Royal Institute of International Affairs, Oxford University Press International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-)

The First World War and the transformations of the state
Author(s): PIERRE PURSEIGLE

Source: International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-), Vol. 90, No.
2, The Great War (March 2014), pp. 249-264
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Institute of International
Affairs
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The First World War and
the transformations of the state
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Although in England we are not likely to be called upon to make the same sacrifices that
our continental neighbours are already making, let it be understood that this is not a war
which can be, or ought to be, left entirely to the Government and the Army and the Navy.
It is a testing time for the people as well as for those who fight for us. The worst temper is
one in which it is assumed that everything will come out right and that meantime we can
go on living just as before. There will be soon rude reminders that that is not possible.1
In August 1914, provincial and national commentators in Britain and elsewhere

suspected that the conflict which had just begun would transform the role of
civilians in war. Many had indeed sensed that warfare now required the compre
hensive mobilization of belligerent societies: war was not to remain the preserve
of soldiers and commanders. Just how much this conflict would transform combat
as well as life on the home front obviously remained poorly understood. After
the guns fell silent in 1918, historians and scholars attempted to make sense of an
experience which had challenged conventional understanding of the relationship
between the business of war and the organization of modern civil society. Among
them, French historian Elie Halévy had initially presented his analysis in 1929 at
Oxford before an audience of luminaries as anxious to celebrate the Entente as
they were to salvage liberalism from the ruins of war. In November 1936, Halévy
returned to this theme before the French Society of Philosophy to elaborate on
his analysis of what he then called the 'era of tyrannies'.
The era of tyrannies dates from August 1914, that is, from the time when the belligerent
nations turned to a system which can be defined as follows :
a. In the economic sphere, greatly extended state control of all means of production,
distribution and exchange;—and at the same time, an appeal by the governments to the
leaders of workers' organizations to help them in implementing this state control, hence
syndicalism and corporatism along with étatisme.
b. In the intellectual sphere, state control of thought, in two forms: one negative, through
the suppression of all expressions of opinion deemed unfavorable to the national interest;
the other positive, through what we shall call the organization of enthusiasm.2
1 Northampton Mercury, 7 Aug. 1914.

2 Elie Halévy, The era of tyrannies: essays on socialism and war, ed. Fritz Stern, trans. R. K. Webb (London: Allen
Lane/Penguin, 1967), pp. 181, 20$ (first publ. in French, 1938).
International Affairs 90: 2 (2014) 249-264

© 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons
Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford 0x4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Maiden, MA 02148, USA.
Pierre Purseigle
Unmistakably tainted by the emergence of the USSR and the rise of Fascism,
Halévy's reflections on the war experience emphasized the state's direct domina
tion of society and set little store by the role of civil society in wartime. In his
view, the 'world crisis' of 1914—18 had opened up a new and ominous period in
modern history, whose 'evils' he wished to exorcize. His death in 1937 spared him
the horrors of another world war.
While the social and political legacy of 'total war' exercised historians and
philosophers, military commanders had also devoted a great deal of energy
to these questions since the end of the Great War. Born out of his refusal to
accept his defeat in the field in 1918, the reflections of Erich Ludendorff, Germa
ny's former First Quartermaster-General, focused on the type of state that was
required to ensure Germany's future triumph. In Der totale Krieg, published in
1935, Ludendorff essentially argued that a military dictatorship was the only form
of government which could ensure the necessary mobilization of the nation's
resources.3 One can hardly imagine two commentators whose political frames
of reference would be more alien to each other than Halévy's and Ludendorff's.
Yet they both stressed the critical centrality of the state in the process of wartime
mobilization.
The First World War had indeed revealed the state's capacity to mobilize the
belligerents' resources to great effect, irrespective of the specificities of their
political systems. Logically enough, its historiography reflects the importance of
the warring state, and scholars of the war have devoted a great deal of energy to
analysing the operations of the state in the conflict. To a large extent, scholarly
efforts have focused primarily on the war's impact on political regimes, and in
particular on their institutional arrangements and structures. This was the case
with many of the early works, including those published under the aegis of the
Carnegie Endowment Series on the economic and social history of the war.4
Analysts were particularly concerned with the unprecedented degree of state inter
vention in economic life.5 Even in countries as committed to economic liberalism
as was the United Kingdom in 1914, the state had not hesitated to take control
of essential industries such as the railways (1914), steel (1916) and coal production
(1917). After 1945, this perspective informed wider reflections on the emergence
of a new type of corporatist state, characterized by the wartime partnership
struck between state administrations and business, and greater integration of state
and economic elites. Until the late 1970s, the political and economic history of
the First World War largely revolved around the mobilization of the coercive
3 Hew Strachan, 'Total war in the twentieth century', in Arthur Marwick, ed., Total war and historical change:
Europe, 1914-1955 (Buckingham and Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press, 2001), p. 261.
4 Josef Redlich, Österreichische Regierung und Verwaltung im Weltkrieg (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky/
Carnegie-Stiftung für internationalen Frieden. Abteilung für Volkswirtschaft und Geschichte, 1925); Pierre
Renouvin, Les Formes du gouvernement de guerre. L'organisation gouvernementale française pendant la guerre (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France/Publications de la Dotation Carnegie pour la paix internationale. Section
d'économie et d'histoire, 1925).
5 S. J. Hurwitz, State intervention in Great Britain: a study of economic control and social response, 1914-1919 (New York :
Columbia University Press, 1949).
250
International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

