Conference
25.04.2017 Viimsis Eesti sõjamuuseumis ja Tartus Kaitseväe Ühendatud Õppeasutustes

The Estonian War Museum’s 8th Annual Baltic Military History Conference “National Formations in the Great War: from an Imperial Mobilisation Policy to Armies of Independent Nation States

Great nations and empires have formed military units based on ethnic groups or tribes since Antiquity. There are national formations in some armies even today. Before the Great War, most of continental Europe had established universal conscription as a basis of mass armies relying on a vast pool of trained reserves. The Russian Empire sought unity in its recruitment and formation systems. However, the German Kaiserreich and the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy were different from Russia in terms of their constitutional origins as unions of separate states. Therefore, as commanders-in-chief, the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs presided over several nominally independent armies that were to a varying degree integrated into imperial armed forces. When the empires entered the Great War, Royal Prussian, Bavarian, Saxon and Württembergian troops as well as Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian units had often retained their own commanders, uniforms and tactical peculiarities. Sometimes they even took their oath to their King, not the Kaiser. Empires with overseas possessions also formed units based on an ethnicity or nationality. The reasons were somewhat different from continental states. In some cases, officers from the imperial homeland led local recruits in Asian, African and American colonies and protectorates. In other cases, local men fought under the command of local chiefs and warlords, maintaining their own traditions, tactics, and sometimes even pursuing their own goals. Because of the climate and tropical diseases, for which there was no cure until the 19th century, it was difficult to deploy European soldiers in many colonies. But in the Great War, military migration took another direction, as large numbers of colonial and dominion soldiers from Australia and New Zealand to Algeria and Senegal were brought to the fronts of Europe.

The Estonian War Museum’s annual conference for 2017, marking the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Estonian national units within the Russian imperial army, will aim at a comparative study of national formations in the Great War. It will analyse the political and military goals of the empires in recruiting and forming national units. To what extent were national formations tools for imperial war propaganda and mobilization, to what extent were they supposed to rouse national separatism against those empires? How important was the initiative by national leaders themselves? Obviously, internationalist agitation by the Bolsheviks, which competed with nationalist agitation, cannot be discounted as well. When empires collapsed, a number of those national units became the germ for armies of new states, which fought in independence or freedom wars; but there were national formations on the other side, in the Red Army, too. What was the effect of national units in the long term? Clearly, there were attempts to revive the policy in the Second World War. In terms of tradition, many Eastern and Central European armed forces still draw their history and origins from the battlefields of the First World War and the continuation wars.

Conference schedule

Speakers and their topics

Chosen works can be found in the Estonian War Museums’s yearbook (linked).