The Day The Great War Ended 24 July 1923

On 24 July 1923 the last Treaty ending hostilities in the Great War was signed at Lausanne in Switzerland. That Treaty closed a decade of violence. Jay Winter tells the story of what happened on that day. On the shores of Lake Geneva, diplomats, statesmen, and soldiers came from Ankara and Athens, from London, Paris, and Rome, and from other capital cities to affirm that war was over. The Treaty they signed fixed the boundaries of present-day Greece and Turkey, and marked a beginning of a new phase in their history. That was its major achievement, but it came at a high price. The Treaty contained within it a Compulsory Population Exchange agreement. By that measure, Greek-Orthodox citizens of Turkey, with the exception of those living in Constantinople, lost the right of citizenship and residence in that state. So did Muslim citizens of Greece, except for residents of Western Thrace. This exchange of nearly two million people, introduced to the peace conference by Nobel Prize winner and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, provided a solution to the immense refugee problem arising out of the Greek-Turkish war. At the same time, it introduced into international law a definition of citizenship defined not by language or history or ethnicity, but solely by religion. This set a precedent for ethnic cleansing followed time and again later in the century and beyond. The second price of peace was the burial of commitments to the Armenian people that they would have a homeland in the lands from which they had been expelled, tortured and murdered in the genocide of 1915. This book tells the story of the peace conference, and its outcome. It shows how peace came before justice, and how it set in motion forces leading to the global war that followed in 1939.

On 24th July 1923 the last Treaty ending hostilities in the Great War was signed at Lausanne in Switzerland. Jay Winter tells the story of the peace conference, and its outcome. He shows how peace came before justice, and how the conference and the Treaty set in motion forces leading to the global war that followed in 1939.

This set of essays introduces readers to new historical research on the creation of the new order in East-Central Europe in the period immediately following 1918. The book offers insights into the political, diplomatic, military, economic and cultural conditions out of which the New Europe was born. Experts from various countries take into account three perspectives. They give equal attention to both the Western and Eastern fronts; they recognise that on 11 November 1918, the War ended only on the Western front and violence continued in multiple forms over the next five years; and they show how state-building after 1918 in Central and Eastern Europe was marked by a mixture of innovation and instability. Thus, the volume focuses on three kinds of narratives: those related to conflicts and violence, those related to the recasting of civil life in new structures and institutions, and those related to remembrance and representations of these years in the public sphere. Taking a step towards writing a fully European history of the Great War and its aftermath, the volume offers an original approach to this decisive period in 20th-century European history.

This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict -- much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved -- from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré- sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe's countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain's final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month -- and a handful of men -- changed the course of the twentieth century.

Previous edition of this translation: 2005.