World War I (1914 – 18): Postwar Impact

This entry is a subentry of World War I (1914 – 18).

World War I marked a turning point in world history. It reduced the global influence of Europe, destroying some of its monarchies and empires and diminishing the strength of others. It enabled new nations to emerge. Shifting economic resources and cultural influences away from Europe, the war encouraged nations in other areas of the world, notably the United States, to challenge Europe's international leadership.

Essentially a civil war in Europe with global implications, World War I destroyed some empires and weakened others. The 1917 Revolution in Russia, following the czarist regime's collapse, culminated in the Bolshevik seizure of power. With military defeat in 1918, the Otto man and Austro‐Hungarian Empires disintegrated, while Germany replaced the kaiser's government with the Weimar Republic. New nations such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia emerged from former empires. Victory for the European Allies came at a high price. They owed over $11 billion to the United States, which was transformed from a net debtor to a net creditor. New York replaced London as the world's financial center. The European Allies also faced increasing demands for self‐rule from their colonies. They no longer controlled sufficient military and economic resources to shape world affairs as before.

By war's end, the United States and Japan were among the victorious powers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, along with the United Kingdom, France, and Italy, with U.S. president Woodrow Wilson playing a leading role. He made the League of Nations an essential part of the Treaty of Versailles with Germany. The United States and the Allies, refusing to recognize the Bolshevik government in Russia, excluded the Soviet Union from Paris. Still, the specter of Bolshevism loomed over the conference.

Wilson sought a peace settlement that would protect democratic and capitalist nations. Affirming the principle of national self‐determination, he called for a postwar League of Nations to provide collective security for its members. He expected the League, under American leadership, to protect its members' territorial integrity and political independence against external aggression, and thereby preserve the peace.

Within the belligerent countries, the war had enhanced the state's role in the economy and society, but it also generated a backlash. Democratic governments in Western Europe retained civilian control, while autocratic governments in Central and Eastern Europe had succumbed to both military rule and revolution. Western democratic governments lost authority after the war. British elections in 1918 that kept Prime Minister David Lloyd George in office also registered Irish demands for self‐rule. France experienced political instability after Premier Georges Clemenceau's resignation following his defeat in the presidential election.

Americans likewise reacted against Wilson's strong wartime leadership. The 1918 elections reduced the Democrats to the minority in Congress. After the war, as wartime agencies removed regulations, the United States experienced rapid inflation, labor strikes, and economic recession. The American Expeditionary Forces returned from France and quickly demobilized. Congress reorganized the armed forces with the National Defense Act of 1920, reducing the regular army to nearly its prewar level.

Rapid readjustment and demobilization produced social unrest in the United States in 1919–20. Regardless of their wartime patriotism, African Americans were primary victims of urban race riots and rural lynchings, while socialists and other radicals, whether immigrants or native‐born, were targets of the Red Scare. Wilson was partly responsible for this postwar impact, given his negative attitudes toward black people, new immigrants, and labor strikes, and his international focus, resulting in a neglect of postwar reconstruction at home. He contributed to the Red Scare, too, by advocating the League of Nations as a barrier against Bolshevism. Nevertheless, under Henry Cabot Lodge's leadership, the Republican Senate kept the United States out of Wilson's League by rejecting the Treaty of Versailles.

Americans reacted against the wartime regulatory state and international involvement. Voters in 1920, including women who had just gained the suffrage under the Nineteenth Amendment, elected Republican senator Warren G. Harding to the presidency. Promising less government at home and less entanglement abroad, he epitomized one postwar alternative to Wilsonianism.

The postwar legacy of World War I was very different from Wilson's hopes. The League of Nations failed to maintain peace when aggressive nations—notably Communist Russia, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan—later challenged the Versailles peace. These revisionist powers rejected democracy and capitalism and challenged the status quo. They exploited the Anglo‐American revisionism of the treaty's critics, such as John Maynard Keynes in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1920), to justify their aggression. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, which resulted in part from the postwar failure to create a sustainable world economy, they turned modern nationalism into a hostile force that culminated in World War II.

Yet the long‐term impact of World War I also included the enduring legacy of Wilsonianism. Wilson had emphasized the principle of national self‐determination in the peacemaking. To curb nationalist excesses and aggression, he had advocated collective security through the League of Nations, hoping to enable free nations to participate in a new world order of peace and prosperity. He had endeavored to shape public opinion in favor of democracy and capitalism as well as internationalism. Despite his failure after World War I, Wilson's ideals deeply influenced the statecraft of future generations. Wilsonianism would continue to shape the international history of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

• Burl Noggle, Into the Twenties: The United States from Armistice to Normalcy, 1974.
• Barry D. Karl, The Uneasy State: The United States from 1915 to 1945, 1983.
• Robert H. Ferrell, Woodrow Wilson and World War I, 1917–1921, 1985.
• Klaus Schwabe, Woodrow Wilson, Revolutionary Germany, and Peacemaking, 1918–1919: Missionary Diplomacy and the Realities of Power, 1985.
• Arthur Walworth, Wilson and His Peacemakers: American Diplomacy at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, 1986.
• Lloyd E. Ambrosius, Woodrow Wilson and the American Diplomatic Tradition: The Treaty Fight in Perspective, 1987.
• Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser‐Schmidt, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years, 1998