International impact
League of Nations
But treaties would be nothing without a central body to bind them. With no controlling force, Europe would fall back into the old imperial ways of shaky alliances and secret dalliances. The American President, Woodrow Wilson, proposed his '14 points for peace' in January 1918, which included the vision of restoring lost lands along sympathetic national borders.
The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 led to the construction of a League of Nations, or committee of states. Although designed to oversee arbitration between countries, and act as a means of avoiding war in the future, the League of Nations was unable to prevent the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Nonetheless, its blueprint was taken up in 1945, when the United Nations was constituted to perform a similar role.
An Assembly Line of the Ford Motor Company, Detroit,
Michigan in 1935. America became a major industrial power between the
two world wars
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Birth of a superpower
The victorious European nations blunted most of Woodrow Wilson's points for peace to fit their own agendas. This sidelining of America out of European affairs led to the United States not joining the League of Nations. With several empires destroyed, Russia in turmoil and the remaining victorious nations on the edge of financial ruin, America stood alone in the aftermath of war as a rich and heavily industrialised nation with relatively little loss. This consequence of the First World War was to lead to America becoming a true superpower among the nations of world, an institution with the money and influence to dominate global politics to the present day.
Home affairs
Close to home, one of the first dramas the British government had to deal with as war broke out concerned Ireland. Irish republicans, who were fighting to gain independence from Britain, took advantage of the war situation to step up their actions. The growing discontent gathered pace as the British authority's attentions were occupied with fighting in the trenches, and eventually led to the Easter Rising of April 1916. Republicans occupied strategic parts of Dublin and demanded a break from British rule.
Though the rising was quashed, support for the republican movement grew when Irish men were ordered to join the army along with everybody else in Britain. Independence for Ireland was eventually achieved in 1922.
Although this episode was an internal affair and not necessarily a consequence of the First World War – as was a similar uprising in South Africa – the timely outbreak of war on the continent provided the window of opportunity for action by the republicans.