Tweet
Agence France Presse -- English
December 29, 2013 Sunday 1:17 AM GMT
Europe unity tested on WWI centenary
PARIS, Dec 29 2013
A Europe badly shaken by a faltering economy and rising populism is
set to commemorate the centenary of Word War I, the conflict still
known as the "Great War" that scarred the continent and shaped the
20th century.
Commemorations for the 1914-18 Great War are planned through the
summer on either side of the Western Front, but with no single event
bringing all of the former foes together.
Plans for a major gathering in Sarajevo -- where the assassination of
the Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist is
seen as sparking the conflict in June 28, 1914 -- had to be dropped
due to a lack of international consensus.
Europe was left ruined by four years of all-consuming warfare, but
while European nations shared in the trauma of what some historians
called a collective "suicide", how they remember the Great War varies
greatly.
Europeans "continue to approach this transnational event through the
narrow framework of national memory", explained the Australian
historian John Horne, of Dublin University.
For the British and French, World War I is vividly etched in the
collective imagination as a just and necessary victory, secured at a
terrible human cost.
Remembering the war is a big deal in France and Britain, as well as in
Australia and New Zealand whose very sense of identity is tied to the
conflict, with hundreds of official projects and wall-to-wall media
coverage.
In Germany and Russia, by contrast, the Great War's memory was all but
supplanted by the cataclysm of World War II, two decades later.
The centenary also comes as the very idea of a shared European future
is under attack, with eurosceptics, nationalists and the far-right
gaining ground across the continent as the eurozone heads into a
fourth year of economic crisis.
'Different experience for each country'
Delegations from the warring parties in World War I have been invited
to France for a "peace demonstration" on Bastille Day, July 14. The
presidents of Germany and France, Joachim Gauck and Francois Hollande,
will also stand side by side in France on August 3 to mark the start
of the war "with gravity and reverence".
And a German-British ceremony is planned the following day in Belgium,
invaded by German troops on the first day of the war, August 3, 1914.
But in Germany itself, as in Italy and central Europe, the centenary
has so far gone largely unnoticed.
The diversity of national memories makes it difficult -- if not
impossible -- for all the former foes to commemorate the war together,
historians explain.
"It is a different experience for each country," argued the German
historian Gerd Krumeich, proof that "there is no such thing as a
common European mindset or sensitivity, Europe very much remains a
rational idea."
The Bosnian capital will be hosting a string of cultural events,
organised by France and Germany.
But neighbouring Serbia -- which resents the notion that Serbian
nationalism was to blame for triggering the war -- wants to use the
centenary as a chance to set the record straight, and lay historical
responsibility squarely with the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Vladimir Putin's Russia, meanwhile, has seized on the chance to fan
national pride, reviving the memory of a war it says was unjustly
forgotten under the Soviet regime -- which today's Russian rulers
accuse of bowing shamefully to Germany in 1917.
The Great War dragged almost half the world's population into a cycle
of violence of unprecedented scale and intensity.
Over the course of 52 months, it left some 10 million dead and 20
million injured and maimed on battlefields that sprawled from the
howling North Sea coast to the Russian steppes and the deserts of the
Middle East.
Millions of civilians perished under occupation, through disease,
hunger or deportation, including a million Armenians systematically
massacred by Turkish forces.
Four of the world's most powerful empires -- Russian, German,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman -- collapsed as the world map was
redrawn, giving rise to dozens of new nation states.
World War I fanned the emergence of many of the ideologies that were
to fashion the 20th century, and its looming conflicts: Communism,
Fascism, Nazism, anti-colonialism, pacifism.
And Europe's economic and political ruin cleared the way for the rise
of a new economic and military superpower, the United States, which
was to dominate the second half of the century.
December 29, 2013 Sunday 1:17 AM GMT
Europe unity tested on WWI centenary
PARIS, Dec 29 2013
A Europe badly shaken by a faltering economy and rising populism is
set to commemorate the centenary of Word War I, the conflict still
known as the "Great War" that scarred the continent and shaped the
20th century.
Commemorations for the 1914-18 Great War are planned through the
summer on either side of the Western Front, but with no single event
bringing all of the former foes together.
Plans for a major gathering in Sarajevo -- where the assassination of
the Austro-Hungarian heir Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist is
seen as sparking the conflict in June 28, 1914 -- had to be dropped
due to a lack of international consensus.
Europe was left ruined by four years of all-consuming warfare, but
while European nations shared in the trauma of what some historians
called a collective "suicide", how they remember the Great War varies
greatly.
Europeans "continue to approach this transnational event through the
narrow framework of national memory", explained the Australian
historian John Horne, of Dublin University.
For the British and French, World War I is vividly etched in the
collective imagination as a just and necessary victory, secured at a
terrible human cost.
Remembering the war is a big deal in France and Britain, as well as in
Australia and New Zealand whose very sense of identity is tied to the
conflict, with hundreds of official projects and wall-to-wall media
coverage.
In Germany and Russia, by contrast, the Great War's memory was all but
supplanted by the cataclysm of World War II, two decades later.
The centenary also comes as the very idea of a shared European future
is under attack, with eurosceptics, nationalists and the far-right
gaining ground across the continent as the eurozone heads into a
fourth year of economic crisis.
'Different experience for each country'
Delegations from the warring parties in World War I have been invited
to France for a "peace demonstration" on Bastille Day, July 14. The
presidents of Germany and France, Joachim Gauck and Francois Hollande,
will also stand side by side in France on August 3 to mark the start
of the war "with gravity and reverence".
And a German-British ceremony is planned the following day in Belgium,
invaded by German troops on the first day of the war, August 3, 1914.
But in Germany itself, as in Italy and central Europe, the centenary
has so far gone largely unnoticed.
The diversity of national memories makes it difficult -- if not
impossible -- for all the former foes to commemorate the war together,
historians explain.
"It is a different experience for each country," argued the German
historian Gerd Krumeich, proof that "there is no such thing as a
common European mindset or sensitivity, Europe very much remains a
rational idea."
The Bosnian capital will be hosting a string of cultural events,
organised by France and Germany.
But neighbouring Serbia -- which resents the notion that Serbian
nationalism was to blame for triggering the war -- wants to use the
centenary as a chance to set the record straight, and lay historical
responsibility squarely with the Austro-Hungarian empire.
Vladimir Putin's Russia, meanwhile, has seized on the chance to fan
national pride, reviving the memory of a war it says was unjustly
forgotten under the Soviet regime -- which today's Russian rulers
accuse of bowing shamefully to Germany in 1917.
The Great War dragged almost half the world's population into a cycle
of violence of unprecedented scale and intensity.
Over the course of 52 months, it left some 10 million dead and 20
million injured and maimed on battlefields that sprawled from the
howling North Sea coast to the Russian steppes and the deserts of the
Middle East.
Millions of civilians perished under occupation, through disease,
hunger or deportation, including a million Armenians systematically
massacred by Turkish forces.
Four of the world's most powerful empires -- Russian, German,
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman -- collapsed as the world map was
redrawn, giving rise to dozens of new nation states.
World War I fanned the emergence of many of the ideologies that were
to fashion the 20th century, and its looming conflicts: Communism,
Fascism, Nazism, anti-colonialism, pacifism.
And Europe's economic and political ruin cleared the way for the rise
of a new economic and military superpower, the United States, which
was to dominate the second half of the century.