Copyright © 2014 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2014 The Royal Institute of International Affairs.
power of the state as historians drew on Max Weber's work.6 Since the late 1980s,
however, the emergence and consolidation of cultural history as the dominant
paradigm in First World War studies has shifted the emphasis away from the state
to underline the agency of the belligerent populations. The study of the wartime
state has suffered relatively as a result, while the field as a whole has prospered,
with attention directed to new objects and methods.
This article represents part of a larger endeavour to bring the state back to
the centre of the historiographical discussion, because the transformations of the
state testified to the impact of industrialized warfare on the political structure of
belligerent societies. Since the war involved a wide range of political systems, it is
essential to acknowledge these profound differences. A constitutional monarchy
like Britain was allied to both the secularist French Republic and to an autocratic
Russian empire, whose tsar—like his Austro-Hungarian counterpart—reigned by
the Grace of God. The German Kaiserreich combined authoritarian and parliamen
tarian features illustrated by the uneasy coexistence of a reactionary emperor with
a Reichstag elected on a wide franchise. Meanwhile, the Ottoman sultan—caliph
of Islam—had been reduced to a minor role since the ascent to power of the
Committee Union and Progress in 1918.
In discussing how the Great War ushered in fundamental transformations of
politics in these different contexts, this article will nonetheless stress the common
ality of the challenges issued by industrialized mass warfare and will evoke the
'belligerent state' as a shorthand for the responses offered in the war by individual
political systems. It will address two critical aspects of the wartime relationship
between state and society: the deployment of coercion and the expression of
national solidarity. It will finally suggest how the logic of mass participation in
modern warfare transformed both the contours and the foundations of the state.
For this transformation was not simply the result of the pragmatic adoption of
contingent and reversible policies; the First World War contributed to a critical
redefinition of the sources of the state's authority and redefined sovereignty.
Violence
In his 'Politics as vocation' lecture delivered in 1919, Max Weber famously defined
the state as the 'community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legiti
mate use of physical force within a given territory'.7 Legitimate coercion is there
fore at the core of the conventional Weberian state, along with a bureaucratic
administration supported by a centralized fiscal authority. Elaborated in the era of
the First World War, Weber's thesis is an obvious and indispensable starting point
for any reflection on the state in that conflict. Yet its uncritical adoption may well
obscure the historical nature of the wartime state.
6 Jürgen Kocka, Facing total war: German society, 1914—1918 (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1973).
7 Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: essays in sociology (London: Routledge,
1998), p. 78.
251
Pierre Purse igle
Monopoly or devolution of legitimate coercion?
In practical terms, mass military mobilization brought about the devolution of

the means of coercion. In arming millions of their citizens, the warring states
effectively undermined their institutional monopoly of the means of violence.
Unwittingly perhaps, the arch-conservative Heinrich von Treitschke himself
acknowledged as much when he averred that 'the very constitution of a State
rests upon the distribution of weapons among the people'.8 The degree of military
mobilization varied greatly among belligerents but affected almost 30 per cent
of the overall male population aged between 15 and 49.9 Britain, Germany and
France mobilized respectively 12.5 per cent, 15.4 per cent and 17 per cent of their
workers.10
In this respect, the First World War constitutes a remarkable historical situa
tion. To take but one dramatic example, the French mutinies of 1917 shed light on
the particular nature of the constitution of the state. For in this context, soldiers
in arms who had effectively been entrusted with the means of legitimate violence
refused unquestioning obedience to the state's bidding. In a remarkable study, Len
Smith revealed how mutineers called upon their identity as citizen-soldiers and
on a conception of popular sovereignty inherited from the French Revolution
to challenge the military authorities. One may indeed argue that in doing so the
mutineers literally and paradoxically perhaps embodied the state."
Recent historical works have also demonstrated the extent to which Weber had
misunderstood the nature of discipline in the armed forces in his Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft. Whereas he presented it as a purely rational and impersonal mecha
nism to obtain obedience, historians of First World War armies have stressed the
importance of leadership and command defined as a relationship, however unequal
and however informed by class and cultural prejudices it may have been.12 Indeed,
on both the front line and the home front, the mobilization of belligerents relied
on a conditional and decentralized process.
Most paradoxically perhaps, the idiosyncratic operation of conscription in
Britain further undermines the idea that the state held a monopoly of legitimate
coercion. Witness the military tribunals created by the Military Service Act that
established conscription in 1916 and symbolized the coercive powers of the wartime
state. These tribunals, akin to the local recruitment boards set up in the United
States in June 1917, had been put in place to consider appeals lodged by individuals,
families or businesses against conscription. Arbitrating between the demands of the
military and the interests of local communities, they provided a site where agents
8 Heinrich von Treitschke, The organization of the army (London: Gowans & Gray, 1914), p. 5.
9 Jay M. Winter, The Great War and the British people (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
10 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of extremes: the short twentieth century, 1914-1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 44.
11 Leonard V. Smith, Between mutiny and obedience: the case of the French Fifth Division during World War I (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
12 Gerth and Mills, eds, From Max Weber, pp. 253-60; Gary Sheffield, Leadership in the trenches: officer-man relations,
morale and discipline in the British army in the era of the First World War (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Alexander
Watson, Enduring the Great War: combat, morale and collapse in the German and British armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Emmanuel Saint-Fuscien, A vos ordres? La relation d'autorité
dans l'armée française de la Grande Guerre (Paris: Editions de l'Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2011).
252

