Unit 8: 20th-Century Global Conflict
Notes From Other
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Notes From LTS
The Road to War - LT1
Question #1: Describe the rise and fall of the Bismarckian system and the role of alliances in the lead up to WWI.
Question #2: What caused the outbreak of the First World War?
Growing International Conflict
- European statesmen failed to resolve the diplomatic problems created by Germany’s rise to Great Power.
- Why?: The Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany opened a new era in international relations.
- Bismarck had made Prussia-Germany the most powerful nation in Europe. After 1871 he stated, Germany had no territorial ambitions and wanted only peace.
- Bismarck’s first concern was to keep France - bitter over its defeat and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine - diplomatically isolated without allies.
- His second concern was the threat to pease posed by the enormous multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia, particularly in southeastern Europe, where the waning strength of the Ottoman Empire had created a threatening power vacuum in the disputed border territories of the Balkans.
- From 1871 to the late 1880s, Bismarck maintained German leadership in international affairs.
- How?: Bismarck signed a series of defensive alliances with Austria-Hungary and Russia designed to isolate France.
- But: In 1890 the new emperor William II incautiously dismissed Bismarck because he disagreed with the chancellor’s friendly policy toward Russia.
- Key Term: Kaiser William II, (dismissed Bismarck because of the chancellor’s friendly policy toward Russia and refusing a nonaggression pact with Russia)
- Germany refused to renew a nonaggression pact with Russia.
- This fateful move prompted long-isolated republican France to court absolutist Russia, offering loans, arms, and support.
- In early 1894 France and Russia became military allies.
- So?: Continental Europe was divided into two rival Europe.
- The Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy faced an increasingly hostile Dual Alliance of Russia and France, and the German general staff began secret preparations for a war on two fronts.
- Key Term: Triple Alliance, (The alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy. Italy left the alliance when war broke out in 1914 on the grounds that Austria had launched a war of aggression)
- Key Term: Dual Alliance, (A military pact that Russia and France formed in 1894 to target the triple alliance, (mostly Germany))
- After 1891 Britain was the only uncommitted Great Power.
- Many Germans and some Britons felt that the advanced, racially related Germanic and Angle-Saxon peoples were natural allies.
- But: The good relations that had prevailed between Prussia and Great Britain since the mid-18th century gave way to bitter Anglo-German rivalry.
- How?: 1. Commercial rivalry in world markets between Germany and Great Britain increased sharply in the 1890s, as Germany became a great industrial power.
2. Germany’s ambitious pursuit of colonies further threaten British interests.
3.Germany’s decision in 1900 to expand significantly its battle fleet posed a challenge to Britain’s long-standing naval supremacy. In response to German expansion, British leaders prudently shored up their exposed global position with alliances and agreements
- Britain improved its often-strained relations with the United States, concluded an alliance with Japan in 1902, and allied with France in the Anglo-French Entente of 1904, which settled all outstanding colonial disputes between Britain and France.
- Germany’s leaders decided to test the strength of their alliance.
- In 1905 William II declared that Morocco - where France had colonial interests - was an independent, sovereign state and demanded that Germany receive the same trading rights as France.
- William II insisted on an international conference in hopes that his saber rattling would settle the Moroccan question to Germany’s benefit.
- But: Only brought France and Britain closer together, and Germany left the conference empty-handed.
- the result of the First Moroccan Crisis in 1905 was something of a diplomatic revolution.
- Britain, France, Russia, and even the United States began to see Germany as a potential threat.
- German leaders began to see sinister plots to encircle Germany and block its development as a world power.
- In 1907 Russia, battered by its disastrous war with Japan and the revolution of 1905, agreed to settle its quarrels with Great Britain in Persia and Central Asia and signed the Anglo-Russian Agreement.
- This agreement laid the foundation for the Triple Entente, and alliance between Britain, Russia, and France
- Key Term: Triple Entente, (The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia prior to and during the First World War)
- Germany’s decision to expand its navy with a large, enormously expensive fleet of big-gun battleships, known as “dreadnoughts: because of their great size and power, heightened international tensions.
