Waiting for war: Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, 1914-1918

• Autor(a) principal: Meneses, Filipe Ribeiro de
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/comunicacaoecultura.2013.5123

Although the First World War began officially on 28 July 1914, the countries of southern Europe were by no means unaccustomed to armed conflict. Whether in the colonial sphere (in the cases of Portugal, Spain, and Italy) or against a European power (in the cases of Italy and Greece), all four of the countries covered in this paper had recently been engaged in sometimes defensive, but more often aggressive, military action – so much so that the chronological limits of the First World War are beginning, in the opinion of many historians – to fray at the edges. Nevertheless, all four countries would find it impossible to contain the internal political, socioeconomic and cultural tensions unleashed by the war which, beginning in the Balkans, quickly spread across Europe, from France and Belgium to Russia and the Ottoman Empire, and beyond. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on these tensions in four countries whose ambitions were greater than their means, but in which interventionist figures saw in the war a shortcut to the fulfilment of their hopes for territorial aggrandizement, political ascendancy and a new status among the victorious nations. The consequences of this “pre-war” situation would, in all four cases (even if Spain was to remain neutral), have a dramatic impact on wartime and postwar politics.