The Legacy and Consequences of World War I

A hundred years ago, in mid-August 1920, a decisive battle took place in Central Europe between two sizable armies waging fierce combat operations in the region for more than a year. In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Warsaw (as it was later termed by historians) the 950,000 troops of Soviet Russia were forced to retreat from the former Western provinces of the recently dismantled Russian Empire. The Treaty of Riga signed in 1921 marked not only the final geopolitical reshuffle in that part of Europe following WWI, but also an almost two-decade-long halt to the otherwise inevitable – and predictably significant – expansion of the calamitous political regime enforced in post-revolutionary Russia. The latter was explicitly acknowledged, at times in the most reverential terms, by some contemporaries (D’Abernon 1931).¹ Strangely enough, though, the appreciation of the war’s significance was not matched by the universal recognition of the victorious country as a self-sufficient political entity. The Republic of Poland, which – essentially unassisted by the Western European powers, and even, in several respects, deliberately sabotaged by some of them² – was able to defend its newly regained independence, was called “pathological” (L. Namier), “an economic impossibility” (J. M. Keynes), “a farce” (E. H. Carr), “a historical failure” which in 1939 “deserved its fate” (D. L. George), “the monstrous bastard of the Peace of Versailles” (V. Molotov), “pardon the expression, ‘a state’” (Stalin) and “an artificially begotten state” which “cannot be considered a cultured nation at all” (A. Hitler) (Davies 2013, 291).³

What sparked all these comments was the rather unexpected re-emergence of Poland – concurrent with the (re)emergence of a few smaller Central European nation states, such as Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia – brought about by the final developments in the Eastern theatre of World War I.

The events of 1914–1918, the hundredth anniversary of which was solemnly remembered across the world a few years ago, comprised one of the bloodiest military conflicts in the history of mankind. Triggered by an apparently consequential, though relatively local, act of political violence, it finished four years later as an unprecedented international hecatomb, taking the lives of millions of people, both soldiers and civilians. It is that previously unheard-of scale of bloodshed, vividly epitomised by the number of casualties on a single day of the Battle of Somme (over 57,000 British casualties on 1 July 1916), which to a large extent forged the collective memories of the war, widely prevalent and firmly embedded to this day in most Western societies. The public remembrance of the events of 1914–1918 is profoundly affected by the dreary numbers of non-combatant victims of the war, whose deaths and suffering are attributed to the unbridled unfolding of the military operations.

What makes it even more difficult to rationalise the historic showdown of the post-Viennese global powers is the ambiguous evaluations of its outcome: the final end of hostilities in 1918 is often said to have been marred by the emergence of the world order that was doomed to precipitate the greatest humanitarian disaster of the twentieth century: World War II. It is most probably this sentiment that was articulated by German philosopher Jurgen Habermas as part of his warning about the dire consequences of a possible failure of the post-WWII European project: “When [the German Revolution of 1848] failed, it took us [Germans/Europeans?] 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before” (Diez 2011).

All these caveats notwithstanding, there can be no denying that for a whole group of peoples inhabiting the region of Central Europe, the autumn of 1918 meant the beginning of a twenty-year period of a relatively untrammelled exercise in freedom and democracy. In the case of some of them – the re-emergent Republic of Poland being but one of the illustrative examples – the newly regained independence was the culmination of a several-generations-long struggle, at times exceedingly bloody and severe, against the more or less oppressive dominance of their political supervisors (or, at least in some cases, most unequivocally, their countries’ illegitimate occupiers). For these nations or political communities, it was the outbreak of the second global conflict of the twentieth century that was the greatest calamity of the age, one that undoubtedly extended – despite Habermas’s claim to the contrary – far beyond the ultimate defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.

Over a hundred years after the Armistice of Compiègne, the ever-increasing tensions running across the international community raise anew truly serious concerns about the prospective stability of today’s world order. It is sufficient to remember a remark about the alleged origins of WWII in the Treaty of Versailles, made at the celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland – i.e. 5 years before Russia’s annexation of Crimea – by the then-Prime Minister of the Russian Federation to recognise how parallel these concerns may be to the apparently historical deliberations on the restoration and (inefficient) maintenance of world peace in the period of 1918–1939. While commemorating the heroism of ordinary soldiers, as well as the tragedy of all the innocent victims of World War I, one cannot avoid confronting a whole set of ethical, legal and political issues related to the first global conflict of the twentieth century, which still seem to retain universal relevance.

The following three articles were first presented at the conference organised in March, 2018 by the Faculty of Christian Philosophy and the International Centre for Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue, Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, in cooperation with the Department of English and Philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I. The first article points out the enduring – and patently disconcerting – significance of the events of 1914–1918 by analysing the nature of the war, as well as its profound impact on international relations, in terms of Hans J. Morgenthau’s theory of political realism; the second examines a paradoxical case of Polish volunteers’ participation in the anti-Russian campaign on the Great War’s Eastern Front as displaying all the essential characteristics of justified warfare (classically construed); whereas the third emphasises a crucial element of jus post bellum, namely the adequate (well-balanced) international remembrance of all war-related civilian deaths – the latter still remaining arguably distorted as regards the dramatic historical developments in Central and Eastern Europe in the last one hundred years. Opening an unprecedented era of virtually unrestrained political and military violence, the bloody clash of global powers at the beginning of the previous century will surely continue to pose numerous challenges for contemporary researchers.

Acknowledgement

This introduction and the following three articles constitute a special section of this issue of our journal dealing with the legacy and consequences of World War I. We thank our guest co-editor for this section, Adam Cebula, for his fine work in getting these articles published, and also for writing this introduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 See, for example, D’Abernon (1931).

2 For a comprehensive account of the attitude of West European leaders to the Polish-Soviet war of 1919–1920, see Nowak (2015). For an account of the war, see Davies (1983).

3 The quotes are followed by the author’s remark: “Rarely, if ever, has a newly independent country been subjected to such eloquent and gratuitous abuse.”