Chapter Twenty

World War One

TricoloreAs the crisis deepened, socialist parties across Europe began to protest going to war.  They argued that the fighting would only result in oppressed workers on one side killing oppressed workers on the other side. Foremost in the opposition to the war was Jean Jaures, French socialist leader and editor of the newspaper Humanite. Moderate, patient and articulate, he had successfully fused all the bickering rival factions of French socialists into a strong second party during the previous decade. He had a long history of principled, unpopular stands, and the voters had thrown him out of parliament after he stood up against the scapegoating of Alfred Dreyfus.

After a few years in the political wilderness, Jaures was elected again to the Chamber of Deputies. Now he frantically worked to defuse the oncoming war. On July 31, he had just returned to Paris from neutral Belgium where he was trying to persuade German union representatives that all workers worldwide should call a strike and stop the upcoming war. This argument sounded a lot like treason to some people, so a young French nationalist, Raoul Villain, struck back. According to a witness:

I was dining with a member of my family and a friend at the Cafe du Croissant, the well-known resort of journalists in the Rue Montmartre.... M. Jaures was also dining there with some Socialist deputies and members of the staff of the Humanite….

At about half-past nine, when we were just finishing dinner, two pistol shots suddenly resounded in the restaurant. At first we did not understand what had happened, and for a moment thought that there was shooting in the street outside. Then we saw that M. Jaures had fallen sideways on the bench on which he was sitting, and the screams of the women who were present told us of the murder. It should be explained that M. Jaures and his friends were sitting on a bench with their backs to the open window of the restaurant, and the shots were fired from the street through the window. M. Jaures was shot in the head, and the murderer must have held the pistol close to his victim. A surgeon was hastily summoned, but he could do nothing, and M. Jaures died quietly without regaining consciousness a few minutes after the crime. Meanwhile the murderer had been seized and handed over to the police, who had to protect him from the crowd which had quickly collected in the street.

German socialists were also being torn between pacifism and patriotism. The leaders of the Social Democratic Party of Germany considered a massive demonstration against the coming war, and even sent a representative to Paris to possibly coordinate with the French, but after Jaures was assassinated, the German socialists suspected the France was already spinning out of control. Rather than being left isolated and abandoned beyond the fringe of German politics, the SDP turned around and voted with the rest of parliament on August 4 for the war credits the German government needed to finance its mobilization. In the end, it was just easier for everyone to get swept up in war fever and not fight the flow of history. The war rolled over Europe like wildfire.

One of the few places that pacifist sentiment actually affected government policy was Italy, which was required by treaty to join the war on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. As war clouds gathered, Italian socialists managed to organize enough opposition to block any immediate action. The Socialists were adamantly opposed to getting mixed up in the approaching war.

Of course, pacifist ideology went no more than halfway towards keeping Italy out of the war. The remaining ground was covered by the cold calculations of foreign policy. Italy wanted to annex several enclaves of ethnic Italians inside of Austria-Hungary and spread eastward to the other side of the Adriatic Sea, so attacking their supposed ally Austria-Hungary would eventually seem like a more useful course of action. Benito Mussolini, the editor of the leading socialist newspaper, Avanti, dutifully followed the Socialist party line at first and wrote editorials against going to war in 1914, but his heart wasn’t in it. Within a year, he was enthusiastically beating the drum for a war against Austria-Hungary instead, for which he was expelled from the Socialist Party.


Greece         

Based on past performance, Greece should have been a natural ally of the Triple Entente. In the recent Balkan Wars, Greece had fought alongside Serbia and against Ottoman Turkey, so it made sense to do this again. On the other hand, King Constantine had been educated in Germany and was married to the Kaiser’s sister, so the royal family preferred Germany, as did the Greek Army’s officer corps, which had also been trained by the Germans. Since, as a practical matter, there was no way that Greeks would ever fight alongside the hated Turks, the pro-German side pushed for neutrality.

