Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923

Abstract

On May 25, 1919, the conservative Austrian newspaper Innsbrucker Nachrichten observed that the end of the Great War had not made Europe a more peaceful place. Under the headline “War in Peace,” the paper pointed to the extraordinarily high levels of ethnic and revolutionary violence that had recently erupted across the collapsed European land empires.1 Indeed, if anything, the cessation of hostilities on the western front on November 11, 1918, was the exception rather than the rule. The war had finished a year earlier on the eastern front, as the Bolsheviks extricated Russia from the conflict. Yet despite this, violence continued there and spread to the Central powers as they were defeated in the fall of 1918. Ethnic strife, pogroms, revolutions, counterrevolutions, wars of independence, civil conflict, invasions, and interstate wars went on until 1923. One or more of these kinds of violence affected Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic states, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Italy, Anatolia, and the Caucasus. Ireland experienced a war of independence and civil war in the same period.2