Kozlowski: World War I’s consequences still relevant

What connects the current strife in the Middle East, drama in the Balkans, worldwide U.S. power… What connects the current strife in the Middle East, drama in the Balkans, worldwide U.S. power and prestige, the Vietnam War and this coming Friday?

World War I, which ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918.

Despite having a large impact on world history, Americans generally pay little attention to World War I. This makes sense for a variety of reasons: First, we were only engaged in the battle for about a year and a half and only saw heavy combat for a little more than eight months. Second, 116,000 Americans died during that time period, compared to the 675,000 Americans who died in the influenza pandemic of 1918. Third, WWI was not as obviously about stopping totalitarianism, and the Armenian genocide is not nearly as well-known as the Holocaust. Fourth, WW1’s American opposition, a movement that included socialists like Eugene Debs, didn’t receive nearly as much media attention as Vietnam’s. Finally, World War I wasn’t televised, unlike the Vietnam and both Iraq wars.

Nevertheless, the First World War helped define the world we know today. Before WWI, the world order of the 19th century, which was dominated by European powers that had been carefully balanced during the 1815 Congress of Vienna, was still very much in force. When Europeans found themselves in conflict with one another, a series of compromises and treaties were usually established to maintain the peace. For example, the Congress of Berlin in 1884 neatly divided Africa into colonies and spheres of influence without shedding European blood (or the consultation of the people who actually lived there). This isn’t to say there weren’t major wars in Europe, but merely that none of them thoroughly embroiled the entire continent. There was social strife and change, but political change came incrementally.

The years before WWI were also singularly optimistic. Technological progress and prosperity had made large-scale conflict unthinkable in the same way they had made the Titanic unsinkable. There was a sense that progress was inevitable and that everything improved with the passage of time. Even those who disliked the world order the most — the communists — believed in inevitable progress toward something desirable.

World War I destroyed the 19th century and ushered in the 20th. The Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, all linchpins of the old order, collapsed. The French and British empires were seriously weakened. The subjects of the surviving empires had made massive contributions to the war effort and began to demand greater self-determination in return.

Other colonial subjects noticed that their rulers were not invincible, setting the stage for another key feature of the 20th century: the gradual collapse of European empires into independent states.

Meanwhile, the only real winners of World War I, Japan and the United States, became the only great powers to emerge largely unscathed. The stage was set for the United States to become a superpower and for Japan to expand its hold over the Pacific Rim.

Other features of the 20th century — the Cold War, WWII and even Vietnam — were set into motion because of WWI. Russia was probably the worst loser of the war, which gave Lenin and the Bolsheviks an opportunity to establish themselves, albeit in a civil war that took millions of lives. Germany only repressed communist rebellions through the actions of private militias known as Freikorps, which would soon provide muscle for the rise of Hitler (Hitler’s rise as an indirect result of WWI is already well-known).

Even U.S. involvement in Vietnam stemmed in part from the First World War: Ho Chi Minh participated in the Versailles Conference, seeking self-determination for French Indochina. He was roundly ignored.

And what about all those marvelous prewar ideas about progress and perfection? They were replaced by cynicism, post-modernism and existentialism. In fact, the reason many Europeans see us as starry-eyed, naive idealists is not because they’re more sophisticated. Rather, it’s because an entire generation of European men was obliterated in Flanders, Verdun, Tannenberg, Isonzo and countless other places.

WWI informs more than our attitudes — much of the current political stupidity can be traced to the time of the war. The political climate of the Balkans directly caused WWI, and the region is still troubled. The excitement in the Middle East is partly a result of how the Ottoman Empire fell apart. Oil first became an important commodity around the First World War, when the British fleet shifted from coal to oil propulsion and armies gradually adopted trucks, airplanes and tanks.

World War I should remind us that the world’s current state did not come about at random. History explains current events in sometimes surprising ways. The fears, dreams, hopes, prejudices and hatreds of people around the world have historical roots, and without understanding those roots we cannot understand those peoples. Now and then we’re tempted to believe that riots in a foreign place or country must have come about because the people there are crazy and woke up one morning and randomly decided to cause mayhem. I’m quite sure uninformed foreigners are entirely baffled by the fact that Protestant-Catholic relations in this country are generally much less tense and complicated than white-black relations. Or that 40 years later, people still get into arguments about Vietnam. History is context. And without context, nothing makes sense.

Just because something happened a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant to us today: the Sunni-Shiite split in Islam has its roots in the 8th century C.E. The caste system in India goes back even further than that. If we want to understand the world as it currently exists, we need to understand the world as it once existed. Learning history does not just mean that we avoid making the mistakes of the past. It might also prevent us from making some mistakes in the present.

Write kozthought@gmail.com