of the state pursued military manpower in face of individual opposition and local
economic interests. In the meantime, the American experience of the war also
demonstrates that the wartime state relied on civil society organizations and local
elites to implement conscription and to enforce norms of patriotic behaviour.13
The recent work of Mehmet Beçikçi on the mobilization of manpower in the
Ottoman empire also stresses how the growing dependence of the Ottoman state
on civil society forced it to come to terms with the demands of local communities,
despite its centralizing and authoritarian tendencies.14
Bureaucratic administration
The societies that went to war in August 1914 sought to bring the resources of
industrial societies to bear on their enemies on the battlefields. The economic
modernization and industrial revolutions that most belligerents had benefited
from in the nineteenth century offered them the possibility to mobilize and equip
fighting forces of unprecedented sizes. Yet industrialized warfare also created its
own pressures, illustrated in particular in the area of logistics. Equipped with the
means of modern warfare, the armies of 1914 had to be supported by dense logis
tical networks whose supply lines, supported by the railway networks built in the
previous decades, allowed them to advance and survive without drawing on the
resources of the land on which they were fighting. In September 1916, for instance,
128,000 tons of stores and ammunition crossed the Channel from Britain to France
every week.15
The challenge of economic mobilization was not simply one of scale, though;
it was also one of sophistication. Wealth was necessary but not sufficient; techno
logical and scientific knowhow and organizational skills were also required to
match the political will to enact a swift and profound, if temporary, transforma
tion of national economies. Total war was indeed 'the largest enterprise hitherto
known to man, which had to be consciously organized and managed' and could
only be pursued by highly specialized industrialized societies.16
The history of the wartime state has thus rightly focused on national adminis
trative structures and governmental agencies. Yet many of the material or human
resources so needed by the state were provided by civil society. From strict control
to flexible partnership, the attitude of the state towards civil society was dictated by
circumstances; and circumstances, if not universal goodwill, imposed cooperation.
Given the limitations of administrative bodies thrown into disarray by military
mobilization, assistance to soldiers' dependants and war victims was ensured by
civil society organizations organized in each locality. In Britain, for example, the
13 Jeanette Keith, Rich man's war, poor man's fight: race, class, and power in the rural South during the First World War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam wants you: World
War I and the making of the modern American citizen (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
14 Mehmet Beçikçi, The Ottoman mobilization of manpower in the First World War: between voluntarism and resistance
(Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012).
15 Bernard Wasserstein, Barbarism and civilization: a history of Europe in our time (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), p. 56.
16 Hobsbawm, Age of extremes, p. 44.
253
Pierre Purseigle
Soldiers' & Sailors' Families Association played a critical role in maintaining the
cohesion of the home front until June 1916, when the War Pensions Committee
took charge of this mission.
Local, national and comparative studies have demonstrated how voluntary
organizations in this way compensated for the shortcomings of the state, proving
indispensable in the mobilization of the material and cultural resources of the
nation, and even benefiting from the war.17 In Austria-Hungary, the state pursued
what Ke-Chin Hsia called a 'partnership of the weak' to respond to its wartime
delegitimization.18
In France, the war challenged the institutional and normative definition of the
centralized, universalist, republican state and vindicated the pragmatic approach
to public service embraced by Léon Duguit.19 For Duguit argued that the modern
state was, in the era of the Great War, better understood not as a set of coercive
institutions, but as a provider of public services:
The modern State increasingly appears as a group of individuals working in a concerted

fashion to meet the material and moral needs of participants, under the leadership and
control of governing authorities; the notion of public service is thus substituted for that of
public might; the State ceases to be an authority that orders to become a group that works.20
Fiscal state
Finally, the fiscal state needs to be reconsidered in the light of the social dynamics
underlying the mobilization of belligerent societies. In 1914, the fiscal structure of
the belligerent states remained little developed and taxation raised only a portion
of the income needed to support the war effort. As a result, that effort depended on
borrowing, and in particular on domestic borrowing, which provided over 70 per
cent of the belligerents' wartime revenue. Such reliance revealed the continuing
support enjoyed by the war among the civilian populations, for only victory in
the field would yield the expected profit.
Nonetheless, taxation was essential to the funding of the war effort, even though
Germany and Britain stood on opposite sides of the wartime fiscal spectrum as the
former relied largely on loans and the latter on taxes.21 For many belligerent states
the adoption of income tax marked a defining moment in their fiscal history.
17 Theda Skocpol, Andrew Karch, Ziad Munson and Bayliss Camp, 'Patriotic partnerships: why great wars
nourished American civic voluntarism', in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds, Shaped by war and trade:
international influences on American political development (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2002), pp. 134-80.
18 Ke-Chin Hsia, 'A partnership of the weak: war victims and the state in the early First Austrian Republic',
in Günther Bischof, Fritz Plassner and Peter Berger, eds, From empire to republic: post-World War I Austria,
Contemporary Austrian Studies 19 (Innsbruck: UNO Press and Innsbruck University Press, 2010), pp.
192-221. See also his chapter in the next volume published under the aegis of the International Society for
First World War Studies, 'Who provided care for wounded and disabled soldiers? Conceptualizing state-civil
society relationship in First World War Austria', in Gunda Barth-Scalmani, Joachim Bürgschwentner and
Matthias Egger, eds, Other fronts, other wars? (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming 2014).
19 Pierre Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice, et citoyenneté. Angleterre-France, igoo—1918 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013).
20 Léon Duguit, Traité de droit constitutionnel, 2 vols (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1927), vol. 1, p. ix.
21 Hans-Peter Ullmann, 'Finance', in Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge history of the First World War, vol. 2, The state
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 417, 421.
254

