the future of Germany in 1916. It was German dominance of eastern Europe. He proposed German colonization of the area along with the elimination of its Slavic population.

 

During the war, he set up puppet states in the Baltic regions under German control. Germany controlled a huge amount of land in eastern Europe and western Russia after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Bolshevik (Communist) government. But Germany couldn’t hold them. Fearing another one million American troops coming to France in 1918, Ludendorff decided on one last huge offensive campaign. He needed most of eastern-front troops in France.

 

Germany’s new government of the Weimar Republic was attacked by right-wing and Fascists organizations containing violent paramilitary wings. Many Germans did not believe Germany had been militarily defeated in the war. In 1923, Ludendorff joined Hitler in the Munich putsch to overthrow the Bavarian government. It failed. Hitler was sentenced to a short and easy prison term, during which he wrote Mein Kampf. Ludendorff continued active in far-right-wing politics but was overshadowed by Hitler.

 

Hitler slowly marginalized Ludendorff, partly because of Ludendorff’s conspiracy theories. Ludendorff died two years before Hitler’s armies conquer Poland and started to dominate central and eastern Europe in a war with Russia.

  

German inflation in the early 1920s wiped out the savings of the middle class. Germany went into recession in 1928. As the recession worsened, German voters moved to supported left-wing and right-wing parties. In the election of 1932, the left-wing parties gained two million more votes than in the prior election. German conservatives, fearful of a left-wing government, prevailed on a very old President Hindenburg to appoint Adolf Hitler as chancellor in January, 1933.

 

Although stripped of its navy and its army much reduced in numbers and armaments, a small group of German army officers began planning the next war in the 1920s. More than the victors, German tactical and strategic plans were based on integrating the new military technology of tanks, airplanes, machine guns and artillery to achieve offensive victories. Germany was able to quickly rearm under Hitler, leading to Panzer divisions led by Rommel and Guderian (graduates of 1920s planning groups) and World War II. 

  

ENGLAND


England experienced a stagnant economy in 1920s, made worse by returning to the gold standard at the pre-war exchange ratio. The country was wracked by large labor strikes during the 1920s. The English landowning class continued to decline because of land taxes, death duties and cheaper food imports. The Labor Party replaced the Liberal Party as England's second party.

 

The English pound, the de facto international currency before the war, was overvalued relative to other currencies after the war. This made exports expensive and imports cheap. England ran trade surpluses before the war but trade deficits after the war. 

 

England had to repatriate much of its large foreign investment and borrowed heavily from the United States during the war. After the war, London lost its role as the global financial center to New York.

 

CHINA AND JAPAN


About 100,000 Chinese and Vietnamese were brought to France as workers during the war. Many were radicalized. Zhou EnLai (Chou En-lai) and Ho Chi Minh went to France after the war. Both were influenced by the Russian Revolution. Ho was a founding member of the French Communist Party and Zhou joined a Chinese Communist cell in France. When they went home, Chou En-lai eventually became the number two man in the Chinese Communist government and Ho Chi Minh led the fight against the French in Indochina and established a Communist government in Vietnam. He may also have the distinction of being the only person to be a founding member of two Communist parties.


The Versailles Treaty gave Japan the Pacific islands formerly controlled by Germany. (America would learn the names of these islands after December 7, 1941.) The Treaty also gave Japan control of a part of China formerly occupied by Germany (Shandong province). Demonstrations by outraged Chinese students and intellectuals in 1919 is considered the beginning of modern Chinese nationalism.

The Japanese military and nationalists, seeing a weakening of European colonial power in Asia, took over Manchuria and began planning a Japanese empire in China and Southeast Asia. Japan, now the strongest imperialist power in Asia, invaded China in 1937 and conquered eastern and southeast Asia in 1941-42.

 

The war with Japan gave the Chinese Communists, almost annihilated by the Chinese Nationalists in the 1930s, a new lease on political life that led to victory in the Chinese civil war and the founding of Communist China in 1949.

 

THE UNITED STATES


The United States had already passed England in industrial production and total output before the war. But the United States did not leverage its military contribution to Allied victory in World War I and its financial and industrial power into global political power. Instead, America reverted to its traditional isolationism.

 

U.S learned the cost of choosing isolation after WWI. There was no return to isolationism after WWII. The global situation had changed – American leaders saw the Soviet Union as a direct threat to U.S. The combination of Russian atomic bombs, ICBMs and long-range bombers meant that Ameria could no longer hide behind two oceans. New military and civilian institutions were created to support new strategies.

 

New weapons such as tanks and airplanes, new logistics and communications, and new strategies (mobile all arms offensives) that were developed near the end of World War I would be crucial in World War II. The United States far outproduced Germany and Japan in the new weapons of war.


EUROPE'S CULTURAL AND INTELLECTUAL DOMINANCE

 

It also seems that the great creative surge in Europe from the 1880s to 1914 did not continue with the same intensity after the war.  Much of European art and literature in the quarter century before WWI seems to express an uneasiness with the middle-class culture of the times. There seems to have been an artistic intuition of the disintegration, chaos and violence to come. Russian artists and writers explored revolutionary themes after the failure of the 1905-06 Revolution. Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain and Robert Musil’s A Man Without Qualities explored new forms of neurotic behavior in the ruling class. In Austria, Mahler’s symphonies introduce chaos and deconstruction into Romantic music and Schiele’s nudes illustrated stark terror in human relations. Stravinsky outraged France with The Rites of Spring.

Italian futurists celebrated machine-based violence and would support the Fascists after the war. Possibly, Cubism represented the new sensibility.

 

Many European artists, intellectuals and scientists migrated to United States, including Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. Many Europeans who created the new media of movies - producers, directors, writers, actors and composers - ended up in Hollywood after the war. Except for Humphrey Bogart, almost everyone connected with Casablanca (my favorite movie) was a European emigrant or refugee.


European physicists and chemists were crucial in designing the American atomic bomb. One of them - Edward Teller - led the team that designed the more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb. Calculations for the bomb were done on an innovative computer designed and built under the supervision of his Hungarian friend John von Neumann. Many departments of American universities were dominated by European refugees, including the Economics Department of Harvard, which produced many of America’s first generation of Nobel Prize winners in economics. In biology, James Watson, the co-discover of the structure of DNA, was educated by a European refugee biologist. Many of the Nobel Prizes won by “Americans” after the war were earned by European refugees.

 

CONCLUSION


There was too much dislocation, too much damage, too many new disputes, too much violence after World War I for the old order to be reestablished. But there was no stabilizing new order to bring Europe back to 1913 because of chaos, fear, anger and resentment everywhere in Europe. It was only after the Great Depression and the horrors of World War II did western Europe, with American financial support and military protection, begin the transition to a reduced but peaceful and prosperous future.

 

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For about 50 excellent video lectures on the world right after World War I, see Jesse Alexander, The Great War, on YouTube. This series also has hundreds of video lectures on all aspects of the war, including the war outside of Europe. Highly recommended.


The first five posts are best read in order.


For posts on various influences leading up to World War I, see


Bismarck and the Origins of World War I

The Beginning of the Twentieth Century:  The Start of World War I

Wealth and Power in Pre-World War I Europe 

The Austro-Hungarian Empire Before World War I

Europe on the Brink of World War I

The next two posts illustrate that the Entente powers (England, France and Russia) had access to resources beyond their national boundaries, which was one reason they won the war.

The Maxim Machine Gun and Smokeless Powder

For a list of all posts, with links, on this blog, see List of Posts by Topic


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