- German patriots saw a large navy as the legitimate right of great world power and as a source of national pride.
- But: British leaders saw the German buildup as a military challenge that forced them to spend the “People’s Budget” on battleships rather than on social welfare.
- Recall: People’s Budget, (A bill proposed after the Liberal party came to power in Britain in 1906, it was designed to increase spending on social welfare services, but was initially vetoed in the House of Lords)
- The leading nations of Europe were divided into two hostile camp, both ill-prepared to deal with the worsening situation in the Balkans.
- Britain, France, and Russia - the Triple Entente - were in direct opposition to the German-led Triple Alliance.
- This unfortunate treaty system only confirmed the failure of all European leaders to incorporate Bismarck’s mighty empire permanently and peacefully into the international system.
The Mood of 1914
- Widespread militarism (the popular approval of military institutions and their values) and nationalism encouraged leaders and citizens alike to see international relations as an arena for the testing of national power, with war if necessary.
- All the Great Powers built up their armed forces and designed mobilization plans to rush men and weapons to the field of battle.
- Universal conscription in Germany, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia - only Britain still relied on a volunteer army - exposed hundreds of thousands of young men each year to military culture to discipline.
- The continent had not experiences a major conflict since the Franco-Prussia War (1870-1871), so Europeans vastly underestimated the destructive potential of modern weapons.
- Encouraged by the patriotic national press, many believed that war was glorious, manly, and heroic.
- If they expected another conflict, they thought it would be over quickly.
- Leading politicians and intellectuals likewise portrayed war as a test of strength that would lead to national unity and renewal.
- Ex. German volunteer wrote in his diary as left for the front in 1914, “I believe that this war is a challenge for our time and for each individual, a test by fire, that we may ripen into manhood, become men able to cope with the coming stupendous years and events.”
- Support for military values was closely linked to a growing sense of popular nationalism, the notion that one’s country was superior to all others.
- Since the 1850s the spread of the idea that members of an ethnic group should live together in a homogenous, united national state had provoked all kinds of international conflicts over orders and citizenship rights.
- Nationalism drove the spiraling arms race and the struggle over colonies.
- Broad popular commitment to national interest above all else weakened groups that thought in terms of international war sentiment by socialists or women’s groups were seen as a betrayal of country in time of need.
- Leading statesmen had practical reasons for promoting militarism and nationalism.
- Political leaders had long used foreign adventurism and diplomatic posturing to distract the people from domestic conflicts.
- Great Britain: Leaders faced civil war in Northern Ireland and vocal and increasingly radical women’s movement
- Russia: Defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the revolution of 1905 had greatly weakened support for the tsarist regime.
- Germany: the victory of the Marxist Social Democratic Party in the parliamentary elections of 1912 led government authorities to worry that the country was falling apart.
- France: Likewise faced difficult labor and budget problems.
- Determined to hold onto power and frightened by rising popular movements, ruling classes across Europe were willing to gamble on diplomatic brinksmanship and even war to postpone dealing with intractable social and political conflicts.
- Victory promised to preserve the privileged positions of elites and rally the masses behind the national cause.
The Outbreak of War
- On June 28, 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by Serbian revolutionaries during a state visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo.
- Gravrilo Princip, a fanatical member of the radical group of the Black Hand, shot the archduke and his wife, Sophie, in their automobile.
- Key Term: Gravrilo Princip, (Apart of the Black Hand and shot the archduke and his wife, causing tensions to break into a world war)
- Key Term: Black Hand, (a secret Serbian military society founded in 1911, dedicated to uniting South Slavic territories into a Greater Serbia)
- Princip’s deed, in the crisis-ridden border between the weakened Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires, led Europe into world war.
- In the early years of the 20th century, war in the Balkans - “the power keg of Europe” - seemed inevitable.
- The reason was simple: Between forced the Ottoman rulers to give up their European territories.
- Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and others now sought to establish independent nation-states, and the ethnic nationalism inspired by these changing states boundaries was destroying the Ottoman Empire and threatening Austria-Hungary.
- By the early 20th century nationalism in southeastern Europe was on the rise.
- Independent Serbia was eager to build a state that would include all ethnic Serbs and was thus openly hostile to Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire since both states included substantial Serbian minorities within their borders.
- To block Serbian expansion, Austria in 1908 annexed the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- The southern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire now included an even larger Serbian population.
- Serbians expressed rage but could do nothing without support from Russia, their traditional ally.
- In the First Balkan War (1912), Serbia joined Greece and Bulgaria to attack the Ottoman Empire and the quarreled with Bulgaria over spoils of victory.
- In the Second Balkan War (1913), Bulgaria attacked its former allies. Austria intervened and forced Serbia to give up Albania.
- Encouraged by their success against the Ottomans, Balkan nationalists increased their demands for freedom from Austria-Hungary, dismaying the leaders of that multinational empire.
. - The assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand instigated a 5 week period of intense diplomatic activity that culminated in world war.
- The leaders of Austria-Hungary concluded that Serbia was implicated in the assassination and deserved severe punishment.
- So?: On July 23 Austria-Hungary gave Serbia an unconditional ultimatum that would violate Serbian sovereignty.
- But: When Serbia replied moderately but evasively, Austria mobilized its armies and declared war on Serbia on July 28.
- From the beginning, Germany pushed Austria-Hungary to confront Serbia and thus bore much responsibility for turning a little war into a world war.
- Emperor William II and his chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg realized that war between Austria and Russia was likely, for a resurgent Russia would not stand by and watch the Austrians crush the Serbs.
- Yet Bethmann-Hollweg hoped that, although Russia (and its ally France) would go to ear, Great Britain would remain neutral, unwilling to fight in the distant Balkans.
- The German chancellor sent a telegram to Austria-Hungary, which promised that Germany would “faithfully stand by,” its ally in case of war.
- This “blank check,” of unconditional support encouraged the power faction in Vienna to take a hard line against the Serbs at the time when moderation might still have limited the crisis.
- Vast Russia required much more time to mobilize its armies than did Germany and Austria-Hungary.
- Since the complicated mobilization plans of the Russian general staff assumed a two-front war with both Austria and Germany, Russia could not mobilize against one without mobilizing against the other.
- So?: On July 29 Tsar Nicolas II ordered full mobilization, which in effect declared war on both the empire and Germany.
- The German general staff had also long thought in terms of a two-front war.
- Their misguided Schlieffen Plan called for quick victory over France after a lightning attack through neutral Belgium - the quickest way to reach Paris - before turning on Russia.
- Key term: Schlieffen Plan, (Failed German plan calling for a lightning attack through neutral Belgium and a quick defeat of France before turning on Russia)
- On August 3 German armies invaded Belgium.
- Great Britain declared on Germany the following day.
- The speed of the so-called July Crisis created shock, panic, and excitement, and a bellicose public helped propel Europe into war.
- Massive crowds thronged the streets of Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Berlin, and Vienna. Shouting pro-war slogans, the enthusiastic crowds pushed politicians and military leaders toward the increasingly inevitable confrontation.
- Those who opposed the war could do little to prevent its arrival.
Answer #1:The rise of the Bismarckian system started after he stated that Germany had no territorial ambitions and wanted peace. His concern was the threat to peace posed by the enormous multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and Russia. He signed a series of defensive alliances with Austria-Hungary and Russia designed to isolate France. This ended when William II dismissed Bismarck because of the Chancellor’s friendly policy toward Russia and refused to renew a nonaggression pact with Russia. The role of alliances causes the division of Europe. France courted Russia and had the Dual alliance, then Britain joining by allying with France and Russia setting things with Britain, making the Triple Entente. The alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary allowed Austria to declare a war against Serbia with safety since Germany said they’ll be on their side if war breaks out.
