American Studies/ Nelson
The long-term historical consequences of World War I provide historians a myriad of historical connections. As you read the following, highlight the major consequences of World War I. After you finish reading divide the effects of World War I into two categories: immediate and long term. Within each area, again divide the effects into European, American and Global. (See the format sheet at the conclusion of this reading.)
Global Consequences of World War I
By Edward J. Davies II
World War I (1914-1918), one of the world’s most devastating conflicts, was a struggle of great size that began in Europe and eventually involved 32 nations. The war was fought between two great military alliances—the Allies, which included France, Russia, Britain, and eventually the United States; and the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austro-Hungary, and later, the Ottomans. By the end of the Great War, nearly 10 million troops had died and about 21 million soldiers had been wounded.
The Great War also precipitated revolution and unrest, an outcome wholly unexpected by the European powers. The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917 was only a foretaste of the rumblings and unrest that would eventually reach Berlin and even Peking. At the end of the war, Vladimir Lenin emerged as a person feared or venerated throughout the world. At the same time, Woodrow Wilson entered the fray with his famous Fourteen Points, a set of war aims designed to bring and preserve peace. Wilson’s novel ideas, such as self-determination and the League of Nations, stood in sharp contrast to Lenin’s revolutionary appeals to exploited peoples and his advocacy of violence to achieve justice and equity. The contrasting ideas of these two visionaries energized colonial peoples across the globe and intensified their demands for independence or autonomy. At the same time, the end of the war embittered many people as empires crumbled, reparations were exacted from the losers, and the victors redrew the map of Europe.
The War, Manpower, and Colonial Populations
Although World War I began in Europe, from the very beginning it reached far beyond the confines of that continent. Peoples throughout Africa, India, and Asia experienced the war as recruits or laborers in European armies. These regions also contributed significant resources to sustain the war efforts of warring nations.
As the war raged on, the European powers’ desperate need for soldiers and laborers compelled them to look to their colonial populations. Colonial leaders gave their support, believing that loyalty demonstrated during the ruling country’s time of great danger would lead to greater autonomy in the colony, a relaxation of racial regulations, and even home rule at the end of the conflict. Certainly the leaders in British India and the British African colonies supported the war effort with such motives in mind. Volunteers—both soldiers and laborers—came forth in large numbers to complement the existing colonial regiments of Britain, France, or Germany.
The French, for example, recruited 70,000 Algerians and 170,000 West Africans to serve in their European armies. The British relied on Indian troops for their ill-fated 1915 campaign in southern Iraq and to reinforce their armies in northern France. In fact, almost a million Indian troops and laborers served throughout the globe. The British also recruited 100,000 Chinese laborers to meet the logistical demands of their armies in northern Europe. In addition, hundreds of thousands of porters and workers from West Africa, Egypt, and India provided invaluable services for the warring nations.
Subversion and Belligerent Policies in the Colonies
Off the battlefields, the warring nations used other means to weaken their enemies. For example, they vigorously encouraged unrest, rebellion, and nationalism among their enemies’ colonial subjects. This strategy was intended to weaken opponents by forcing them to devote resources and military power to suppress civil and military disturbances, especially in west Asia. Probably the best-known incidence of such subversion occurred in Arabia, where British agent T. E. Lawrence mobilized the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The emerging Arab nationalism was a sentiment endorsed by the British government, which promised—but never delivered—Arab independence.
Britain was also behind Zionism, another movement with the potential to affect western Asia. During World War I, a small number of idealistic Polish and Russian Jews formed into a cohesive group that reached out to all Jewish communities regardless of their country, language, or local customs. This group eventually won British support for the formation of a Jewish homeland after the war. This support, documented in the Balfour Declaration, collided with Britain’s earlier guarantees to the Arab nationalists and would later lead to violent and bloody disputes between the Jewish and Arab communities.
The Germans and Ottomans, too, developed subversionary policies. They hoped to exploit the Pan-Islamic sentiment spreading in the British crown colony of India. An underground opposition party, the Ghadr (Revolt), had already existed in the Punjab State. Leaders in Berlin, a gathering place for exiled Indian dissidents, hoped to exploit this increasing tension. In the end, however, the great distance between Europe and India and the difficulty of coordinating potential rebels under stiff British resistance foiled these ambitions. The Germans and Ottomans were more successful in their efforts to encourage Islamic resistance in North and West Africa, where opposition to colonial rule eventually outlasted the war itself.
