This article analyses the demobilization of Australian veterans after the First World War, placing this process in the broader transnational context of Britain’s settler society dominions more generally. It explores the public challenges posed by demobilization in Australia, and by way of comparison, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and how each of these dominions negotiated reintegration of veterans through the deployment of cultural and political strategies grounded in emergent nationalist discourses. Nationalism became a means of both acknowledging the contribution of veterans in making the nation and tying veterans back into the civil society. While nationalism was the ideological glue that held settler societies together in the immediate postwar years, preventing social and political disintegration, in Australia these nationalist discourses took on a peculiar character, at once proclaiming the virtues of veterans as founders of the nation while adopting a heightened sense of the importance of ties to the Empire. What emerged was a hybrid discourse that interwove nationalism and Empire loyalism, conceptualized here as Empire nationalism. This unusual Australian political discourse was forged by the experience of the Great War and demobilization, grounded in an effort to make soldier citizenship the core foundation for a new nationalism. In Australia Empire nationalism became a framework that both sanctioned particular forms of veteran violence and accommodated that violence into an affirmation of nationalist values, placing the Anzac legend at the centre of the national ethos, one that looked both inward to Australia and backward to Britain.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/124?rss=1
In East-Central Europe, the First World War did not end with the armistices of 1918. In the wake of the Russian Revolution and imperial collapse, armed conflicts of various kinds, sizes, and political motivation dominated the years 1917 to 1922, when former citizens of the major European land empires fought for independence and statehood. These conflicts were not only rooted in pre-war conflicts, and in growing tensions between the awakening national self-consciousness of the indigenous populations on the one hand and the sometimes harsh imperial politics of the nineteenth and early twentieth century on the other. With the imperial armies dissolving, a brutal but in some ways conventional war – occasional and sometimes even large-scale atrocities against civilians notwithstanding – gave way to an outburst of paramilitary violence against civilians. Various warlords in the western territories of former Tsarist Empire used violence as a mere raison d’etre; armies under development – as the Polish army or the Bolshevik Red Guard/Army – lacked discipline, their conscripts being brutalized and inclined to commit atrocities. Ultra-violent milieus such as the European counterrevolutionary militias added to the extraordinary death toll in the region.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/58?rss=1
Were US citizens brutalized by the First World War? Mobilization unified the nation, forcing both the willing and unwilling to take a stand in regards to the war and war-induced changes within American society. The spike in the use of violence to achieve political goals during the postwar period coincided with the return of veterans from the battlefield, but veterans did not instigate this period of violence. Rather than brutalization through combat, the ‘radicalizing’ effect of the war stemmed from how the mobilization process politicized both civilians and soldiers. The effects of war-related politicization resonated into the postwar period in both violent ways (giving the appearance of brutalization) and non-violent ways. Widespread violence in 1919, however, was only one variant of the more general radicalization and politicization US society underwent during the First World War. The non-violent trajectories that developed more fully in the early 1920s were less visible but equally important legacies of wartime mobilization. Over time, politicized veterans within the civil rights movement and veterans organizations quickly opted for nonviolent over violent forms of political expression. The USA thus joined the ranks of the other victor nations where successful veteran reintegration into existing social, economic, and political structures helped to mitigate war-associated violence. The state's embrace of veterans' demands for benefits ultimately gave most returned servicemen a stake in maintaining rather than challenging the existing political system. This did not mean that the effects of wartime politicization evaporated. Instead the two key social justice movements of the twentieth century, the fight for racial equality and the equitable distribution of income, benefited from the injection of politicized veterans into these respective causes.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/78?rss=1
This article explores the dynamic relationship between demobilization and remobilization in Lithuania after 1918. Focusing on the formation of Lithuanian and German paramilitaries and their military roles in the postwar conflict, the article argues that their emergence was grounded in their experiences of the Russian revolution and demobilization. War veterans formed the nucleus of both groups but they were joined by new volunteers who saw the postwar conflict as an opportunity to fulfil their nationalist, anti-Bolshevik or revanchist aspirations. The paramilitaries played significant roles in state- and nation-building in the Baltic region.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/38?rss=1
This article reconsiders important aspects of African participation in the First World War, both in Europe and in Africa itself, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, it explores demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context. The article argues that, although French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies does not conform to George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has been so influential in understanding postwar events in parts of Europe. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, even if the effects of the war were still important in many areas of the continent. Further, the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/100?rss=1
In the case of Russia, the existence of a relationship between lost war, revolution, and Civil War is obvious. Unlike the German case, however, it has not been investigated in any detail. The Great War is often seen as the ‘forgotten war’ in the shadow of the Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War of 1918–21. Inspired by George Mosse’s work on Germany, this article investigates the connections between these conflicts. It argues that it is not easy to reconstruct the direct linkages between the fronts of an industrialized war to the violence of revolution and civil war. Rather, enduring traditions were transferred, transformed, and radicalized: the style of rule, the result of an absent political and patriotic consensus between the heterogeneous communities of communication, and dispositions to violence among the decisive sectors of the population, not only the soldiers and the revolutionaries, but also the peasants and workers longing for an egalitarian and just economy. The main role of the war was that it destroyed the old state and set these pre-existing violent tendencies free, which began to feed on themselves.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/1/15?rss=1
Quelle: http://www.riha-journal.org/articles/2014/2014-oct-dec/paredes-battle-of-pavia
Quelle: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13507486.2014.983433?ai=z4&mi=3fqos0&af=R
Powered by
WordPress and plainscape theme.