The First World War 1914-1918

1815

Woodrow Wilson, the president of the US

The Triple Entente was an “association between Great Britain, France, and Russia, the nucleus of the Allied Powers in World War I. It developed from the FrancoRussian alliance that gradually developed and was formalized in 1894, the AngloFrench Entente Cordiale of 1904, and an Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, which brought the Triple Entente into existence,”

The Second Morocco Crisis, also known as Agadir Crisis, was a milestone on the road to the First World War. When the French moved a large column of soldiers further into the interior of Morocco, Germany demanded territorial compensation. Threatening warfare if they did not get it, Berlin sent a gunboat to Agadir. Though the French backed down and gave Germany a slice of the French Congo, which became part of Germany’s colony of Cameroon (Neukamerun), Germany’s perceived bullying left a bitter taste in the mouths of the British. Fearing Berlin would also build a naval base on the Moroccan Atlantic, Lloyd George gave his famous Mansion House Speech in which he dangled the possibility of war.

The Balkan League are

• Serbia
• Bulgaria
• Greece 
• Montenegro

Self-determination: “The idea that each national group has the right to establish
its own national state. It is most often associated with the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism and became a key driving force in the struggle to end imperialism,”

Social Darwinism is “the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak,”

Schlieffen Plan: “The German pre-1914 plan for a pre-emptive military offensive against France, which would involve troops passing through neutral Belgium. It is named after the German army chief of staff, General Alfred von Schlieffen,”

They were;

- Germany

- Austria - Hungary

- Ottoman Empire

- Bulgaria

Bolsheviks: “Originally in 1903 a faction led by Lenin within the Russian Social Democratic Party, over time the Bolsheviks became a separate party and led the October 1917 revolution in Russia. After this ‘Bolsheviks’ was used as a shorthand to refer to the Soviet government and communists in general,”

Paris Peace Conference in 1919

“the Council of Ten,” was composed of two delegates from each power: Britain, France, Italy, the US, and Japan, the chief victors of the Entente. 

Fourteen Points
“On Jan. 8, 1918, President Wilson, in his address to the joint session of the United States Congress, formulated under 14 separate heads his ideas of the essential nature of a post-World War I settlement.
The text of the Fourteen Points is as follows:
1. Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.
2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in peace and in war, except as the seas may be closed in whole or in part by international action for the enforcement of international covenants.
3. The removal, so far as possible, of all economic barriers and the establishment of an equality of trade conditions among all the nations consenting to the peace and associating themselves for its maintenance.
4. Adequate guarantees given and taken that national armaments will be reduced to the lowest point consistent with domestic safety.
5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.
6. The evacuation of all Russian territory and such a settlement of all questions affecting Russia as will secure the best and freest cooperation of the other nations of the world in obtaining for her an unhampered and unembarrassed opportunity for the independent determination of her own political development and national policy and assure her of a sincere welcome into the society of free nations under institutions of her own choosing; and, more than a welcome, assistance also of every kind that she may need and may herself desire. The treatment accorded Russia by her sister nations in the months to come will be the acid test of their good will, of their comprehension of her needs as distinguished from their own interests, and of their intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, must be evacuated and restored, without any attempt to limit the sovereignty which she enjoys in common with all other free nations. No other single act will serve as this will serve to restore confidence among the nations in the laws which they have themselves set and determined for the government of their relations with one another. Without this healing act the whole structure and validity of international law is forever impaired.
8. All French territory should be freed and the invaded portions restored, and the wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has unsettled the peace of the world for nearly fifty years, should be righted, in order that peace may once more be made secure in the interest of all.
9. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality.
10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.
11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Serbia accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several Balkan states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several Balkan states should be entered into.
12. The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.
13. An independent Polish state should be erected which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.
14. A general association of nations must be formed under specific covenants for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike,”

Germany - Treaty of Versailles
Austria  - Treaty of Saint-Germain
Bulgaria - Treaty of Neuilly
Hungary - Treaty of Trianon
The Ottoman Empire - Treaty of Sevres (not implemented)

The primary outcomes of the Paris Peace Conference can be listed as follows:
• First, the peace treaties, mainly the Treaty of Versailles, constituted a new Europe in which Germany and other defeated states lost their pre-war status.

• Second, the end of the First World War marked the emergence of new non-European powers—namely the US and Japan—and the end of European dominance over the international system. 

• Third, as the globalization of the international system was already underway before the outbreak of war, the League of Nations had something of a soft landing.

• Fourth, since the First World War was supposed to be as a “war to end all wars,” the new peace was to prevent war as foreign policy option.

• Fifth, the end of the war marked a sharp increase in economic interdependence between states, which added a strong economic to the political dimension of the international system.

Lausanne Peace Tready - July 24, 1923

Vladimir Lenin

Entente Powers, also known Allies or Allied Powers, refer to the coalition of
states during the First World War fought against the Central Powers. “The major
Allied powers in World War I were Great Britain (and the British Empire), France, and the Russian Empire, formally linked by the Treaty of London of September 5, 1914. Other countries that had been, or came to be, allied by treaty to one or more of those powers were also called Allies: Portugal and Japan by treaty with Britain; Italy by the Treaty of London of April 26, 1915, with all three powers. Other countries—including the United States after its entry on April 6, 1917—that were arrayed against the Central Powers were called ‘Associated Powers,’ not Allied powers; U.S. President Woodrow Wilson emphasized that distinction to preserve America’s free hand.

The major Entente offensive aimed at the Turkish Straits was the Gallipoli Campaign (Çanakkale Battles).

The Ottoman Empire

Austria - Hungary

Tsarist Russia