World War I and the Bolshevik Seizure of Power in Russia
Unanticipated events in Imperial Russia proved equally as dramatic and successful as the warring nations’ policy of subversion. In 1917, the Russian Revolution shook the entire world and created an ongoing challenge to Western powers. The revolution would also provide hope to countries such as China that were struggling against imperial control. Within three decades after the revolution, more than one-third of the world would live under communist regimes.
A longtime ally of France, Imperial Russia went to war in 1914, ill-prepared to sustain the huge costs demanded by modern, industrialized conflict. The war brought catastrophic losses and unbearable hardships to the millions of Russians who fought in the Imperial armies. During the war, Russia also coped with massive internal migrations as millions of refugees fled war zones and large numbers of civilians left their homes for jobs in wartime industries and agencies. This vast movement of peoples, which equaled the number of individuals called for military service, greatly disrupted a society already buckling under great domestic pressures and notorious for its inefficiencies. Food shortages soon affected the cities while inflation undermined peasant purchasing power. Workers and peasants blamed the deteriorating situation on the country’s leadership. By 1917, Czar Nicholas and his monarchical regime had lost the confidence of the Russian people. The monarchy was replaced by a provisional government, supposedly under democratic forces.
At this moment, an exiled Bolshevik revolutionary named Vladimir Lenin returned to Petrograd, assisted by German authorities who hoped that Lenin would create even more unrest in a country devastated by internal strife. Lenin and his Bolshevik followers soon decided the provisional government was wrong to keep Russia in the costly and grim war. By the fall of 1917, Lenin and his supporters had seized power from the provisional government, which had lost the support of the Russian people. Once in control, the Bolsheviks fulfilled their promise to take Russia out of the war. In December 1917, they signed the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, which ended Russia’s participation.
Wilson Versus Lenin
Lenin’s decision to take Russia out of the war directly challenged the message of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson. Since early in the war, Wilson had vigorously pursued a negotiated settlement that would bring a just peace to the warring nations. Central to Wilson’s Fourteen Points, a set of war proposals that included territorial settlements and strategies for preventing future wars, were his notions of self-determination and his ideas for the formation of the League of Nations, an international assembly similar to the United Nations which eventually superseded it. Wilson believed his proposals represented a revolution in international affairs and an alternative to traditional European diplomacy, long dependent on balance of power. Wilson faced further challenges as European nations disagreed with several of his key points. The United States declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917, with Wilson intending victory as a way to crush antidemocratic forces.
Lenin challenged both Wilson’s vision of the future and European ideas of diplomacy. He saw imperialism as a poison to working class people everywhere. Lenin also argued that the war grew naturally out of the imperialism of capitalist countries and their exploitation of colonial peoples. For Lenin, Wilson was an integral part of the capitalist world and, therefore, part of the larger problem. While both men advocated a new global order, they pursued it in vastly different ways.
The End of the War and Revolution
In 1918, the waves caused by the Russian Revolution swept into Europe, which was already in the midst of great turmoil. In Germany, loss of faith in a leadership unable to break the British blockade or win a decisive victory in the west led to military mutinies and uprisings throughout the country. Mass disobedience began in the navy and culminated in the refusal of the German sailors in the port of Kiel to make one last death ride for the honor of the Second Reich. The mutiny soon gripped the navy’s rank and file, who demanded an end to the war. The old regime was on its last legs, and the Second Reich was soon replaced by a provisional government.
The sailors, joined by soldiers and workers, were soon building soviets, councils modeled after those pioneered by the Russian Bolsheviks. These soviets directly challenged the old order in Germany. Then in 1919, the Spartacist League, reborn as the communist party, attempted an ill-advised overthrow of the new provisional government. Russian Bolsheviks gave aid directly and indirectly to their fellow German communists, in hopes of fanning the revolution everywhere in Europe. To Lenin’s dismay, German military and paramilitary forces crushed the attempted revolution. Attempted revolutions rocked Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria, demonstrating the appeal of Lenin to war-weary populations. All failed.
In spite of these European failures, the soviet-style revolution reached beyond Europe. Tobacco workers in Cuba formed their own soviets, as did Irish Catholic sheepherders in Australia. In addition, a Bolshevik Party appeared in Monarchical Spain. Even in the United States, the bastion of capitalism, Finnish workers in the upper Midwest embraced communism and revered Lenin for years. The war and the revolution were transforming the world.
The Impact of the War in East Asia
The war also reached East Asia in dramatic and fateful ways. The Japanese, who had joined the Allies in declaring war on Germany, ruthlessly exploited wartime conditions. Taking advantage of the great distance between Europe and East Asia, the Japanese quickly moved to seize the German-held Shantung Peninsula, southeast of Peking. The Japanese then seized control of the peninsula’s main rail line and began to expand their presence through newly formed manufacturing companies and other industries. The Japanese military also looked to Manchuria and Mongolia, where they intended to expand Japan’s influence.
