The First World War

All major wars prompt debate among historians over their causes, but the First World War has loomed as a particularly important case study. This war in particular demands explanation due to its unprecedented scale and destructiveness, especially as it came after a fairly long period of peace among the Great Powers. With all the technological and ideological forces that the war unleashed, studying the origins of the war promises to reveal a point of connection between an old world that the war shattered and the new one that we still inhabit.

One of the most hotly contested questions within this field is the degree to which Germany bears responsibility for causing the war, as the victorious Allied powers declared at the postwar Versailles Conference. The proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, piecing together what had been dozens of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, and cities into a single state, severely challenged Europe’s centuries-long effort to ensure a relative balance among its major powers. The new German state had just seized the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine from France in the Franco-Prussian war. Germany and its principal ally, the empire of Austria-Hungary, flanked Russian-controlled Poland on two sides. When Kaiser Wilhelm II announced plans to build a large navy, which he regarded as necessary to confirm its status as a first-rate power, Great Britain feared a challenge to its own dominance over the high seas. However, Germany was hardly a belligerent state disrupting an otherwise peaceful state of affairs. The Great Powers had spent decades, in some cases centuries, establishing overseas colonies as sources of wealth, manpower, and prestige, a process that vastly accelerated after the Industrial Revolution. Germany’s geographic position and relative newness as a state had largely left it out of this competition, and its efforts to catch up caused significant friction; the state feared that any concessions would signify weakness.

If Germany was rising, its Austrian ally was in decline. Compelled to share the monarchy with Hungary after a string of military defeats, the empire was acutely concerned with developments in the Balkans, where new nations (mostly notably Serbia) had declared independence from a significantly weakened Ottoman Empire. Having freed itself from the Turks, Serbia was eager to liberate their brethren still under Austrian rule. With dozens of nationalities under its domain, the Austrians were anxious that Slavs might try to turn the dual monarchy into a triple monarchy or seek independence, either of which could spell their doom. Making matters worse was the support that Russia was providing to Serbia. This was ostensibly a matter of supporting fellow Slavs and Orthodox Christians, but in reality, it reflected Russia’s eagerness to reassert itself as a major power following a disastrous defeat against Japan in 1905. Austria-Hungary appeared vulnerable enough to be a suitable target of Russian coercion, but the question loomed of whether it was possible to confront Austria-Hungary without also confronting their German allies.

It is plausible to assign immediate blame for starting the war to Serbia for its possible complicity in the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, to Austria-Hungary for being the first to declare war, to Russia for mobilizing, to Germany for its support of Austrian belligerence, or even to Britain for failing to make its commitments clear in advance. Whichever conclusion one reaches, the world in July 1914 was primed for war. The European powers had managed to carve up most of the world among themselves, and once they ran out of space, they turned that same impulse against themselves.