ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT
ld, for centuries. Now it too was e. In its place religious and ethnic ups fought for power. The Arabs and Jews had both been promised stine. They have been fighting over er since. The Greeks tried to seize a the of Turkish territory and a terrible and ethnic cleansing followed.
he Austro-Hungarians had gone to to defend an empire but ended up ng it. New states were springing up ts place. The Czechs, Hungarians, venes, Serbs, Slavs, Croats, Poles, Austrians, Bosnians and Slovaks jostled to take back control. The German Empire was no more. The Kaiser fled into exile in Holland. Communists fought with nationalists over who would control the new Germany.
Even the victors were close to ruin. The British and French empires, which covered so much of the globe, were fatally weakened. The war had saddled them with debt, disrupted their economies, and undermined their legitimacy.
How could Europeans claim superiority now they had just unleashed one of the most appalling wars in history?
Much of Ireland used the tumult following the war to break away from the UK. Across Britain’s empire, Indians and Africans watched closely.
In Britain itself, the gigantic sacrifices of men and women in the trenches and factories meant the government, led by my great-great-grandfather – David Lloyd George – was forced to give millions more people the right to vote.
NBritish Army in Jerusalem
ow, all men over 21 could vote and for the first time some women. The electorate more than doubled. The old politics was blown apart. The Labour Party, fringe before the war, would form a government six years later. As well as the vote, veterans wanted jobs and homes. As Communism stalked the continent, politicians were terrified of revolution.
Money for housing, welfare and pensions meant less for battleships. My gran remembers her grandpa telling her, after he left power, that he felt unable to
Lenin with Bolsheviks in Moscow, 1921 control the passions and forces that the war had unleashed.
The USA had stepped on to the world stage for the first time as a major military power. Its economy was supercharged by the wartime orders and President Woodrow Wilson played a leading part in shaping the post-war order. Deep hostility between the Japanese and Chinese as to who would control Germany’s former territories on the Chinese coast pushed the two Asian powers close to a war that would eventually devastate both. Activists in China, inspired by Russia and sensing the opportunity in the chaos, founded the Chinese Communist Party.
The world of the late 19th century was gone. Obliterated. New countries, new movements, new aspirations and new ideologies swept aside the old certainty of aristocratic European empires. The messy end to the war, the economic upheavals that followed, the desires of peoples to live in one or another new state, the extreme ideas, all led directly to a Second World War.
The Armistice of 1918 was hardly an end. There would be more fighting, misery, murder, destruction, genocide.
Gavrilo Princip’s bullet shattered the global order and we still haven’t put it back together.
■ On This Day in History, by Dan Snow, is published by John Murray at £14.99 in hardback and available in audio and as an ebook.