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1918/19: 100 Years On

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1918/19: 100 Years On ESSAYS Ewald Frie 1918/19: 100 YEARS ON Open Futures 1918/19 – War and victory, collapse and defeat, revolution and reform, peace and re- organisation, civil war and violence, famine and Spanish flu and much else. The elements can be separated analytically, and many of them have been analysed individually in a historical context. They have been interpreted and incorporated into the narratives of revolution research, the history of warfare and violence, peace research, the history of diseases and epidemics. But the historical dynamics of 1918/19 resulted from the interplay of the various elements in very different constellations. 1918/19 is therefore a challeng- ing anniversary for a historical scholarship that is exploring new conceptual territory: – spatially: leaving the construct of the nation state and instead ›playing with scales‹1 from the local to the global; – temporally: departing from era- and progress-based master narratives and instead ›zooming in and out‹ and playing with temporal perspectives;2 – conceptually: departing from conceptual constructs due to the blurring of categories like ›crisis‹3 or ›revolution‹4 and instead focusing on a broad range of phenomena of social transformation on the premise of ›multidimensional understandings of emergence and destabilization‹.5 1 E.g. James Retallack (ed.), Imperial Germany 1871–1918, Oxford 2008. 2 E.g. Emily S. Rosenberg (ed.), A World Connecting. 1870–1945, Cambridge 2012 (A History of the World, ed. by Akira Iriye and Jürgen Osterhammel). 3 Cf. Thomas Mergel (ed.), Krisen verstehen. Historische und kulturwissenschaftliche Annäherungen, Frankfurt a.M. 2012, pp. 9-22, and the Leibniz Research Alliance ›Crises in a Globalised World‹: <http://www.leibniz-krisen.de/en/start/>. 4 Cf. Arne Hordt et al., Aufruhr! Zur epochenübergreifenden Beschreibung beschleunigten sozialen Wandels in Krisenzeiten, in: Historische Zeitschrift 301 (2015), pp. 31-62; Keith Michael Baker/Dan Edelstein (eds), Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, Stanford 2015. 5 Elisabeth S. Clemens, Towards a Historicized Sociology. Theorizing Events, Processes, and Emergence, in: Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2007), pp. 527-549, here p. 529. Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 15 (2018) © Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung/Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam 2018 | ISSN 1612-6041 (Online) 1918/19: 100 YEARS ON 3 The following essay presents some reflections on the challenges and opportunities that the 100th anniversary of the confluence of events in 1918/19 creates for historical scholarship. 1. A Global Moment The end of the First World War was a date of global significance. To be sure, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month – the official turning point – could not be felt everywhere. In many parts of the world there was no fighting, nor had there been any between 1914 and 1918. There were no guns to be silenced here. In other regions, especially in the ›shatter zones‹6 of Central and Eastern Europe, the fighting simply continued after 11 November; the World War turned into wars of one state against another, into civil wars, wars of independence, and revolutions. In what was to become Turkey, war was waged from 1912 to 1923. In the various regions of what be- came the Soviet Union, the war ended at different times. But the ceasefire on Novem- ber 1918 had little influence on the regional manifestations of the deadly civil war that immediately followed the revolution. Despite its often minimal direct impact, the end of the First World War deserves to be described as a date of global significance. The German offer of a ceasefire to the American president, the parliamentarisation and subsequent revolutionisation of the German Reich, and finally the signing of the armistice in the Forest of Compiègne confirmed around the world the key role of Woodrow Wilson and his Fourteen Points. Their stated goal was nothing short of ensuring ›that the world be made fit and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of jus- tice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression‹.7 This not only provided orientation for the political restructuring of the vast geographical regions in Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa that had lost their political fabric after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire and (since a year earlier, in 1917) the Russian Empire. Elsewhere, too, people now demanded safety ›for every peace-loving nation‹ and ›fair dealing‹, inter- preting Wilson’s Fourteen Points in their own way. The empires of the winners, France and Great Britain, had survived the war. But why should the people there be 6 Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution. A Genocide, Oxford 2009, p. 81; quoted in Robert Gerwarth, Rechte Gewaltgemeinschaften und die Stadt nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Berlin, Wien und Budapest im Schatten von Kriegsniederlage und Revolution, in: Friedrich Lenger (ed.), Kollektive Gewalt in der Stadt. Europa 1890–1939, Munich 2013, pp. 103-121, here p. 105. 