At the end of 1914 H. G. Wells published The War That Will End War, a collection of patriotic essays justifying Britain’s participation in the war. The title sounds familiar as it was taken up later on in other contexts, particularly by the British prime minister David Lloyd George and the American president Woodrow Wilson (‘the war to end (all) wars’).

With To End All Wars? the In Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres) and CEGESOMA (Brussels) once again return to this historic title for a multi-day conference, to tackle two questions: what were the consequences of the new geopolitical order installed after this so-called ‘last war’, and how is the legacy of both war and post-war order remembered up to the present day?

In 1918 the Armistice should have ended the war. But weapons did not fall silent. The war had shattered four ancient empires. Their collapse created power vacuums, exposed old wounds and created new ones. The Paris peace conference in 1919 and a series of subsequent treaties modelled a new world order that offered hardly any solutions. Geopolitically speaking it sometimes seems as if the consequences of the First World War are not yet fully over.

And don’t we seem to find the reverberations of this in the (almost finished) centenary? How remarkable is it that some of the speeches during the centenary celebration between 2014 and 2018 hardly differed from the antagonistic language of the allied side in 1919? And why, for example, do many voices from the Islamic world still criticize the negative results of a certain First World War treaty for the Middle-East?

To End All Wars? wants to take stock of various forms of legacy and meaning of the First World War as they have revealed themselves in the course of the past one hundred years. From the unique perspective of remembrance carried by Ypres, we will critically reflect on the past four year centenary, also asking the question which meaning the First World War will or should still have in the future.