The Great War, the War to End All Wars, was the ruinous culmination of the European ‘Balance of Power’ doctrine. From the days of Louis XIV onwards, and indeed foreshadowed by the terms of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, there had been a tendency for states to form strategic alliances in order to counterbalance the overwhelming superiority of a mighty neighbour. In the century between 1813 and 1914, a dual system of two balancing alliances had emerged, that of a Central-European ‘Axis’ bracketed by a French-British-Russian entente. The resulting domino effect, which inexorably led from the Sarajevo incident to the battles of Tannenberg and Verdun, is notorious. Also notorious is the huge, industrialized scale of the warfare: this was no longer a ‘continuation of diplomacy by other means’ (as war had been for Clausewitz), no longer the backing up of international confrontation by an armed campaign, but a life-and-death struggle between entire nations. The social, economic and ideological investment in the Great War was total. Propaganda and jingoism were capable of penetrating society to a far greater extent than in the previous century, and a frenzy of national hatred was whipped up from all quarters to make this, morally no less than in other respects, an almost ‘total war’. German professors and intellectuals issued proclamations in support of German right, might and superiority; British noble and royal families like Battenberg and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha were compelled to change their names to the more patriotically sounding Mountbatten and Windsor. Slogans like Gott strafe England and Hang the Kaiser suffused the public sphere. The national fanaticism of the First and Second World Wars can only compare to the religious fanaticism of the Crusades and the Wars of Religion, illustrating once more that nationalism had taken the place, ideologically and socially, of religion as a mobilizing force.

Even as the military events unfolded, it was obvious that the Great War would mark a fundamental shift in the European state system. The British entry into the war was motivated and proclaimed as a defence of Belgium and of small states whose violated neutrality had been guaranteed internationally. The various nationalities of the Romanov and Habsburg Empires had by now developed active and ambitious national emancipation movements, all of which were to use the military deadlock of the great imperial war to proclaim self-government.