New WWI History

My opinion is that the world we have been living in for almost a century was born out of WWI. This includes the Middle East problems since 1948, it is in the current affairs of Turkey, and it played out in Serbia and Bosnia thirty years ago. You can disagree. It explains my interest in A New Intellectual History of The First World War: My Interview with Duncan Kelly regarding his new book, “Worlds of Wartime: The First World War and the Reconstruction of Modern Politics” 

When this failed to materialize, the obvious corollary kicked in. That despite Du Bois’s pessimism around his perceived failures (about which Chad Williams has so piercingly written in recent years), and at first glance counter-intuitively, the First World War didn’t in fact end at all, and hasn’t ended yet. The continuity between a sense of time and place where with ‘no justice’ there would be ‘no peace’, connects past and present in this way in a depressingly obvious way. That there is also a sense in which wartime over environmental and ecological resources and capacities remains, seems to me another lasting lesson of the global intellectual history of wartime, alongside the resurgence of contemporary debates about data and information management, economic planning and the limits of libertarian approaches to markets and politics, and that one thing a serious and credible political theory and intellectual history should try to show, is how the liminal qualities of our present were shaped in ways that we ourselves are often not completely certain about. 

sch 9/22