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Introduction: Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2010

JULIA EICHENBERG  and
JOHN PAUL NEWMAN
JULIA EICHENBERG
Affiliation:
Centre for War Studies, Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland; eichenbj@tcd.ie.
JOHN PAUL NEWMAN
Affiliation:
School of History and Archives, Newman Building, University College Dublin, Belfield Campus, Dublin 4, Ireland; johnpaul.newman@ucd.ie.
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Abstract

This special issue deals with the phenomenon of the emergence of radical violence in what might be called ‘shatter zones’ of empires after the end of the First World War. It argues that the emergence of violence was due to the absence of functioning state control and facilitated by the effects of experiencing mass violence during the First World War. In the multi-ethnic regions of the former empires, the rising wave of nationalism directed this violent potential against ethnic and religious minorities.

Type
Introduction
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 19 , Issue 3: Aftershocks: Violence in Dissolving Empires after the First World War , August 2010 , pp. 183 - 194
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 The analysis of borderlands as ‘shatter zones’ was introduced into recent historical discussion by the interdisciplinary and international research project, ‘Borderlands: Ethnicity, Identity, and Violence in the Shatter-Zone of Empires since 1848’ (2003–7), at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, co-ordinated by Omer Bartov. The term has also been used in reference to the post-1918 period by Donald Bloxham; see Bloxham, , The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2009), 81 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘Introduction’, in Paramilitary Violence in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923 (forthcoming).

3 For a comparative survey of the collapse of Austria-Hungary, the Russian empire, and the Ottoman Empire beginning with the outbreak of the war, see Roshwald, Aviel, Ethnic Nationalism and the Fall of Empires: Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, 1914–1923 (London: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar. For a study of the violent aftermath of the collapse of the Hohenzollern empire, see Waite, Robert, Vanguard of Nazism: The Free Corps Movement in Post-war Germany 1918–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952)Google Scholar.

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5 The authors, following the practice usually followed in Western works, have set the end of the Russian Civil War as spring 1921 and the introduction of the New Economic Policy. Violence and aftershocks of war and revolution, however, continued until the end of the period under study, and beyond. See Pipes, Richard, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (London: Haverill Press, 1995), 343–81Google Scholar.

6 The standard military history of this front is still Stone, Norman, The Eastern Front 1914–1917 (London: Penguin, 2008)Google Scholar. See also Rachamimov, Alon, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (New York: Berg, 2002)Google Scholar.

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9 See Ziemann, Benjamin, War Experiences in Rural Germany 1914–1923, trans. Skinner, Alex (Oxford: Berg, 2007)Google Scholar, and Banac, Ivo, ‘“Emperor Karl has become a Comitadji”: The Croatian Disturbances of Autumn 1918’, Slavonic and Eastern European Review, 70, 2 (1992), 284–305Google Scholar.

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14 Ibid., 185.

15 Ibid. See also Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

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22 Ibid., 697.

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24 Wimmer and Schetter, ‘Ethnische Gewalt’, 317.

25 Ibid., 318.

26 Michael Hanagan, ‘Gewalt und die Entstehung von Staaten’, Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung (2002), 153–76, 156.

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28 On the successor states see Macartney, C. A., Independent Eastern Europe: A History (London: Macmillan, 1962)Google Scholar. On the Kemalist republic see Lewis, Bernard, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

29 Brubaker, Rogers, ‘Aftermaths of Empire and the Unmixing of Peoples: Historical and Comparative Perspectives’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 18, 2 (1995), 194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See Mann, Michael, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 10–11Google Scholar.

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32 Theweleit, Klaus, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Bodies, Floods, History, trans. Conway, Stephan, in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner, foreword by Barbara Ehrenreich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)Google Scholar, Theweleit, , Male Fantasies, Vol. 2: Male Bodies, Psychoanalyzing the White Terror, trans. Turner, Chris and Carter, Erica, in collaboration with Stephan Conway, foreword by Jessica Benjamin and Anson Rabinbach (Cambridge: Polity Press, in association with Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar; also Gerwarth, Robert, ‘The Central European Counter-revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War, Past and Present, 200 (August 2008), 175–209CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (London: Allan Lane, 1970), 55Google Scholar.

34 Jaeger, Friedrich, ‘Der Mensch und die Gewalt. Perspektiven der historischen Forschung’, in Straub, Jürgen, ed., Was ist der Mensch, was Geschichte? Annaeherungen an eine Kulturwissenschaftliche Anthropologie (Bielefeld: transcript, 2005), 301–24, 311–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Ibid., 313.

36 Geyer, ‘Political Violence’, 701–2.

37 Jaeger, ‘Der Mensch und die Gewalt’, 314.

38 Geyer, ‘Political Violence’, 707.