Europe’s Small Wars in the Wake of the First World War

Whereas peace did not come to the ruins of the Habsburg, Tsarist and Ottoman empires until 1923, the situation south of the River Isonzo and west of the Vistula was different. Here the post-Great War legacy states remained in borders which were unaltered (Spain, Portugal, Netherlands), shrunken (Germany, after 1922, the United Kingdom) or expanded (Belgium, France, Italy). Unlike Poland and the Baltic States, their post-1918 wars were not existential. In the European continent as a whole, a fifteen-year period persisted without major war. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was the first occasion on which full-scale conflict had broken out in Europe since the end of the Russo-Polish War in 1921. With the exception of Spain between 1936 and 1939, western European states also did not undergo the trauma of the cataclysmic civil wars of Finland and post-Tsarist Russia, or the mass displacement of civilians (like in the Greco-Turkish war).