When the British offered tempting slices of Turkey to encourage Greece to join their side, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos of the Liberal Party suggested Greece take the offer and the territory. The king disagreed, but Venizelos started the process anyway. In March 1915 he tried to offer Greek troops to the British who were preparing to get slaughtered by the Turks at Gallipoli, but the king vetoed it and Venizelos was forced to resign.

The Liberals forced new elections in June, which they easily won, so Venizelos dusted off his prime minister hat and waited for the call from the palace; however, it wasn’t until August that King Constantine finally broke down and reappointed him.

About this time, Bulgaria declared war on Serbia. It was widely known that Bulgaria wanted to take Macedonia and the port of Salonika away from Greece if it got the chance, so Venizelos let the British and French set up a base in Salonika to support their Gallipoli offensive, and to be on hand if the Bulgarians tried any funny business. King Constantine fired him again for taking sides in the war and called new elections in December, 1915.

Angry that the king had overstepped his authority by dissolving parliament unilaterally, the Liberal Party boycotted these elections, which undermined the legitimacy of the new government appointed by Constantine. In August 1916, supporters of Venizelos staged a coup in Salonika where the Entente troops were on hand to protect them. Athens briefly saw riots between the rival partisans, but King Constantine came out ahead in the capital, so Venizelos moved to Salonika to take charge. The Allies recognized his as the legitimate government of Greece, which now declared war on Germany and its allies. For the next year, Greece muddled along with two rival governments, but fearing that the king might go over to the Germans, Allied troops landed outside Athens and forced Constantine to abdicate in favor of his more cooperative son, Alexander.

The Shake-up of Empires

As the name implies, the First World War was much bigger than anything that had come before it, and it bled the participants white. Not only did nations have to draft every young man for the fight, it soon became necessary for governments to take control of their national economies and squeeze every last drop of war materiel out of them. All sorts of unprecedented government policies appeared. The French imposed their first ever income tax. The Germans paid for the war by massive borrowing. America restored the draft and passed the Sedition Act of 1918 which outlawed any expression of opinion that used "disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language" about the government. It was an extremely broad law that scooped up anyone suspicious - pacifists, communists, socialist and labor leaders. Most countries that survived the war came out the other side with large bureaucracies controlling the nation’s economy. Many countries suffered worse fates and didn’t even survive the war.

By the time the smoke cleared, the world had lost four of its most powerful monarchies: Russia in 1917, Germany and Austria in 1918 and Turkey in 1923. Including the recent revolution in China, nearly half the old world was swept away during the 1910s. Eastward from the Rhine, all the way to the South China Sea, everything had changed.

Russian Empire

The First World War bled the Russian Empire dry within a few years, during which the Germans slowly, painfully and bloodily conquered vast stretches of Russian territory. Millions of Russians were dead, crippled or starving. With their faith in their leaders shattered beyond recovery, the Russian people threw out their tsar in 1917. After many months of political chaos and fights between the right, left and center, the extreme Bolshevik faction of the Communists ended up firmly entrenched in the capital and (nominally) in charge of the whole country. They tried work out a deal with the Germans, but the Germans were in no mood to be generous so they forced the Bolsheviks to surrender huge swaths of territory in exchange for peace. Under the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Russia was forced to let almost all the European lands inhabited by non-Russians be detached and organized into small monarchies to be held as vassals of the German Empire. Thus Estonia-Latvia, Finland, Lithuania, Poland and Ukraine ended up on the new map of Europe as German satellites. When Germany surrendered in November 1918, these new east European countries were cut lose to find their own way in the world. They chased away the princes who had been installed by the Germans and held off Bolshevik attacks from the inside (in the case of Finland) and the outside (in the case of Poland and the Baltic states) to become model democratic republics; however, some, like Ukraine, fell to Bolshevik counterattacks and had to wait another seventy years to be free.

