Chapter 28: The Beginning of the 20th century Crisis: War and Revolution

  • World War I was defining event of 20th c.
  • “Great War”

The Road to World War I

  • June 28, 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Bosnia

Nationalism and Internal Dissent

  • Nationalism: System of nation-states led to competition instead of cooperation
  • Not all ethnic groups had achieved the goal of nationhood, causing increased tensions
  • Alliances: Triple Alliance and Triple Entente
  • Militarism: growth of large mass armies, increase in military leaders as well as contingency plans for potential conflicts
  • Expansion: (imperialism) rivalries over colonial and commercial interests
  • Diplomacy based on Brinkmanship
  • Increased popularity of Socialism especially among the working classes

Outbreak of War: Summer of 1914

  • Rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia to dominate states in southeastern Europe freeing themselves from Ottoman Empire
  • Serbia, supported by Russia, wanted to create a large, independent Slavic state in the Balkans, Austria wanted to prevent that.
  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand and wife Sophie were assassinated by 19 year old Gavrillo Princip, a member of the Serbian nationalist group, The Black Hand.
  • Austria was outraged and wanted to punish Serbia, Germany backed its ally Austria and said they had full support (blank check)
  • Austria declared war on Serbia on July 28, and Russia said it would support Serbia
  • Russia mobilized against Austria and didn’t want to alter original plans, so also mobilized against Germany, then Germany declared war on Russia
  • Germany instituted its Schlieffen Plan (for two front war against Russia and France through Belgium. Germany declared war on France (b/c they didn’t want to only mobilize against Russia)
  • Great Britain then declared war on Germany

The War 1914-1915: Illusions and Stalemate

  • Believed war would be over in a few weeks
  • German advance halted at the First Battle of the Marne
  • Trenches were dug, stalemate resulted
  • Eastern Front, Russians were beat in Germany
  • Italy switched alliances and joined the allies by attacking Austria
  • Russian casualties: 2.5 million killed, captured or wounded
  • Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, attacked and eliminated Serbia from the war

The War 1916-1917: The Great Slaughter

  • Trench warfare, baffled military strategists
  • Ineffectively sent masses of soldiers across “no man’s land” against barbed wire and machine guns
  • Introduction of poison gas

The Widening of the War

  • New allies
  • Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria joined the Central Powers
  • Balkan Front, Allies’ Gallipoli Plan failed
  • Italy joined the allies in exchange for the promise of Austrian land
  • Middle East: British officer, Lawrence of Arabia, encouraged Arab princes to revolt against Ottoman Empire
  • Japan seized a number German-held islands in the Pacific, Australia took over German New Guinea
  • United States joined: Sinking of Lusitania by German U-Boats, US joined after Germany went back to unrestricted submarine warfare

The Home Front: The Impact of Total War

  • Use of conscription
  • Police force to stifle internal dissent
  • Ex: British Parliament passed Defense of the Realm Act (DORA)-dissenters can be arrested as traitors
  • Use of propaganda
  • End of unemployment
  • New roles for Women
  • Equal pay measures
  • Expected that Women would turn back over jobs when men returned “till the khaki soldier boys come marching back.”
  • Women’s Suffrage in Germany, Austria, Britain

The Russian Revolution

  • Russia was unprepared for total war of WWI
  • Led by Tsar Nicholas II of the Romanov Family
  • Tsar took personal charge of army
  • Soldiers were ill-equipped for war
  • Wife was Alexandra- born in Germany, raised in Great Britain, seen as an outsider: their only son, Alexei was a hemophiliac, influenced from Rasputin
  • Rasputin: a self-proclaimed holy man, said you had to sin as much as possible in order to reach salvation
  • Rasputin was assassinated by members of Tsar’s family, made a prophesy that Tsar’s entire family would die
  • March 1917- strike led by working-class women over scarcity of bread
  • March8 10,000 Petrograd women demanded “Bread and Peace” and “Down with Autocracy”
  • March 12 Duma met and urged tsar to abdicate on March 15 (ides of March)
  • Provisional Government- led by Alexander Kerensky: continued Russian participation in WWI
  • Soviets: workers organization and socialists
  • Bolsheviks: small faction of Marxist Social Democrats led by V.I. Lenin
  • Exiled to Switzerland, helped by Germans in sealed boxcar back into Russia
  • Sought mass support
  • Redistribution of land, end to war, “Peace, Land, Bread”, “Worker Control of Production,” “All Power to the Soviets.”
  • Leon Trotsky: revolutionary w/ Bolsheviks
  • Coup D’Etat November 6-7 of Bolsheviks over the Provisional Government
  • March 3, 1918 Lenin signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk w/ Germany and gave up eastern Poland, Ukraine, Finland, and the Baltic provinces
  • Civil War
  • Many people opposed the communists, including thousands of Allied troops sent to different parts of Russia
  • Red Army (Bolsheviks) vs. White armies (anti-communist)

End of War

  • German leader Wilhelm II abdicated, Weimer Republic established and Nov. 11, 1918 at 11 AM an armistice went into effect.

