Archdukes, Cynicism, and World War I

Name ________________________________________________________ Date ________ Hour ______

1. Other than the obvious, why is World War I considered a tragedy?

2. So what was the immediate cause of the war?

3. How long were the trenches used on the Western Front of the war? How much land did the trenches cover?

4. How many people were killed and wounded in the war?

5. What was the most efficient killer in World War I?

6. What two American technologies made their debut in the war?

7. How destructive was WW I and what were the causes of this destruction?

8. What were the conditions like for the soldiers in World War I?

9. What ended the war and what were the results?

Critical Thinking: About halfway through the video, John mentions the idea that people make history and are also made by history. What do they think he means by this?

Putting the “World” in World War IBy Mary Price, revised by Amy Elizabeth Robinson

World War One is sometimes referred to as the “Great War” or the “War to End All Wars,” but it is now clear that it was neither qualitatively “great,” nor—obviously—an end to all wars. It is true, however, that it was a World War. From the beginning, it was a war of empires, not merely of nations, and it eventually drew almost the entire inhabited globe into its orbit. It was also a hugely important turning point in world history. Consider the world scene in 1914, the year the war broke out.

World War 1 began in Europe, so we will start there. Europe was divided into a number of sovereign nation-states, but in some ways it still constituted a single cultural community. Especially in the cities, people tended to dress alike, eat many of the same foods, and enjoy the same art and music. Even though there were many different church denominations, monotheistic faiths such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam gave Europeans some generally shared ideas about the supernatural, morality, and destiny. People traveled widely and easily within Europe (passports as we know them today did not yet exist), especially using the railway networks that linked most countries. Europeans spoke a variety of languages, but French served as a language of diplomacy and scholarly exchange. European states had different sorts of governments. France and Portugal were the only republics. Most countries were monarchies, many of them constitutional monarchies such as Great Britain, along with some autocracies such as Russia.  But the governing elites of Europe generally shared similar political values and faced similar political challenges—especially the rise of socialism, the growing demand for women’s suffrage, and the question of how to maintain, expand, or acquire an empire.

The unity of civilization in Europe might be symbolized by the architecture of three sorts of public buildings. One was the railway station, which represented European communication and industry. The second was the town hall, which typified public participation in government. The third was the opera house, which symbolized common culture in the fine arts. These types of structures looked quite alike wherever one traveled in Europe.

So why did European countries make devastating war on one another? The answer only makes sense if you consider these countries in a global, imperial sense. In 1914, the industrial nation-states of Europe dominated most of the world. Britain and France held the most overseas territory, while Russia maintained a vast land-based empire. Britain, France, and Germany possessed about half of the world’s industrial might, and their merchants controlled half the world’s international trade. The Ottomans, with whom Russia and increasingly Britain were in tension, still controlled imperial possessions in the Middle East from Istanbul. These imperial states also coveted territory occupied by each other. Russia wanted access to the Mediterranean via the Ottoman Empire and control over the Balkan Slavic regions of Austria-Hungary. Britain and France both wanted more access to Ottoman-controlled territory: Britain to connect trade with their colony of India more easily and France to access their

colonies in North Africa. Germany wanted to build their empire in Africa to challenge the British. Italy coveted parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

World map with European colonial empires in 1900

Both the economic power of the countries of Europe and their rivalry for world influence produced serious divisions and mutual suspicions among them—even though their affluent populations attended the same operas. National groups that did not have their own states, or not one that included the territories they wanted, expressed their nationalism loudly. These groups were concentrated in Eastern Europe: Poles, Ukrainians, Croatians, Serbs, Czechs, and others. As a result, tensions were growing between the sovereign states. There was general agreement in the early twentieth century that boundaries in Europe were to be regarded as fixed. One state was not supposed to covet the territory of other states. There was also a sense that the world was already “carved up,” and there might not be enough colonial possessions (and thus industrial resources) to go around.

Within Europe an ominous arms race was picking up. Germany, which became a unified sovereign state in 1871, was a new power on the scene. Germany’s rapid rise as an industrial and military power caused alarm, especially for France and Britain. Germany’s leaders openly aspired to have an empire to match their increasing economic power.  All the European powers informally agreed that whenever a conflict threatened to break out between two of them, the powers would gang up on the side of the underdog and the crisis would be defused that way. But Europe had no regular machinery for settling international disputes. Neither the League of Nations nor the United Nations yet existed. Shifts and adjustments in the balance of power ended, and Europe divided into two solid alliance blocks: Germany and Austria-Hungary on one side, Britain, France, and Russia on the other.

