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![]() Parts 5 and 6, taken together, complement the previous focus on major European states and the USA. The global impact of demobilization on Europe’s overseas empires is covered in part 6. Part 5 considers how applicable demobilization is as a description in these new nations, citing some suggestive cases from central and eastern Europe. Demobilization, meanwhile, was an even more ambiguous phenomenon in the “shatterzones” of European land empires where borders were in flux and “wars after the war” beckoned. An intrinsic element of demobilization in the years 1918-20 considered in this section was the simultaneous crystallization of politically-charged myths which, even if not universally shared within these nations, reflected how many returnees from war rationalized the dislocation of defeat or their frustration at an apparently hollow or dishonoured victory. This transversal approach, drawing on a country-by-country analysis, places military demobilization firmly in the context of the social and economic demobilizations that ran in parallel to it. Parts 3 and 4 survey the practical realities of military demobilization for the war’s defeated and victorious sides respectively. It also elucidates some of the commonalities and differences in the demobilization process for different belligerents and in different parts of the world. Providing an overarching interpretative framework, part 2 offers a multidimensional definition of demobilization, including how welfare policies, provision for disability, and veterans’ movements were constitutive of demobilization and of the reorientation of national life towards the post-war era in the decade that followed 1918. This article considers demobilization in its various guises – military, social, economic, political, and cultural – and shows how contrasting contemporary priorities influenced the various forms it took. The end of fighting remained provisional until the signature of peace treaties. Military demobilization was itself a complex logistical task and politicized process, balancing security with the semblance of fairness in the context of an armistice in November 1918. The process of demobilization, of converting armies, societies, and nations, from a war footing to peacetime conditions, was a massive undertaking that concerned all countries that had engaged in the First World War, be they victors, vanquished, or the successor states of empires that ceased to exist as a result of the First World War.
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