The division of Europe froze political change for several decades. Attempts by some Soviet satellite states to break free East Germany in , Hungary in , Czechoslovakia in were brutally suppressed by the Red Army.
There was no possibility for the nations that had been bolted together in the state of Yugoslavia to establish their own identities. The pent up demand for independence would later tear the Balkans apart in the s after the death of President Tito. By the s it became clear that Soviet communism was failing to deliver the standard of living that most people enjoyed in the West.
The appointment of a new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in , opened the path for a fundamental realignment of the European political landscape.
His policies of glasnost and perestroika offered hope to the peoples of Eastern Europe and in he declined to send in the Red Army to suppress demonstrations for greater freedom in East Germany. The prescient founding fathers took the highly symbolic coal and steel industries as the starting point for a new community method of government. If France and Germany shared responsibility for the industries that were at the heart of the armaments industry then there really could be no further war between these two rivals.
This logic continued with the birth of the European Community in The desire to develop a new system of governance and avoid war as an instrument of policy was at the very heart of the discussions leading up to the Treaty of Rome.
The EU was viewed then and continues to be viewed as a peace project. By building up a community covering most aspects of economic life, from trade to a common currency, the EU has achieved a unique model of regional integration. Until unification in Germany was content to take a back seat to the US on security matters and to France on EU matters. Germany was a Musterknabe of the EU and one of the strongest supporters of a federal Europe.
This ap-proach began to change under the chancellorship of Gerhard Schroeder and accelerated under Angela Merkel. Germany began to play a more assertive role in defending its national interests. It swiftly became apparent that only Germany had the financial and economic muscle to rescue the debt-laden members of the eurozone.
But Germany received little thanks for its bail-out assistance. Anti-German sentiment was also to be found in many other countries, from Spain to Hungary. Even though Germany has become the undoubted leader of the EU it is still reluctant to play a dominant role in military matters.
It contributes less to European security than Britain or France: in it spent 1. This reflects a continuing horror of war in general and a determination that German troops should never again be used for the purposes of aggrandizement.
This had led to Berlin being at odds with its EU partners, especially France and the UK, over issues such as the intervention in Libya and the proposed intervention in Syria. The burden of the two world wars is much more obvious in Berlin than Paris or London. But the reluctance to use force to achieve political aims is widespread in the EU.
The US continually presses the Europeans to spend more on defence, a plea that usually falls on deaf ears. The bloody conflict in the Balkans in the s, however, showed that war as a means to achieve political goals has not disappeared from the European continent. The Russian military intervention in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in and its annexation of Crimea in showed that the Russian bear was also ready to use force to achieve its aims.
The EU response as a conflict prevention manager and peacemaker has been patchy. Tony Blair hoped that the Balkans tragedy would push the Europeans to do more. Together with Jacques Chirac he promoted a plan for the EU to have its own defence forces. The ambitious aims outlined in , however, have never been realised. True, the EU has engaged in some useful peacekeeping operations in the Western Balkans and in parts of Africa.
But overall the EU is not perceived as a hard security actor. This again reflects the deeply ingrained memories of the horrors of war on the European continent, especially in Germany. The Russian de-stabilisation of Ukraine in the first half of has also brought challenges to Germany. Traditionally Germany has enjoyed a close and privileged relationship with Russia, partly due to historical ties including war guilt and partly due to economic and trade interests.
These economic ties led Germany to be very cautious about agreeing to pursue a sanctions policy against Russia. The group of Russlandversteher crossed party lines epitomised by former Chancellor Schroeder greeting Putin with a bear hug in St Petersburg at his 70th birthday party.
Germany has also been to the fore in seeking a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine crisis although it remains to be seen whether this will produce acceptable results.
The shadow of and is thus still present in Europe today. Perhaps the biggest change is that military power is far less significant in European politics than it was a century ago. There is little or no appetite for using force to achieve political goals.
Defence spending remains low. The rise of television and social media has brought the horrors of land wars and casualties instantly to a broad public. One has only to compare the public and media reactions to one soldier killed in Afghanistan to the huge numbers killed at the Somme.
But as the world moves from a hegemonic system based on the US hyper-power to a more multi-polar world this will have serious consequences for Germany and Europe. For Europe, will it redouble efforts to deepen the European integration project, trying to ensure a closer connection between the EU institutions and European citizens? Or will it drift back into a system of nation states adopting beggar thy neighbour policies? As leader of Europe Germany again has a key role to play.
It has also profited hugely from the EU and thus has a moral duty to ensure the continued success of the European project.
These gains should not be under-estimated. The anniversary of the First World War should give us the occasion to reflect on what kind of Europe we want. A Europe dominated by populists and nationalists has never brought a more peaceful or prosperous Europe. It has only led to conflict. But as the results of the European Parliament elections in May demonstrated we cannot take the progress in European integration since for granted.
We owe it to the fallen in both world wars to fight for a closer and more integrated Europe. Although the European Union is facing enormous political challenges, Germany has shown little initiative in European politics in recent years.
Proposed reforms of other member states, such as France, have been mostly opposed on the grounds that «the German taxpayers» must not be even further burdened. This study investigates the factual and popular basis of this narrative.
Teaser Image Caption. Share with friends: Tweet Share Share Print. Contents Who caused the War? Interested in Europe and the EU? Perspectives Southeastern Europe. Perspectives Southeastern Europe is a publication series intended to let experts from Southeastern Europe express their views about current political issues in their region.
The European Economic Community, which was founded in by six Member States, has become the European Union with currently 27 members. A changing European Parliament Commentary. The European Parliament has become more pluralist and more diverse, which may mean opportunities for its future work.
