The 'end' of a war that was supposed to end all wars laid the foundations of the biggest slaughter in human history, WWII, when it imposed a humiliating and crippling treaty on Germany, a humiliation that was coupled with the impacts of the Great Depression, spawning the Nazis, who wanted a place under the sun, and propelled the U.S. to occupy a hegemonic place and displace the old empires.
"The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war, To the Flame, the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of status as a major power. As he shows, in 1914 the British realm bore more than a passing resemblance to the Austro-Hungarian—for Bosnia read Ireland. Even far weaker states such as Italy and Spain were bent on colonial expansion in North Africa. The competing militarism and annexationism of the European system, leading to repeated near misses at a general conflagration before 1914, answered to the logic of Schumpeter’s diagnosis of imperialism, as a reflex product of aristocracies whose values were still largely pre-capitalist. But this was a world of industrialized capitalism whose dynamic detonated the explosion of the system."
—Alexander Zevin
"The structural reality is that the First World War took place over empires, for empires, and between empires. For a clear-eyed portrait of the world that it yielded, there is no better place to start than the opening chapter of Dominic Lieven’s study of Tsarist Russia’s road to war, To the Flame, the latest major contribution to the scholarship of the conflict. In it, Lieven lays out the codes and aims of conduct shared by the ruling classes of Europe, saturated with considerations of honour, prestige and virility, for whom territorial aggrandizement was an automatic criterion of status as a major power. As he shows, in 1914 the British realm bore more than a passing resemblance to the Austro-Hungarian—for Bosnia read Ireland. Even far weaker states such as Italy and Spain were bent on colonial expansion in North Africa. The competing militarism and annexationism of the European system, leading to repeated near misses at a general conflagration before 1914, answered to the logic of Schumpeter’s diagnosis of imperialism, as a reflex product of aristocracies whose values were still largely pre-capitalist. But this was a world of industrialized capitalism whose dynamic detonated the explosion of the system."
—Alexander Zevin