ABSTRACT

With European war imminent, the British foreign secretary, Edward Grey, observed ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’1 Even so, the scale and magnitude of the war could not have been envisaged. When the guns finally fell silent on 11 November 1918 the casualties suffered by the British empire alone were 908,000 killed and 2,090,000 wounded. Overall the British and their allies lost 5 million killed, 13 million wounded, and 4 million either prisoners of war or missing; whilst Germany and her allies (Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria) had 3.3 million killed, 8.3 million wounded and 3.6 million as POWs. The material damaged inflicted upon western Europe was intensive, but confined to a relatively narrow geographical strip. Although a global war, the scale of the destruction caused some to consider it a European civil war, and then the uncertainty of the new world scene owing to the Russian Revolution and the growing economic preeminence of America led to questions about the merit of the European order. The absence of any ‘European institutional’ form during the inter-war years would mean that ‘Europe’, what it was, what it meant and where it should go, shifted over time with each of the problems and proposals that emerged.