RICERCA ITALIANA     

At the origins of the national states "system" in central-eastern Europe: the first world war and the Versailles Peace Treaties.

Università degli Studi di Roma "La Sapienza"

Abstract

The end of the first world war, the dissolution of the great multinational Empires (Ottoman, Hasburg) and the transformation of the tsarist Empire in a new political and institutional system inspired by Marxist theories based on the suppression of private property and of market economy – Union of Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) – open new and unexpected sceneries.
The winner powers try, with the Versailles Peace Conference, to create a new European and international order with the goal to create a new system of international relations in order to respond to the hope that people had during the hard times of the war.
The dissolution of the great multinational Empires – "the prisons of the people"- according to the evolution of political thought in the XIX century, should open a new age characterized by the presence of the free nations now able to create their own national State, sovereign and independent.
The 1815 Congress of Wien, the Holy Alliance and the "Restoration" after the Napoleon era, represent moments of the reactionary contrattacco finalized to to make useless
the modernization represented by the French revolution, the end of the social system dominated by the nobility and the growth of the bourgeoisie as a social strength able to carry on an epochal
changing. The ideological tension inside the various European societies produces different effects opening a period characterized instability that lasts for twenty years.
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Principal Investigator

Antonello Folco BIAGINI Università degli Studi di ROMA "La Sapienza"

Research Objectives

The goal of the research regards the wide phantom of consequences that the international historical events of the First World War and the peace of Versailles had on the inner equilibriums of the central-eastern Europe and Balkan countries.
The fundamental importance of these thematic emerges in all its dramatic dimension in the re-start of confrontation and ethnic clashes exploded in the period between the two world wars and that recently, after the end of the Cold War, emerged again with all their violence.
In the Danubian and Balkan area, however, the goal of a, sovereign, free and independent national State, that constituted one of the scopes of the first world war pursued through fights and suffering long all century XIX, it seems to be reached, even if with different degrees of success (are interesting the Romanian, Bulgarian and Hungarian cases, very different the one from the other).
The great multinational Empires - the Austro-Hungarian and that Ottoman - have been dissolved, the czarist Empire do not exist more in consequence of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. The new Soviet political system succeeds but to maintain the geopolitical Euro-Asiatic configuration of the old Empire substantially intact while the ideology of the revolution of October, founded on myths like the social equality and the end of the "bourgeois exploitation" of the workers, ends in order to influence European politics of the Twenties. In the period between the two >>>

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

«The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.»: this is what the British Foreign Minister Edward Grey told the night in which his country started the war against Germany. In this sentence, full of catastrophic feelings, was contained the idea that a certain world was near the end and that, at the end of the war, it would have change for ever. The human beings survived, ma the XIX century system felt down, while a new era, the so called “Short Century”, was opening.
For over a Century conflicts were not so long and few people were directly involved in the wars; the new conflict, changed definitely that reality and the societies who were involved in it.
The end of the war had really those effects that many expected; not considering the consequences that the war experience had on the society and the individuals, there were important effects on the geopolitical level because the world after the Peace Treaties of Versailles was completely different from the one before: two great multinational empires, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman, felt down and they were replaced from many new national states; the czarist empire, endured the effects of the communist revolution, thanks to the course of the hostilities, and it was replaced by the Bolshevik state, that took his inheritance also if on different ideological bases.
Also the German Reich endured the effects of the military defeat, and its place was >>>