Poland was one of those places that Germany took from Russia in 1916 to set up as a puppet state. Then as East Europe turned more chaotic, Poland declared itself free from all foreign control in October 1918, even before Germany was completely beaten. Poland held its first elections in January 1919 and began to organize into a proper nation. The new Polish army under General Józef Piłsudski beat back a Bolshevik offensive in August 1920 and saved Warsaw from Russian reconquest. Meanwhile Lithuania was trying to set itself up right next door under similar pressures.

Nowadays Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania – the distilled essence of Lithuania, if you will -- but in the dying days of the Russian Empire, it was a polyglot city that could just as easily fit into any neighboring country. It was, for example, the hometown of Józef Piłsudski, the Polish war hero who had become the voice and grim, furry face of independent Poland; however, Vilnius ended up on the Lithuanian side of the Polish border. To keep his hometown out of alien hands, Pilsudski organized a secret militia of ethnic Poles living in Lithuania to seize control of Vilnius and then request annexation by Poland. The Lithuanians weren’t fooled by this, so it sparked a year and a half of war between the two nascent democracies of Poland and Lithuania over where the border should fall. (April 1919-November 1920)

Finland had been a self-governing Duchy under the Russian Tsar, with reasonably democratic institutions for handling domestic issues, many of them quite innovative in liberal governance. For instance, in 1906, Finland became one of the first places in Europe to allow women to vote. After the first Russian Revolution (in February 1917, ousting the tsar) Finland continued the arrangement with Russia under the same conservative parliamentary majority they had under the monarchy. After the Bolsheviks took over Russia in a second Russian Revolution (November 1917), however, Finland declared its independence. By now, the Red/White split destroying Russia had infected Finland as well. When parliament reached an impasse over which side to take in the ongoing Russian Revolution, they dissolved and pulled apart into factions. Each side began beefing up their militias, and soon they had a civil war on their hands. During the Finnish Civil War, the Russian Bolsheviks assisted the Finnish Red Guards, while the Germans assisted the conservative White Guards. It became as nasty as any other war of the Twentieth Century, with both sides summarily executing captured opponents by the thousands whenever they got a chance, but coming on the heels of the First World War and running alongside the Russian Civil War, the Finnish Civil War has tended to get forgotten in the chaos.

After the Reds were soundly defeated, Finland drew up a democratic constitution.

German Empire

Towards the end of World War One, the pacifist wing of the Social Democratic Party in Germany formed the Spartacus League. Dangerous notions like pacifism did not sit well with the authorities, and any legislators who refused to vote for new war bonds were quickly ejected from parliament. Many leaders of this faction such as Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg spent the last couple of years of the war in jail for their antiwar activities.

W[Luxemburg]hen the war turned against them in fall of 1918, the Germans tried to negotiate a cease fire, but the Allies insisted that the Kaiser be removed before they would even consider it.  On November 9, 1918, the emperor quit and went into exile, leaving parliament to declare a republic and negotiate a cease-fire with the Entente.

After the fall of the German Empire in November 1918, political prisoners were freed and the old imperial restrictions against radicalism were lifted, so Liebknecht and Luxemburg restructured the Spartacus League into the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). They disagreed over whether to cooperate with other parties in governing the new Germany, with Liebknecht stubbornly opposed to any compromise and Luxemburg stubbornly in favor of working within the system.

In early January 1919, after the socialist party newspaper in Berlin had printed a series of articles insulting the Spartakists, some stray workers with communist sympathies worked themselves into a frenzy and seized the newspaper offices. Rather than disown the action as Rosa Luxemburg suggested, the KPD called a general workers’ strike in support. Within a couple of days there were a half million strikers on the streets of Berlin. Not having the manpower on hand to put down the Spartakist Revolt, Chancellor Friedrich Ebert of the interim government enlisted the aid of the  Freikorps, an unofficial right-wing militia of recently discharged veterans who had held onto their The Freikorpsweapons when they left the army. Coming out of the losing end of a World War, the Freikorps veterans were bitter and undisciplined, and they showed little mercy to the strikers. For a few days, the streets of Berlin were the site of a civil war. When Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg fell into Freikorps hands on January 15, they were bound and dragged off to the Eden Hotel in Berlin for several hours of torture and interrogation. Then Luxemburg was beaten to death with gun butts and dumped in a nearby river, while Liebknecht was shot in the back of the head and left without identification at a local mortuary.