Answer #2: The mood before the war encouraged leaders and citizens to see international relations as an arena for the testing of national power by the widespread of militarism. Europeans underestimated the destructive power of modern weapons. Encouraged by the patriotic national press, many believed that war was glorious, manly, and heroic. The support of military came from the growing sense of popular nationalism. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated by Serbian revolutionaries, Gravrilo Princip was the one who shot the archduke and his wife.The Balkan Wars encouraged Balkan nationalists to demand for freedom from Austria-Hungary. On July 23. Then Austria mobilized its armies and declared war. However, before this Germany pushed Austria-Hungary to confront Serbia.
Waging Total War, Trench Warfare, New Technology - LT 2
Question #1: How did the First World War differ from previous wars?
Background Information
- One the western front inference and the eastern front in Russia, the belligerent armies bogged down in a new and extremely costly kind of war, termed total war by German general Erich Ludendorff.
- Key Term: total war, (A war in which distinctions between the soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home are blurred, and where the government plans and controls economic and social life in order to supply the armies at the front with supplies and weapons)
- Governments revoked civil liberties, and many civilians lost lives or livelihoods as occupying armies moved through their towns and cities.
Stalemate and Slaughter on the Western Front
- The Belgian army heroically defensed its homeland and fell back in good order to join a rapidly landed British army corps near the Franco-Belgian border.
- Russian armies attack eastern Germany, forcing the Germans to transfer much-needed troops to the east.
- Instead of quickly capturing Paris per the Schlieffen Plan, by the end of August dead-tired German soldiers were advancing slowly along an enormous front in the scorching summer heat.
- On September 6 the French attack a gap in the German line at the Battle of the Marne
- France threw everything into the attack.
- At one point the French government desperately requisitioned all the taxis of Paris to rush reserves to the front.
- So?: France was saved and Germany fell back.
- With the armies stalled, both sides began to fig trenches to protect themselves from machine-gun fire.
- By November 1914 an unbroken line of 400 miles of defensive trenches extended from the Belgian coast through northern France and on to the Swiss frontier.
- The cost in lives of trench warfare was staggering, the gains in territory minuscule.
- Key Term: trench warfare, (A type of fighting used in World War I behind the rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire; the cost in lives as staggering and the gains in territory minimal)
- Recently invented weapons, the products of an industrial age, made battle impersonal, traumatic, and extremely deadly.
- How?: The machine-gun, hand grenades, poison gas, flamethrowers, long-range artillery, the airplane, and the tank were all used to murderous effect.
- The leading generals of the combatant nations, who had learned military tactics and strategy in the 19th century, struggled to understand trench warfare.
- The French and British offensives of 1915 never gained more than 3 miles of territory.
- In 1916 the unsuccessful German campaign against Verdun cost some 700,000 lives on both sides and ended with the combatants in their original positions.
- The Battle of the Somme, a great British offensive undertaken in the summer of 1916 in northern France, exemplified the horrors of trench warfare.
- The battle began with a weeklong heavy artillery bombardment on the German line, intended to cut the barbed wire fortifications, decimate the enemy trenches, and prevent
The Peace Settlement - LT5
Question #1: In what ways was the Allied peace settlement flawed
Question #2: Evaluate the relative goals of different countries and how successfully they were achieved in the postwar peace settlement.
The End of the War
- In early 1918 the German leadership decided that the time was ripe for a last-ditch, all out attack on France.
- The looming arrival of the first U.S. troops and the growth of dissent at home quickened german leaders; resolve.
- In the great Spring Offensive of 1918, Ludendorff launched an extensive attack on the French lines.
- They were stopped in July at the second Battle of the Marne, where 140,000 American soldiers saw action.
- By September British French, and American armies were advancing steadily on all fronts.
- On October 4 the German emperor formed a new, more liberal civilian government to sue for peace.
- As negotiations over an armistice dragged on, frustrated Germans rose up in revolt.
- On November 3 sailors in Kiel mutinied, and throughout northern Germany soldiers and workers established revolutionary councils like the Russian soviets.
