The Great War within the Neorealist Theory of International Relations

The Great War represented a turning point in international politics. It took the form of a “major war” involving all the great powers (“general war”) and determining a reorganization of the international political order, both in the distribution of power and prestige and at the regulatory level (“source war”) (Waltz 1979, trad. it., 362; Rotberg and Rabb 1988; Bonanate 2010, 15–29). In addition to effects at the systemic level, however, a special significance has been attributed to WWI for its original features. Between 1914 and 1918, many restraints on the violence of the past— simultaneously and definitively—ceased; first, the limits on the number of political actors, nations, and soldiers involved in military operations (and, consequently, of the victims); second, the time limits, because, while it was not the longest conflict in absolute terms, in its five-year term, there were neither days of truce, nor moments of non-belligerence and there was an extraordinary intensity in the fighting. The same happened with spatial limits, with an unprecedented expansion of the theater of war on a global scale, proved by its land, maritime and air dimensions. Moreover, the previous limits on the magnitude of destruction of weapons and on their mobility (fighter aircraft, tanks, long-range cannons, poison gases) vanished. The war, finally, thanks to the means of mass communication and to the transnational spread of ideologies, lost its “inter-state” connotation, ceasing to be an exclusive affair of governments and armies involved—to take on an “inter-national” trait—and becoming a clash between peoples and models of civilization (Colombo 2006). These elements, combined with the tragic death toll and the political instability of the next two decades, meant that the First World War actively promoted the creation of an autonomous, systematic, and homogeneous field of study, dedicated to international politics, which took the name of International Relations (IR) (Carr 1941).