A Revolution of the Imagination: Dreams of Democracy and Peace

“A parliament […] which monitors the administration on an ongoing basis, while collaborating with it. This was not the case before the war. After the war, parliament will have to be reshaped in this way, or we’ll be back to the old poverty,”² Max Weber demanded in early 1918, as one of many German intellectuals who supported the war effort. This was not, as we see, unreserved support.

Both the rulers and the ruled realized that the war, and such a bloody war at that, had to mean political and social changes. It was hard to imagine that people who had risked their lives in the trenches had no right to vote—but in Great Britain it was only made universal to men in 1918. The above quote from the great sociologist brilliantly demonstrates that Wilhelm II’s subjects did not dream only of building a German sphere of influence or creating satellite states; they also set real postulates for the modernization of the Reich, moving toward its democratization (unlike in Great Britain, the right to vote in the Reichstag elections was universal—nonetheless, on many occasions the complicated federal structure of the Empire and the considerable influence of the general staff and monarch made it possible to ignore the voice of parliament).

Despite the aforementioned inconsistencies in London’s politics, the Entente began to be associated with the struggle for democracy, especially with the fall of the Tsardom after the February revolution and America’s entry into the war (1917). In neutral countries, such as Spain, there were also growing demands for the replacement of oligarch rule with authentic parliamentarianism.³

The downfall of the Central Powers seemed to symbolize the end of autocracy, especially joined with the popularity of Thomas Woodrow Wilson and his idea of the self-determination of nations. With the Treaty of Versailles (1919), the history of the League of Nations began.

From today’s point of view, it is easier to see the dark side of this landscape—Russian democracy died young, and in the 1930s the League was incapable of preserving the peace, ultimately becoming a laughing stock. But the organization’s first decade brought pretty fair results in resolving international conflicts, of which there was no short supply—and this in spite of the growing isolationism of the rising superpower, the United States.⁴

Within the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928), the various states declared they would forsake war as an instrument of politics. Even if this was mere public relations, it bore elegant testimony to the pacifist state of that public, or at least a great portion of it.