The empires strike back
The shattered remains
The close of the First World War found three major empires destroyed. While the victorious nations divided the spoils, even they found the financial burden of warfare a bitter pill to swallow. All of the strutting powers who had flexed their muscles before the war were now weakened versions of their former selves. The collapse of the Central Powers witnessed a major restructure of European borders and the birth of new nations.
Division and deconstruction
The Ottoman Empire folded shortly after the war, following the irreversible decay of its government. The Treaty of Sevres, signed in 1920, officially divided the domains of the Ottomans amongst the Allies. The region known as Palestine was divided between the British and French Empires. Syria experienced an Arab revolt under King Faysal, and became an independent Arab state. Iraq came under British mandate, while the ancient dominion of Thrace was divided between Greece, with accessions to Bulgaria, and the new independent Turkey, which became a recognised republic in 1923. The contentious Ottoman domains in the Balkans were absorbed into the new Yugoslavia.
As the war ended, the delicate empire of Austro-Hungary was deconstructed by a series of nations pulling away. With the Habsburgs in flight, both Hungary and Austria broke apart into separate nations. The new nations of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia swallowed large areas of land, and Romania on the eastern frontier claimed additional regions. Italy was given the Alpine areas, and the newly reinstated republic of Poland gained areas in northern Austria. The Treaty of Saint-Germain, signed in 1920, formalised the dissolution of the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while the Treaty of Trianon, signed the same year, declared the independence of Hungary.
Punishing Germany
The most contentious treaty at the end of the First World War relates to the dissolution of the German Empire. Following the armistice of 11 November 1918, the Allies compiled a treaty that was to ensure that Germany stood no chance of ever waging war again, and also guaranteed that the financial burden of being forced to go to war was duly repaid to the West. The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919, officially recognised that Germany was responsible for the war and set about the dividing up of her empire between the victors.
Reflecting the national mood in the German magazine Simplicissimus, cartoonist Thomas Theodor Heine, in 1919, saw the terms of the Versailles Treaty as equivalent to sending Germany to the guillotine
Mary Evans Picture Library
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All of her overseas colonies were dissolved and areas on German borders were repatriated to nations historically connected with them, such as Alsace-Lorraine to the French and parts of Silesia to Poland. Other clauses in the treaty concerned what were known as reparations. These were repayment penalties for causing the war, to be paid by Germany to the victors. They included the provision of free coal (which actually upset existing internal markets) and steel, which were worth billions of German marks. Germany also had restrictions imposed on its military, to limit the future size of her army and the types of weapons she could produce.
The crippling effects of the Versailles Treaty caused much bitterness, which was later capitalised upon by one particular old soldier of the trenches – Adolf Hitler. But while Germany felt the blows of losing the war, the division of her empire, and the resultant reparations, many were occupied with trying to salvage what they could from the situation they found themselves in. In 1919, the Weimar Republic was constituted, which took the place of the old monarchy and empire. This democracy ran for 14 years until it was enveloped by Hitler's Nazi party in 1933.
Dawn of a new era
From the First World War (which occurred as a result of the imperial age) to the Second World War (which essentially happened as a result of the First), the environment of pompous, aggressive and unwieldy monarchies gradually faded as their empires burnt themselves out.
The surviving great institutions that still existed after the Second World War slowly relinquished their possessions, giving independence to many countries and establishing commonwealths and unions of nations. The world moved forward into a new commercially driven era, where the ideologies of peoples were pioneered by the new empires of their day – the influential nations who would become known as the superpowers.