A Specter of “The Great War” – That was then, this is now.

The world mobilizes for war… The results – Military and civilian casualties, 37 million: over 16 million deaths and 20 million wounded, ranking it among the deadliest conflicts in human history.

Jean-Claude Juncker calls for creation of EU army

The president of the European Commission has called for the creation of an EU army in order to show Russia “that we are serious about defending European values”.

In an interview with German newspaper Die Welt, Jean-Claude Juncker, who leads the EU’s executive arm, said an EU army would let the continent “react credibly to threats to peace in a member state or a neighbour of the EU”.

The EU is divided on how to deal with an increasingly forthright Russia, which has been accused by NATO and the US of supplying rebel fighters in eastern Ukraine with military equipment and intelligence in the conflict against government-backed forces.

Some member states, including the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, are calling for the bloc to take a much stricter line on its eastern neighbour.

Large member states are also split over the idea of an EU army, with the proposals being cautiously welcomed by many senior German politicians but repeatedly dismissed outright by a succession of British governments.

In an interview with German radio on Sunday, Ursula von der Leyen, Germany’s defence minister, also spoke in favour of a European army, pointing out that a brigade of Dutch soldiers was already under German command.

“I think that in the Bundeswehr we would also be prepared, in certain circumstances, to put units under the control of another nation,” she told Deutschlandfunk. “This interweaving of armies, with the perspective of one day having a European Army, is, in my opinion, the future,”

Mr Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg, whose army consists of 900 professional soldiers, has long argued for the establishment of an EU force, making it part of his foreign policy plan during the selection process for the presidency of the commission in 2014. British prime minister David Cameron argued against his appointment, claiming that Mr Juncker was too much of a federalist for the position.

Mr Cameron has repeatedly reassured eurosceptic MPs in his own party that Britain would “never support” any form of EU army. Responding to Mr Juncker’s comments on Sunday, a government spokeswoman said: “Our position is crystal clear that defence is a national, not an EU responsibility and that there is no prospect of that position changing and no prospect of a European army.”

Some MEPs defended the idea, arguing that such an army should be controlled by the European Parliament.

“I support Juncker in building an EU army if it means the termination of all EU member states’ armies and is controlled by the European Parliament,” tweeted Jan Philipp Albrecht, a German Green MEP.

But eurosceptic parties criticised the suggestion. Mike Hookem, a defence spokesman for the anti-EU UK Independence party, said: “A European army would be a tragedy for the UK. We have all seen the utter mess the EU has made of the eurozone economy, so how can we even think of trusting them with this island’s defence.”

Mr Juncker said an EU army would “help us to develop a common foreign and security policy, and to fulfil Europe’s responsibilities in the world”. Nato was not a sufficient protection for the EU as not all EU members are part of the alliance, according to Mr Juncker.

Reporting by Duncan Robinson in Brussels and James Shotter in Frankfurt and Helen Warrell in London via The Financial Times

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Flashback:

The World Mobilizes for War

The main participants in the WWI mobilized over the course of about a week. First Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia after Serbia refused to accede to Vienna’s extensive demands regarding Serbian support for anti-Austrian groups. Then Russia declared war on Austria-Hungary. This required Germany to go to war in defense of its ally. German war planning assumed that any war with Russia would expand to include war with France, and the operational plan called for attacking France first. Thus the main practical step Germany took to defend Austria was to launch a preemptive attack on France and Belgium, neither of whom had officially entered the war yet. The violation of Belgian neutrality brought Britain into the war and it was off to the races. But the literal timing shouldn’t confuse you — it had long been French policy to support Serbia against Austria in hopes of initiating a war in which Russia would help France fight Germany, which was far too powerful for France to fight alone.

Ottoman Turks commit genocide against the Armenians

In 1915, frustrated by early setbacks in the war, leaders of the Muslim-majority Ottoman empire launched a campaign to purge non-Muslim elements. They began persecuting the Armenians, a Christian ethnic group whose ancestral homeland straddled the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires. Hundreds of thousands of Armenian men, women, and children were slaughtered. According to some estimates, as many as three quarters of the 2 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed. Hundreds of thousands of Armenians fled their homeland, producing significant Armenian diaspora populations in the United States, Russia, and elsewhere. No one was punished for these atrocities, and to this day it’s a sensitive topic for the Turkish government. As recently as 2007, diplomatic pressure from Turkey dissuaded Congress from officially recognizing the incident as a genocide.

