Four empires collapsed due to the war, old countries were abolished, new ones were formed, boundaries were redrawn, international organizations were established, and many new and old ideologies took a firm hold in people's minds.

Through the period from the Armistice of 11 November 1918 until the signing of the Treaty of Versailles with the Weimar Republic on 28 June 1919, the Allies maintained the naval blockade of Germany that had begun during the war.

[2] The continuation of the blockade after the fighting ended, as author Robert Leckie wrote in Delivered from Evil, did much to "torment the Germans ... driving them with the fury of despair into the arms of the devil.

[4] However, it is also the case that for eight months following the end of hostilities, some form of blockade was continually in place, with some contemporary estimates that a further 100,000 casualties among German civilians due to starvation were caused, on top of the hundreds of thousands which already had occurred.

[5][6] After the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 28 June 1919, between Germany on the one side and France, Italy, Britain and other minor allied powers on the other, officially ended war between those countries.

Included in the 440 articles of the Treaty of Versailles were the demands that Germany officially accept responsibility "for causing all the loss and damage" of the war and pay economic reparations.

[21] Lobbying by Chaim Weizmann and fear that American Jews would encourage the United States to support Germany culminated in the British government's Balfour Declaration of 1917, endorsing creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

[23] The establishment of the modern state of Israel and the roots of the continuing Israeli–Palestinian conflict are partially found in the unstable power dynamics of the Middle East that resulted from World War I.

[33][34] Indeed, in Chile the war bought an end to a period of intense scientific and cultural influence writer Eduardo de la Barra scornfully called "the German bewitchment" (Spanish: el embrujamiento alemán).

Two other minor entities were established, the Centrocaspian Dictatorship and South West Caucasian Republic (the former was liquidated by Azerbaijan in the autumn of 1918 and the latter by a joint Armenian-British task force in early 1919).

Solidarity was briefly maintained when the Transcaucasian Federative Republic was created in the spring of 1918, but this collapsed in May when the Georgians asked for and received protection from Germany and the Azerbaijanis concluded a treaty with the Ottoman Empire that was more akin to a military alliance.

[37] Greece fought against Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal, a war that eventually resulted in a massive population exchange between the two countries under the Treaty of Lausanne.

Later, when Germany rearmed, the nation states of south-central Europe were unable to resist its attacks, and fell under German domination to a much greater extent than had ever existed in Austria-Hungary.

In Germany, there was a socialist revolution which led to the brief establishment of a number of communist political systems in (mainly urban) parts of the country, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the creation of the Weimar Republic.

The treaty required Germany to permanently reduce the size of its army to 100,000 men, and destroy their tanks, air force, and U-boat fleet (her capital ships, moored at Scapa Flow, were scuttled by their crews to prevent them from falling into Allied hands).

[43] On the western front, the growing strength of the Turkish National Movement forces led the Kingdom of Greece, with the backing of Britain, to invade deep into Anatolia in an attempt to deal a blow to the revolutionaries.

With the nationalists empowered, the army marched on to reclaim Istanbul, resulting in the Chanak Crisis in which the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, was forced to resign.

[44] Lausanne Treaty formally acknowledged the new League of Nations mandates in the Middle East, the cession of their territories on the Arabian Peninsula, and British sovereignty over Cyprus.

Battles such as Gallipoli for Australia and New Zealand, and Vimy Ridge for Canada led to increased national pride and a greater reluctance to remain subordinate to Britain, leading to the growth of diplomatic autonomy in the 1920s.

On the other hand, the Labour Party remained unified despite tensions between pacifist and pro-war leaders; it used the war to expand the British trade union movement, and benefited from the establishment of universal suffrage under the Representation of the People Act 1918.

The "mother" category relates back to the role of women before the Great War, the woman who stayed at home and took care of the household while the husband was off at work.

[58] In Italy, the discontent was relevant: irredentists (see: irredentismo) claimed Fiume and Dalmatia as Italian lands; many felt the Country had taken part in a meaningless war without getting any serious benefits.

With British assistance, Japanese forces attacked Germany's territories in Shandong, China, including the East Asian coaling base of the Imperial German Navy.

[59] While disillusioned by the war, it having not achieved the high ideals promised by President Woodrow Wilson, American commercial interests did finance Europe's rebuilding and reparation efforts in Germany, at least until the onset of the Great Depression.

American opinion on the propriety of providing aid to Germans and Austrians was split, as evidenced by an exchange of correspondence between Edgar Gott, an executive with The Boeing Company and Charles Osner, chairman of the Committee for the Relief of Destitute Women and Children in Germany and Austria.

Gott argued that relief should first go to citizens of countries that had suffered at the hands of the Central Powers, while Osner made an appeal for a more universal application of humanitarian ideals.

So the new threat of poison gas dropped from enemy bomber aircraft excited a grossly exaggerated view of the civilian deaths that would occur on the outbreak of any future war.

One gruesome reminder of the sacrifices of the generation was the fact that this was one of the first times in international conflict whereby more men died in battle than from disease, which was the main cause of deaths in most previous wars.

The war left allied countries overburdened with debt to the United States, and the wrecked German economy was not able to pay reparations except when loaned by American banks.

Introduced as a temporary war measure, passport control hindered economic migration and prevented equalizing labor costs in poor and developed countries, with the latter declaring their wish to abolish any restrictions but not actually wanting their workers to compete with immigrants.