Equally significant in this context was the imposition of a tax on excess profits,
designed to address ethical as much as financial concerns. Such taxes also illus
trated the wartime triangulation of state coercion, business interests and trade
union pressure.22 The conflict thus rearranged the relations of state and market
and also expanded the principle of taxation into civil society. Indeed, the devel
opment of voluntary schemes of charitable contribution was often underpinned
by a rhetoric of political obligation and patriotic service that defined citizenship
in strongly ethical terms.23 The 'coercive voluntarism' that Chris Capozzola has
identified in the American context also ran through other belligerent societies.24
Solidarity
The study of coercion and domination does not, however, exhaust the political
history of the war and the analysis of the wartime state. As the belligerent state
was also called upon to preserve and guarantee the solidarity of the nation in
arms, it is necessary to consider how states sought to express and reinforce social
cohesion in the face of the war's demands.
An existential conflict
The conflict that broke out in 1914 was not simply the result of geopolitical and
strategic tensions. In Halévy's words, it was a 'quarrel ... between nation and
nation, culture and culture'.25 This conflagration of empires and nations was
indeed a 'clash of ideas',26 a conflict pitting competing visions of the European and
international orders against one another. Indeed, the Great War firmly ensconced
cultures and ideologies at the heart of the business of war.
Although historians of the First World War have successfully challenged the
notion that the populations of Europe enthusiastically welcomed the conflict, the
war was soon invested with existential significance.27 By and large resigned to a
conflict whose consequences they dreaded, belligerent societies saw this war 'as
one of legitimate self-defence'.28 This conviction undermined an opposition to
the war hampered and at times suppressed by virtue of the legislation adopted
by the warring states to restrict political and civic rights in the name of national
defence. In hindsight, the fears of government and national elites wary of the
dubious loyalty of the working classes proved unfounded. Even in Russia, where
revolution had shaken the foundations of the tsarist regime as recently as 1905, the
22 Theo Balderston, 'Industrial mobilization and war economies', in John Home, ed., A companion to the First
World War (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 225.
23 Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice, et citoyenneté.
24 Capozzola, Uncle Sam wants you.
25 Halévy, The era of tyrannies, p. 176.
26 Strachan, 'Total war in the twentieth century', p. 271.
27 Jean-Jacques Becker, 1914: Comment les français sont entrés dans la guerre (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale
des Sciences Politiques, 1977); Jeffrey Verhey, The spirit of 1914: militarism, myth, and mobilization in Germany
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Adrian Gregory, The last Great War: British society and the First
World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
28 John Home, 'Public opinion and polities', in Hörne, ed., A companion to the First World War, p. 280.
255

Pierre Purseigle
masses rallied to defend the nation,29 96 per cent of soldiers reporting for duty.
Similarly, the French and German armies encountered very little difficulty indeed
in raising their armies.30
Intellectuals, artists and politicians couched this dramatic clash of nations in
strikingly similar terms across the lines of battle. In the words of Oxford scholar
Alfred Zimmern, this was 'a conflict between two different and irreconcilable
conceptions of government, society and progress'.31 Although national political
elites stood at the forefront of this cultural mobilization across the belligerent
world, civil society's commitment to national defence is best described as the
result of self-mobilization.32
This 'defensive acquiescence' in both military engagement and social mobili

zation had been made possible by the force and resilience of national cultural
constructions.33 The enemy was seen as posing a threat to one's own culture,
identity and way of life; industrialized warfare was thus construed as a life
and-death struggle and was represented in absolute terms. Notwithstanding the
rhetoric of professional patriotic orators, the defence of the nation was commonly
articulated in communitarian terms and framed in the language of local, class or
religious solidarities.34 The war was construed as a personal battle for the safety
of one's family and home.
The economics of war and the legitimacy of the state
The war cultures were grounded in the moral superiority that each camp claimed
to embody. Yet the ethics of mobilization also ran deeper, helping to define and
regulate behaviours and social relations within the belligerent societies. The
wartime mobilization prompted the emergence of new divisions, new categories
within the belligerent citizenry whose respective positions were evoked in terms
of duty and defined by the wartime 'social relations of sacrifice'.35 The front-line
29 Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian nation: military conscription, total war, and mass politics, 1905-1925 (DeKalb:
Northern Illinois University Press, 2003).
30 Hew Strachan, The First World War: a new history (London: Free Press, 2006).
31 A. Zimmern, 'German culture and the British commonwealth', in R. W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson,
A. E. Zimmern and A. Greenwood, The war and democracy (London: Macmillan, 1915; first publ. 1914), p. 348.
See also Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen, Au nom de la Patrie. Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre
Mondiale (1910-1919) (Paris: La Découverte, 1996); Martha Hanna, The mobilization of intellect: French scholars and
writers during the Great War (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996).
32 John Hörne, ed., State, society, and mobilization in Europe during the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997).
33 Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 'Violence et consentement: La "culture de guerre" du premier
conflit mondial', in Jean-Pierre Rioux and Jean-François Sirinelli, eds, Pour une histoire culturelle, L'Univers
Historique (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997), p. 112.
34 Pierre Purseigle, 'Beyond and below the nations: towards a comparative history of local communities at
war', in Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle, eds, Uncovered fields: perspectives in First World War studies (Boston
and Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 95-123; Stefan Goebel, 'Forging the industrial home front in Germany: iron
nail memorials in the Ruhr', in Macleod and Purseigle, eds, Uncovered fields, pp. 159-78; Roger Chickering,
The Great War and urban life in Germany: Freiburg, 1914-1918, Studies in the Social and Cultural History of
Modern Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 364-5; Purseigle, Mobilisation, sacrifice,
et citoyenneté.
35 Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, Capital cities at war: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 10.
256
soldier stood out as the main character and role model of a wartime narrative that
defined the ideal civilian comportment as the translation into daily life of duty,
sacrifice and solidarity.36
The demands of industrial warfare were such that the material comfort of the
home front populations was not merely compromised as a gesture of solidarity