- Revolution erupted in Germany, and masses of workers demonstrated for peace in Berlin.
- With army discipline collapsing, William II abdicated and fled to Holland.
- Socialist leaders in Berlin proclaimed a German republic on November 9 and agreed to tough Allied terms of surrender.
- The armistice went into effect on November 11, 1918. The war was over.
Revolution in Austria-Hungary and Germany
- The independent states of Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, and a larger Romania, were carved out of its territory.
- A greatly expanded Serbian monarchy gained control of the western Balkans and took the name Yugoslavia.
- For four months in 1919, until conservative nationalists seized power, Hungary became a Marxist republic along Bolshevik lines.
- in late 1918 Germany likewise experiences revolution that resembled the Russian Revolution of March 1917.
- In both countries, liberals and moderate socialist politicians struggled with more radical workers’ and soldiers’ councils for political dominance.
But: In Germany moderate from the Social Democratic Party and their liberal allies held on to power and established the Weimar Republic - a democratic government that would lead Germany for the next 15 years.
- Their success was a deep disappointment for Russia’s Bolsheviks, who had hoped that a more radical revolution in Germany would help spread communism across the European continent.
- The great majority of the Marxist politicians in the Social Democratic Party were moderate, not revolutionaries.
- They wanted political democracy and civil liberties and favored the gradual elimination of capitalism.
- They were also German nationalists, appalled by the prospect of civil war and revolutionary terror.
- Moderate Social Democrats quickly came to terms with the army and big business, which helped prevent total national collapse.
But: The triumph of the Social Democrats brought violent chaos to German in 1918 to 1919.
- The new republic was attached from both sides of the political spectrum.
- Radical Communists led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg tried to seize control of the government in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin in January 1919.
- The Social Democrats called in nationalist Free Corps militias, bands of demobilized soldiers who had kept their weapons, to crush the uprising.
- Liebknecht and Luxemburg were arrested and then brutally murdered by Free Corps soldiers.
- In Bavaria, a short-lived Bolshevik-style republic was violently overthrown on government orders by the Free Corps.
- The Kapp Putsch - were repressed by the central government.
- Communists and radical socialist blamed the Social Democrats for the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and the repression in Bavaria.
- Right-wing nationalists, including the new Nazi Party, despised the government from the start.
- They spread the myth that the Germany army had never actually lost the war - instead the nation was “stabbed in the back” by socialists and pacifists at home.
The Treaty of Versailles
- In January 1919 over 70 delegates from 27 nations met in Paris to hammer out a peace accord.
- The conference produced several treaties, including the Treaty of Versailles.
- Key Term: Treaty of Versailles, (The 1919 peace settlement that ended war between Germany and the Allied powers)
- This idealism was greatly strengthened by U.S. president Wilson’s January 1918 peace proposal, Fourteen Points.
- Key Term: Fourteen Points, (Wilson’s 1918 peace proposal calling for open diplomacy, a reduction in armaments, freedom of commerce and trade, the establishment of the League of Nations, and national self-determination)
- Key Term: League of Nations, (A permanent international organization, established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, designed to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars)
- Wilson demanded that peace be based on the principle of national self-determinations.
- Key Term: national self-determinations, (The notion that peoples should be able to choose their own national governments through democratic majority-rule elections and live free from outside interference in nation-states with clearly defined borders)
- The “Big Three” - the United States, Great Britain, and France - controlled the conference.
- Germany and Austria-Hungary and Russia were excluded, though their lands were places on the negotiating table.
- Italy took part, but its role was quite limited.
- Representatives from the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia attended as well, but their concerns were largely ignored.
- the Big Three began to quarrel.
- Wilson was almost obsessed with creating the League of Nations. He insisted that this question come first, for he passionately believed that only a permanent international organization could avert future wars.
- Wilson had his way - the delegates agreed to create the League, though the details would be worked out later and the final structure was too weak to achieve its grand purpose.
- Prime Ministers Lloyd George and Great Britain and George Clemenceau of France were unenthusiastic about the League. They were primarily concerned with punishing Germany.
