Democracy and War

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to link the processes of democratization that developed in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe with those of the twentieth-century’s inter-war period. The point of intersection is, of course, the First World War, by the end of which democracy as a cause had been ‘outed’ as never before as part of the heightened politicization of European life in the post-war era. The problem that arises is why the experience of the war sensitised issues concerning the form of government and society as it did, and in particular how it had an impact on the values and processes of democratization. The answer I want to consider is a simple one: that the raison d’être of the war was ‘to make the world safe for democracy’. The phrase was US President Woodrow Wilson’s, and was at the heart of his justification of US intervention in April 1917;¹ but was it at the heart of the involvement of other belligerent governments during the war? The question I want to grapple with is, therefore, the extent to which the elevation of political and ideological values — and particularly democracy — by 1918 can be attributed to state advocacy during the war, in the shape of war aims and propaganda.