with the soldiers at the front; it was expected to become a casualty of the war.
Material deprivations at home soon augmented the military losses at the front to
foster a growing sense of victimization on the home fronts. The dialectical articu
lation of victimization and participation thus structured the patterns of perception
and behaviour which ultimately determined the level and form of social mobiliza
tion.37 The munitions worker, the nurse, the shirker, to name just three, presented
distinctive figures of mobilization, positive or negative, that corresponded to
specific levels of participation in the war effort. The 'profiteer' and the 'shirker',
ubiquitous within belligerent societies, became the paradigmatic embodiment of
this language. Fairness and justice—or lack thereof—were at the core of discus
sions of military service and access to material resources. Inflation and the govern
ments' incapacity to rein it in adversely affected social relations.38 The unequal
distribution of food, coal, petrol and other vital goods—often compounded by
forced or planned internal migrations—put national solidarity to the test. In
Eastern and Central Europe in particular, the relations between urban dwellers
and rural populations crystallized these divisive tensions, turning sour as soon as
access to foodstuffs became problematic.39
Military service, war work and patriotic service rearranged social and gender
identities.40 The state was not merely tasked with the extraction of human and
material resources; as chief organizer of the nation in arms, it was expected to
allocate material resources in an equitable manner and to adjudicate the claims of
competing interest groups. These 'ethics of mobilization' should be understood in
Durkheimian terms: they defined the conditions of wartime solidarity and coined
a language of reciprocal political obligation. In other words, to echo Norbert
Elias, the history of the state in wartime must also be that of the interdependences
that account for the maintenance of the national habitus.41
The scourge of belligerent societies, inflation, directly threatened civilian

living standards and, as a result, the resilience of the home front populations.42
In this respect, the contrast between France and Britain on the one hand, and
36 Melissa K. Stockdale, '"My death for the motherland is happiness": women, patriotism, and soldiering in
Russia's Great War, 1914-1917', American Historical Review 109: 1, 2004, pp. 78-116.
37 Pierre Purseigle, '"A wave onto our shores": exile and resettlement of Western Front refugees, 1914-1918',
Contemporary European History 16: 4, 2007, pp. 427-44.
38 Balderston, 'Industrial mobilization and war economies', p. 227.
39 Belinda Davis, Home fires burning: food, politics, and everyday life in World War I Berlin (Chapel Hill and London:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Maureen Healy, Vienna and the fall of the Habsburg empire: total war
and everyday life in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
40 Janet S. K. Watson, Fighting different wars: experience, memory, and the First World War in Britain, Studies in the
Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004).
41 Norbert Elias, La Société des individus (Paris: Fayard, 1991).
42 Balderston, 'Industrial mobilization and war economies', pp. 223-4.
257
Pierre Purseigle
the Central Powers on the other, was indeed stark.43 Although the rationing of
bread had been introduced in Germany as early as January 1915, the population's
living standards were soon undermined by inflation and shortages. Though the
German people did not starve, their diet was so dramatically affected that it soon
came to encapsulate the hardships endured by civilians.44 The apparent incapacity
of the authorities to feed their population and to regulate supply and consump
tion during the infamous 'turnip winter' of 1916—17 directly threatened the social
compact and the war effort.45 In Berlin and Vienna, women vented their anger
along the food queues that symbolized discontent.46 In Petrograd in 1917, hunger
and a burning desire for peace fanned the revolutionary flames.
The operations and contours of the state
Economic mobilization revealed the critical importance of the belligerent states

but also underlined the respective specificities of their political systems. Entrusted
with national defence, the institutions of the state entered into new relationships
with businesses and civil society organizations to meet the challenges of industrial
warfare. In 1914, many commentators doubted that the liberal democratic states
would be able to mobilize the economy effectively enough; the kind of uncon
tested authority claimed, if not always enjoyed, by authoritarian states was often
deemed to be key to a successful economic mobilization that would direct the
resources of the nation towards the prosecution of the war. Yet in the event liberal
democratic regimes proved equal to the task. Liberalism successfully harnessed the
techniques of business management as well as the tools of the state to meet the
demands of total war.
The mobilization of resources pitted national bureaucracies against one another;

this competition, played out in the economic realm, had a critical impact on the
conflict's outcomes. Most analysts evoke the role played by the wartime indus
trialized Leviathan, and rightly so. Indeed, as Fabienne Bock aptly observed, the
wartime state was distinguished by its exuberance.47 To some extent, however,
this characterization belies the nature of the wartime relationship between the
state and other economic agents. In fact, the experience of the war empha
sized the limitations of the state as much as it stressed its undeniable capacity
to steer the economy for the benefit of national defence. The war gave rise to
new forms of cooperation between the belligerent state, business and civil society,
and 'engendered new forms of corporatist cooperation between civil servant and
businessman'.48
43 Winter and Robert, Capital cities at war.

