Worlds of Wartime - Duncan Kelly

The First World War hardly ended with the formal Armistice in Europe on November 11, 1918, amid the continuing violence of blockades and epidemics, amid numerous forms of reconstruction and revolution. Its legacies, in fact, resonate deeply in our present. Nor is it obvious that it only began on July 28, 1914, just a month after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo. Rather than these formal legal openings and closings, the beginnings and endings of wartime are many, depending upon the questions we ask, and the frames of reference we provide. For many at the time, the outbreak of what would become the First World War was an inevitability, the result of rising tensions over decades, whether due to the dynamics and systems of international politics within Europe, or a result of the competitive logic of imperial politics as practised by Europe outside its borders, rebounding back upon it. This resulted in equally persistent ideas down to our own time, about the inevitability that followed from victory; namely, that to be successful and realistic, modern politics and economics must necessarily be fixed in the form of a democratic nation-state. But this new world of democracy, forged in war, could easily become its own sort of intellectual prison-house, curating and limiting political and economic possibilities just as securely as any form of tyranny. That the tyranny of victory was a danger recognized by many of the leading analysts of the First World War
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