IntroductionEric Hobsbawm (in The Age of Extremes) gave an account of what he called the short twentieth century: 1914-91, from the start of World War 1 to the fall of the Soviet bloc. He had previously identified a long nineteenth century stretching from the 1780s to 1914. He talked of a twentieth century world shaped by the impact of the 1914-18 conflict, a war which ushered in a period of political turmoil lasting until 1945 followed by 25-30 years of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation (although certainly not everywhere and for everyone) which ended in the 1970s when an era of change and crisis began. The end of the Soviet Union was hailed by many (as we will see next term) as the end of history but this was a false and rather silly assessment as the world has since lurched from war to war, has experienced economic meltdown and has seen ever greater depths of injustice and inhumanity.

Many believed that WW1 represented a breakdown of (Western) civilisation (as if the scramble for Africa could be called a civilised enterprise), the end of a golden era. Indeed the end of war in 1918 saw the beginning of the rise of fascism across Europe at the same time as liberal capitalism and Soviet communism locked horns and then united with the express purpose of defeating fascism. Without the Red Army there would have been no victory but as soon as the conflict ended, the Cold War began and allies became enemies once again.

It is certainly true that in 1914 there had been no major war for a century, that is a war in which all or even most of the major powers (Britain, Austria-Hungary, Prussia (Germany after 1871), France, Russia, Italy (after Unification), the US and Japan) were involved. One of the most significant wars - the Crimean (1854-6) had seen Russia pitted against Britain and France but the longest was the American Civil War (1861-5) in which more Americans died than in both world wars, Korea and Vietnam combined. Between 1871 and 1914, there were no wars in Europe at all only Russia was involved in one in 1904-5 when it was defeated by Japan.

There were no world wars in the nineteenth century (in the sense that there had been in the eighteenth as France and Britain fought in India, Europe and North America although there had been international expeditions (the US in Mexico,1846-8 and in Cuba against Spain in 1898) and various campaigns had extended the British and French empires. All this changed in 1914. All major powers and indeed all European states except Spain, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Switzerland took part, troops were sent across the globe. Although the military action outside Europe was not that significant, the naval war was global.

Causes and consequences1. Decline of empires and colonial rivalries2. Web of alliances3. Military matters4. Total warfare5. The agent/ structure debate

Decline of empires and colonial rivalriesThe Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman empires ruled over vast tracts of land and numerous ethnic and religious groups, many of whom were demanding political reform, religious freedom and national independence. The empires were highly bureaucratic, hierarchical and repressive. WW1 would see them collapse. Germany was motivated by its desire to possess the vast colonial territories of Britain and France. Sven Lindquist (in A History of Bombing) argues that the evils Europeans perpetrated in their colonies prefigured the violence they would commit against each other at home. No European power, Britain least of all, had clean hands.

Web of alliancesWW1 was contested by the Triple Alliance France, Britain and Russia and a supporting coalition including Italy, Greece and Rumania and the US after 1917 and the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Triple Alliance had originated in the 1904 Entente Cordiale between Britain and France. Given that France was also allied to Russia, this forced Britain into acting should the latter be attacked. Russia supported Serbia which was being threatened by the Central Powers. Russia sought to defend its fellow Slavs and also to erase the humiliation of losing to Japan during the 1904-5 war.The fatal tangle of alliances saw each country claiming that it was defending itself against a conspiracy of its enemies. France dreamed of recovering Alsace Lorraine (lost after its defeat by Germany in 1870) whilst Germany sought to expand eastwards.