44 Avner Offer, The First World War: an agrarian interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 45-53.
45 Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-IÇ18 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998), p. 146.
46 Davis, Home fires burning; Healy, Vienna and the fall of the Habsburg empire.
47 Fabienne Bock, 'L'Exubérance de l'Etat en France de 1914 à 1918', Vingtième Siècle. Revue d'Histoire, no. 3, 1984,
pp. 41-51.
48 Mark Roseman, 'War and the people: the social impact of total war', in Charles Townshend, ed., The
Oxford illustrated history of modern war (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 250; Keith
258
In this context, cooperation took many guises, determined in part by the polit
ical and business cultures dominant in each belligerent society. It is, however,
important not to assume that cooperation or innovation was merely the preserve
of liberal democratic regimes. Indeed, the German leadership attempted to trans
late the ideal of a national community energized by the conflict into economic
terms.49 The role played by Walther Rathenau at the helm of the War Raw
Materials Office created in August 1914 illustrated this attempt by the state to lead
the mobilization of the economy by combining capitalism and socialism. A former
head of AEG, Rathenau was meant to build on his business experience to cater for
the material needs of the armies; the experience of his French counterpart, Albert
Thomas, a socialist who was asked to perform a similar role in close cooperation
with business leaders, mirrors the German wartime experiment. That both men
were entrusted with the provision of ammunitions also underlines the importance
ascribed by the state to cooperation in a critical area. It also reflects the pragmatic
imperatives that lay at the heart of the process of mobilization. Indeed, the neces
sities of warfare prevailed over the ideological rigidities of political systems.50 The
war compelled the state and the markets alike to acknowledge and overcome their
respective limitations.
Material resources, knowhow, and the exercise of the authority of the state were
essential to wartime mobilization, but its success and sustainability also depended
on the maintenance of the legitimacy of the war effort. For the authority of the
wartime state would become an attribute of dubious value if coercion lost its
legitimate character. Here lay the fundamental link between the authority of the
wartime state and the legitimacy of the conflict.
Sovereignty
In the immediate aftermath of the conflict in 1919-20, the anthropologist Marcel

Mauss set out to write an ambitious study of the state, revealingly entitled 'The
nation'.51 Though he never completed the book, a significant part of it was
published in the 1940s. He clearly saw little point in distinguishing state and
nation, for he defined the 'sovereign body politic' as the assembly of all citizens.
It is with this notion of sovereignty, hotly contested since the end of the conflict,
that I should like to pursue and conclude this brief exploration of the 'belligerent
state', since the war challenged and redefined the sources of political authority.
Middlemas, Politics in industrial society: the experience of the British system since 1911 (London: Deutsch, 1979); Ellis
Wayne Hawley, The Great War and the search for a modern order: a history of the American people and their institutions,
1917-1933 (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1997); Ajay K. Mehrotra, 'Lawyers, guns, and public moneys: the
US Treasury, World War I, and the administration of the modern fiscal state', Law and History Review 28: 1,
15 Feb. 2010, pp. 173-225.
49 Strachan, 'Total war in the twentieth century', p. 273.
50 Balderston, 'Industrial mobilization and war economies', pp. 224—5.
51 Marcel Mauss, 'La Nation (1940-1948)', L'Année Sociologique 7 (n.d.), pp. 5-68.
259
Pierre Purse igle
Claim-making and social mobilization
Defined as 'supreme authority within a territory', the sovereign enjoys, as Robert

P. Wolff put it, 'the right to command and correlatively the right to be obeyed'.52
In 1914-18, the authority of the state rested on its capacity to wage war without
undermining the living standards of its mobilized citizenry. The legitimacy of
the state was intimately bound up with the way it prosecuted war. Central to
Weber's work, legitimacy is not 'some abstract quality, but ... an observable
activity in which governments characteristically engage, the making of claims'.53
Claim-making was indeed critically important to wartime mobilization, as belli
gerent populations constantly defined their contribution to the war effort through
negotiation and bargaining. Existing political cultures offered the framework for
such negotiations, in which the state was just one actor among many, albeit the
dominant one. The significance of these negotiations was revealed by the mecha
nisms and institutions set up to allocate essential resources such as manpower,
for example the British military service tribunals. Representatives of civil society
thus adjudicated conflicts which reflected wider debates over the extraction of
the means of war-making.54 These debates highlighted the significance of the
constant process of negotiation whereby civil society attempted to limit the
claims of the state over the nation.
Likewise in Germany, the implementation of the Hindenburg Programme, the
high command's plan for the authoritarian mobilization of the nation's resources,
had to come to terms with the growing importance of organized labour and a
'certain parliamentarisation of the German system of government'.55 Scholars thus
stressed the necessity and importance of the 'state's ability to secure the consent of
key groups in civil society'.56 Indeed, as General Groener put it in November 1916,
'the war could in any case not be won against the opposition of the workers'.57
Throughout the war, social conflicts including strikes and other forms of
petitioning enabled belligerent societies to articulate the conditions of their
commitment to the war effort. At the front, soldiers' resistance to discipline,
including mutinies, revealed similar dynamics at work.58 Indeed, the logic of mass
participation in industrial warfare contributed to the extension and gradual—
if often limited—empowerment of the citizenry. As Charles Tilly pointed
out, 'the relationship between war making and civilian politics [had] altered
52 Robert Paul Wolff, In defense of anarchism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), p. 4.
53 Rodney S. Barker, Legitimating identities: the self-presentations of rulers and subjects (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 2.
54 On the articulation of war-making, state-making, protection, extraction, distribution and production, see
Charles Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, ad 990-1990 (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990),
P- 97
55 Kocka, Facing total war, p. 130.
56 James Cronin, 'The crisis of state and society in Britain, 1917—22', in Leopold H. Haimson and Charles Tilly,
eds, Strikes, wars, and revolutions in an international perspective: strike waves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries (Cambridge and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme,
1989), p. 459.
57 Kocka, Facing total war, p. 136.
58 Smith, Between mutiny and obedience; Jennifer D. Keene, Doughboys, the Great War and the remaking of America
(Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).
2Ö0