Meanwhile, German statesmen gathered in January in the Saxon town of Weimar, a cultural center associated with Goethe, Schiller and the German Enlightenment, to write, rewrite and eventually adopt a republican constitution. They began with a rough draft composed by Hugo Preuss, an academic jurist in the Interior Ministry. The Nazis would later fixate on his Jewish ancestry as a way to vilify the entire Weimar Republic as a sneaky Jewish plot.

Austria-Hungary

Before the World War had erupted, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been cautiously inching towards constitutional monarchy. By the end of the war, however, the empire was ruined and the various conquered peoples went their own ways. On November 12, 1918, the parliament in Vienna declared a republic and sued for peace. The ethnically German MPs organized a transitional nation of local Germans which became modern Austria and let the oppressed minorities established their own countries. Among these was Czechoslovakia.

The Czech people had been subordinate to Austria for as long as anyone could remember. Throughout the 19th Century, Czech leaders had been unsuccessfully trying to convince the Austrian emperor to let them have their own dominion as part of a multinational federation under his sovereignty. Nothing came of that, so when the First World War broke out, many Czech nationalist leaders skipped the country in frustration and joined the other side. A former philosophy professor and Czech nationalist in the Austrian parliament, Tomáš Masaryk, abandoned Austria-Hungary in December 1914 and bounced around the western nations drumming up support for an independent Czech homeland. In September 1915, the Czech law professor and Boy Scout organizer Edvard Beneš went into voluntary exile as well. By 1917, Masaryk, Benes and other Czech leaders like Milan Štefánik were in Russia, organizing a fighting force for the Entente from the tens of thousands of ethnic Czech prisoners and deserters lost by the Austro-Hungarian army and held by the Russians. With that accomplished, the exiled nationalist leaders scattered to the allied capitals to make influential friends and chat up the idea of an independent Czechoslovakia at diplomatic receptions. In October 1918, as the war turned against Austria, Mazaryk in New York issued a declaration of independence on behalf of the Czechs, and with the final defeat of Austria-Hungary, the Czechs got their country.

British Empire

Even the winners were shaken up. At the start of the First World War, the British put politics on hold and postponed parliamentary elections until the fighting was finished, but the war eventually forced the issue of voting rights in the UK. With every able-bodied man in Britain grabbed and thrown into the meat grinder, the ruling class was running out of reasons not to give them a voice in government. More pragmatically, with the example of the Russian Revolution hanging over the world, it was getting too dangerous to completely ignore the desires of the masses. Since every citizen had contributed one way or the other to the defense of the realm, semi-democracy would no longer do. In 1918, the United Kingdom finally broke down and gave the vote to every man over the age of 21, along with women of property or education over the age of 30. Ten years later, in 1928, the United Kingdom equalized the voting rights of men and women, giving everyone over the age of 21 the right to vote regardless of their wealth, education or facial hair.

In Canada during the war, the vote was extended to veterans and their families, temporarily removing property and gender restrictions for groups likely to support the war, while at the same time stripping the right to vote from conscientious objectors, Mennonites and recently naturalized citizens from enemy countries, who were more likely to vote against the war. In 1920 after the war was over, Canada finally dropped all property and sex restrictions on voting.

Ireland

By the 1910s, Irish nationalism was building toward a climax. Trying to get ahead of the problem, the British parliament in Westminster brought up yet another Irish Home Rule bill to consider in 1912. It would create an Irish parliament to decide all domestic issues, leaving only foreign policy under the control of Westminster. This angered the Protestants of Ulster in Northern Ireland who did not want to be under control of the Catholic south. Nearly a half million signed a petition against passing the bill. The more determined of them formed into a militia (the Ulster Volunteers) to stop the Catholics from getting control of the island, so Catholics in the south formed into a countermilitia (the Irish Volunteers) to stop them from stopping them. With over a quarter of a million angry locals vigorously training under arms, Ireland seemed about to explode into civil war, but luckily the First World War broke out and took everyone’s mind off it.