7 Woodrow Wilson, An Address to a Joint Session of Congress [8 January 1918], in: Arthur S. Link (ed.), The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Vol. 45: November 11, 1917 – January 15, 1918, Princeton 1984, pp. 534-539, here p. 536. Cf. Manfred Berg, Woodrow Wilson. Amerika und die Neuordnung der Welt. Eine Biographie, Munich 2017. 4 EWALD FRIE denied what some of the losing empires attained – independence on a national and democratic basis? Erez Manela described this in 2007 as ›The Wilsonian Moment‹:8 national movements in many parts of the world picked up on Wilson’s rhetoric and used it to construct self-determined visions for the future and plans for their realisa- tion. But they were not given a hearing at Versailles; the prospect was held out of action later, within the League of Nations. The deep-seated frustration permanently changed the national movements outside Europe. The ›Wilsonian Moment‹ had been passed by. One might well criticise this boiling down of the history of the period immediately following the war to the way in which Wilson’s rhetoric was received.9 The important thing here is the structure of the argument. Just as the First World War was not a world war because there was fighting all around the world, but because people all around the world were able to base their actions on this constellation of events and to align their own objectives with it, the collapse of the empires in Central and Eastern Europe, Western Asia and North Africa as well as ›Versailles‹ was a date of global significance. Briefly, the future seemed open. The Europeans had lost their hold. Their inability to contain and end a brutal war had rendered them irrelevant as a model of civilisation. What emerged was perhaps not a global discourse community, but certainly a struggle for post-European futures that took place in different locations around the world and could be observed globally. Some of the actors came to Ver- sailles. Others met elsewhere, corresponded with each other, read and learnt from one another. This writing and talking about post-war futures, though driven by specific and differing needs and grounded in specific and differing structures and balances of power, united people around the world. So the disappointment about the failure of independent entities to emerge from the victorious empires was also shared worldwide. A series of disturbances and insurrections in the spring of 1919 is indication of this. This global interaction was never concentrated in Versailles. But because of the promise to be fulfilled there of a future, just order, ›Versailles‹ acted as a kind of flywheel. The experiences behind the global interaction were similar. Young men from many parts of the world had been in the European theatres of war, whether as soldiers, por- ters or tourists. At the end of the war the Spanish flu had spread around the world, claiming some 25 million lives.10 Many people had experienced deprivation, sickness and death, mobilisation, and polarising rhetoric created by ›us and them‹ communities. They had discussed how to commemorate dead family members and friends who had died far from home, whose bodies would not return. The everyday lives of many had changed. In Europe, women had become visible in a new way as industrial workers and protesters, making it increasingly difficult after 1918 to justify the failure to accord 8 Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment. Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism, New York 2007. 9 Adam Tooze speaks of the ›imaginative construction of an Indian Wilsonian Moment‹, The Deluge. The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916–1931, London 2014, p. 542, fn. 56. Cf. also Katja Naumann’s review of Erez Manela’s book, in: H-Soz-Kult, 20 March 2009, URL: <https://www. hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/rezbuecher-11037>. 10 See now Laura Spinney, Pale Rider. The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, London 2017. 1918/19: 100 YEARS ON 5 25 September 1919: Armenians in the eastern Anatolian city of Erzurum holding a banner referring to Wilson’s guiding principles at a reception for Major General James Harbord, head of the American military mission in the Middle East (Wikimedia Commons; National Archives, Washington DC; photo: Sergeant Barnes/Public Domain) them the right to vote. Also in Europe, paramilitary groups continued the war despite the state monopoly on the use of force that had theoretically been established before 1914, or at least brought the experience of war into society. These groups held a fascina- tion especially for those who were too young to have been involved in the war itself.
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