David's episode guide

When we think about the Great War in Britain today, we are accustomed to thinking of mud, blood, Tommies, trenches and poets. In this series I want to widen the lens and give a sense of the broader consequences of the conflict, demonstrating how the war cast a shadow over the whole twentieth century and right up to the present day. I argue that some of the great questions we face today, such as those in Ukraine, Iraq or Scotland, have their roots back in 1914-18.

While the legacies of the war are vast, many of which I have outlined in my book ‘The Long Shadow,’ this series highlights three legacies in particular.

Each year on November 11th, we are encouraged as a nation to remember the dead of the Great War. That’s entirely right and necessary because 1914-18 was the worst war in our history. It cost us 720,000 dead and millions more wounded or bereaved so we certainly need to continue our solemn acts of remembrance. The suffering is almost unimaginable today.

Yet it’s staggering to think that in 2014 we are now as far from the men of 1914 as they were from the soldiers who fought Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. In other words, a hundred years away. In this episode, I argue that, to understand the Great War as history, it's time to look at it more dispassionately. I explore how the meaning of the conflict has shifted over the last century for both the British and Germans – and how those shifts in understanding the war had profound consequences over the course of the twentieth century.

In this episode I suggest that democracy hit Europe like a big bang in 1918. Statesmen didn't know how granting the right to vote to ordinary men and women would work out and could not foresee how the volcanic force of mass democracy was going to be contained and controlled. The story we tell explores how the British went in a very different direction to much of continental Europe. Countries such as Italy and Germany decided the only way to manage mass democracy was by having a strong, militaristic leader. In the Soviet Union they called it ‘guided democracy’ but in reality, that country was also a brutal dictatorship led by Lenin and Stalin.

British politics, by contrast, moved towards the centre in the 1920s and 1930s, with a series of coalition governments. Britain managed to avoid the extremes of communism on the one hand and fascism on the other, engaging a majority of voters through the extension of home ownership and economic development in the 1930s – particularly in the South and Midlands.

The casualties in all of this were people in the North and Scotland, who suffered high unemployment throughout the 1920s and 1930s, as a result of declining industries such as coal, textiles and shipbuilding. This is why, in 1945, the Labour Party decided it had to ensure a better life for the soldiers and their families who endured the Second World War. Attlee’s government implemented a radical agenda of nationalisation and welfare, a legacy that Margaret Thatcher attempted to undo in the 1980s but in many ways is still with us today, not least in the form of the National Health Service.

This episode focuses on nationalism. In 1918, defeat in the Great War broke up the empires that had controlled much of East and Southeast Europe in the nineteenth century. Deciding how to put the pieces together has been a key challenge faced by Europe ever since, and is still a prevalent issue in Ukraine today. How do you create a viable, strong state that still does justice to a variety of ethnic minority groups living within it? I explore that issue through the prism of the old Habsburg Empire and, in particular, the story of Czechoslovakia, one of the new states invented in the aftermath of war.

By way of comparison, I also explore the theme through the story of the United Kingdom. I believe that the questions we face today – Scotland, the nature of the United Kingdom, Northern Ireland and its relationship with the South – have their roots in the period just before the Great War and in the fallout from the conflict, particularly 1916 in Ireland.

We tend to think that these issues have come to the surface in recent times – the troubles in Northern Ireland, for instance, or the SNP demand for a referendum on independence. In this series, I want to emphasise the importance of taking a long view of history, as well as the usefulness of viewing our island’s story by contrast to that of other countries.

Kipling once asked ‘what do they know of England who only England know?’ The same question may be posed of all the countries of the United Kingdom, especially at a time of sharper national consciousness in the wake of the Scottish Referendum. This series is a journey into comparative history, which took me and the team to 10 countries and across a century of turmoil as we traced the ‘Long Shadow’ of the Great War and its legacies.