The Peace Settlement

  • 27 victorious Allied nations met
  • wanted “eternal peace”
  • American President Woodrow Wilson outlined his “Fourteen Points”- no secret diplomacy, reduction of armaments, self-determination, beginning of a League of Nations
  • Other countries wanted revenge and to make Germany pay for war
  • Great Britain led by David Lloyd George wanted Germany to pay
  • Clemenceau from France wanted demilitarized Germany, German reparations, and separate Rhineland

The Treaty of Versailles

  • five separate peace treaties w/ defeated nations: Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey
  • Treaty w/ Germany very important
  • War Guilt Clause (Article 231)
  • Reparations to Allied govts.
  • Reduce army and navy and eliminate air force
  • Alsace and Lorraine back to France, parts of Prussia to Poland, demilitarized zone
  • New countries emerged from German/ Russian Empires and Austro-Hungarian Empire and Ottoman Empire
  • Finland, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary
  • Problems of minorities in each of the eastern European countries led to future problems
  • Mandates after WWI in former Ottoman Empire
  • France: Lebanon and Syria, Britain: Iraq and Palestine (ignored self-determination)
  • Issue of lack of enforcement of the peace agreement
  • US Senate did not ratify the Treaty of Versailles

An Uncertain Peace: The Search for Security

  • Conflicts over border regions
  • France isolated after US and Britain withdrew their military alliances
  • $33 Billion in German reparations
  • Germany refused first payment
  • France occupied Ruhr valley and confiscated mines and factories
  • Germany printed more paper money
  • August 1924: Dawes Plan- new international commission w/ new plan for reparations
  • Reduced reparations
  • $200 million loan for German recovery- new American investment in Europe
  • Kellogg-Briand Pact- signed by 63 nations, “renounced war as an instrument of national policy”

The Great Depression

  • Downturn in domestic economies
  • International financial crisis created by the collapse of the American stock market in 1929
  • October 29,1929 crash of American Stock Market: American investors pulled money out of Germany
  • Reversal of traditional Gender roles, low-paying jobs for women, while men remained unemployed
  • Unemployed young men: some formed gangs
  • Renewed interest in Marxism
  • Also interest in communism and fascism

The Democratic States

  • Wilson, WWI was fought to “make the world safe for democracy”
  • Increase in women’s suffrage
  • John Maynard Keynes wrote General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money in which he said that unemployment stemmed from a decline in demand and demand could be increased by public works, financed if necessary, through defecit spending to stimulate production.
  • France- Popular Front was a coalition of leftist parties- Communists, Socialists, and Radicals
  • Weimer Republic in Germany: struggled to gain popular support and faced serious economic problems, runaway inflation
  • United States: election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: New Deal: National Recovery Administration (NRA): required govt., labor, and industrial leaders to work out regulations for each industry: Second New Deal- Works Progress Administration (WPA)- 1935- employed 2-3 million people who built bridges, roads, post offices, and airports, Social Security Act, and Labor Unions: World War II ultimately ended massive unemployment for US

Socialism in USSR

  • Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) which was a modified version of the old capitalist system “Two steps backward to go one step forward”
  • Alexandra Kollontai led a Bolshevik program for women’s rights
  • Lenin’s death in 1924 set off a struggle amongst the seven members of the Politburo
  • The Left headed by Leon Trotsky wanted to end the NEP and launch Russia on the path of rapid industrialization (even at expense of the peasantry), carry on the revolution and spread communism abroad
  • The Right rejected the cause of world revolution and wanted to concentrate on constructing a social state in Russia. Continue the NEP
  • Personal rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin- eventually Stalin rose from party secretary to take power. Trotsky was expelled, fled to Mexico, was executed five years later by someone secretly working for Stalin w/ an ice-pick

Search for a new Reality

  • WWI brought mass disillusionment/ despair
  • New image for women

Nightmares and New Visions: Art

  • Dadaism: show the purposelessness of life
  • Tristan Tzara
  • Create anti-Art
  • Hannah Hoch: women’s roles in new mass culture
  • Surrealism: sought a reality beyond the material, sensible world and found it in the world of the unconscious
  • Employ logic to portray the illogical
  • Salvadore Dali: the Persistence of Memory
  • Functionalism in modern architecture; Bauhaus school of art

Search for Unconscious

  • “stream of consciousness” technique
  • James Joyce: Ulysses
  • Hermann Hesse: Steppenworlf, Demian, Siddhartha