The incident that precipitated World War I was in itself a small one: the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was traveling in the town of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. While his carriage was driving through the streets, a Serbian terrorist shot him. Serbian revolutionaries regarded Austria as the special enemy of the little country of Serbia. From this incident unrolled a series of events that nobody managed to control and that led directly to the outbreak of the war in August 1914. Austria made demands on Serbia. Russia was an ally of Serbia and therefore started mobilizing its army. Germany then mobilized as well because it felt it had to stand by Austria, its ally, against Russia. Finally, France and Britain, Russia’s allies, mobilized too. Germany invaded

France and tried to knock it out of the war fast, but the army got bogged down in Belgium and northeastern France. This is where the trench lines were dug. This was the Western Front.

The rigid alliance system made it almost inevitable that a local quarrel could become a European war, and that is exactly what happened. And because of the global imperialism and integration that had accelerated at the end of the long nineteenth century, it became a world war. Turkey joined the Central Powers in late 1914. Japan, China, Italy, and the United States all came into the war eventually on the Allied side. Other independent countries across the globe, such as Liberia, Siam, Brazil, and Panama, joined the war because of German attacks on shipping (justified as part of their blockade of Britain), or because they hoped to have a voice in post-war peace negotiations. Before the war was over, more than thirty countries with a combined population of 1.4 billion people were involved.

It is paradoxical that war on such a devastating scale, containing such animosity, could also facilitate the convergence of people, ideas, experiences, technologies, and microbes across the globe. But this is what happened. Historian Jennifer Keene says, “The globalization of the world economy meant that millions of civilians worldwide felt the war’s impact even if they never left their homes. The best example of this is the quick diffusion of the Spanish Influenza around the globe, a catastrophic epidemic that war-related travel intensified.” The war mobilized massive numbers of men and technologies. Battles were fought not just in the trenches of Western Europe but in places as far apart as Tsingtao in China, Damascus, the Falkland Islands, and Kilimanjaro in East Africa. German submarines crisscrossed the globe enforcing the blockade of British goods and shipping. The war is considered to be a founding moment of national consciousness for the far-flung British settler colonies of Australia and New Zealand, and two million Africans, 1.5 million Indians, and 100,000 Vietnamese served as colonial troops and conscripted laborers, both on the Western Front and in non-European combat theaters. An inscription on the All-India War Memorial in New Delhi, India reads:

To the dead of the Indian armies who fell honoured in France and Flanders, Mesopotamia and Persia, East Africa, Gallipoli and elsewhere in the near and the far-east and in sacred memory also of those whose names are recorded and who fell in India or the north-west frontier and during the Third Afghan War.

Many colonial servicemen believed that their participation in the war effort would reap them rewards once peace arrived. Gandhi, for example, served as an ambulance driver in WW1 South Africa. “If we would improve our status through the help and cooperation of the British,” he wrote, “it was our duty to win their help by standing them in their hour of need.” Other colonial troops, however, were conscripted, and even if they voluntarily accepted the position it was often as an alternative to pitifully-low wages in a labor system that overwhelmingly benefited European economies.

During and immediately after the Great War, people widely understood that it was a global event, a truly world war. It was only later in the twentieth-century, in the wake of the calamities of World War Two, that the war began to be perceived as a smaller, more localized war between European nations. Some historians even describe it as a European “civil war.” But seen in the context of world history, it is clear that World War One was waged within a global imperial system.

Putting the “World” in World War I

Name ________________________________________________________ Date ________ Hour ______

1. The writer claims that in 1914 Europe “still constituted a single cultural community.” What evidence does the writer use to support this claim? Do you think the writer makes a convincing case for the claim?

2. In 1914 what was Europe’s relationship to the rest of the world?

3. What does the writer mean by the statement: “Shifts and adjustments in the balance of power ended,” and how does this statement relate to the start of the war?

4. How did World War I eventually lead to movements for independence from an imperialistic system of government?