How did the efforts of European governments to mobilize all their resources for the war transform the relationship between states and their populations in Europe?
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How did the efforts of European governments to mobilize all their resources for the war transform the relationship between states and their populations in Europe?
First of all, we have to realize the scope of this effort. The British, French, and Germans put seven to eight million people into the field under arms. The Russian army was even bigger. The British army was smaller, still a voluntary force until 1916 but still, we're talking about millions of people who need to be armed, they need ammunition, they need to be clothed, they need to eat every day, and they need the tremendous technological apparatus that accompanied these troops into war: the artillery, the airplanes, etc. This effort required the mobilization of entire societies. It was simply not possible for anyone to be exempt from this effort.
The belligerents in the First World War did this through essentially dictatorial means. Normal checks and balances were suspended, the whole idea of a free market economy was suspended, and war ministries and raw materials boards in the government took control of the entire economy in order to achieve these military goals.
Of course, the mobilization in 1914 caused a tremendous economic crisis. If you take all of the young men or, eventually, all men between the ages of 18 and 40, and march them off to war, the first thing that happens is that all of the factories close down. Dependent women and children are left without breadwinners in their families. And here, too, the state stepped in by providing assistance for the unemployed, providing family allowances, etc. This took place in all of the major powers.
Once these regimes of assistance and these principles of intervention have been established, it becomes very difficult to see how you would back away from this after the war. Although in Britain and France, the process of demobilization at the end of the war did entail the government stepping back from the economy, in many ways the sacrifices that the populations had endured during the course of the war made it very difficult for them to back away from the forms of assistance that they had grown accustomed to.
I think historians are in agreement that the precedent for the institutions of the Welfare State, the state offices that step in to ensure a minimum level of well being amongst members of the population, is established during the First World War.
What consequences did the war have for Europe's colonial subjects in Africa and Asia?
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What consequences did the war have for Europe's colonial subjects in Africa and Asia?
There's a tendency in talking about the First World War to think of it as primarily a European phenomenon, but it was a world war. It was a world war because many of the combatants were empires. France was an empire. Britain was an empire. Belgium was an empire. That meant that people from many parts of the world were asked to participate in the ware effort. The unprecedented scope of the conflict and the demands that it placed on national economies meant that the ability of these nations to draw upon a global network of trade, resources, and manpower was crucial to their survival. You could even say that the blockade of Germany that rendered it incapable of drawing upon its own global resource network had a great deal to do with their defeat.
So what did it mean for the empires to be engaged in this war? And what, in particular, did it mean for their colonial subjects? We first have to realize that there were many people from other parts of the world serving in the armed forces. In the British army, there were people from India, from Egypt, from Australia and New Zealand and Canada. In the French army there were North Africans from Algeria, people from the West African colonies known as the Tirailleurs Senyialais (Senegalese sharpshooters). There were literally tens of thousands of people who were brought to Europe to fight in the war.
What did they think about it? For many, it was an opportunity to demonstrate a kind of attachment to national body. It was an opportunity to show their commitment, a sense of sacrifice. And for many of them, they also hoped that there would be some kind of recognition of this sacrifice at the end. To give one example of this, though an accident of history there was a small part of West Africa in present-day Senegal where a small group of Africans actually had parliamentary representation. There was an African member of parliament in France during the war. His name was Blaise Diagne, and he saw the war as an opportunity to show the resolve and commitment of colonial subjects to the national crisis. He went out and traveled through West Africa on a recruitment drive, believing that if he could drive up the numbers of West Africans who enlisted that these colonial subjects would then deserve citizenship.
Ultimately, of course, that didn't happen. At the end of the war, colonial workers who were brought in for the war effort were quickly discharged and returned to the colonies under military discipline. Many of the colonial troops found that they were not welcome in the communities that they were billeted in. There was a great fear that they might meet French women and so they were kept under stricter discipline than other troops. And they, too, were disappointed in their hopes for citizenship in the aftermath of the war.
Additionally, one might argue that the developments of the nationalist movements in these colonies received some impulse from the disappointment felt by the colonial troops in the aftermath of the First World War.