Originally published at: http://timeghost.tv/rise-of-the-nations-i-between-2-wars-i-1918-1-of-2/
After the War to End All Wars, there’s more of two things. More nations and more wars. Wars of independence, civil wars, ethnic wars, ideological wars and just plain old wars. In the first Prelude to the Between 2 Wars series, covering the years 1919-1939 from WWI to WWII chronologically, we look at the rise…
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At last!!!
Two friendly observations, concerning the map:
1. 1:05 It’s spelled “Cyprus”, not “Zyprus”,
2. “Macedonia”, (the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia), was created as an entity for the first time in 1944, as a constituent country of Yugoslavia. Before 1944, it was organized as a province of Serbia/Yugoslavia, called “South Serbia” and then “Vardar Banovina”, with different regional borders. Generally, the national self-identification of the inhabitands of the region are a matter of a heated debate. During the interwar years most considered themselves as Bulgarians…
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Thank you so much - the map is a frigging headache of the first water and any help to sort that out is very much appreciated. The map was created with English and German names and somehow the Z moved form one to the other, sorry about that. For the next episode we will fix the Macedonia situation (it was left hanging as the maps when we developed the border changes starting with a 2016 state of the world). I know we have a future version were it passes between countries, so I’m a bit fluxed as to why it’s suddenly back in ;-/ In any case, so, so much data and literally millions of border nodes that have to be shifted for every month of devlopment in these years. If you find anything else, please feel free to tell us, it is truly appreciated.
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Pleasure to help… Sure that, like The Great War, the map will keep evolving!!
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Top stuff!
It makes you realise how much we take living in a stable, well established country with a democratic government and the rule of law for granted. These things can’t just be flung together overnight, especially somewhere that doesn’t have those traditions.
It’s sad to see the same mistakes being played out in the Middle East all over again to this very day.
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Nice to see this going! Not a period I know a lot about, so will follow this eagerly.
I have two small pieces of feedback related to the editing:
- The zoom out-zoom in animations on the map starting at 0:55 feel very abrupt and really disorientated me with each jump.
- I had a hard time focusing on Indy’s words once the slideshow at 2:36 got started. I think this is because the images were not directly related to what he spoke about and I needed to read the titles to figure them out–and since I can’t read and listen at the same time very well, I unfortunately ended up tuning out Indy for this segment.
Hope that’s some use to you! Keep up the good work 
Nice to see the start of the new series.
I did find the credits interesting and had to look up Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff. Is this a gag or are you actually receiving assistance from the American Friends of Georgia public charity as mentioned in the Wikipedia page?
…and if you are, it’s cool that the descendant of the medieval kings of Alania are helping out.
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@Yanshui Thank you for the feedback, that’s what we appreciate most with having community like you guys; great and constructive dialogue. I hope you don’t mind, but I have one comment and a follow up question to one of your points below:
We won’t be doing that in the future (at least not if this case doesn’t repeat itself, which it won’t) - this was a a conscious style move as the point is not what happens on the map, but that so much happens on the map. The disorientation is the point so to say,
I realised that when doing this segment, I thought long and hard about it. It’s a very controversial segment as what Indy says is still to this day clouded by exactly the problems he describes and a current source of deadly international conflict (see Syria, Myanmar, the Kurdish regions, many parts of Russia and the resurge of birther nationalism. In the interest of furnishing documentation other than just our words without making the script very long and a bit knotty, I needed images. After some research into how I could do that I realised tgat it needed a certain mass of information, but I felt it added so much value that it was worth it. That leads to three questions:
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Did the slideshow in the end add essential value or was it only distracting?
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Was it the text that distracted you, or the images, or both?
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Did you rewind after the segment and listen to Indy again? If yes, was that OK? If no, did it distract you from the rest of the clip?
Sorry if I’m spamming you with questions, but subjective feedback at this early stage when we don’t have any masses of data yet is so valuable.
Thank you.
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Hei!
Thank you for doing this in depth-look at the interwar period, since the early years in particular are a hugely interesting political mess. It`s often forgotten that for thousands of veterans the war sure as hell did not end in 1918.
Anyway, I hate to bring this up but I have another map nitpick: The borders of Finland are wrong on your map. Youre using the post-1944 modern borders. Until the end of second world war Finland extended further South East on the Karelian peninsula. This wouldnt be a problem if that border region wouldn`t become a war zone in 1939.
Cheers,
Elmo
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This is not a gag, but we do not have any relationship to AFG - the credits are for the Brigadier membership tier to which Constantine and Darren have pledged - it would be indiscrete of me to ask for anything more than their extremely gracious support. Hence, I do not know what Constantine’s relationship to any other Sidamon-Eristoffs past or present is. No matter what it is, we are honoured and grateful for both Darren’s and Constantine’s contribution, it is essential to keep the wheels rolling.
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Normally I wouldn’t defend what is clearly an error, but here I have to as it deserves an explanation. It’s both wrong and it isn’t. Problem is that just like Indy points out in this episode for the general state of the world there is no clear border in the region at this point. Between 1918 and 1920 we’re in the middle of the Heimosodat, or Kindred Nation Wars - the border is in contention… well the whole existence of Finland is in contention to be fair. Because of how things happened with Brest-Litovsk (signed and cancelled before it really had any effect (especially on Finland that was a third party to be effected in the future)) Russian Karelia has never passed clearly to one or the other side (yet). So, we are faced with three options:
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Draw the border as one or the other side saw it - leads to controversy with viewers feeling strongly about this that I don’t even want to think about.
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Draw the contended area in as contended - that opens a whole can of worms as doing that for one place leads to us having to do that for the rest of the world - I can employ a full time person working only on that and they still won’t get it exactly right.