The Zimmermann telegram: Germany proposes a Mexican war against the US

Anticipating that the German submarine campaign would draw the United States into the war, Germany’s foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, sent a coded telegram to the German ambassador in Mexico. In the event the United States declared war on Germany, the ambassador was instructed to approach the Mexican government with a proposed alliance. Germany would help fund a military campaign to allow Mexico to retake some of the territory lost in the Mexican-American war seven decades earlier. This map shows Zimmermann’s proposal: Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico would be annexed into Mexico (the red line shows Mexican territory before 1845). Unfortunately for Zimmermann, the Brits were not only tapping undersea cables between Europe and the United States, but they had also broken Germany’s ciphers. So the Brits deciphered Zimmerman’s message and passed a copy along to the Americans. The release of Zimmermann’s telegram inflamed American public opinion and helped to build momentum for a US declaration of war, which occurred on April 6, 1917. Mexico, meanwhile, realized that it would have no hope of defeating the United States and rejected Germany’s proposal.

A continent on the brink of famine

Germany was blessed with excellent military leadership that allowed the nation to hold its own against numerically superior foe. But it had a problem that couldn’t be overcome with military tactics alone. Britain and France could draw on the resources of their vast overseas empires, and trade with neutral countries, to get the resources they needed to win the war. Thanks to the British blockade, the Central Powers were cut off from the rest of the world. So conditions in Germany, for soldiers and civilians alike, steadily deteriorated. This map, based on a map from a book published by the United States government in July 1918, shows the food situation in Europe as the war was drawing to a close. While the US government might have been tempted to exaggerate Germany’s hardship, this map is basically accurate. By 1918, the Central Powers were facing severe food shortages, and things could have gotten a lot worse if the war had dragged into the winter of 1919. An increasingly desperate German citizenry began pressuring the German government for peace.

Changes to Europe after World War I

The war officially ended when Germany agreed to lay down its weapons on November 11, 1918. In 1919, the victorious Allies, led by Britain, France, and the United States, met in Paris to decide the fate of the empires they had defeated. Their decisions transformed Europe’s borders. The Austro-Hungarian empire was carved up into six new countries. One of these, the awkwardly named Czechoslovakia, would split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992. The former Serbia was combined with territories annexed from Austria-Hungary to form Yugoslavia, a national home for South Slavic peoples. It, too, disintegrated in the early 1990s, producing several small nations that exist in the Balkans today. The Soviet Union lost some of the Russian Empire’s former territory to the new Baltic states and to Poland. Poland, along with France, got chunks of Germany. Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are gone, but the other new states persist today, so it’s fair to say that World War I set the contours for the modern European state system.

The war devastated European economies

The war devastated economies across continental Europe. Not only did each country rack up significant amounts of war debt, they almost all suffered massive losses in gross domestic product over the course of the conflict. France and Russia had each lost a third of their prewar output by the time they left the conflict. The economic pain and massive debt load prompted the Allies to demand huge punitive damages from from the losing side after the war. The burden of debt and reparation payments hobbled the Weimar Republic that governed Germany from the end of the war until Adolf Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s. Germany stopped paying reparations in 1931, having paid only a small fraction of the sum the allies had demanded. The Allies also demanded that Austria, Hungary, and Turkey pay reparations, but their economies were so devastated by the war that they never made significant payments.

The Bolshevik revolution sparks civil war in Russia

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, it triggered a civil war. Opponents organized a White Army to oppose Soviet control of Russia. The Whites were strongest in the Eastern parts of the vast Russian empire, and for a time they controlled the bulk of the land — though much of their Eastern holdings were sparsely populated. The White Army was aided by the British, French, and Americans, who didn’t want to see a communist revolution succeed in one of the world’s most powerful nations. But Allied support wasn’t enough to help the White Army defeat the Soviet Red Army in battle. After making gains in 1918, the Whites were driven into retreat in 1919. The White Army had been largely destroyed by mid-1920, though it took another two years for the Soviets to consolidate their control of the vast territory they would dominate for the next 70 years.

See: 40 maps that explain World War I

Remember, when the Germans enlisted foreigners to serve in its army, they called it the Waffen SS.

That was then, this is now.