One Long War?

“The Great War” was fought from 1914 to 1918, and another global conflict erupted 20 years later. The two events became known as the First World War and the Second World War, but many historians argue it was really all one long war. Are they right? One way to determine if two events are continuous is to look for continuities—the themes and situations that connect them.

Let’s explore the continuities of nationalism, empire, and colonialism of this deadly period in history. We’ll also consider the causation that links them.

Continuity: Nationalism

We’ll start with nationalism. Basically, nationalism is when a country and its people think they are better and more important than any other country. It was one of the most important continuities of the First World War and the Second World War.

In June of 1914, a young Bosnian Serb man assassinated a key Austro-Hungarian political figure. It triggered a series of events as political leaders in Vienna and Berlin strengthened alliances in preparation for war. The assassination might have been a surprise. However, everyone’s willingness to fight was not. Several decades of tensions and conflict had created a hostile atmosphere across Europe. In addition, many European countries wanted access to more resources. To do this, European powers sought to expand their empires by taking over others.

The major European states reacted quickly to the assassination. Most people believed the war would be short and inexpensive, but it was neither. It snowballed into the bloodiest conflict up to that point in world history. The final result was 17 million people dead, another 20 million wounded, and a continent that was even more unstable. To make matters worse, at the “end” of the war in 1918, the same territorial disputes and national tensions remained. Then came the Second World War, which began in 1939.

Between the two wars, an important new actor entered the story: Adolf Hitler. A decade after the end of the Great War, most Germans were hungry, humiliated, and furious at the harsh terms they had to accept. It was no secret that the terms of the peace treaty, the Treaty of Versailles, were harsh. They put severe limits on Germany’s industry and military. Germany also had to pay a large amount of money as a consequence. Germans’ growing resentment toward their conquerors was ripe for a strong national leader to take advantage of. Along came Hitler and his Nazi party in the early 1930s. German leaders had appealed to German nationalism in 1914. It was nothing compared to this new and fierce desire to prove Germany’s superiority. The Nazis drew on deep wells of German nationalism.

Adolf Hitler effectively appealed to Germans’ national pride. He also called for lebensraum, German for “living space,” for the German people. Twenty years before, France, Germany, Russia, and other powers had also called on national pride to arouse their people to fight a war. Some might argue that the Nazi nationalism of the 1930s was more brutal, racist, and destructive than the national goals of that earlier conflict. But weren’t both sides promoting a similar vision of the world, a vision in which their nation was supreme above all others?

Continuity: Empire and colonialism

A second continuity between the two wars was the importance of empire. In the decades before the great war industrial, military, and colonial rivalries had spread across the globe. Many non-Europeans fought for their European colonizers in these wars and millions of them would die. Survivors, both civilian and military, suffered long after the war was over.

One example—of many—is Japan. The Japanese state had a very small empire when it joined the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War. As a result of being on the winning side, Japan expanded its sphere of influence over China. Its forces also captured the German colonies in Asia, and took control of many Pacific sea lanes (trade routes). Its empire was expanding, but Japanese imperialists still wanted more.

In the 1930s, nationalist politics in Japan were intensifying. They turned increasingly toward militarism and imperialism. A shortage of raw materials in Japan pushed industrialists to demand new sources for natural resources—colonies, in other words. In these colonies, they could also sell their goods. To broaden its economic sphere of influence, Japan invaded and occupied China in 1937. The Chinese were treated as conquered colonial subjects. Japanese forces killed some 400,000 Chinese people and raped tens of thousands of women.

At the same time, the German and Italian states were trying to expand their empires as well. Benito Mussolini had risen to be the Fascist dictator of Italy. He declared to his people that he was going to rebuild the Roman Empire for a new Italy. Under his leadership, the Italians invaded Albania, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Greece. Germany under Nazi rule turned its colonial ambitions mainly toward Eastern Europe. It began large-scale invasions in 1939 that marked the beginning of the Second World War.

In 1940, these three empires signed a pact. They agreed to help each other pursue their expansionist goals. In December of 1941, Japan bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The objective was to prevent the American military from interfering with Japan’s imperial goals in Asia. The United States responded by entering the Second World War. Four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy declared war on the United States. The European and Pacific conflicts had merged into one.

Causation: German moves

Historians have deeply studied how the First World War ended. They have also researched the events of the years afterward (1919–1928). They have drawn lines between those periods and the rise of fascism and the Nazi Party in Germany. Scholars who hold this view focus on the treatment of the German people at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. The war had cost Germany all of its colonial possessions. Those losses were added to the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles. Costly reparations,¹ crippled industries, and forced disarmament in the wake of defeat meant Germany could never reach world-power status. The victors of the First World War, especially the French, wanted to punish Germany for its role in starting the war. They also hoped to weaken the German nation so it could never be a threat again. The plan backfired.

This settlement, while reasonable to some, ultimately had dangerous consequences for the world. Holding the German people guilty for their leaders’ choices in the First World War left Germans hungry and desperate. Their resentment paved the way for an authoritarian state.

Hitler and his Nazi party came to power early in the 1930s. They rose partly because they harnessed the desperation of German citizens after the First World War. Germans were also eager to find someone to blame for their defeat. Opportunistic leaders gained power by channeling prejudice and hatred. They aimed it at Jews, Communists, and other groups. Such fearmongering spoke to the hearts of a once proud and powerful nation. The vision of a resurrected Germany motivated great national effort and sacrifice. It also led to sweeping German victories in the first years of the war.

In the end, Germany and Japan were both defeated in 1945 and so failed to achieve their nationalist dreams. Their defeat came at the end of the second phase of this 30-year conflict (1939–1945). The Second World War added at least 70 million more deaths to this violent period in history.

Conclusion

The continuities between the First World War and the Second World War suggest that the conclusion of the first conflict contributed to the second. Remember that the Second World War was even deadlier than the first. We can ask ourselves if the end of the First World War was a missed opportunity to create a longer-lasting peace. We can wonder whether the year 1919 was a missed chance to deal more effectively with militarism, nationalism, and imperialism. But historical questions like these should give us pause. Larger questions often loom, such as: Were these continuities a result of the mistakes made by those who negotiated the end of the First World War? Or did they arise from deeper issues that were not so easily resolved?

Fun fact: “Fascist” is capitalized when referring to the actual National Fascist Party that Mussolini led. Hitler was also a fascist, but there the word is lowercase because it refers to his style of leadership, not the name of his political party. In a fascist state, as Hitler’s Germany would become, strict economic and civic laws can be enacted without a democratic process.

1 In this context, reparations means the money that the defeated owes the victor after a war.