The Irish rallied to king and country and signed up in droves to fight the Germans, but the hard core decided instead that this would be the perfect time to try throwing off British rule. On Easter Monday, 1916, about a thousand armed Irishmen took over several important buildings in central Dublin, hoping to spark a general uprising. It didn’t work. Instead, British troops started to root them out the next day with tanks and artillery, and by Saturday the rebellion was over. As the rebel prisoners were led off to jail, they were jeered and abused by the angry residents of Dublin who had watched several neighborhoods destroyed by their careless stunt. Then the British commander on the scene hastily and secretly executed the leaders of the rebellion. This suddenly made the rebels posthumously sympathetic and popular.

Once World War One was over, politics-as-usual resumed in Great Britain. Riding high on the new wave of hatred the Irish felt for the British after the executions, the extreme Irish nationalist party, Sinn Fein, won 73 seats in the December 1918 parliamentary elections (up from 6) at the expense of the old-fashioned moderates of the Irish Parliamentary Party, whose seats fell from 68 to 7.

The Sinn Fein delegates refused sit in the British parliament at Westminster. Instead they met as the Dail (Assembly) in Dublin and declared Ireland independent. The British declared Sinn Fein and the Dail illegal and arrested whomever they could catch. The paramilitary Irish Republican Army started guerrilla operations against the royal police force, killing enough to slow them down, so the British boosted their manpower by recruiting the nastiest unemployed veterans they could find, the Black and Tans, and giving them the freedom to hit the IRA as hard as they wanted, no questions asked.

As the situation spun out of control, Westminster tried to calm the Irish by passing a Home Rule bill in 1920 which split Ireland in two, a mostly Catholic south and a mostly Protestant north. Each of them [Collins]got their own parliament for domestic issues, in Dublin and Belfast respectively, and they kept their seats at Westminster, which gave them a voice in foreign affairs.

This was unacceptable to the IRA who held out for absolute independence of the whole island; however, the British insisted that Ireland must remain under the British Crown as a dominion. For a while talks stalled, but finally, as the killings continued and the bodies piled up, one faction of Sinn Fein under the leadership of Michael Collins agreed to keep the king. This was good enough for the British, who just wanted to get out as quickly as possible. They signed a treaty with this group and gave most of Ireland to Collins, keeping only the six Protestant counties of the north for the UK.

The other half of Sinn Fein under Eamon de Valera would have none of this, so the two sides fought a civil war over it from June 1922 to May 1923, during which a few thousand more Irish were killed, including Collins, ambushed by the IRA. In the end, however, with Britain feeding guns to the pro-treaty side, the Irish Free State emerged as a dominion of the crown.

Since then, one of the peculiarities of Irish democracy has been that the two major parties don’t really line up as traditional left and right wings. Instead, the two dominant parties have been defined by which side they took in the fight over the treaty. Eamon de Valera’s anti-treaty faction became Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) while’s Michael Collins’ pro-treaty faction is now Fine Gael (Tribe of the Irish).

The fight for independence left such a bad taste in the collective Irish mouth that when the Second World War broke out, Ireland as a whole and Eamon de Valera (prime minister from 1932 to 1948)  in particular couldn’t decide who was worse, the British or the Nazis, so Ireland remained neutral while the world burned around them. Even so, 5,000 soldiers of the Irish army outright deserted and joined British units to fight against Hitler, whom they considered to be the greater danger. They were treated as criminals after the war if they returned home.

Finally, in 1949 Ireland went all out and declared itself a republic, severing all ties to the UK. By this point, the British were losing colonies left and right so they let the Irish go.