As part of a broader pro-European alliance the Greens will unquestionably play an important role in the newly elected Parliament. Russia quit the war as domestic unrest triggered the Bolshevik revolution, rise of Communism and the Cold War. The best physicians and researchers were in the military … so that led to great discoveries that made a huge difference for public health.
Chudnofsky points out that disease awareness and prevention leaped forward during WWI, first to heal soldiers and later for civilians. Medical advances included screening for tuberculosis, treatment for tetanus, vaccines for typhoid, prevention of venereal disease and disinfection for surgery.
Triage for medical attention emerged from the trenches of WWI to become a fixture in battlefields and other disasters. And mobile field hospitals and medical trains were innovations that helped evacuate casualties and save thousands of lives — techniques now common on battlefields.
During World War I the United States broke with its tradition of relying primarily on volunteers and used conscription to raise the bulk of its military force.
The creative means that men devised to evade the draft impresses Keith more than the centralization of state police power. Sterba argues that Italian and Jewish immigrants, both on the home front and overseas, used the war to assimilate into mainstream culture on their own terms. He sees the willingness of local communities to cooperate with federal directives as essential to the government's success in mobilizing for war.
Capozzola coins the term "coercive voluntarism" to describe how local civic groups secured their communities' compliance with wartime edicts on food conservation, the purchases of liberty bonds, and dissent. Self-policing by community leaders on the local and state level, Capozzola contends, helped the federal government create a culture of patriotic obligation that successfully pressured citizens to provide manpower, material, and food.
Even more importantly, World War I militarized the notion of citizenship, forever linking civic rights to the male obligation to serve.
The present-day requirement that all male residents between the ages of 18 to 25, citizen and immigrant alike, register for selective service perpetuates this notion. However, civil rights activists were disappointed when Wilson's war for democracy failed to topple Jim Crow at home.
For a long time, the historiography ended there. Recent histories, however, argue that the war was a pivotal moment when new militancy, ideologies, members, and strategies infused the civil rights movement. Within the black community, wartime committees sold liberty bonds, publicized food conservation measures, and recruited volunteers. Lentz-Smith contends that those wartime committees served as incubators in which future civil rights leaders learned how to organize, publicize, and fund community-based grassroots campaigns.
Williams investigates the extensive postwar activism of African American veterans, emphasizing the role they played as symbols and leaders within the civil rights movement.
In several articles, I trace how military service served as a vehicle for politicizing black soldiers and consider the structural, not just ideological, opportunities for soldiers to organize. I also examine how civil rights activists took up the banner of equal medical treatment for black veterans as a strategy to advance the entire civil rights movement.
These works balance an acknowledgement of the state's coercive power and pervasive racial violence with narratives that emphasize individual agency and empowerment. The predominant narrative now focuses more on movement building than it does short-term successes, which were few and far between.
The recent historiography thus depicts World War I as a formative moment in the long civil rights movement, demonstrating the importance of activism by the World War I generation for the civil rights successes of the s and s.
Then, as now, civil rights activists embraced the goal of creating an American democracy in which black lives mattered. Writing Women into the History of the War The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, guarantees the World War I era a prominent place in historical works devoted to the suffrage movement.
Yet the most innovative recent histories focus less on the national suffrage movement and more on incorporating the story of female leadership into the main narrative of the war. This scholarship makes it impossible to disentangle the history of the war from women's history: one cannot be understood without the other. Capozzola and Lentz-Smith, for instance, discuss how middle-class women who belonged to an array of social clubs became essential grassroots organizers, mobilizing white and black communities across the nation to support the war.
Irwin details a different sort of political awakening among women by focusing on their humanitarian relief work, often initiated to help women overseas. Moderate-leaning suffragists found multiple ways to use the war to their advantage.
The service of women on federal wartime committees organized by the Food Administration, the Department of the Treasury, and the War Department helped normalize the sight of women exercising political power. On the local level, suffragists blended calls for the vote into their voluntary patriotic activities, as they promoted victory gardens and recruited volunteers for the Red Cross. In Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War , Kimberly Jensen offers a less sanguine vision of female advancement during the war, exploring how violence against women became accepted as a legitimate method of controlling unruly women who protested loudly and directly such as striking female workers and radical suffragists who picketed the White House.
Military officials often looked the other way when U. Jensen recovers that history of violence against women, seeing the fight for full-fledged citizenship as a struggle to both protect the female body and acquire the right to vote.
Her portrait of gendered violence within the armed forces is especially timely given the recent revelations that rape and sexual harassment are too often experienced by female service members. A New Look at the Battlefield Violence was a defining characteristic of the World War I experience for civilian and soldier, male and female, black and white. New studies of the battlefield underscore the brutality of combat, while simultaneously investigating the learning curve that the U.
The fighting man's experience forms the center of these new approaches, which all seek to better understand the mindset and actions of those sent into battle.
Rather than focusing on generals and their staffs, Mark E. Lengel's To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, argue that the most substantial and effective learning on the battlefield occurred from the bottom up. The authors contend that improved decision and war-making capacities within companies and divisions enabled the entire army to improve its combat effectiveness against the German army.
Byerly considers a different foe, the influenza virus, which killed nearly as many American soldiers as enemy weapons. Byerly challenges the conventional narrative that traffic congestion and straggling during the Meuse-Argonne battle revealed ineptness and a reluctance to fight. Reinterpreting those events through the prism of the epidemic, she suggests that the onslaught of the flu sent a stream of victims to the rear to seek care.
Learning to cooperate with allies and one another served as another important adjustment to modern warfare for both generals and enlisted men. In Doughboys, The Great War, and the Remaking of America , I argue that discipline was often negotiated, rather than coerced, and thus gave enlisted men the power to shape the disciplinary structure of the military.
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