- Clemenceau wanted revenge, economic retribution, and lasting security for France.
- required the creation of a buffer state between France and Germany, the permanent demilitarization of Germany, and vast reparation payments.
- Clemenceau’s demands seemed vindictive, and they violated Wilson’s sense of Christian morality and the principle of national self-determination.
- Clemenceau gave ip the French demand for Rhineland buffer state in return for French military occupation of the region for 15 years and a formal defensive alliance with the United States and Great Britain. Both pinky promised that their countries would come to France’s aid in the event of a German attack.
- The new independent nations carved out of the Austro-Hungarian and Russia Empires included Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, and the Baltic States, and Yugoslavia.
- The Ottoman Empire was also split apart, its territories placed under the control of the victors.
- Germany’s African and Asian colonies were given to France, Britain, and Japan as League of Nations mandates or administered territories, though Germany’s losses within Europe were relatively minor, thanks to Wilson.
- Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France.
- Ethnic Polish territories seized by Prussia during the 18th century partition of Poland were returned to a new independent Polish state.
- Predominantly German Danzig was also placed within the Polish border but as a self-governing city under League of Nations Protection.
- Germany had to limit its army to 100,00 men, agree to build no military fortifications in the Rhineland, and accept temporary French occupation of that region.
- Famous war guilt clause.
- Key Term: War guilt clause, (An article in the Treaty of Versailles that declared that Germany (with Austria) was solely responsible for the war and had to pay reparations equal to all civilians damages caused by the fighting)
- For the Germans, reparations were a crippling financial burden.
- the clause was a cutting insult to German national pride.
- Many germans believed wartime propaganda that had repeatedly claimed that Germany was an innocent victim, forced into war by a circle of barbaric enemies.
- On June 28, 1919, representatives of the German Social Democrats signed the treaty in Louis XIV’s Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, where Bismarck’s empire had been joyously proclaimed almost 50 years before.
- Allied leaders had seen speed as essential because they feared that the Bolshevik Revolution might spread.
- The Western alliance had collapsed, and a grandiose plan for permanent peace had given way to a fragile truce.
- First, the U.S. Senate and, to a lesser extent, the American people rejected Wilson’s handiwork.
- Republican senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge believed that the treaty gave away Congress’s constitutional right to declare war and demanded changed in the articles.
- The self-righteous Wilson rejected all compromise.
- In doing so, he ensured that the treaty would never be ratified by the United States and that the United States would never join the League of Nations.
- The Senate refused to ratify treaties forming a defensive alliance with France and Great Britain.
- America in effect had turned its back on Europe.
- The new American gospel of isolationism represented a tragic renunciation of international responsibility.
- Using U.S. actions as an excuse, Great Britain too refused to ratify its defensive alliance with France.
- They broke their pinky promise and France stood alone.
- The borders of new states such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia cut through a jumble of ethnic and religious groups that often despised each other.
- The new central European nations would prove to be economically weak and to come.
- In the colonies, desires for self-determination were simply ignored.
The Peace Settlement in the Middle East
- Allied leaders brought radical and controversial changed to the region: the Allies dismantled the Ottoman Empire, Britain and France expanded their influence, and Arab nationalists felt cheated and betrayed.
- The British government had encouraged the war time Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks and had even made vague promises of an independent Arab kingdom.
But: when fighting stopped, the British and French chose instead to honor their secret wartime agreements to divide and rule the Ottoman lands.
- Most important war the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, named after Britain and French diplomats.
- Britain and France agreed that former Ottoman territories would be administered by the European powers under what was later termed the mandate system.
- Key Term: mandate system, (The plan to allow Britain and France to administer former Ottoman territories, out into place after the end of the First World War.
- France would receive a mandate to govern modern-day Lebanon and Syria and much of southern Turkey, and Britain would control Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq.
- British plans for the former Ottoman lands that would become Palestine further angered Arab nationalists. The Balfour Declaration of November 1917, written by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour.
