On Monday, in commemorations across western Europe, from Britain to Belgium to France and Russia, people gathered to mark the centenary of the start of World War I with simple ceremonies and grand gestures. The war that was supposed to end all wars was a war that most of us alive today cannot remember and can barely comprehend such was its scale, its baffling causes and grotesque carnage and loss of life.

Sadly, Malta, which was closely involved – albeit not directly – in the war as the “nurse-maid of the Mediterranean”, but which also lost many hundreds of war dead serving in various combat and support roles with the Royal Navy and the British Army failed officially to mark the occasion.

A walk round some of the excellently maintained War Graves Commission cemeteries in Malta might be a salutary lesson for those who have forgotten their history and should be reminded of the small, but important, part played by our forebears in this historic event.

World War I was the defining event of the 20th century. It destroyed empires, some quickly, such as the Ottoman, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires.

Britain was shorn of its empire 40 years later. It created fractious new nation states. It forced America to become a world power.

And it led disastrously and directly to Soviet communism, the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, fascism, World War II and the Holocaust.

The turmoil in the Middle East today has its roots in the world that the World War I spawned. As one German-American historian, Fritz Stern, put it, the war was “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”. One American academic, Philip Bobbitt, argues that World War I marked the start of “the long war of the 20th century”, which only came to an end in 1989/90 with the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union. What happened a century ago should inform the policies of western democracies as it takes stock of the flashpoints in the world and, especially, on Europe’s doorstep today.

From Gaza and Israel to Ukraine, from Afghanistan to Iraq, Libya and Syria, blood is flowing and instability is rife. While Malta may only feel remotely involved, what is happening in these flashpoints are shaping our world and making it more dangerous than it has been for decades.

Chaos engulfs the Middle East. The Arab Spring in countries not 1,000 miles from our shores has mutated into an age of barbarity. Like 1914, there is an air of complacency as crises swirl around us.

The 21st century appears to be going the way the world began the 20th with powerful states determined to throw away the rule book on international behaviour that states of the previous century had used to maintain peace.

Russia was brought into the international order after 1990, but it has become a pariah following its annexation of Ukrainian territory and the strong indications it helped shoot down the Malaysian MH17 aircraft. There are glaring parallels between the Kaiser’s expansionist Germany of 1914 and Vladimir Putin’s expansionist Russia today. Between the invasion of Belgium and today’s annexation of the Crimea.

The international order is in danger of fragmenting. World War I showed how quickly countries can descend from order into chaos, from civilisation into barbarism. A century later, we should remember that.

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