Military mattersGermany aimed to knock France out and then invade Russia in a lightning campaign (in WW2, the strategy would be known as a blitzkrieg) before the massive but cumbersome Tsarist war machine could strike. However the German advance into France through neutral Belgium halted within 6 weeks. Both sides created parallel lines of defensive trenches and troops dug in with little serious movement over the next three years the Western Front. The Front saw wholescale massacres of soldiers and unceasing bombardment. When the Germans launched an offensive at Verdun between February and July 1916 in an abortive attempt to break the impasse, there were one million causalities. Another failed British offensive on the Somme cost 420,000 lives. It was correct to speak of a lost generation. This was a formative experience for many and one which underpinned the interwar determination to prevent another such conflict. On the Eastern Front, the Germans pushed Russia out of Poland. The Central Powers dominated this theatre of war but both the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empire grew increasingly destabilised. After the October Revolution, the new Bolshevik government (whose strategy had been to promise peace and bread) published all the secret treaties of the pre-war years and agreed a separate peace with the Germans at Brest Litovsk in March 1918 which resulted in a huge loss of Russian territory. This enabled the Germans to concentrate on Western operations. However the USs entry into the war facilitated victory for the Western allies. The Central Powers were defeated and their governments collapsed. Revolutions swept across Europe.In an attempt to break the deadlock on the Western Front, the Germans introduced poison gas (an innovation which eventually led to the 1925 Geneva Convention banning chemical warfare a convention not always adhered to in modern times) whilst Britain pioneered the use of tanks, submarines and aircraft. This mechanisation of warfare obviously increased the intensity of the slaughter. The term genocide came into fashion. To take just one example, during the war about 1.5 million Armenians were murdered by Turkey. WWI also generated an enormous refugee problem with some 4-5 million people trying to escape the violence.Total warfareWW1 was a total war in the sense that until Brest Litovsk no government was willing to compromise and seek an end to hostilities. It was a war which ruined both victors and vanquished and it also ruined any chance of restoring a stable liberal order. Taking part in the Versailles Conference (and later in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace), John Maynard Keynes warned that if Germany was not reintegrated into Europe, there could be no future stability.It was also a total war in that it embraced all society. Enormous strains on European economies and labour forces resulted in increased government intervention and centralised planning. Whilst devastating European economies, the war gave a huge fillip to the US economy. The US did not suffer the destruction experienced by Europe, The war saw a huge social transformation in that large numbers of women were for the first time employed albeit temporarily outside the home. All countries experienced domestic strains during the war. Britain, for example, was trying to deal with demands for Irish Home Rule, with the activism of the suffragettes and with trade union unrest. Many people spoke out against the war. The French socialist, Jean Jaures, condemned it and was assassinated. The US socialist, Eugene V. Debs, also opposed war although still in prison, he received a million votes for president in 1920. More than 20,000 British men of military age refused conscription and more than 6000 conscientious objectors including Bertrand Russell went to prison. The agent/ structure debateYou need to guard against an interpretation of history which sees the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife by Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on June 28 1914 as the cause of WW1. Instead you need to understand having looked at all the above points how social relationships are structured and how these impose constraints upon individual actors. Princip was motivated by Serbian nationalism and his anarchist beliefs and his act was a repudiation of a crumbling empire and the inequalities and iniquities it perpetuated. The groundwork for war had been laid over the previous two decades. It may be that some powers were more culpable than others Austria-Hungarys determination to destroy Serbia is one example - but the general conditions were pre-existent; what triggered it was a series of particular steps. Revisionist perspectives on WW1As the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the war loomed, historians debated its causes. Thus Niall Ferguson argued that there had been no immediate threat to Britain in August 1914 and that it could have faced a German-dominated Europe at a later date on its own terms instead of rushing in unprepared and at enormous human and economic cost. If Germany had defeated France and Russia, it would have faced a massive challenge trying to run Europe and would have remained significantly weaker than the British empire in naval and financial terms. In response, then Education Secretary Michael Gove attacked left-wing academics for disparaging Britains role and condemned the Black Adder portrayal of the war as a series of catastrophic mistakes perpetrated by an out-of-touch elite (The Guardian, 30/1/14:1-2). Other historians have rejected the Eurocentric nature of how WW1 is viewed. Millions of colonial people fought during it British India contributed 1.5 million soldiers but their role is not remembered nor the fact that major powers refused to acknowledge their rights to self-determination and citizenship.

The Versailles settlementUS intervention meant the Americans, most notably President Woodrow Wilson, were leading participants in the post war settlement. Wilson blamed the war on three things:- the traditional methods of statecraft, in particular secret diplomacy - the suppression of ethnic minorities by politically dominant groups- the lack of democratic control over politics

At the Versailles peace conference, his solution to the problem of war in Europe was contained in his famous 14 point plan, which in summary included:- to replace the old secret diplomacy with a new type of international politics which was to be open to scrutiny- to re-draw the map of Europe according to the principle of national self-determination and to fill the power vacuum left by the end of the Tsarist, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires- to spread democracy across Europe to ensure that foreign policy was under democratic control.In addition, the peace plan, signed on the 28th June 1919 and known as the Treaty of Versailles - laid down the terms of the reparation payments to be made by the defeated countries, - Germany was judged to have been responsible for the war. It was deprived of an effective navy, any air force and its army limited to 100,000 men. Alsace Lorraine was returned to France and a substantial region in the east given to Poland. Germany also lost its colonies. Germanys treatment created a toxic legacy as right-wing, militaristic elements plotted to take revenge - created the League of Nations. This is significant because it was a formal institution designed to manage world affairs, and its membership was not confined to European states (US was never a member due to the Senates failure to ratify). The League embodied the new liberal or idealist ideas about the conduct of inter-state relations: benign human nature belief that humans can rationally resolve problems, including war belief in peace through law and international institutions Implicit in the post-war settlement was the need to create a cordon sanitaire of anti- communist states Finland, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and Poland around revolutionary Russia. Remember that the allies also intervened in the Russian civil warThe promise of the League, however was never fulfilled: it was based on a huge double standard being utterly inconsistent on the principle of national self-determination it failed when faced with aggression. The principle of collective security, by which an attack on one state was to be considered an attack on all, was proved to be a lame duck in the face of German, Italian, Japanese and Russian aggression