- Key Term: Balfour Declaration, (A 1917 British statement that declared British support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine)
- Some members of the British cabinet believed the declaration would appeal to German, Austrian, and American Jews and thus help the British war effort.
- Others sincerely supported the Zionist vision of a Jewish homeland, which they hoped would also help Britain maintain control of the Suez Canal.
- The declaration enraged Arabs.
- In 1914 Jews accounted for about 11 percent of the population in the three Ottoman districts that the British would lump together to form Palestine; the rest of the population was predominantly Arab.
- Both groups understood that Balfour’s National Home for the Jewish People implied the establishment of some kind of Jewish state that would violate majority rule.
- Only the kingdom of Hejaz - today part of Saudi Arabia - was granted independence.
- Arab nationalists came together in Damascus as the General Syrian Congress in 1919 and unsuccessfully called again for political independence.
- The congress proclaimed Syria an independent kingdom; a similar congress declared Iraqi independence.
- A French army stationed in Lebanon attacked Syria, taking Damascus in July 1920.
- The Arab government fled, and the French took over.
- The British bloodily put down an uprising in Iraq and established control there.
- The British in Palestine formally incorporated the Balfour Declaration and its commitment to a Jewish national home.
- The Allies sought to impose even harsher terms on the defeated Turks than on the “liberated” Arabs.
- A treaty forced on the Ottoman sultan dismembered the Turkish heartland.
- There was a sizable Greek minority in western Turkey, and Greek nationalists wanted to build a modern Greek empire modeled on long-dead Byzantium.
- In 1919 Greek armies carried by British ships landed on the Turkish coast at Smyrna and advances unopposed into the interior, while French troops moved in from the south.
- Turkey seemed finished.
- Turkey survived the postwar invasions.
- Led by Mustafa Kemal, the Turks refused to acknowledge the Allied dismemberment of their country and gradually mounted a forceful resistance, Kemal had directed the successful Turkish defense against the British at the Battle of Gallipoli, and despite staggering losses, his Turkish army repulsed the invaders.
- In 1923, after long negotiations, the resulting Treaty of Lausanne recognized the territorial integrity of Turkey and solemnly abolished the hated capitulation that the European powers had imposed over the centuries to give their citizens special privileges in the Ottoman Empire.
- Kemal, a nationalist without religious faith, believed that Turkey should modernize and secularize along Western lines.
- He established a republic, was elected president, and created a one-party system - partly inspired by the Bolshevik example - to transform his country.
- Kemal set out to limit the place of religion and religious leaders in daily affairs.
- he decreed a controversial separation of church and state, promulgated law codes inspired by European models, and established a secular public school system,.
- Women received rights that they never had before.
- By the time of his death in 1938, Kemal had implemented much of his revolutionary program and over Turkey much closer to Europe, foretelling current efforts by Turkey to join the European Union as a full-fledged member
The Human Costs of the War
- The raw members are astonishing: estimates vary, but total deaths on the battlefield numbered about 8 million soldiers.
- Russia had the highest number of military casualties, followed by Germany.
- France had the highest proportionate number of losses; about 1 out of every 10 adult males had died in the war.
- Between 7 and 10 million civilians died because of the war and war-related hardships, and another 20 million people died in the worldwide influenza epidemic that followed the war in 1918.
- By 1918 thousands of adhoc military cemeteries were scattered across northern France and Flanders.
- The bodies moved to more formal cemeteries, but hundreds of thousands remained unidentified.
- Each nation built a tomb of the Unknown Soldier as a site for national mourning.
- Memorials were also built on the main battlefields.
- The victims of the First World War included millions of widows and orphans and huge numbers of emotionally scarred and disabled veterans, now termed post-traumatic stress disorder.
- Some soldiers received medical treatments, others were accused of cowardice and striking, and were some 10 million soldiers came home physically disfigured or mutilated.
- Governments tried to take care of the disabled and the survivor families, but there was never enough money to adequately fund pensions and job-training programs.
