Different definitions for WWI

Welcome, foreigner (or spanish) visitor, to my personal blog. This is my space of opinion and here I teach and write about several topics like geography, History, geopolitics, politics, art or others more informal, like some music (video clips from Youtube, normally).

With this post I want to internationalize this blog, in order to be readied in different countries and not only in mine or other Spanish talking countries. I’ve seen at Google Analytics that my blog is readied in second place (after Spain) at the US and at the United Kingdom, English speaking countries (US with Spanish in ascent).

Post in English will show the tag “International”, in the low part of the article.

This first post in english is going to deal with the First World War, called too the Great War, “the war that would finish all the wars”, unfortunately, we know nowadays that that wars was not the last, but only the beginning of two decades of violence and death that would finish with another world war, the Second, more destructive than the First.

Anyway, the WWI was a long four year conflict which confronts two big alliances, especially in Europe, where the war began. In one hand, the Triple Alliance later called Central Emperies: the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy (which we’ll see that played in his own way). In the other hand, the Triple Entente later called by historians the allies: France, United Kingdom and the huge Russian Empire. When war starts, in July 1914, only Serbia (with allies) and the Austro-Hungarian Empire (with central empires) participated in war but the complex system of alliances, created years before, made the war international and so destructive as finally was. Germany, France, Russia, United Kingdom, Turkey, and more countries of Europe, Asia (Japan, China), Africa (by the European colonies) and the Americas (United States) participate in that conflict. Italy, who was allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary until 1914, finally entered in war with the allies betraying its old friends. And Spain, my country, decides the most reasonable position in that moment: neutrality.

WWI is difficult to catalogue because of its complexity and all the causes of its beginning but we can talk about six types of war in order to define WWI:

-          Liberator war: WWI was seen in that moment like a war for liberates the energy of the youth. Too for liberate the neighbour country of a cruel dictatorship.

-          Patriotic/nationalist war: WWI was shown by the governments as a patriotic war because of an assumption attack of the enemy or by historic causes. Anyway, the political material put so much interest in throw patriotic messages to keep the support of population to the war.

-          Inevitable war: WWI was inevitable, according to the governments of then. There were different reasons for that: politic (alliances created years before that didn’t allow the countries avoid the war), economic (the “other” countries want to destroy our economies), geography (the “other” countries want to invade us and take part of our territory) and historic (the attacks came always from the “another” country).  

-          Imagine war: years before the beginning of WWI, was common imagine the future and hypothetic war in literature or different publications. The imagine war was absolutely different as the real: short, with deciding battles, with cavalry as main weapon of war… finally WWI was long, with no decisive battles and with new weapons like planes, tanks, poisonous gas…

-          Against the war: WWI was celebrated at the beginning by governments, soldiers and majority of populations but there was some groups that were against the war (with the repudiation of the society because of that). An example were the socialists of 2^nd International. But, finally they failed because nationalism had entered too in 2^nd International: German socialists didn’t trust in Russian socialists and at the opposite.

-          Avoided war: some countries avoid the war during all the conflict keeping neutrality. In Europe were a minority: Spain because of its distance from fronts, Holland for avoids destruction similar as Belgium, Scandinavia countries because of its distance, Switzerland because of its traditional politic of neutrality which keeps today and the Vatican because the politic of Popes of avoiding been identified with a specific political regime.

With this explanation I finish this post; I hope that it would be interesting and useful to you, thank you!