THE END OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

This summer is full of remembrance for the outbreak of the First World War 100 years ago. But it's also worth remembering how it ended.

The traditional way of ending wars was unchanged for centuries. Kings and nobles decided to have some sport by invading their neighbour's territory. There was lots of rape and pillage, not so many decisive pitched battles (Hastings and Agincourt were exceptions), and death for the soldiers was more likely to come from disease than fighting. At the end of the campaigning season, everybody withdrew and a treaty was signed, swearing eternal friendship. If there had been an obvious loser, then they had to pay in terms of territory or money or both. The treaty was often supported by a dynastic marriage.

The first major change to this system came with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, ending the Thirty Years War. Instead of kings negotiating with kings, and princes with princes, states negotiated with states. It's widely seen as the formal start of international relations. However, losers were still expected to pay and/or there were adjustments to territory. France paid after the defeat of Napoleon, and again in 1871, when it had been beaten by Prussia/Germany and lost Alsace-Lorraine.

The First World War settlement, thrashed out mainly in Paris in the spring and summer of 1919, was different from the standard model in a number of crucial, and interrelated, respects. First, a number of the states that had gone into the war in 1914 no longer existed. The Russian Empire had collapsed into revolution in 1917, and had signed a traditional treaty with Germany (reparations, loss of territory) in 1918. Austria-Hungary collapsed in the autumn of 1918 into bits and pieces, and the Ottoman Empire was tottering.

Secondly, and one of the causes of the first, there was a new principle in the air, that of self-determination. Expounded most eloquently by the American President Wilson, it said that nations should live in their own states. The polyglot Habsburg Empire was the obvious case for implementation of this new idea. But there were others, and a bewildering number of new states came into being in the immediate aftermath of the war, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Armenia, Azerbaijan. The principle seemed sensible, and was backed up by plebiscites in certain areas, but the victorious allied powers were by no means consistent. Germany was not allowed to merge with (the now 100% German) Austria, France got Alsace-Lorraine back, even though a plebiscite there would probably have opted for continued union with Germany, Italy got the German-speaking South Tyrol, the Kurds were denied a homeland, the former German concessions in China were given to Japan, Hungary lost so much territory, that it went from a Magyar country with substantial minorities to having 3 million Magyars living in Romania, Slovakia and Yugoslavia. And so on.

Thirdly, the main defeated party (Germany) had not been defeated. This was not in fact true; the Allied offensive in the summer of 1918 had been so successful that it was the Germans who begged for an armistice. However, because of the time lag between the end of hostilities in November 1918 and the signing of the peace treaty at the end of June 1919, coupled with the fact that none of the fighting on the Western front had taken place on German soil, allowed the myth to develop that Germany had not been defeated, but betrayed by its generals and ruling class. The loss of territory (mainly to the newly revived country of Poland) and the obligation to pay reparations thus came to be seen as unjust punishment.

Fourthly, on the question of reparations, it was impossible to come to an agreement. The destruction of men, equipment, and other assets had been unlike anything in history. However the sums were totted up, it was clear that the total was beyond the power of any one country to pay. With the demise of Austria-Hungary, that country could only be Germany.

Each of these reasons became the basis for resentment and dissatisfaction, which ultimately led to renewed fighting 20 years later (for the non-European states, some of those resentments - eg Palestine and the Kurds - remain to this day). The second war was not inevitable; the terms of the peace did not guarantee a return to conflict. However, they allowed unscrupulous, megalomaniac people to argue that war was the only way to get rid of their unjustified burden. Unfortunately, during the inter-war years, there were plenty of such people, and even more who were prepared to listen to them.

Walter Blotscher