Which war in 2001 is subjectively deemed a world war?
World war A world war, as it is commonly understood, is a large-scale war involving many of the countries of the world or many of the most powerful and populous ones. World wars span multiple countries on multiple continents, with battles fought in many theaters. While a variety of global conflicts have been subjectively deemed "world wars", such as the Cold War and the War on Terror, the term is widely and generally accepted only as it is retrospectively applied to two major international conflicts that occurred during the 20th century: World War I (1914–1918) and World War II (1939–1945).
Spirit of 1914 The Spirit of 1914 (German: Augusterlebnis) was the alleged jubilation in Germany at the outbreak of World War I. Many individuals remembered that euphoria erupted on 4 August 1914 after all the political parties in the Reichstag, including the previously antimilitarist Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), supported the war credits in a unanimous vote, later referred to as the "Burgfrieden" (literally "castle peace", but more accurately party truce). Many, particularly those in the middle class, believed Germany had ended its decades of bitter domestic political conflict. The string of military victories in the following weeks, which demonstrated what Germany could accomplish when unified and suggested that the war would be short, reinforced the ebullience. Many on the political right accordingly believed, and continued to believe into the Nazi era, that these first weeks of the war were Germany's finest hour, the German equivalent to 1789 in France. Until the 1990s, most historians took the memory of the Spirit of 1914 at face value and claimed that the enthusiasm in August 1914 was universal.