ABSTRACT
The First World War has often been regarded as a watershed, indeed sometimes the watershed, in European history, as a traumatic break with the politics of the pre-war ancien regime. The initial enthusiasm for the war exhibited by the working class of most European nations evaporated relatively rapidly, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, for a number of fairly obvious reasons, most clearly those associated with material distress. The militancy of engineering workers and their like cannot be explained solely in terms of the role of the semi-skilled worker, however; certain skilled sections of the labour force also played a crucial role. The security of government systems in pre-war Europe was thus far from guaranteed. It is equally true to say that the ideological divisions which in part produced the fateful division of the European labour movement into Communist and Social Democratic camps were prefigured in the ideological debates of the pre-war years.
