11/13/2018 100 Years Of World War 1: How World War I Shaped The 20th Century And Beyond

How World War I Shaped The 20th

Century And Beyond A 100 Years
On
As the guns fell silent in 1918, World War I victors all agreed on
one thing: Germany must pay.
World | Agence France-Presse | Updated: November 11, 2018 11:08 IST
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World War 1, the "war to end all wars", turned out to be the opposite. (AFP)

Paris:

As the guns fell silent in 1918, World War I victors all agreed on one thing: Germany must
pay
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11/13/2018 100 Years Of World War 1: How World War I Shaped The 20th Century And Beyond
pay.

How much was a matter of debate but there was never any doubt that the post-war
settlement enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles was going to be punitive.

Germany did pay, but it was not alone. A century on, the world lives with the consequences
of a peace accord that, even at the time, was criticised as making another war inevitable in
Europe, a continent which had dominated the world for centuries.

Economist J.M. Keynes, then a British Treasury official, resigned rather than be associated
with a treaty he denounced as "Carthaginian" in its harshness. French Marshal Ferdinand
Foch judged it "not so much a peace as a 20-year armistice".

The "war to end all wars" turned out to be the opposite. By ensuring Germany's economic
ruin and political humiliation, the post-war settlement provided fertile ground for the rise of
Nazism and its horrors.

Beyond Germany, the slew of peace treaties redrew the map of Europe, carving up
vanquished empires and creating as many future conflicts as new countries and borders
from the Baltic States to Turkey, via Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

Famine, terror and the Cold War

Just as important, the war served as an incubator for the 1917 Russian Revolution.

Against a backdrop of desperate food shortages, military failure left the Tsarist state
crippled and vulnerable to an assault by Lenin's Bolsheviks, who then established the
Soviet Union as an authoritarian Communist state.

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11/13/2018 100 Years Of World War 1: How World War I Shaped The 20th Century And Beyond

The First World War was first a gigantic European melee, the outcome of which was played
on the Western Front, in France and Belgium, where the most deadly battles took place.

Disastrous agricultural policies resulted in more than three million people dying in the
famine of the early 1930s, millions more under the Great Terror unleashed by Lenin's
successor, Joseph Stalin.

By the mid-1930s, conditions were in place for the post-World War II division of Europe.

That in turn produced the Cold War and its associated splitting of the rest of the planet into
Western or Soviet spheres of influence, and an unstable global equilibrium that helped fuel
countless conflicts across the developing world.

While the political prestige of the main victors Britain and France was at a height in 1919, it
did not hide the blossoming on the international stage of the United States, which would
become the main economic, military and political power in the Western camp in the
following decades.

Middle East overhaul

World War I also left a lasting mark on the Middle East. By encouraging an Arab revolt,
Britain helped precipitate the collapse of the Germany-allied Ottoman empire.

A secular Turkey emerged and Britain and France assumed post-war control of much of the
Arab world.

By then Britain had also made clear, through the 1917 Balfour Declaration, its support for
the principle of a Jewish state on land it had pledged to the Arabs.

Finally, the Ottoman Empire's collapse also resulted in the killing of up to 1.5 million
Armenians in what they steadfastly argue was a full-blown genocide.

A new social order

Events in Russia cast a long shadow over the rest of Europe, generating a fear of upheaval
that helped accelerate reforms while also inspiring other revolutionaries, including the
nascent fascist movement that was soon to seize power in Italy.

Worker uprisings in Germany and Hungary immediately after the war were crushed or
collapsed internally.

But waves of militancy in other countries -- in the Fiat factories of Turin, Italy or the
shipyards of Scotland's Red Clydeside -- delivered major advances in terms of working
conditions and the rights of trade unions to represent their members.

More broadly the aftermath of World War I was a period of rapid social progress in much of
the industrialised world. This was most notable in terms of women's right to vote, which, in
th l i ft h i b " d" th hf
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11/13/2018 100 Years Of World War 1: How World War I Shaped The 20th Century And Beyond
the popular memory, is often seen as having been "earned" through female participation in
war-related activities.
Less obvious positive legacies of a war which left millions maimed or traumatised were
greater social acceptance of the disabled and the destigmatisation of mental illness.

The war also spurred new waves of creativity in the arts.

Poetry was revived as an art form across the world; Dadaism, the avant-garde art
movement, was born and led in turn to Surrealism.

Jazz, brought to Europe by American soldiers, became the soundtrack for the escapism
and innovation of the "roaring '20s".

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from
a syndicated feed.)

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