- What was the First World War?
- Causes of the First World War
- Consequences of the First World War
- Countries participating in the First World War
We explain everything about the First World War. The sides and their participating countries, the causes and consequences of the war.
Soldiers of the English infantry, in France.What was the First World War?
World War I, also known as the Big war In some countries, it was an international armed confrontation that encompassed practically all the countries of the European continent, and various nations of the Middle East, Asia, Africa and also of America, in four years of war on a large scale, from 1914 to 1918.
The countries in dispute were organized into two opposing alliances, called the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, in which were several of the great empires of the time, and almost all the military and industrial powers of the time. Almost 70 million soldiers fought, coming from the nations Europeans and their African and Asian colonies.
Thus, the First World War is considered the fifth armed conflict with the highest cost in lives in human history, given the enormous number of participants and the variety of technologies used for the first time, from aerial bombardments, machine guns, poison gas and the first war tanks.
This conflict was extremely important for the political and economic order of the world, since it generated important revolutions in some of the participating nations, collapsed empires and allowed the rise of new powers.
The end point of the First World War was the surrender of Germany with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on June 28, 1919. The oppressive conditions of said treaty would paradoxically ignite the wick of discontent that would cause the WWII two decades later.
Causes of the First World War
The starting point of the Great War was the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Thus a conflict A large-scale diplomat who immediately took up arms, as the Empire invaded the Kingdom of Serbia, and fired numerous alliances from side to side that escalated to become a world war.
The division of the world made by the European imperial powers during the previous century must also be considered as a cause of the war, since the mercantile colonization of Africa and Asia allowed them to develop economically and industrially, but on very unequal and competitive terms: England and France had the monopoly industrial development, which generated discord and rekindled nationalist squabbles.
Consequences of the First World War
Beyond the almost 10 million soldiers killed, 20 million wounded and almost 8 million missing on both sides, the Great War had important political consequences at the time, such as the dissolution of four of the participating empires: the Russian , German, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian.
The Russian case is famous because the October Revolution took place in 1917, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew Tsarism and took the first steps towards a socialist state that would later become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
For its part, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was divided into the nations of Austria and Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire fell to the Arab Revolution that gave birth to the nations of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Israel. Something similar happened with the Kingdom of Serbia, which gave way to a multi-ethnic nation: the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.
Finally, the dissolution of the German Empire came on such oppressive terms and in a condition of poverty such, after their armies were eliminated and their African colonies confiscated, that resentment and the feeling of betrayal would nest in the country, sowing the seeds that later Adolf Hitler would reap.
Countries participating in the First World War
The two sides faced in the Great War were the following:
The Triple Alliance. Constituted in 1882, it brought together the so-called “Central Powers”: the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Kingdom of Italy. The latter would change sides in the first year of the conflict, however, and its place would be taken by the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Bulgaria.
Other nations such as the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan, the Belarusian People's Republic, the Kingdom of Finland, the Kingdom of Lithuania, the Kingdom of Poland, the Ukrainian State, among others, would support the alliance based on their commercial relations with it.
The Triple Entente. Formed by the British Empire, the French Republic and the Russian Empire, and then by the Kingdom of Italy in 1915. The Great Empire of Japan, the Kingdom of Romania, the Kingdom of Belgium, the Kingdom of Serbia, the Portuguese Republic and the United States of America.
But when the conflict increased in scale and the balance tipped towards the Triple Entente, other nations joined the fight, such as Brazil, the Armenian Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, the Principality of Albania, the Kingdom of Siam, the Kingdom of Finland ( which changed sides in 1918) and the Kingdom of Montenegro.