- Nearly 10 percent of German civilians were direct victims of the war, and the new German government struggled to take care of them.
- Great Depression in 1929, benefits were cut, leaving bitter veterans vulnerable to Nazi propaganda who paid homage to the sacrifices of the war while calling for the overthrow of the republican government.
- Newly formed radical right-wing parties, including the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists, successfully manipulated popular feelings of loss and resentment to undermine fragile parliamentary government.
Answer #1:
Answer #2:
Stalin’s Soviet Union - LT 12
Question #1: Describe the features of the Soviet totalitarian regime and explain how it threatened the postwar order.
Question #2: How did Stalin and the Communist party build totalitarian state in rhetoric Soviet Union
Background
- Key Term: Fiver-Year Plan, (A plan launched by Stalin in 1928, and term the “revolution from above,” aimed at modernizing the Soviet Union and creating a new Communist society with new attitudes, new loyalties, and a new socialist humanity)
From Lenin to Stalin
- By spring 1921 Lenin and the Bolsheviks had won the civil war, but they ruled a shattered and devastated land.
- Many farms were in ruins, and food supplies were exhausted.
- In southern Russia drought combined with the ravaged of war to produce the worst famine in generations.
- Industrial production had broken down completely.
- In the face of economic disintegration, riots by peasants and workers, and an open rebellion by previously pro-Bolsheviks sailers at Kronstadt, Lenin was tough but, as ever, flexible.
- He repressed the Kronstadt rebels, and in March 1921 he replaced War Communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP).
- Key Term: New Economic Policy (NEP), (Lenin’s 1921 policy to re-establish limited economic freedom in an attempt to rebuild agriculture and industry in the face of economic disintegration)
- Now peasants producers were permitted to sell their surpluses in free markets, and private traders and small handicraft manufacturers were allowed to reappear.
- The NEP bought rapid economic recovery, and by 1926 industry trial output surpassed, and agricultural production almost equaled, prewar levels.
- In 1924, as the economy recovered and the government partially relaxed its censorship and repression, Lenin died with a chosen successor, creating an intense struggle for power in the inner circles of the Communist Party.
- The principal contenders were Stalin and Trotsky.
- Joseph Dzhugashvili, Stalin, was a good organizer but a poor speaker and writer, and he had no experience outside of Russia.
- Trotsky, a great and inspiring leader who had planned the 1917 Bolsheviks takeover and then created the victorious Red Army, appeared to have all the advantages in the power struggle.
- Stalin won because he was more effective at gaining the all-important support of the party.
- Stalin also won because he was better able to relate Marxist teaching to all Soviet realities in the 1920s.
- Stalin developed a theory of “socialism in one country” that was more appealing to the majority of the party members than Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent revolution.”
- Stalin argued that the Russian-dominated Soviet Union had the ability to build socialism on its own.
- Trotsky maintained that socialism in the Soviet Union could succeed only if a socialist revolution swept throughout Europe.
- Stalin’s willingness to break with the NEP and “build socialism” at home also appealed to the young party militants, who detested the capitalist appearing NEP.
- The Communist had inherited the vast multiethnic territories of the former Russian Empire.
- Lenin initially argued that these ethnic groups should have the right to self-determination even if they claimed independence from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R) was organized as a federation of four Soviet republics: The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Ukraine, Belorussia, and Transcaucasian.
- The last was later split into Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the five Central Asian republics were established in the 1920s and 1930s.
- In contrast to Lenin, Stalin argued for more centralized Russian control of these ethnic regions.
- His view would dominate state policy until the breakup of the Soviet in the early 1990s.
- The Soviet republics were granted some cultural independence but no real political autonomy.
- With cunning skill, Stalin achieved supreme power between 1922 and 1927.
- First he allied with Trotsky’s personal enemies to crush his rival, and then he moved against all who might challenge his ascendancy, including former allies.
- Stalin’s final triumph came at the party congress of December 1927, which condemned all “deviation from the general party line” that he had formulated.
The Five-Year Plans