20th-century international relations
20th-century international relations, history of the relations between states, especially the great powers, from approximately 1900 to 2000.
The history of the 20th century was shaped by the changing relations of the world’s great powers. The first half of the century, the age of the World Wars and the start of the Cold War, was dominated by the rivalries of those powers. The second half saw the replacement, largely through the agency of those wars, of the European state system by a world system with many centres of both power and discord. This article provides a single integrated narrative of the changing context of world politics, from the outbreak of World War I to the 1990s. Because domestic affairs figure heavily in the analysis of each state’s foreign policies, the reader should consult the histories of the individual countries for more detail.
For discussion of the military strategy, tactics, and conduct of the World Wars, see World War I and World War II.
The roots of World War I, 1871–1914
Forty-three years of peace among the great powers of Europe came to an end in 1914, when an act of political terrorism provoked two great alliance systems into mortal combat. The South Slav campaign against Austrian rule in Bosnia, culminating in the assassination of the Habsburg heir apparent at Sarajevo, was the spark. This local crisis rapidly engulfed all the powers of Europe through the mechanisms of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, diplomatic arrangements meant precisely to enhance the security of their members and to deter potential aggressors. The long-term causes of the war can therefore be traced to the forces that impelled the formation of those alliances, increased tensions among the great powers, and made at least some European leaders desperate enough to seek their objectives even at the risk of a general war. These forces included militarism and mass mobilization, instability in domestic and international politics occasioned by rapid industrial growth, global imperialism, popular nationalism, and the rise of a social Darwinist worldview. But the question of why World War I broke out should be considered together with the questions of why peace ended and why in 1914 rather than before or after.
The Bismarckian system, 1871–90
The era of the great powers
The European map and world politics were less confused in the decades after 1871 than at any time before or since. The unifications of Italy and Germany removed the congeries of central European principalities that dated back to the Holy Roman Empire, while the breakup of eastern and southeastern Europe into small and quarreling states (a process that would yield the term balkanization) was not far advanced. There the old empires, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman (Turkish), still prevailed. The lesser powers of Europe, including some that once had been great, like the Netherlands, Sweden, and Spain, played little or no role in the affairs of the great powers unless their own interests were directly involved. Both physical size and the economies of scale important in an industrial age rendered smaller and less developed countries impotent, while the residual habits of diplomacy dating from the Congress of Vienna of 1815 made the great powers the sole arbiters of European politics.
In the wider world, a diplomatic system of the European variety existed nowhere else. The outcome of the U.S. Civil War and Anglo-American settlement of the Canadian border ensured that North America would not develop a multilateral balance-of-power system. South and Central America had splintered into 17 independent republics following the final retreat of Spanish rule in 1820, but the new Latin American states were inward-looking, their centres of population and resources isolated by mountains, jungle, and sheer distance, and disputes among them were of mostly local interest. The Monroe Doctrine, promulgated by the United States and enforced by the British navy, sufficed to spare Latin America new European adventures, the only major exception—Napoleon III’s gambit in Mexico—occurring while the United States was preoccupied with civil war. When the United States purchased Alaska from the Russian tsar and Canada acquired dominion status, both in 1867, European possessions on the American mainland were reduced to three small Guianan colonies in South America and British Honduras (Belize). North Africa east of Algeria was still nominally under the aegis of the Ottoman sultan, while sub-Saharan Africa, apart from a few European ports on the coast, was terra incognita. The British had regularized their hold on the Indian subcontinent after putting down the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, while the Chinese and Japanese empires remained xenophobic and isolationist. Thus, the cabinets of the European great powers were at the zenith of their influence.
Europe itself, by 1871, seemed to be entering an age of political and social progress. Britain’s Second Reform Act (1867), the French Third Republic (1875), the triumph of nationalism in Italy and Germany (1871), the establishment of universal manhood suffrage in Germany (1867), equality for the Hungarians in the Habsburg monarchy (1867), emancipation of the serfs in Russia (1861), and the adoption of free trade by the major European states all seemed to justify faith in the peaceful evolution of Europe toward liberal institutions and prosperity.
International peace also seemed assured once Otto von Bismarck declared the new German Empire a satisfied power and placed his considerable talents at the service of stability. The chancellor knew Germany to be a military match for any rival but feared the possibility of a coalition. Since France would never be reconciled to her reduced status and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine imposed by the treaty ending the Franco-German War, Bismarck strove to keep France isolated. In 1873 he conjured up the ghost of monarchical solidarity and formed a Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) with Austria-Hungary and Russia. Such a combination was always vulnerable to Austro-Russian rivalry over the Eastern Question—the problem of how to organize the feuding Balkan nationalities gradually freeing themselves from the decrepit Ottoman Empire.
After the Slavic provinces of Bosnia and Hercegovina rebelled against Ottoman rule in 1875 and Russia made war on the Ottoman Empire two years later, the Dreikaiserbund collapsed. Bismarck achieved a compromise at the Congress of Berlin (1878), but Austro-Russian amity was not restored. In 1879, therefore, Bismarck concluded a permanent peacetime military alliance with Austria, whereupon the tsarist government, to court German favour, agreed to a renewal of the Dreikaiserbund in 1881. Italy, seeking aid for her Mediterranean ambitions, joined Germany and Austria-Hungary to form the Triple Alliance in 1882.
The next Balkan crisis, which erupted in Bulgaria in 1885, again tempted Russia to expand its influence to the gates of Constantinople. Bismarck dared not oppose the Russians lest he push them toward an alliance with vengeful France. So instead he played midwife to an Anglo-Austro-Italian combination called the Second Mediterranean Entente, which blocked Russian ambitions in Bulgaria while Bismarck himself concluded a Reinsurance Treaty with St. Petersburg in 1887. Once more the Eastern Question had been defused and Germany’s alliances preserved.