Historical events usually recede in importance as they retreat in time - not the first World War

The German Jewish historian Fritz Stern described the first World War as the “first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”.

Without the first World War, there would have been no second World War, no Bolshevik revolution, no Iron Curtain and no Cold War. Hitler would have died in much deserved obscurity, Lenin in exile in Switzerland and Stalin would never have come to public prominence. Fascism and Communism would not have prospered with such disastrous consequences.

In Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914, a chauffeur took a wrong turn and drove back into the path of the Bosnian Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip, who shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and his wife Sophie. The world too took a wrong turn on that day. It was the most calamitous of black-swan events.

[ On the trail of Gavrilo Princip, the most influential teenager in history: The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin who Brought the World to War ]

Historical events usually recede in importance as they retreat in time. The first World War remains an exception. Its legacy is as relevant today as it ever has been.

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The two most prominent conflicts in the world, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war in Gaza, can be traced directly back to the events of more than a century ago.

The first independent Ukraine state was declared in January 1918 following the Russian Revolution of the previous year and was recognised a month later by the defeated Bolshevik government, which had been forced to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany.

A year later the western part of Ukraine, which had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the eastern part, which had been part of the Russian empire, merged to create the Ukrainian state, which was eventually crushed by Soviet Russia.

Still, Lenin recognised Ukraine’s separateness by creating the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (1922) with a theoretical right to secede from the Soviet Union, a right eventually exercised in August 1991 when Ukraine reaffirmed, rather than declared, its independence – this time for good.

In his now notorious 2021 essay which provided his justification for his later invasion, Russian president Vladimir Putin criticised the cessation option as a “dangerous time bomb” and the granting of Crimea to Ukraine from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR) in 1954 as a “gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time. Russia was robbed”.

Modern Ukraine, was, therefore, “entirely the product of the Soviet era”, Putin concluded. He made the same point in the interminable history lesson that passed for an interview with Tucker Carlson. Lenin had transferred lands to the Ukrainian SSR that had always been Russian and never belonged to them. In Putin’s warped worldview it is Russia that has the historic grievances.

The concept of Zionism, a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, began in the late 19th century and was accelerated by the first World War. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 was an event rooted in the British desire to dismember the Ottoman Empire and to engage the Jewish communities in the United States and Germany in favour of the Allied war effort.

The British ruled Palestine under a League of Nation mandate until 1948, when, faced with the consequence of previous decisions and uprisings by militant Arabs and Jews, they left.

[ Winston Churchill sent the Black and Tans to Palestine ]

Elsewhere in the Middle East the borders of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan were created following the Sykes-Picot Agreement in 1916 between the British and French governments. The arbitrary nature of the borders, which cut across ethnic and religious divides, has been causing trouble ever since.

Of the 24 countries competing at Euro 2024, 11 – Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Turkey and Georgia – owe their status as nation states in part or in full to the outcome of the first World War.

A 12th country, which did not qualify for the European Championships but also owes its existence to the outcome of that war, is our own – the Republic of Ireland. The timing of the outbreak of the first World War was particularly unfortunate for Ireland as the Home Rule Act was supposed to come into force in September 1914. It was postponed for the duration of the war, which was not expected to last long.

As the late historian Keith Jeffery pointed out, the seminal event in the Irish Revolution was the first World War, as without it the Easter Rising would not have happened. The Rising, which involved the attempted importation of German arms, was an event that happened in and because of the first World War, not during it.

Without the Easter Rising, there would have been no War of Independence and no independent Irish State. Partition might have happened anyway given unionist resistance to Home Rule, but the form of it, a hard border between two separate jurisdictions, was a consequence of the militant turn that Ireland took in 1916.

Historical events can be divided into those that are history and have no bearing on the present day and those that remain current affairs. Partition is one such issue as is the situation in the Middle East. Ukraine’s status as an independent country was history until Putin made it current affairs again. Stern’s observations about the importance of the first World War in shaping the 20th century could equally apply to the 21st century.

Ronan McGreevy is an Irish Times journalist, the author of Wherever the Firing Line Extends: Ireland and the western Front published by The History Press, and a first World War tour guide with GTI Travel