V - The War of the Nations

Summary

Some of the belligerent states were multi-ethnic like Russia, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. However, on the whole the ethnic communities inhabiting them did not voice any aspirations to gain independence, stopping at a demand of the right to autonomy within the existing state. The desire to set up their own nation-state could be observed only in some ethno-national groups (such as the Poles), or merely their upper strata, and even there it was certainly not a hard-and-fast rule. None of the ethno-national groups in the imperial states contemplated wide-scale clandestine military action in a liberation movement against the state they were in. At any rate none of them had the forces needed for such action. The nature of the 1914 mobilisation and of the war, at least in its initial phase, ruled out irredentist activities of any kind whatsoever. Soldiers from the various ethnic communities making up the multi-ethnic states marched off to war without asking questions to do their soldier's duty. If the governments of the multi-ethnic states had been seriously worried by the risk of irredentism, they would never have decided to go to war. In the first phase of the global conflict the so-called national question (viz. national aspirations) had absolutely no impact whatsoever on the progress of the war.