causes of world war 1 research paper

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• Introduction & Top Questions
• Forces and resources of the combatant nations in 1914
• Technology of war in 1914
• The Schlieffen Plan
• Eastern Front strategy, 1914
• The strategy of the Western Allies, 1914
• The German invasion
• The First Battle of the Marne
• The war in the east, 1914
• The Serbian campaign, 1914
• The Turkish entry
• The war at sea, 1914–15
• The loss of the German colonies
• Rival strategies and the Dardanelles campaign, 1915–16
• The Western Front, 1915
• The Eastern Front, 1915
• The Caucasus, 1914–16
• Mesopotamia, 1914–April 1916
• The Egyptian frontiers, 1915–July 1917
• Italy and the Italian front, 1915–16
• Serbia and the Salonika expedition, 1915–17
• The Western Front, 1916
• The Battle of Jutland
• The Eastern Front, 1916
• German strategy and the submarine war, 1916–January 1917
• Peace moves and U.S. policy to February 1917
• The Western Front, January–May 1917
• The U.S. entry into the war
• The Russian revolutions and the Eastern Front, March 1917–March 1918
• Greek affairs
• Mesopotamia, summer 1916–winter 1917
• Palestine, autumn 1917
• The Western Front, June–December 1917
• The Far East
• Naval operations, 1917–18
• Air warfare
• Peace moves, March 1917–September 1918
• The Western Front, March–September 1918
• Czechs, Yugoslavs, and Poles
• Eastern Europe and the Russian periphery, March–November 1918
• The Balkan front, 1918
• The Turkish fronts, 1918
• Vittorio Veneto
• The collapse of Austria-Hungary
• The end of the German war
• The Armistice
• Killed, wounded, and missing

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How many people died during world war i, what was the significance of world war i.

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• Australian War Memorial - First World War 1914–18
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• Table Of Contents

What was the main cause of World War I?

World War I began after the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914.

What countries fought in World War I?

The war pitted the Central Powers (mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) against the Allies (mainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, from 1917, the United States).

The Allies won World War I after four years of combat and the deaths of some 8.5 million soldiers as a result of battle wounds or disease.

Some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds or disease during World War I. Perhaps as many as 13,000,000 civilians also died. This immensely large number of deaths dwarfed that of any previous war, largely because of the new technologies and styles of warfare used in World War I.

Four imperial dynasties—the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the sultanate of the Ottoman Empire , and the Romanovs of Russia—collapsed as a direct result of the war, and the map of Europe was changed forever. The United States emerged as a world power, and new technology made warfare deadlier than ever before.

Recent News

World War I , an international conflict that in 1914–18 embroiled most of the nations of Europe along with Russia , the United States , the Middle East , and other regions. The war pitted the Central Powers —mainly Germany , Austria-Hungary , and Turkey —against the Allies—mainly France , Great Britain , Russia, Italy , Japan , and, from 1917, the United States . It ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. The war was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused.

World War I was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties (in Germany , Russia , Austria-Hungary, and Turkey ), resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II .

The last surviving veterans of World War I were American serviceman Frank Buckles (died in February 2011), British-born Australian serviceman Claude Choules (died in May 2011), and British servicewoman Florence Green (died in February 2012), the last surviving veteran of the war.

The outbreak of war

With Serbia already much aggrandized by the two Balkan Wars (1912–13, 1913), Serbian nationalists turned their attention back to the idea of “liberating” the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary . Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević , head of Serbia’s military intelligence , was also, under the alias “Apis,” head of the secret society Union or Death , pledged to the pursuit of this pan-Serbian ambition. Believing that the Serbs’ cause would be served by the death of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand , heir presumptive to the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph , and learning that the Archduke was about to visit Bosnia on a tour of military inspection, Apis plotted his assassination . Nikola Pašić , the Serbian prime minister and an enemy of Apis, heard of the plot and warned the Austrian government of it, but his message was too cautiously worded to be understood.

At 11:15 am on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo , Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip . The chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff , Franz, Graf (count) Conrad von Hötzendorf , and the foreign minister, Leopold, Graf von Berchtold , saw the crime as the occasion for measures to humiliate Serbia and so to enhance Austria-Hungary’s prestige in the Balkans . Conrad had already (October 1913) been assured by William II of Germany ’s support if Austria-Hungary should start a preventive war against Serbia. This assurance was confirmed in the week following the assassination , before William, on July 6, set off upon his annual cruise to the North Cape , off Norway .

The Austrians decided to present an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia and then to declare war, relying on Germany to deter Russia from intervention. Though the terms of the ultimatum were finally approved on July 19, its delivery was postponed to the evening of July 23, since by that time the French president, Raymond Poincaré , and his premier, René Viviani , who had set off on a state visit to Russia on July 15, would be on their way home and therefore unable to concert an immediate reaction with their Russian allies. When the delivery was announced, on July 24, Russia declared that Austria-Hungary must not be allowed to crush Serbia.

