The Future of Violence

What exactly do we identify as the end of the war? If we mean the end of combat, the Armistice of 11 November 1918 suspended hostilities on the Western Front until the Versailles Peace Treaty was signed.

This evolution took various forms across different countries. There were battles between regular armies. For example, the Greco-Turkish War (1919-22) ended, for the first time in Western history, with the mandatory transfer of 1.5 million individuals on the basis of ethnic homogeneity: Turkish citizens living in Turkish territory who were of Greek Orthodox faith were systematically exchanged for Greek citizens living in Greek territory who were of Muslim faith (Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations of 30 January 1923, later integrated into the Treaty of Lausanne of 24 July 1923). There was also ethnic and religious violence, such as in Poland or in Ireland (during the war of independence of 1919-21), as well as class struggles against an ‘internal enemy', as in Bolshevik Russia. Violence contesting the colonial presence also broke out in India and Egypt, Algeria and Indochina.

Some of the violence emerged directly from the outcome of war in the autumn and winter of 1918.

The historian George Mosse used the concept of brutalisation to encapsu­late the transformation of war violence into political violence, from violence against an external enemy to violence against an internal one. Since the late 1990s, this idea has been met with so much enthusiasm from historians - and not only First World War specialists - that the meaning Mosse gave it in his groundbreaking book has often been forgotten. He pointed to veterans' heightened indifference to violence as a result of the traumatic experience of the Front and of the pursuit, in peace, of the aggressive attitudes of war.^[480] The term ‘brutalisation' is certainly too vague to be fully convincing. Is brutalisation a collective phenomenon which we can observe at the scale of postwar societies (and, in this case, did veterans from victorious nations react differently from those from vanquished ones?), or is it a behavioural trait manifested only by certain veterans? Even if Mosse's stated goal has always been to carry out a ‘comparative cultural history' of Europe in 1914-18 and after the war, his examples are largely drawn from German political history.

According to the historian Antoine Prost, the idea of brutalisation is more difficult to apply to France, where a strong republican tradition and pacifist movement mitigated veterans' violence.^[481] In Great Britain, brutalisation was much more a ‘collective fear' than a reality in the 1920s.^[482] For Dirk Schumann, the relative stability of France and of the United Kingdom is due to their displacement of postwar violence towards their colonies, whereas Germany, having lost its colonial empire, was forced to shift linger­ing war violence onto the political field - against its own citizens.

These interpretations start with the assumption that the experience of war in itself inevitably kindles a response of individual and collective violence, which certain countries might succeed in suppressing with parliamentary democracy and veterans' associations, or in redirecting towards the colonial empire. But might it not be instead the ‘culture of defeat',^[483] with its emotional mixture of humiliation, frustration and anger, that explains how some countries descended into various forms of political violence while others were able to organise the return of veterans while limiting social disorder? Defeat is neither only the result of the power balance between two nations, nor simply a fact sanctioned by diplomats, but very much a state of mind. In Germany, for example, the feeling of defeat encompassed various realities: the occupation of the Rhineland, the political instability of the Weimar Republic, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, the loss of border regions in central Europe - from which, not coincidentally, most of the members of the Freikorps emerged in the aftermath of the war.

In Russia, the weakening of state power opened up space for warlords, who carried out frequent pogroms with their private armies. In this unique period of ‘war communism' (1918-21), many forms of violence combined to create a quasi-permanent climate of violence: the struggle against counter­revolutionaries (real or imagined), against foreign intervention forces (which reached 20,000 men in 1919), and against ‘class enemies' such as kulaks; the Polish-Soviet war (1919-21), in which some 250,000 people died; ethnic strug­gles. The Russian philosopher Pyotr Struve, who went from Bolshevism to the counter-revolutionary movement, concluded that ‘everything we are living through is only the continuation and mutation of the world war'.

At the same time, the disintegration of European empires led to a resurgence of nationalism in the Caucasus, in the new Baltic states, in Poland, and also outside Europe.