ULUSLARARASI İLİŞKİLER TARİHİ - Deneme Sınavı - 14

In order to prevent an unstable situation created by Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 from exploding, Bismarck convened the Congress of Berlin in 1878 as a check and balance for the region.

The 1878 Congress of Berlin was thus one of the milestones of the pre-1914 system. The 1815 Concert of Europe, on the brink of collapse since the Crimean War, with Bismarck’s intervention lasted until 1904.

The Triple Entente was an “association between Great Britain, France, and Russia, the nucleus of the Allied Powers in World War I.

It was the irredentist policies of the small Balkan states without an Ottoman “safety valve” that dragged a declining Austria-Hungary and destabilized Russia into conflict, pulling Germany and Britain into the morass with them.

It was the British-German rivalry that did most to lead to war in terms of naval rivalry.

Massive production rates and economic expansion greatly enhanced the scale of most states’ military buildups. Thus industrialization contributed to militarism and armaments as a cause for World War I.

Russia’s position became more precarious, as the Ottomans closed the straits to the Black Sea, seriously damaging the link between the Entente Powers.

The immediate impact of the Gallipoli Campaign was the inclusion of Italy and Bulgaria to the war.

The revolution plunged Russia into a bloody civil war that would last until 1922. They withdrew from the war signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

Everywhere, the war economy transformed societies. As working hours and conditions became more demanding for workers and conditions worsened, labor unrest spread. Shortages and deteriorating living conditions also caused great dissatisfaction among civilians, before long leading to antiwar sentiment and testing the legitimacy of monarchy throughout the continent. Everywhere socialism was on the rise, especially after the Russian Revolution of 1917 (Ferguson, 2015:233-250).

The Fourteen Points include references to open diplomacy, freedom of the seas, the reduction of national armaments, the removal of trade barriers between nations, impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, the readjustment of territorial borders based on the right to self-determination - especially within the former German, Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires-, the rights of minorities in those states, and the creation of “a general associations of nations” known as the League of Nations.

The principal actors, known as the “Big Four”, were Great Britain, France, Italy, and the United States.

The committee on the Covenant of the League of Nations was set up under the chairmanship of US President Wilson whose top priority was to create a permanent international organization for the postwar world order.

The League was exposed to infinite complications since it aimed to bring a universal standard to the relations of more than sixty member states “differing widely in size, in power, and in political, economic and cultural development” (Carr, 1946: 28).

There was no common enemy to necessitate a common military strategy.

Prior to the 16th century, emperors, kings, and princes predominated far more than sovereign nation states, while the Catholic Church was also central to determining the European feudal order. Indeed, ideas such as state sovereignty,
independence, or international law were not established concepts before the 17th century.

In the field of International Relations, the concept of the state system refers to the relationships between politically organized groups that have distinctive territories, are not influenced by higher authorities, and exercise a measure of
independence from one another.

To be sure, states existed in the Middle Ages, but their power was determined by different characteristics than modern states. For one, they had neither sovereignty nor independence in the modern term of the word because two kinds of hierarchy prevailed—the Holy Roman Emperor as temporal authority and the Pope as spiritual authority.

There were also semi-autonomous local rulers such as lords and knights who were not fully independent either.

Niccolò Machiavelli was great interpreter of Roman ideas about civic virtue and citizenship, he believed politics was based on human action, rather than religious conviction or sentiment and did much to revive the Roman idea of virtue.