fundamentally'.59 The war experience dramatically reinforced the terms of the

social contract to which 'citizenship' refers. A continuing process of negotiation
and bargaining thus manufactured popular consent to a war effort elaborated
as much through struggles and conflicts as through outspoken support. 0 The
petitions filed by Russian peasants demonstrate the sophistication of the process
of claim-making in the First World War.61 Indeed, the Russian case underlines the
necessity to differentiate between the contestation of state policies and the rejec
tion of national solidarity. Joshua Sanborn did indeed demonstrate that claims
were often framed in national terms.62
The meaning and practice of sovereignty
The experience of imperial regimes dramatically illustrates what was at stake in

the conflict. As Michael Geyer put it, 'the issue in great wars and the cause for
profound crises is not governability or ways of military reasoning, but the nature
of the government and military reason itself'.63 It is therefore no surprise that social
theorists sought to elaborate new conceptions of sovereignty in the immediate
aftermath of the conflict. Chief among them of course was Carl Schmitt, whose
work continues to generate commentary and rebuttals.
Drawing on Hobbes, Bodin and Treitschke, Carl Schmitt articulated his theory
of sovereignty around a situation of exception and emergency. As he put it in
his Political theology, published in 1922, 'sovereign is he who decides on the excep
tions'.64 Shunning the principles of liberal democracy and constitutionalism,
Schmitt identifies sovereignty in the capacity to suspend the current legal regime
in response to an emergency. For all its undeniable relevance to the experience
of the First World War, that conflict nonetheless sheds a rather unforgiving light
upon this theory.65
The experience of his own country does indeed offer a spectacular rejoinder to
Schmitt's position. The plurality and dynamism of German civil society contrasted
with a political system which, although not unreformed, had resisted greater
popular participation and had allowed the concentration of, some have argued,
dictatorial powers in the hands of the Army Supreme Command.66 Yet the first
59 Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, p. 83.

60 Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, p. 102; Charles Tilly, 'The emergency of citizenship in France
and elsewhere', in Charles Tilly, ed., Citizenship, identity and social history, International Review of Social History
supplement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 229.
61 Emily E. Pyle, 'Peasant strategy for obtaining state aid: a study of petitions during World War I', Russian
History /Histoire Russe 24: 1-2, 1997, pp. 41-64.
62 Joshua A. Sanborn, 'The mobilization of 1914 and the question of the Russian nation: a reexamination', Slavic
Review 59: 2, 2000, pp. 267-342.
63 Michael Geyer, 'War and the context of general history in an age of total war \ Journal of Military History 57:
5, 1993, pp- 145-63 at p. 157.
64 Carl Schmitt, Political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2005), p. 5.
65 For a remarkable and comprehensive approach to the wartime state that speaks directly to Schmitt's position,
see Jay Winter, ed., The Cambridge history of the First World War, 3 vols (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), vol. 2: The state.
66 Martin Kitchen, The silent dictatorship: the politics of the German high command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff,
1916-1918 (London: Croom Helm, 1976).
201
International Affairs go: 2, 2014

Pierre Purseigle
months of the war and the subsequent debate over the ideas of 1914 prompted
important debates over the nature of the national community. Later, as Benjamin
Ziemann has pointed out, social movements in which women played a prominent
role articulated discourses of political participation that often rested on notions
of rights and entitlement.67 Finally, like the 1917 French mutinies, the collapse of
the German empire—described by Wilhelm Deist as a covert soldiers' strike68—
demonstrated that if the sovereign is to be defined by its capacity to suspend the
current legal regime in response to an emergency, sovereignty clearly was in the
hands of the mobilized citizenry.
Schmitt's attempt to redefine sovereignty chimes with Ludendorff's prescrip
tion for the next war and represents a truly reactionary attempt to turn the clock
back to the status quo ante bellum. For the First World War had actually demonstrated
that, despite its best efforts, the state could not successfully claim a monopoly on
sovereignty.69 In fact, the logic of mass participation in wartime constrained the
state even while it enabled it to act in unprecedented ways, since its very legiti
macy depended on its capacity to uphold a social compact now redefined by the
sacrifice of soldiers and civilians alike. As the state made claims over civil society in
the name of national defence, both combatants and civilians increasingly invoked
popular sovereignty to make claims upon the state.
War, revolution and political change
Finally, as Halévy put it, 'the world crisis of 1914-1918 was not only a war—the
war of 1914—but also a revolution—the revolution of 1917'.70 Beyond Russia,
the war had in fact brought down the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman
empires and allowed the birth or rebirth of nations across Europe. Across the
belligerent world, from Washington to Beijing, postwar social movements
challenged established political, racial, gendered and social hierarchies. In the eyes
of these protesters, the Great War had demonstrated the need for a redefinition of
the contours of their national citizenry.71 In Germany and Austria, the postwar
enfranchisement of women in a revolutionary context underlined the assimila
tion of national and popular sovereignty. In establishing 'a democratic republic',
the postwar Austrian constitution proclaims 'its law emanates from the people'.
Another defeated power, the Ottoman empire, also illustrated a radical break with
67 Benjamin Ziemann, 'Germany 1914-1918: total war as a catalyst of change', in Helmut Walser Smith,
ed., The Oxford handbook of modern German history (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), http://www.
oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199237395.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199237395-e-17,
accessed 13 Feb. 2014.
68 W. Deist, 'The military collapse of the German empire: the reality behind the stab-in-the-back myth', War in
History 3: 2, 1 April 1996, pp. 186-207.
69 For a discussion of Schmitt's contemporary import, see Andrew Norris, 'Sovereignty, exception, and norm',
Journal of Law and Society 34: 1, March 2007, pp. 31-45.
70 Halévy, The era of tyrannies, p. 162.
71 Jennifer D. Keene, 'Protest and disability: a new look at African-American soldiers during the First World
War', in Pierre Purseigle, ed., Warfare and belligerence: perspectives in First World War studies (Leiden and Boston:
Brill, 2005), pp. 177-203 ; Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of democracy: African American soldiers in the World War
I era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
2Ö2

