In 1914, Europe’s political order was anchored by emperors and kings—Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Romanovs. By 1918, these dynasties lay in ruins, replaced by fledgling democracies. World War I, sold as a “war to end all wars,” became Woodrow Wilson’s ideological battleground to remake the globe in democracy’s image. His Fourteen Points promised self-determination, yet sowed chaos: collapsing empires fractured into unstable nation-states, while the Treaty of Versailles planted seeds for future conflict.
This “crusade for democracy” reshaped borders and minds, but at a staggering cost. Monarchies fell, yet the new republics—Weimar Germany, fractured Austria, revolutionary Russia—buckled under economic collapse and political extremism. Democracy, hailed as liberation, often birthed disillusionment. Critics argue Wilson’s idealism masked a darker truth: replacing organic traditions with brittle systems ripe for manipulation.
A century later, the legacy is contested. Did democracy truly triumph—or merely ignite a cycle of ideological fervor and backlash? The war’s end wasn’t a victory for freedom, but the dawn of modern statecraft’s paradox: Can forced democracy ever bring stability?
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https://mises.org/articles-interest/introduction-democracy-god-failed
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