Name: World War I: The Seminal Tragedy - The Concert of Europe - Extra History - #1
Uploaded: 2022-06-26T04:56:06.000Z
Duration: 9 min 54 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

[male narrator]  Human history is equal parts

Very rarely have we displayed  all three to such a degree

This war is called the seminal  catastrophe of the 20th century

because without it, there is  no Stalin and no Hitler;

Without it, we don't have a Cold War  that leads us to the very brink of annihilation.

Nor do we see the Middle East carved up  by old men still bitter from four years

of meaningless,  self-inflicted catastrophe.

Without this war,  we probably don't have 9/11

or the turmoil in the  Middle East today.

Born in a crucible of  gunpowder and toxic smoke

Blood spilled in war from the fields  of France to the waters off America.

From the Russian frontier  to the sands of the Middle East.

From the Chinese mainland  to the deepest parts of the sea.

It shattered the past and forced us to give up  our last ties to our medieval understanding.

When the smoke cleared and a stunned  world climbed out of its trenches,

we lived in a new age with new powers,  new ideas, and new terrors.

It is the defining event  of the 20th century.

But it's not the war itself that  we're here to talk about today.

Hopefully, over the course  of this show,

a bit at a time, we'll slowly,  story by story,

cover the sprawling events  of this turning point in history.

Today we are focused on  the events that led to this war.

For if the war itself is the seminal  catastrophe of the 20th century,

then the weeks before  the war are its seminal tragedy.

In these next few episodes, we'll focus on  the very human, very personal stories

to ignite itself in one suicidal blaze  from which it still hasn't recovered,

because it is a tragedy  of the highest order.

a story so grand we would  think it must be fiction

if the scars of the war couldn't still  be seen on the fields of France.

It begins with the death of  a prince and his lady

and ends in mass slaughter the likes  of which the world has never seen.

For a hundred years,  Europe has been at peace.

There have been wars, sure, but they were  minor wars, wars on the periphery,

wars without many of the  Great Powers involved.

Not since Napoleon did the great  states of Europe vie in bloody battle.

For after the ravages  of the Napoleonic Wars,

the statesmen of Europe  had come together

to try to stop such a catastrophe  from ever happening again.

They created a system called  the Concert of Europe

so that whenever war  seemed perilously close,

the nations of Europe would come  together in a congress, a conference,

and instead come to a settlement  that all parties would abide by.

But Europe has changed since those  weary of the Napoleonic conflicts

first came together to  create the Great Concert.

The first and most major change  was the formation of Germany.

it's important to remember Germany  as a nation was only forty years old.

But to say that Germany was a strong nation  is to undersell the magnitude of its creation.

was something perhaps unique  in the history of the world.

For overnight, with the  signing of a few papers,

the middle of Europe was transformed  from a thousand tiny squabbling states

to the greatest land power  the world had ever known.

In one night, suddenly the most  powerful nations of Europe,

Russia, France,  Austria-Hungary, and England

were not the most powerful nations  in Europe any longer.

Overnight in the very heart of  Europe had been created a nation

with more manpower, natural resources,  and economic strength

than any other nation in the world,  except perhaps for Great Britain.

Moreover, this creation was  cemented in the defeat of France,

which at the time was considered  the strongest land power in Europe,

and at the time of our story, that defeat  and its memory still run deep.

And now look at the world from the perspective  of that powerful new German nation.

Here they are, arguably the most  powerful country in the world,

and yet they see themselves being denied  all the rights of a great world power.

Britain and France held  territories across the globe.

Even the Netherlands, a nation which  the might of the new Germany

can wipe off the face  of the earth in a week,

had colonies from Asia  all the way to Africa.

had been denied those possessions  simply because their nation was young.

Imagine what this does  to the balance of power.

Imagine what this does  to the geopolitical scene.

the entire EU declared  themselves a single nation

with a single economy, a single military,  and a single foreign policy.

Imagine if they said that they want  greater access to Middle Eastern oil.

Imagine now if representatives from  Russia and the United States smiled

and told this young nation  that they'd be happy

to continue to sell them oil  at an inflated price, though.

This was the position  Germany found itself in.

a system built around a balance  of power and compromise,

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World War I: The Seminal Tragedy - The Concert of Europe - Extra History - #1

entire

force

strength

fear