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Bite the bullet and accept that we can’t solve this as the basis is not an exact fact base, but political problems that are way out of our program scope and time, and settle for an error for the time being. By 1920 this specific case gets resolved.
Our solution in general is to focus only on the regions we are talking about at the moment and try to get them at least approximately right. Even this is a challenge since borders change at a breakneck pace at this point. In an episode that covers a year, when we don’t tell it month, by month we will at some point have it wrong as we have to chose one state of the border during the year or the other.
We experimented with a brutal solution by getting rid of all the countries on the map that weren’t pertinent to the segment we’re illustrating. This didn’t work though for a simple reason - although the land masses are enough to give a feeling of where what is, it doesn’t furnish you with the neighbouring states and that can get very confusing if your not a geographical genius, with a picture perfect memory, and a perfect understanding of global geopolitical history.
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My two pieces of metaphoric copper based coinage:
- I didn’t find the slideshow portion distracting. The various names for Charlemagne were greatly amusing.
- Love the opening and closing title animation (yay, Mondrian).
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I think it was a nice illustration of evolution and controversies of nationalist ideas.
The part about the flags had the slides switching a bit too fast, so I missed couple of texts/dates at first view, since I didn’t expect them.
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Not a problem! I generally don’t comment on youtube videos, but you could say I’m more invested in you guys than in most other shows 
Just speaking for myself here, natch:
- Distracting. I had to split my attention, which meant I didn’t really get either the narrative or the slideshow.
- I think it had to do with the fact that the text and images were not directly related to the narration. If Indy was talking about Charlemagne as an example and you showed some images (with or without text) I wouldn’t have even noticed, especially if they were full-screen. Possibly it’s because, like Noariki mentioned, I did not expect these images in this context.
- I did not rewind, mostly because I studied history myself and thought I knew what argument he was making (which, admittedly, is an assumption!). If I was less familiar with the specific subject material, I’d probably have gone back.
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Thanks for clariying!
You make an excellent point, the borders (and Finnish independence) where contested until 1920, when the White governement of Finland and Soviet Russia agreed on the old borders of the Grand Duchy of Finland, leaving the Finns with much of Karelia. I must apologize for simply assuming you made an error, though I did notice the same in at least one GW episode.
This opened my eyes to a whole bunch of problems you have to deal with. Keep up the good work!
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- Thank you for that.
- It’s the level of commentary from our community that is one of the most rewarding and special things about doing TimeGhost.
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No need to apologise, we do make mistakes. In this case it was a conscious mistake though 
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Well that’s not quite right - from our 21st century vantage point it might look like nationalism, but it’s not. Sure, it’s identity politics, but it’s neither about nationalism, nor patriotism - it’s about religious self-determination. These conflicts are exactly what we reference in the video when we mention the previous identity crisis of the Habsburg / Holy Roman Empire that were resolved (although badly) in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia.
The Hussites were not focused on a pro-Czech agenda, it was an anti-Papal reformist movement that was a) not unitarian and b) not focused on ethnicity. The Hussites started out in Bohemia, but eventually spread to Transylvania, Moravia, Hungary (present Slovakia), Silesia, parts of present Southern Poland and the Southern Lithuanian dependencies. Jan Hus did not preach for nationalism, but for a localisation of the power of the Church. Again, this is a central theme of the whole reformation movement which he preceded by 100 years. In other words; it’s the right to religious self-determination, not national self-determination, or sovereignty that is at the centre of the movement.
The same goes for the Lutheran reform 100 years later. The princes of the Holy Roman Empire were growing increasingly frustrated with the financial, social, and military power of the Papal States in and around their principalities. In the general population there was an increasing feeling of distrust against the Roman Catholic Church and their socio-economic power. Luther blew into a horn that was just waiting to be sounded. The tune everyone was waiting for was a denouncement of the power of the Pope and the Papal States. When they speak of German in this time, they mean non-Roman and you might argue that such an us and them argument creates an ‘us’ as in a nationalist movement by default, but that would be ascribing ambitions and intentions that were clearly not present at the time.
The princes that were feeling the most threatened by the power of the Roman Catholic Church were quick to support Luther. But, and this is important… Luther was involuntarily fanning the flames of a brewing class struggle - not a nationalist movement, not a patriotic movement, but a class movement for more individual religious and financial freedom. This eventually led to much bloodshed when the peasant class rose up against their noble lords. To oversimplify a very complex issue: some of the princes benefitted from this, others did not, This pitted the princes against each other and created a musical chairs situation with principalities switching between support and oppression of Catholicism and Protestantism at a breakneck pace. Thus a conflict within the Holy Roman Empire took root that went to the very core of what the Empire was about, which eventually led to The Thirty Years War. The only way you can say that the Lutheran movement was nationalist is in as much as that there was a language element to it. Again though, this was not about nationalism, but it was about accessibility to religious liturgy and transparency for the people that spoke local languages.
It’s without a doubt correct that by its focus on regional power and accessibility through common language all of this lay the foundation for the nationalist movements that sprung up two to three hundred years later, but the reformation in itself was not yet a nationalist movement. In the history of ideas they are related, but not the same. However, during the romantic nationalist surge in the 19th century it was portrayed as being the same thing and components of the reformation that had language, or regional basis were exaggerated and inflated to fit into the narrative of a national heritage. Luther himself and his contemporaries probably would have had a very hard time understanding this.
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And that’s early modern Europe alone. If we turn back we can see that an ethnic (if we can say ethnic) identity, rested on belonging to a particular tribe, to have a citizenship of a certain city-state or an empire (Roman identity of 1st century BC to 3rd century AD and later were hugely different, speaking a certain language, believing to a certain religion (or doctrine of a religion), living in a certain region…
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