Notions of solidarity and integration in times of war: the idea of Europe, 1914–18

Abstract

This article argues that the First World War did not just aggravate nationalist sentiments but also encouraged intercultural exchange and a better understanding of other societies and ways of life. Indeed, the wartime prevalence of notions of solidarity and integration requires more attention and careful analysis. The essay explores three key issues, focusing in particular on solidarity practices and transnational interaction. It investigates military alliances, the collaboration between national independence movements, and the role of neutral countries as refuge and gathering place of pacifist groups and intellectuals. Many of these actors discussed and promoted forms of at least regional cooperation in post-war Europe.     

Beyond Annexationism: The Central Powers’ Ostpolitik as Structural Transformation, 1917–18

This article explores the eastern policy of Germany and Austria-Hungary during the latter half of the First World War (1917–18). It attempts to go beyond the traditional annexationist–non-annexationist dichotomy prevalent in the literature and approach the issue from the perspective of structural transformation of the international system. It argues that the Central Powers endeavoured to accommodate imperial collapse in Eastern Europe and prevent its further spread by replacing the obsolete system of imperial dynasticism with a new arrangement based on autonomous and semi-autonomous states. German and Austrian leaders often disagreed on implementation and formed temporary understandings across the civilian–military divide. This policy ultimately proved counterproductive, as it failed to contain the westward spread of national and social revolution. Austro-German support for nominally independent states in Eastern Europe, national in form but Central European in cultural and political outlook, inadvertently contributed to further imperial collapse, as the increasingly restless nationalities of Austria-Hungary began to challenge the legitimacy of imperial dynasticism in Central Europe. The Central Powers’ Ostpolitik in 1917–18 became a transformative historical event due to the fact that it facilitated the structural transformation of international relations in Central and Eastern Europe from imperial dynasticism to a system of nation-states.     

德国史学家关于第一次世界大战战争责任问题的争论

在德国史学界,关于第一次世界大战战争责任问题一直是有争议的。20世纪20-30年代,主要针对《凡尔赛和约》的相关宣判,一部分德国史学家编辑出版了大量外交档案,极力为德国开脱责任,从而在国际上引起激烈争论。20世纪50年代末、60年代初,汉堡史学家弗里茨.菲舍尔以其论述德国战争目标的论文,对德法两国一度达成的一致意见提出质问,再次引发激烈争论。这些争论既与国际国内政治局势的变化密切联系,也与参与者的政治态度和民族情感息息相关。时至今日,不同观点依然存在,只是研究重点发生了明显转移,研究方法也出现了较大更新。     

Icebreakers in Anglo-Russian Relations (1914–21)

Foreign supply to Russia in the First World War is familiar terrain, but although the present paper engages to some degree with the military, diplomatic, and especially economic aspects of the subject, its primary affiliations lie elsewhere. Its principal purpose is to discuss the icebreakers on which it concentrates not only just before but also just after Russia's withdrawal from the First World War, with a view to contrasting the first phase of the ships' history with the second and so highlighting the perennially ambivalent character of the Anglo-Russian relationship. On the way, it touches on questions of geography, English local history, environmental history, the history of technology, and, even, towards the end, Russian literary history.     

Visions/versions of the war: Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Juan Pujol on the Italian front

In 1915, the Spanish journalist Juan Pujol visited the Italian front. His reports appeared in ABC, and were later incorporated in his book In Galitzia and the Isonzo (1916). A few months later, the Spanish writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala visited the same territories. His reports appeared in El Imparcial (Madrid) and La Prensa (Buenos Aires), and were later published in his book Herman in Chains (1917). The poetics evident in the reports of both writers were clearly different, not only for ideological reasons (Juan Pujol supported the Central Empires; Pérez de Ayala favored the Allies), but also for discursive reasons: the reflexive and digressive culturalism of Pérez de Ayala, for example, contrasted vividly with the direct narrative of Juan Pujol. However, since both writers shared some stereotypes about war and used a common repertoire of rhetorical and stylistic strategies, there are significant similarities between their texts.     

THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE REGULATORY STATE

It is well-established in various strands of historiography that the First World War was a formative phase in the evolution of the modern state. This article deals with the Danish case, in which the politics of neutrality made a previously unseen kind of economic regulation necessary. This led to a heated debate about the functions and role of the state, especially its role in economic life. On the one hand, the Social Liberals in government saw the great potential of economic regulations, and their experiences during the war confirmed their beliefs in the importance of a strong state in dealing with the problems of capitalism; on the other, liberals and conservatives began to voice strong criticism of this slide towards stronger state control. Hence different visions of the role of the state came to be the dividing line between Left and Right, and the ideologies of the liberal and conservative Right were redefined in direct opposition to socialism and economic regulation.     

Gettysburg and the Great War

Fifty years after the conclusion of the Civil War, the town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania faced the challenge of another war. From 1914 to 1917, the townspeople followed events in Europe closely, becoming vehement supporters of the American entry into the war by April 1917. In 1918, the Gettysburg Battlefield became inundated with American soldiers for the second time in its history, as doughboys trained for overseas service on the site of Pickett’s Charge. This paper considers the way the town of Gettysburg reacted to and mobilized for the First World War. It explores the notion of a ‘forgotten’ American war in a place that is perpetually haunted by war memories.     

‘Postponing the Evil Day’: Sir Edward Grey and British Foreign Policy

ABSTRACT

Sir Edward Grey is remembered largely as Britain's Foreign Secretary when ‘the lights went out all over Europe’ in the summer of 1914. His record remains contested. From David Lloyd George's crafty deception in his wartime memoirs to more recent revisionist historians, writers have sought to blame Grey for the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on substantial research in private and official, British, and foreign archives, this paper will reconstruct Grey's career as Foreign Secretary with an emphasis on his objectives and the means which he employed to obtain them. Crucially, it places Grey's stewardship of British foreign policy within the broader international context, defined by the steep decline and subsequent renaissance of Russian power in the years between 1905 and 1912/13, with the aim of establishing the limitations of British power. More especially the shift in the international balance around 1913/14 shaped towards Russia, and away from Germany, shaped Grey's calculations during Europe's last summer. The July Crisis showed both the strengths and the limitations of Grey's diplomacy, this persistent and subtle pressing for mediation, but also his misreading of Austro-Hungarian policy.     

Between subversion and coup d'etat: military power and politics after the Great War (1919 – 1922)

Abstract

One of the chief accusations brought against the Italian army has been that between 1919 and 1922 it decided to exert its own political will, venturing to the bounds of subversion in its effort to reorganize the Italian state in a reactionary direction. But the participation of officers and soldiers in episodes of street fighting, in the name of a patriotic anti-Socialist mobilization, or the implication of generals in rumors of golpe, signals of a downhill trend in terms of military discipline, constituted merely the most visible and salient aspect of a much more complex process, rich in nuances, contradictions, and fractures – the process of politicization of the Italian military following the First World War. Really, various sectors of the postwar Italian army and navy clearly preferred to abandon the strong tradition of political neutrality for the prerogative and the privileges offered by the new model of civilian – military relations established by the wartime legislation of 1915. The postwar Italy represented a particular variant on the normalization of the role of the military in Europe, to such a degree that it would be more appropriate to speak of a ‘failure to demobilize wartime culture’ for the military officers themselves, which translated in the concrete terms of political action into the decision not to accept being cloistered once more in their barracks. With the so called Governatorati Militari in Dalmatia, Venezia Giulia and Trentino, the military authorities were licensed to wield practically absolute power, free not only of the normal chain of command but also uncontrolled by the Italian government. The politicization of the officer corps, suspicions concerning the loyalty to the institutions of many of that corps' commanders, the psychosis of the Soviet uprising of the troops, all converged to make the army an unreliable instrument in the eyes of the civilian leadership. A mistrust that would grow in the months to come, sharpening the power crisis of the liberal state and revealing itself fully at the time of that state's collapse, between the summer and the autumn of 1922.     

