The First World War ended at 11 o’clock on 11 November 1918 after an armistice was reached. More than four years of carnage had finally come to an end. But the world would never be the same. When war broke out in 1914, it marked the start of a European and global political crisis that would not be resolved until seventy-five years later, when the collapse of the Soviet empire in Europe brought the Cold War to an end.

The Great War, when it broke out, was unexpected but not unplanned for. There had been ominous signs. Still, the shock was enormous. For the first time in a hundred years, the great powers of Europe were plunging into a war that covered the entire continent, one that also involved every other part of the world. Many people imagined that war would be impossible in a modern, enlightened Europe where conflicts were resolved through peaceful negotiations and agreements, not through violence. Now, it seemed, Europeans were returning to a primitive dog-eat-dog state.

The order that preceded the First World War was generally called an ”armed peace”. It could be described as a latent state of war because it was built on mutual deterrence mainly between the six great powers (Germany, Austria, Russia, France, Great Britain and Italy). It could also be described more positively as a ”balance of power”. It was easy to criticise this ”balance of power”. For instance, the distinguished British Liberal, Lord Morley, wrote: ”Balance! What a beautiful euphemism for the picture of two giant groups armed to the teeth, each in mortal terror of the other, both of them passing year after year in an incurable fever of jealousy and suspicion!”

However, the alternative to the balance of power was the collapse of this balance. That is what took place in July-August 1914, with the result being world war.

When the statesmen of Europe gathered following the previous world war, the Napoleonic Wars, in Vienna in 1814-1815, their goal had been to establish a sustainable balance of power and thus a sustainable peace. They were to succeed in this task surprisingly well; Europe was to secure for itself a relatively peaceful hundred years. But it was not easy and it required continuous reassessment. The system frequently ceased functioning and had to be repaired time and time again before it eventually collapsed in 1914.

Metternich and his contemporaries had wanted to establish a conservative order in which a ”concert” of great powers would play their instruments in harmony and peace. Regular conferences of the great powers were supposed to resolve the problems that arose with mutual understanding, through give and take. Metternich saw nascent nationalism as the great threat to Europe’s peace. Everywhere, national movements were threatening to destabilize Europe. Liberals, on the other hand, embraced these national movements. They saw in them an expression of the drive for freedom. Wars were part and parcel of this.

Metternich’s Europe lay once and for all in ruins in 1848. This was the year of national and social revolutions. Paris, Berlin and Vienna were convulsed by the uprisings. Metternich was forced into exile. It was another statesman, Prussia’s Otto von Bismarck, who would take on the task of re-establishing order. Bismarck realized that the national movements could not be held back. Instead, he wanted to channel them into conservative streams. He was ”the white revolutionary” who united Germany from above. This work was completed through a series of short, brilliantly conducted wars. By the time the German empire was founded in 1871, Bismarck had restructured the European balance of power so quickly that no one else really realized what had happened until it was too late.

The new balance of power after 1871 was based on a shift in the centre of gravity in Germany’s favour. But it was still a balance of power. No one knew that better than Bismarck. He realized that the shift could trigger a movement among other powers to band together to counter Germany’s weight. The balance would then tip to Germany’s disadvantage. This was the ”nightmare of coalitions” that was said to have haunted Bismarck late at night. When the Iron Chancellor was fired in 1890, his replacement was to turn Bismarck’s nightmare into reality. Bismarck had taken twenty-eight years (1862-1890) to found and stabilize the German empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II would take just as many years (1890-1918) to break it to pieces.

The coalitions against Germany did materialize, stimulated by Germany’s clumsy and aggressive foreign policy. France and Russia formed an alliance in 1894, France and Great Britain in 1904 (the ”Entente Cordiale”). Austria alone stuck with Germany while Italy hesitated. As a result, Europe was formed into the two main alliances that Morley spoke of and that would come to blows in the Great War. After war broke out, other powers would be added. Japan, Italy and finally the US would wind up on the side of what was known as the Entente. Turkey (or ”the Ottoman empire”) would end up siding with Germany.

The factor that triggered the First World War is well known. The Austrian heir to the throne, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand, was in Sarajevo with his consort in June 1914 in conjunction with an inspection tour. Several young terrorists had been smuggled in from Serbia to murder him. On 28 June, one of them, Gavrilo Princip, managed to kill the royal couple with shots from his revolver. Austria’s government unwisely decided to take the attack as a pretext for action with the intention of definitively punishing Serbia. This led to the outbreak of world war.

The most dramatic development in the initial phase of the Great War was the German offensive against France. It brought German troops close to Paris before the French managed to change the direction of the war with the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. In 1870, Germany had been able to defeat the French army. In 1940, they were to succeed again. But in 1914, the Germans failed. The main reason was that they were fighting a war on two fronts at this time. Bismarck’s diplomacy had ensured Russia’s neutrality in 1870. Hitler’s would ensure Russia’s neutrality in 1940. But Wilhelm II’s diplomacy had brought Germany enemies from every direction. The country was to pay for this in 1914.

After the Battle of the Marne, the war on the Western Front reached a deadlock. The enormous trenches that ran through Western Europe from the Swiss border to the English Channel were dug. There then ensued the war of attrition, with little geographic movement, that is so strongly etched in people’s minds. Here were the trenches, the bullets, the barbed wire, the mud, the terrible battles that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands but no territorial gain for either side. This was the war that would be depicted by numerous war writers, the most classic being Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front.