established conceptions of sovereignty. The 1924 constitution of Turkey affirmed

'sovereignty belongs without restriction to the nation'.72 Yet the constitution
of the Weimar Republic also attests to the rather ambivalent character of this
transition. Indeed, its very first article—'The German Reich is a Republic. State
authority derives from the people'—illustrates the awkward combination of tradi
tional and modern forms of sovereignty. To misquote Arno Mayer, the persistence
of the ancien régime in the interwar period testifies to the highly contested and
contingent nature of the transition.73
Though the relationship between war and social change lies beyond the scope
of this article, the politics and economics of the fighting fronts and home fronts
underline the need to place the history of social mobilization at the heart of these
reflections. In the First World War, the belligerent states called upon the resources
of civil societies. The latter responded in accordance with the terms of the social
compact they understood to define national solidarity. Steeped in national polit
ical cultures, these debates testified to the capacity of the belligerent societies to
project themselves into a postwar future founded on present sacrifices.74 Such
a capacity certainly contributed to the extraordinary resilience of those bellig
erent societies and determined political developments in the interwar period. But
underscoring the subversive character of the war allows us to bring the postwar
revolutions back into the story of a war that transformed the meaning and practice
of sovereignty, in recognition of what Peter Holquist identified as a European
continuum of war, civil war and revolution.75
Conclusion
In the lectures he gave on politics in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century,
Heinrich von Treitschke offered this definitive statement: 'Without war there
would be no state.'76 While few scholars now share his particular blend of milita
ristic, anti-Semitic and authoritarian nationalism, many would accept that war
has played a central role in the emergence and consolidation of the modern state.
It has indeed become a common trope in historical and social scientific literature
to claim, as Charles Tilly famously put it, that 'war makes states and vice versa'.77
Students of the First World War have of course long recognized the critical impor
tance of the state apparatus in leading, organizing and managing the mobilization
of belligerent societies for the prosecution of war.
The process of wartime mobilization harnessed the state's capabilities as well
as the wealth and resources of pluralist and diverse societies. In demonstrating
72 Edward Meade Earle, 'The new constitution of Turkey', Political Science Quarterly 40: 1, 192$, pp. 73-100.
73 Arno Mayer, The persistence of the old regime: Europe to the Great War (New York: Pantheon, 1981).
74 John Home, Labour at war: France and Britain 1914-1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
75 Peter Holquist, Making war, forging revolution: Russia's continuum of crisis, 1914-1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002).
76 Heinrich von Treitschke, Politik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1897), p. 72. See also Adolf Hausrath,
ed., Treitschke, his doctrine of German destiny and of international relations, together with a study of his life and work (New
York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1914).
77 Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, p. 67.
263
Pierre Purseigle
the interdependence of state and civil society, the war emphasized that the state
cannot merely be apprehended in institutional terms, for it is first and foremost a
social formation. Further, the logic of mass participation in the war transformed
the relationship of individuals and groups to the state. It did so largely in a contin
gent and pragmatic way. In doing so, however, it also affected the political and
ethical underpinnings of the state's legitimacy. In challenging monolithic and
centralized conceptions of state authority, the social history of the conflict can
therefore contribute to further our understanding of the transformations of the
state in the First World War.78
78 For a stimulating and opposite conception of sovereignty, see James J. Sheehan, 'The problem of sovereignty
in European history', American Historical Review m: i, i Feb. 2006, pp. 1—15.
264

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The First World War and the transformations of the state

Author(s): PIERRE PURSEIGLE

the transformations of the state

In August 1914, provincial and national commentators in Britain and elsewhere

1 Northampton Mercury, 7 Aug. 1914.

International Affairs 90: 2 (2014) 249-264

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

Monopoly or devolution of legitimate coercion?

In practical terms, mass military mobilization brought about the devolution of

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

The modern State increasingly appears as a group of individuals working in a concerted

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

This 'defensive acquiescence' in both military engagement and social mobili

The economics of war and the legitimacy of the state

home front populations was not merely compromised as a gesture of solidarity

The scourge of belligerent societies, inflation, directly threatened civilian

The operations and contours of the state

Economic mobilization revealed the critical importance of the belligerent states

The mobilization of resources pitted national bureaucracies against one another;

43 Winter and Robert, Capital cities at war.

In the immediate aftermath of the conflict in 1919-20, the anthropologist Marcel

Claim-making and social mobilization

Defined as 'supreme authority within a territory', the sovereign enjoys, as Robert

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

fundamentally'.59 The war experience dramatically reinforced the terms of the

The meaning and practice of sovereignty

The experience of imperial regimes dramatically illustrates what was at stake in

59 Tilly, Coercion, capital, and European states, p. 83.

International Affairs go: 2, 2014

War, revolution and political change

International Affairs 90: 2, 2014

established conceptions of sovereignty. The 1924 constitution of Turkey affirmed

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