The Changing State of International Relations
We have witnessed how one dynamo of a country—new Germany—started to affect events on the continent; and we have seen how some of the European nations dealt with the demands of change and order. Now, let's turn our attention to European politics and the changing state of international relations in the immediate post-war period. A few general observations about the thirty something years before the outbreak of the First World War are, I believe, in order. After the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, none of the Great Powers fought one another for more than 40 years. If these years were not filled with wars, they were at least filled with rumors of wars. It is the period in which the Concert of Europe—that balance of power system that came out of the Congress of Vienna and which had effectively kept the peace in Europe for much of the century—comes to an end. The balance of power was finally destroyed by two overwhelming developments: The so-called Second Industrial Revolution and Imperialism.
European power, wealth and prestige had reached new heights and spread around the world; progress seemed unstoppable—and indeed, this period saw the invention, development, and application of such wonders as electricity and the light bulb, the internal combustion engine, and the wireless. Motorcars, airplanes and radio signals could not but help to signal the dawning of the age of the possible. Everything was—or seemed—possible. Optimism and confidence were at an all time high—but at the same time, there existed a sort of paradox. Conflicting values and attitudes made the modern civilization seem as if it lacked coherence.
During this half-century, European political, economic, and social life assumed many of the characteristics of our world today. Nation-states with large electorates, political parties, centralized bureaucracies and universal military service emerged. Business adopted large-scale corporate structures, and the labor force organized itself into trade unions. Large numbers of white-collar workers appeared—secretaries, clerks, commercial bankers, stockbrokers and lawyers. Urban life came to predominate throughout western Europe, and the foundations of the welfare state and of vast military establishments were laid—taxation increased accordingly.
Europeans had never had a better lifestyle; the standard of living never higher. Yet working people formed militant organizations to fight their employers; and socialists considered the very success of capitalism to be evidence of its imminent collapse. Conservatives assailed the threat to civilized values posed by excessive faith in reason, rampant avarice, and purposeless tolerance of every idea and faction. The late nineteenth century is often described as the triumph of the middle class and the age of liberalism, but it was characteristic of that triumph and that age that many were moved to reject it.
Such conflict placed an added strain on political life at the very time that the state was expected to wield unequalled power. Each nation developed its own patter for meeting this challenge, and remarkably, each of these political systems escaped the revolutionary upheaval that often seemed likely. That fact, like the continuation of international peace and the spread of European empire, appeared to be evidence of the health of European civilization, but the period closed in the cataclysm of the First World War.