But the war on the Western Front was not the only war. The First World War was a European war, but it was brought to every part of the world. It was brought to China, where the Japanese took advantage of the opportunities for gain that the war provided. It was brought to off the coasts of South America. It was brought to Africa, where the German colonies were invaded and taken over. It was brought to the Middle East, where the Turks fought against the English, the French and Arab insurgents. It was brought to the Caucasus, where they fought against the Russians (while at the same time massacring their own Armenian population).

There were also several European fronts. On the Eastern Front, the Austrians (with moderate success) and the Germans (with greater success) fought the tsar’s army. The Russian war machine sustained its resistance and even its offensive power for a surprisingly long time. When it finally ceased to function, it was because tsarist Russia’s social structure could not withstand the stress in the end. In March 1917, the revolution broke out, dethroning the tsar. In November of that year, there was a coup d’état that brought one of the most ruthless regimes in world history to power in Russia, creating the first one-party dictatorship in history. The new government under Lenin and his Bolsheviks made peace with Germany and Austria in March 1918. It also brought about a civil war in Russia and its former empire which raged on until 1920.

In the south, the Italians and Austrians fought eleven battles along the Isonzo River, where more than a million people died but which is now perhaps best remembered – if it is in fact remembered – through Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

When the First World War ended in November 1918 and peace was concluded the following year, it wound up making greater changes in the map than even the Napoleonic Wars did (and greater than the Second World War would later produce). In Europe, four empires had crumbled (the German, Russian, Austrian and Ottoman). New sovereign states had come into being (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Albania). France had regained the land it lost in 1871. Serbia/Yugoslavia had doubled in size. Austria had been reduced to a fragment. In the Arab world, which had previously been part of the Ottoman empire, new countries arose under British or French protection – Iraq, Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. The modern Middle East came about as a result of the Great War, with the Turks risking their empire just as rashly as the Austrians or Russians. The balance of power that existed prior to 1914 had fallen to pieces.

The peace conference that gathered in Paris in 1919 would attempt to bring order to this chaos. The three leading statesmen, Clemenceau from France, Lloyd George from Great Britain, and Wilson from the US, did their best. If the results were meagre, it was due less to their lack of foresight than to the force of circumstances and to their soon being swept from the scene (Wilson and Clemenceau in 1920, Lloyd George in 1922) so that they had little time to consolidate their work for peace.

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The greatest shortcoming of the peace involved the role of the US. It was the US that had brought victory to the Western powers when it entered the war in 1917. It was President Wilson who by virtue of his country’s unparalleled power and prosperity had drawn up the guidelines for the Peace Treaty of Versailles. But back in his own country, the war had unleashed an isolationist backlash. Americans repudiated the work for peace, and through this the League of Nations and Wilson himself. They retreated into their own hemisphere, firmly resolved to remain neutral in the Europeans’ conflicts from then on. As a result, the peace was essentially doomed, and the way was open for Hitler’s revanchism. The peace had taken US influence in the balance of power for granted. When the US retreated, it was critically shaken.

If France and Great Britain had had statesmen of the old, powerful kind, the damage need not have been so great. But the new democratic Europe created after 1919 was completely set on peace. The old illusions resurfaced once again, stronger than ever. Military power and armaments were seen as something reprehensible. Negotiations and good intentions were thought sufficient to resolve all conflicts. Moreover, the English and French had a bad conscience. When Hitler accused them of having enslaved and exploited Germany with the Treaty of Versailles, they agreed with him. The slide down the slippery slope of concessions had begun.

We know what happened next. A new, even more horrific and bloody world war repeated much of the pattern of the old one. Once again, the US was forced to intervene to save a Europe threatened with bleeding to death, where in the end the struggle for power was over which of the perhaps most feared dictators in history, Hitler or Stalin, would control that part of the world in future. The US intervention came late, but early enough to save democracy and civilization in Western Europe (including Sweden). This time, the Americans stayed on. Their keeping watch over 45 years of the Cold War in the end resulted in the collapse of the dictatorships in the East and the victory of democracy from the English Channel to the Carpathians.

What was Sweden’s role in the First World War? Our country had already kept itself out of war for a hundred years. But the Great War was the first real test of our neutrality. It was a successful test for Sweden as well as for the rest of Scandinavia. Swedes saw it as a reward for our virtues and our moral superiority, our love of freedom and aversion to violence. It was the beginning of the view of Sweden as a small peace-loving country and great moral power which we were to maintain in the Second World War, during the Cold War and in the war on terror. Refusal to take a position vis-à-vis great powers hungry for war had become the hallmark of Swedes, now for almost one hundred year.

The First World War is often considered the ”ultimate cataclysm” of the 20th century, and rightly so. The war was a pre-condition to Lenin taking power in Russia, Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany, which set the agenda for European politics for a long time to come. The Second World War was in many ways a continuation war. Europe’s world hegemony and self-confidence fell victim to the war. It created conditions for the US entry on the world stage and thus for a dominant factor in global politics today. Intellectually and philosophically, the Great War helped to undermine faith in common sense and progress, at least for Europeans. It deprived Europeans of their sense of security, which only began to return after 1989 (except for a brief period of euphoria after 1919). The liberal world system that seemed to be developing with irresistible force was shaken to its very foundation. The entire balance was upset and was not re-established for seventy-five years. Consequently, the First World War revealed something about the fragility and vulnerability of liberal Western civilization – but also something about its ability to survive.