The Second Great War, 1917-1923

Resumen

This essay presents a bifurcated interpretation of the history of the Great War, dividing it into two parts, the first lasting from 1914 to 1917, the second continuing from 1917 to 1923. In this way, I register developments in historiography in which two major changes have occurred in recent years: first, a shift of the geographical epicenter of the war from Paris to Warsaw, and secondly, a shift in the chronology of the war recognizing its failure to end in 1918.

The interpretation posits that there was a crisis in 1917 which separates the first three years of the conflict from the years that followed, and was largely the result of powerful economic and demographic pressures which destabilized all the combatants, but more so the Central powers than the Allies. This crisis abated somewhat in the west in 1918 but continued in an exacerbated form for the following five years. Hatred, hunger, and class conflict were radicalizing elements in the disorder of the post-Imperial world, set adrift by the collapse of the Hohenzollern, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires. Post-imperial violence was endemic in these regions, merging civil war, ethnic conflicts, and national conflicts which played out in this, the Second Great War. My claim is that the passage from wartime crisis to post-war and post-Imperial violence was seamless, and part of one complex but distinctive phase of European history, starting in 1917 and terminating more or less in 1923.

Thus among the legacies of the two Great Wars of 1914-17 and 1917-23 was the creation of an elision between war and civil war precipitating an avalanche of violence extending from one period of global conflict to another. The result was a degeneration of warfare from an institution bounded by political and legal limits into a field of force in which whole peoples could disappear from the face of the earth. Just as the Armenian genocide was the direct outcome of the logic of the total war of 1914-17, the Holocaust was the final statement of the ferocity of total civil war, that form of violence which emerged during the second Great War of 1917-23.