French commemoration: The centenary effect and the (re)discovery of 14–18

A centenary effect is bringing the First World War back into the public sphere in France, even though state authorities have struggled to generate momentum around its national commemorations. First, this article synthesises France's memory of the First World War, comparing it with Australian commemoration, arguing that it is generally consensual and that, to date, there has been an absence of debate over its commemoration. Second, it examines the Mission du Centenaire, France's official board for the commemoration of the centenary of the Great War, the key commemorations announced and the articulations between local, national and international commemorative events. Finally, the article analyses the economic rationale behind the French authorities’ desire for an internationalised centenary, the political messages articulated through the memory of the conflict and the level of popular interest in the centenary commemorations since 2013.

在法国,一战的百年效应就是让一战回到公共领域,政府当局大力营造国家纪念的声势。本文首先对法国的一战记忆做了综述,并同澳大利亚的纪念活动进行比较,指出法国的特点是普遍共识,至今关于一战的纪念并无辩论。本文还研究了法国官方的大战百年纪念委员会即“百年使命”,宣布的主要纪念活动以及地方、国家、国际层面的纪念活动的结合。本文最后分析了法国当局希望百年纪念国际化背后的经济理性、通过战争的记忆所传达的信息、以及2013年以来公众对于百年纪念活动热情的程度。     

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.     

War veterans and the transnational origins of Italian Fascism (1917–1919)

This article explores the origins of the historical relationship between war veterans and Fascism. Transcending the predominant paradigm of the controversial ‘brutalization’ thesis (George L. Mosse), the article relies on a transnational perspective that focuses on the interconnections between historical events and on processes of political communication and symbolic appropriation. Examining historical processes taking place in different European countries, as well as their effects on Mussolini and the Italian interventionists, the article argues that a transnational process of symbolic appropriation of the notion of the ‘veteran’, taking place between 1917 and 1919, is crucial to understand how the Fascist ideology and movement were born.     

Commemoration of the Great War: A Global Phenomenon or a National Agenda?

During the First World War, people from all over the world were present in Flanders Fields. On the eve of the centenary of the Great War, it is striking that the war is not commemorated as strongly in every country that was involved. This article explores the specific national sensitivities related to the commemoration of the First World War and the reasons why some states commemorate it more strongly than others. The data for this article were obtained through desk research and expert interviews. In addition to focusing on the main conclusions, this article briefly explores some theoretical insights on memory and commemoration. The particular history of a nation’s involvement in the war, the extent to which the war contributed to the nation-building process of the state in question, the extent to which a military tradition existed and the extent to which civil society was involved in the commemorative events are all factors that influence the intensity and the way that the war is commemorated. Another remarkable difference is that the emphasis of commemorative events is on a contemporary peace message in some states while other nations focus on the memory as such. Remembrance of Flanders Fields in particular is only important to some nations. The commemoration of the First World War is, as well as much other expressions of heritage, a historic and social construct.     

Commemoration in the United Kingdom: A multitude of memories

In the United Kingdom (UK) the centenary commemoration of the First World War has been driven by a combination of central government direction (and funding) with a multitude of local and community initiatives, with a particular focus on 4 August 2014; 1 July 2016 (the beginning of the Battle of the Somme) and 11 November 2018. ‘National’ ceremonies on these dates have been and will be supplemented with projects commemorating micro-stories and government-funded opportunities for schoolchildren to visit Great War battlefields, the latter clearly aimed to reinforce a contemporary sense of civic and national obligation and service. This article explores the problematic nature of this approach, together with the issues raised by the multi-national nature of the UK state itself.

英国的一战百年纪念是由中央政府指导（并出资）,地方及社区发动,焦点是2014年8月4日、2016年7月1日（索姆河战役）、2018年11月1日。这些纪念日的国家仪式之外还有微观事迹的纪念项目,以及政府资助在校儿童参观一战战场之类,后者的目的显然在于加强当代公民与国家的责任及服务意识。本文讨论了这种做法的问题所在,以及英国政府本身的多民族性所带来的问题。