Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism

Edited by Kai Evers and David Pan

Also available in ebook format from Amazon.com.

Telos Investigations is a new book series that collects papers delivered at Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conferences.

With contributions by Étienne Balibar, Annette Becker, Russell Berman, Jörn Leonhard, among many others, Europe and the World: World War I as Crisis of Universalism focuses within Europe on the conflicts between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as a universalist political project and globally on the conflicts between European imperial politics and universal ideals. This collection of essays probes how these conflicts defined the war as the transition point to a new structure of global relations and postcolonial understandings of cultural identity. The volume's first part considers the history of European universalism and how it affected the lead-up to the war. The second part analyzes how universalist goals affected the conduct of the war itself. While August 1914 marked a simultaneous turning point in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the war ended without such global synchronicity. Instead, it gave way to a wide variety of new spaces and chronologies of violence on a global level. Part three offers case studies of how representations of the war affected its remembrance and the way such war stories subverted or fit into different national narratives. The contributions in part four investigate different ways in which the experience of war and mass violence affected national cultures and notions of universalism in the United States and within Europe.

Praise for Europe and the World

"This fascinating selection of essays sheds new light on the great caesura that was the First World War. For the world's intellectuals—from Meinecke to Mann, from Barbusse to Du Bois—the events of the years 1914 to 1918 were transformative, and we learn more here about the nature of each transformation. But we also encounter less exalted transformations: the experience of the war for a West African soldier, or for a German nurse. And we also see its impact in countries, notably Iran, that historians usually overlook. Above all, the essays here remind us that the war was authentically global in its reach and unsparing in its impact on civilian populations."
—Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of The Pity of War and The War of the World

"Europe and the World opens up an important interdisciplinary conversation about the centrality of World War I to the global transformations that it unleashed and that have created the outlines of our world. Taken together, these essays illuminate how the war served as a pivotal moment in the history of European imperialism and in shaping the resulting violence that has haunted the twentieth and twenty-first centuries."
—Susan Grayzel, author of Women and the First World War

Contents

Introduction
Kai Evers and David Pan

Part I: World War I in the Context of the European Universalist Imagination

1. Universalism in the Age of Crowds: A Short Genealogy
Kevin Olson

2. The Transformation of Sovereignty in Europe from Martin Luther to Ernst Jünger
David Pan

3. From Weltbürgertum and Universalism to Raison d’État: World War I as Transformative Episode in the Political and Moral Thought of Friedrich Meinecke
Joseph W. Bendersky

4. The Collapse of the European Concert: Great Power Politics in the Balkans prior to the First World War
Ekaterina Romanova

Part II: History and Experience of the War

5. Universal Expectations, Particular Experiences: The First World War in Perspective
Jörn Leonhard

6. A Great War Too Long Forgotten: Civilians as Targets
Annette Becker

7. Butchered Belgian Babies? Atrocities, Propaganda, and National Identity
Georges Van Den Abbeele

Part III: The Representational Aspect of the War

8. Kulturarbeit and Ideology in the Great War: Germany’s Role in the Formation of Iranian Nationalism
Mohammad Rafi

9. The Female Front: The Image of the Nurse in World War I Literature and Culture
Elisabeth Krimmer

10. “Ach was könnte nicht alles geschehn”: Kafka’s “The Burrow” and the Anticipation of Future Warfare
Kai Evers

Part IV: Legacies of the War

11. Intellectuals, the War, and the State: W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Mann, and Randolph Bourne Face the Conflict
Russell A. Berman

12. Vergangene Vergangenheit? (A Past with No Future?)
Étienne Balibar

13. Two Wars in One? World War I and the History of Twentieth-Century Violence
Frank Biess

ISBN 978-0-914386-69-8 (paperback)
310 pages
Pub. Date: May 1, 2018