In the wake of their activities in the Shantung Peninsula, the Japanese government issued an ultimatum demanding economic and territorial rights from the Chinese government. The Twenty-One Demands, as the ultimatum was called, severely compromised Chinese sovereignty and greatly enhanced Japan’s presence on the mainland. Under the agreement, Japan took control of territory, manufacturing operations, and key economic and political assets. The day China submitted to the demands, May 25, 1915, henceforth became known as the Day of National Humiliation, a day remembered in yearly demonstrations.
If Japan’s wartime activities compromised China, peace proved even more disturbing in the country. The Chinese had hoped their service in Europe would lead to an end of the unequal treaties the Europeans had forced on them during the second half of the 19th century. Unfortunately, these hopes were never fulfilled. In fact, delegates to the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles learned that a secret agreement among the Allies allowed the Japanese to keep their troops in Shantung peninsula. This news sparked the May 4th Movement of 1919, a series of nation-wide protests against the Japanese presence on Chinese soil. This moment also saw the merging of radical and anti-Japanese sentiments among the Chinese intellectuals and students. Lenin’s claims that imperial powers had exported their exploitation of people abroad struck home with Chinese intellectuals and students. After all, they had seen firsthand the result of imperial exploitation in their homeland and encountered it again when the Japanese moved into the Shantung Peninsula. Having watched the Bolshevik challenge to Russian imperialists, Chinese radicals saw revolution as the means to overthrow the existing social order.
Marxism and revolution now became a third alternative for Chinese people previously faced with making the stark choice between the doctrines of the Confucian east and the Imperial west. Chinese radicals founded debate societies, which brought together young individuals, such as Mao Zedong, to discuss China’s plight. Clearly, many intellectuals and students saw capitalist exploitation as part of the larger problem reflected in the Japanese presence in north China. Many of the students from such societies vigorously participated in and led the May 4th protests.
Chinese laborers, arriving back from Europe, also contributed to these debates. They had acquired an understanding of the world rare among the vast majority of untraveled Chinese. While in Europe, many of these young individuals had learned to read and write. Many had also encountered Wilson’s ideas, particularly his call for self-determination. They presumed that this ideal, if embraced by all nations, would lead to real independence for China and freedom from imperial intruders. The war veterans joined the radical students and intellectuals in their protest over Japan’s continued presence in China. Hundreds of student-led demonstrations swept across the country. Merchants closed their operations while workers struck by the thousands and joined a boycott of Japanese goods.
The May 4th Movement proved more than just a series of protests over a specific incident. It marked a turning point in the emergence of Chinese nationalism and secured China’s legitimate place in the new global order. New styles of dress, vernacular writing, and calls for new values spread through China. Scores of newly founded journals enabled intellectuals to debate the merits of Marxism, liberalism, Socialism, and other new philosophies. Above all, the movement called for a reunited country free from internal division and external exploitation.
The Impact of the War in Africa
The war deeply affected Africa. As demands for personnel to aid the war efforts increased and created a shortage of white labor, black Africans assumed administrative posts and mercantile positions throughout the European colonies. The economic demands of the war also created new industries. However, African colonies also suffered severe economic consequences. Wartime demands eventually created shortfalls in consumer goods and sparked inflation and serious unrest in places such as Portuguese-held Madagascar and French-ruled Senegal. Such disturbances reached as far as South Africa, where an unprecedented number of biracial unions formed to demand economic fairness from the colonial government.
The drain of resources severely weakened Africa’s local populations. In some areas of East and Central Africa, famine struck; shortly thereafter, various epidemics devastated the African peoples. Even more damaging, millions perished from the influenza pandemic that arrived from Europe just before the war ended. In some places, as much as 6 percent of the population perished. While militarily speaking Africa was a sideshow in the Great War, the continent fully participated in its deadly consequences.
As did many European countries, Africa also witnessed a series of revolts against colonial rule. Wilson’s Fourteen Points, including the right to self-determination, were partly responsible for these uprisings. At the same time, the loosening of the war’s fearsome grip on society also facilitated this unrest. Across the continent, rebels raised their arms—against French rule in Morocco, Italian rule in Cyrenica on the north coast, British and French forces in the central Sahara, and European administrators in Somalia. Europeans generally prevailed against the rebels. Ironically, imperial rulers had concluded that their African colonies held great material value and demanded far greater investments in their infrastructures and peoples. This recognition initiated new policies designed to accomplish these ends.