THESIS: THE WAR THAT BEGAN IN 1914 WILL COME TO BE SEEN AS HAVING LASTED UNTIL 1990.
Epochal wars can embrace several conflicts that were thought to be separate wars by the participants, may comprise periods of apparent peace (even including elaborate peace treaties), and often do not maintain the same lineup of enemies and allies throughout. The Long War—which includes the First and Second World Wars, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, and the Cold War—like earlier epochal wars, was fought over a fundamental constitutional question: which sort of nation-state—communist, fascist, or parliamentary—would lay claim to the legitimacy previously enjoyed by the imperial state-nations of the nineteenth century.