Global Perspectives on World War I. A Roundtable Discussion (original) (raw)
2020
Even one hundred years after it broke out, World War I still interests and energizes public attention. That is true not just of the global community of historians but also of broad segments of a public that is no longer limited solely to just those countries that once waged the war. In fact, the events in and around World War I are now the focus of a broad and worldwide historical-political reflection that seeks to grasp the global manifestations of this totalizing war. It seems as though more recently, with the end of the Cold War and subsequent developments, the perception has sharpened yet again that the world in the years between 1914 and 1918 may have much more to do with our present day than many observers have been used to believing. Take just the current geopolitical situation of Europe and the resurgence not only of nationalism but, in some cases, also of an undisguised chauvinism and one might come to consider that it is always worth the effort to investigate the causes an...
2020
The public debate in Germany about World War I has featured distinctive periods of upsurges and pauses since the end of the war in 1918. In this regard, it is not all that different from what has occurred in the other countries previously engaged in this war, with new images of the world war consistently arising, in each case refl ecting changes in the political and social contexts.1 It is possible here to distinguish four phases, each with its own thought dynamic: the Weimar years; the Third Reich; the years from 1945 to 2000 (during which World War I gradually disappeared from collective consciousness); and fi nally a phase beginning approximately at the recent turn of the century that represented a “rediscovery,” whose high point for the time being has been marked by the centenary in 2014.
Towards an interconnected history of World War I: Europe and beyond
2019
In recent years, the historiography of World War I has undergone a very significant transformation in terms of its geographical scope and thematic reach. While most studies of World War I up to the 1990s focused on national experiences, a generation of new scholars subsequently began analyzing the War in comparative perspective across Europe and the world.1 The following decade saw the emergence of a global approach to First World War studies, pioneered by Hew Strachan and Michael Neiberg and developed in a range of recent reference works.2 Jay Winter has identified a significant increase in studies of the War as a transnational phenomenon, defined by Ian Tyrell as an emphasis on “the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies, and institutions across the border.”3 Due to both the transnational training of World War I historians and the collapse of political and ideological dichotomies with the end of the Cold War, a transnational view has emerged in opposition to an international app...
TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 2019
Edited by Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Heike Liebau, and Anorthe Wetzel, The Long End of the First World War (Campus, 2018) also claims that World War I did not simply end in 1918. The volume brings together a selection of revised versions of papers presented in the international conference, “The Long End of the First World War: Ruptures, Continuities and Memories”, that took place in Hannover in May 2017.
1914 in World-Historical Perspective: The Uneven and Combined Origins of the First World War
European Journal of International Relations , 2013
The causes of World War I remain a topic of enormous intellectual interest. Yet, despite the immensity of the literature, historiographical and IR debates remain mired within unhelpful methodological dichotomies revolving around whether a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ versus ‘primacy of domestic politics’ or systemic versus unit-level approach best account for the war’s origins. Given that this historiography is the most prolific body of literature for any war within the modern age, it reveals a much deeper problem with the social sciences: how to coherently integrate ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations into a synthesized theory of inter-state conflict and war. Drawing on and contributing to the theory of uneven and combined development, this article challenges standard interpretations of the war by distinctively uniting geopolitical and sociological modes of explanation into a single framework. In doing so, the article highlights how the necessarily variegated character of interactive socio-historical development explains the inter-state rivalries leading to war. Contextualizing the sources of conflict within the broad developmental tendencies of the Long 19th Century (1789–1914) and their particular articulation during the immediate pre-war juncture, the article seeks to provide significant contributions to recent debates in IR and historical sociology, as well as those concerning the relationship between history and IR theory.
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF INHERITING: THE FIRST WORLD WAR PHENOMENON INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
By this conference, we will commemorate the centenary of the First World War, an event that left an indelible mark on the whole European 20th century. The consequences of the war played a decisive role for social, political, cultural and economic processes that defined European (and world) development. In the course of the war, conditions arose for the emancipation of a new historical agent - “suffering humanity”, while some emblematic marginal social worlds – those of the “poor”, of “women”, of “children” – became increasingly visible to the Grand Politics. The Great War, as it was called by the generation that experienced it and had great difficulties in surmounting it, created new resources for negotiating the identities of the modern individual in the framework of the nation state. It seems that precisely these aspects of the legacy of the First World War still remain marginal for modern studies of Balkan history. The specific focus of the conference will be the war as experienced by the “little beings”, by “those who seemingly never existed”, those left in the shadow of the Grand History; in its subject matter, the conference will emphasize everyday life at the frontline and in the rear, the everyday battle against other, invisible enemies: against fear, anger, shortages, infectious diseases, corruption... We hope to contribute to revealing the other legacy of this war, the lived experience of the survivors and of those who did not survive. Exactly what is the legacy that comes down to us from the living dead and the dead live ones, from the participants in this war – a heritage that, for one hundred years now, we seemingly refuse to inherit, and inherit something else in its place? Why is this so? How does this happen and with whose complicity? These and many other questions related to the Great War we shall try to address by students, teachers and researchers in various scientific fields, such as history, philosophy, cinema, art, sociology, literature, interested in The First World War Phenomenon.
The Cambridge History of the First World War
The Cambridge History of the First World War, 2013
Timing counts for so much in publishing and that is never clearer than when a major anniversary approaches. With the centenary of the First World War not yet actually upon us, there has already been a rush of publications. Meanwhile, just as many of the grandest television and radio programmes promised by the BBC have already been aired. Do we know anything we did not know a year or two ago? Have new perspectives been aired? Similarly, the big question for many centenary-type publications is how far they advance understanding, or perform a useful summative role, or merely take advantage of public interest?