-- Matthew White


1917


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The Dreyfus Affair: In 1894 a French spy discovered that the Germans had somehow acquired secret French defense plans, so someone had to be blamed. The French army picked Captain Alfred Dreyfus because he was Jewish and no one liked him. He was tried for espionage, given a life sentence and imprisoned in solitary confinement at Devil’s Island in French Guiana.  A couple of years later, the real culprit, Major Ferdinand Esterhazy was uncovered, but a closed military court acquitted him because 1) he wasn’t Jewish and 2) they had already pinned the crime on Dreyfus. In 1898 the popular writer Émile Zola published a scathing essay (“J’accuse”) on the case, for which Zola was tried and convicted of libel and forced to flee to England to avoid jail. Finally, in 1899, President Émile Loubet pardoned Dreyfus, although Dreyfus didn’t get his rank back until 1906. Aside from ripping apart French politics for a generation, the main result of the Dreyfus Affair was that a Jewish journalist covering the case, Theodor Herzl, decided that Jews would always be outsiders until they got their own country. This part of the story picks up again in the 1940s. See “1948: Two Troublesome Countries Emerge”.

The murderer, Raoul Villain, was imprisoned without trial for the duration of the war. Finally in 1919 he was tried and acquitted by the jury. “Workers!” Jaures’ colleague, Anatole France announced in Humanite “A monstrous verdict brings in that assassinating Jaurès is not a crime”. Villain was briefly arrested the next year trying to pass fake currency. He fled France and hid out in Ibiza, Spain. In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, a patrol of leftist soldiers, who knew nothing about him except that he was some right-wing Frenchman, decided he was up to no good and shot him. They left him for dead, but actually he didn’t completely die until a couple of days later.

The democratic tendencies of WW1’s participants can be sorted into four categories [Polity IV scores in brackets]:

Democratic Republics: USA [10] , France [8]
Democratic Monarchies: Greece [10], New Zealand [10], Australia [10], Canada [9], UK [8], Belgium [7]
Moderate/Bourgeois Monarchies: Serbia [4], South Africa [4], Germany [2], Italy [-1]
Authoritarian Monarchies: Japan [1], Ottoman Empire [-1], Rumania [-4], Austria-Hungary [-4], Russia [-6], Bulgaria [-9]

Backwoods Slovakia was too small and primitive to survive on its own in a hostile world. Although Czechs and Slovaks are not the same, they are similar enough to make combining them into the same country seem sensible to everyone but the Slovaks.

The parliament (Imperial Council) of Austria had two chambers (Lords and Deputies) which had to agree before anything could happen. The upper ranks of the nobility and clergy sat in the House of Lords. Local governments selected representatives to send to the House of Deputies. Originally, the local governments were elected by men of property or good family in a district according to medieval formulas based on class membership, but after a few ratchet twists of reform, the House of Deputies eventually was elected by direct universal male suffrage after 1906.

After all the rebel leaders had been shot, leadership of the Irish independence movement devolved on a couple of minor prisoners from the Easter Rebellion who had been accidentally spared. Michael Collins was waiting around with his fellow prisoners when he heard the British call his name, but he quickly decided it would be safer to just slouch inconspicuously in the crowd instead of answering and going through that suspicious-looking door the other leaders had gone through. He later slipped into the group of lesser prisoners who were being transported to jail. At the same time, when the British learned that Eamon de Valera had been born in  New York City, they decided not to shoot him so as not to antagonize the Americans.

Fianna Fáil usually wins about 40-50% of the votes, while Fine Gael gets 25-35%. Third in this system (but lately, second) is the Labour Party, ordinary leftists who usually win 5-15% and often partner with Fine Gael to form coalition governments.




Manchester Guardian (1st August 1914). Quoted by John Simkin in “Jean Jaurés : Biography”, www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FWWjaures.htm

John Waite, “Why Irish soldiers who fought Hitler hide their medals”, BBC Radio 4, 28 December 2011. Jennifer O'Leary, “Pardons likely for Irish WWII 'deserters' ”, BBC, 2 February 2012.







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Copyright © April 2019 by Matthew White