Serbia replied to the ultimatum on July 25, accepting most of its demands but protesting against two of them—namely, that Serbian officials (unnamed) should be dismissed at Austria-Hungary’s behest and that Austro-Hungarian officials should take part, on Serbian soil, in proceedings against organizations hostile to Austria-Hungary. Though Serbia offered to submit the issue to international arbitration, Austria-Hungary promptly severed diplomatic relations and ordered partial mobilization.

Home from his cruise on July 27, William learned on July 28 how Serbia had replied to the ultimatum. At once he instructed the German Foreign Office to tell Austria-Hungary that there was no longer any justification for war and that it should content itself with a temporary occupation of Belgrade . But, meanwhile, the German Foreign Office had been giving such encouragement to Berchtold that already on July 27 he had persuaded Franz Joseph to authorize war against Serbia. War was in fact declared on July 28, and Austro-Hungarian artillery began to bombard Belgrade the next day. Russia then ordered partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary, and on July 30, when Austria-Hungary was riposting conventionally with an order of mobilization on its Russian frontier, Russia ordered general mobilization. Germany, which since July 28 had still been hoping, in disregard of earlier warning hints from Great Britain, that Austria-Hungary’s war against Serbia could be “localized” to the Balkans, was now disillusioned insofar as eastern Europe was concerned. On July 31 Germany sent a 24-hour ultimatum requiring Russia to halt its mobilization and an 18-hour ultimatum requiring France to promise neutrality in the event of war between Russia and Germany.

Both Russia and France predictably ignored these demands. On August 1 Germany ordered general mobilization and declared war against Russia, and France likewise ordered general mobilization. The next day Germany sent troops into Luxembourg and demanded from Belgium free passage for German troops across its neutral territory. On August 3 Germany declared war against France.

In the night of August 3–4 German forces invaded Belgium. Thereupon, Great Britain , which had no concern with Serbia and no express obligation to fight either for Russia or for France but was expressly committed to defend Belgium, on August 4 declared war against Germany.

Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia on August 5; Serbia against Germany on August 6; Montenegro against Austria-Hungary on August 7 and against Germany on August 12; France and Great Britain against Austria-Hungary on August 10 and on August 12, respectively; Japan against Germany on August 23; Austria-Hungary against Japan on August 25 and against Belgium on August 28.

Romania had renewed its secret anti-Russian alliance of 1883 with the Central Powers on February 26, 1914, but now chose to remain neutral. Italy had confirmed the Triple Alliance on December 7, 1912, but could now propound formal arguments for disregarding it: first, Italy was not obliged to support its allies in a war of aggression; second, the original treaty of 1882 had stated expressly that the alliance was not against England .

On September 5, 1914, Russia, France, and Great Britain concluded the Treaty of London , each promising not to make a separate peace with the Central Powers. Thenceforth, they could be called the Allied , or Entente, powers, or simply the Allies .

The outbreak of war in August 1914 was generally greeted with confidence and jubilation by the peoples of Europe, among whom it inspired a wave of patriotic feeling and celebration. Few people imagined how long or how disastrous a war between the great nations of Europe could be, and most believed that their country’s side would be victorious within a matter of months. The war was welcomed either patriotically, as a defensive one imposed by national necessity, or idealistically, as one for upholding right against might, the sanctity of treaties, and international morality .

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World War I

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 10, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

World War I, also known as the Great War, started in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918. During the four-year conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers had won, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan region of southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire , Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand —heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Great War

Watch The Great War . Available to stream now.

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-Hungary , like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen ), Germany began fighting World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting Russia in the east.

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege , using the most powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused of inciting civilian resistance. 

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne , fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces confronted the invading German army, which had by then penetrated deep into northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug into trenches , and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

HISTORY Vault: World War I Documentaries

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World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as “ All Quiet on the Western Front ” by Erich Maria Remarque and “ In Flanders Fields ” by Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae . In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of the fallen soldiers:

Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of East Prussia and Poland but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia’s assault forced Germany to move two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan .

Russian Revolution

From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s Eastern Front but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra.

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks , which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict.

Neutrality, however, it was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania —traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign

With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an infantry battalion in France.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia , while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was unchallenged by any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany’s strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain’s mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.

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For four years, from 1914 to 1918, World War I raged across Europe’s western and eastern fronts after growing tensions and then the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria ignited the war. Trench warfare and the early use of tanks, submarines and airplanes meant the war’s battles were devastatingly bloody, claiming an estimated 40 […]

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World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-boats, the use of planes in World War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His “interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V. (first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.

By the war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army. 

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne . The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

The Harlem Hellfighters and Other All-Black Regiments

By the time World War I began, there were four all-Black regiments in the U.S. military: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. 

Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U.S. military. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely. Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers.

Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in 1917, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions . Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918. The 93rd Division, however, had more success. 

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A Harlem Hellfighter’s Searing Tales from the WWI Trenches

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With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. The 93 Division’s 369 regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters , fought so gallantly, with a total of 191 days on the front lines, longer than any AEF regiment, that France awarded them the Croix de Guerre for their heroism. More than 350,000 African American soldiers would serve in World War I in various capacities.

Toward Armistice

By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such a devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All Wars.” But the Treaty of Versailles , signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations , Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a “peace without victory,” as put forward by President Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II .

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies now associated with military conflict—machine guns, tanks , aerial combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remain in effect today.

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5 Key Causes of World War I

Illustration by Hugo Lin. ThoughtCo.

• M.A., History, University of Florida
• B.A., History, University of Florida

World War I, known as the "war to end all wars," occurred between July 1914 and November 11, 1918. By the end of the war, over 17 million people had been killed, including over 100,000 American troops. The causes of the war are infinitely more complicated than a simple timeline of events, and they are still debated and discussed to this day.

However, the list below provides an overview of the most frequently cited events that led to war. These include a combination of mutual defense alliances, imperialistic rivalries, the rise of militarism, fervent nationalism, and the immediate catalyst—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Watch Now: 5 Causes of World War I

Mutual defense alliances.

Countries throughout the world have always made mutual defense agreements with their neighbors, treaties that could pull them into battle. These treaties meant that if one country was attacked, the allied countries were bound to defend them. Before World War 1 began, the following alliances existed:

• Russia and Serbia
• Germany and Austria-Hungary
• France and Russia
• Britain, France, and Belgium
• Japan and Britain

When Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia got involved to defend Serbia. Germany, seeing that Russia was mobilizing, declared war on Russia. France was then drawn in against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany attacked France by marching through Belgium pulling Britain into war. Then Japan entered the war to support its British allies. Later, Italy and the United States would enter on the side of the Allies (Britain, France, Russia, etc.).

Imperialism

Imperialism  is when a country increases its power and wealth by bringing additional territories under its control, usually without outright colonizing or resettling them. Before World War I, several European countries had made competing imperialistic claims in Africa and parts of Asia, making them points of contention. Because of the raw materials these areas could provide, tensions around which country had the right to exploit these areas ran high. The increasing competition and desire for greater empires led to an increase in confrontation that helped push the world into World War I.

As the world entered the 20th century, an arms race had begun, primarily over the number of each country's warships, and the increasing size of their armies—countries began training more and more of their young men to be prepared for battle. The warships themselves increased in size, number of guns, speed, method of propulsion, and quality armor, beginning in 1906 with Britain's HMS Dreadnought . Dreadnought   was soon out-classed as the Royal Navy and Kaiserliche Marine quickly expanded their ranks with increasingly modern and powerful warships. 

By 1914 , Germany had nearly 100 warships and 2 million trained soldiers. Great Britain and Germany both greatly increased their navies during this time. Further, in Germany and Russia particularly, the military establishment began to have a greater influence on public policy. This increase in militarism helped push the countries involved into war.

Nationalism

Much of the origin of the war was based on the desire of the Slavic peoples in Bosnia and Herzegovina to no longer be part of Austria-Hungary but instead be part of Serbia. This specific essentially nationalistic and ethnic revolt led directly to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand , which was the event that tipped the scales to war.

But more generally, nationalism in many of the countries throughout Europe contributed not only to the beginning but to the extension of the war across Europe and into Asia. As each country tried to prove its dominance and power, the war became more complicated and prolonged.

Immediate Cause: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

The immediate cause of World War I that made the aforementioned items come into play (alliances, imperialism, militarism, and nationalism) was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand  of Austria-Hungary. In June 1914, a Serbian-nationalist terrorist group called the Black Hand sent groups to assassinate the Archduke. Their first attempt failed when a driver avoided a grenade thrown at their car. However, later that day a Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and his wife while they were driving through Sarajevo, Bosnia, which was part of Austria-Hungary. They died of their wounds.

The assassination was in protest of Austria-Hungary having control of this region: Serbia wanted to take over Bosnia and Herzegovina. The assassination of Ferdinand led to Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia. When Russia began to mobilize to defend its alliance with Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia. Thus began the expansion of the war to include all those involved in the mutual defense alliances.

The War to End All Wars

World War I saw a change in warfare, from the hand-to-hand style of older wars to the inclusion of weapons that used technology and removed the individual from close combat. The war had extremely high casualties over 17 million dead and 20 million injured. The face of warfare would never be the same again.

In 1914, British author H.G. Wells published his book "The War That Will End War," discussing the change in warfare and coining the phrase that would eventually become synonymous with World War I.

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• World War 1: A Short Timeline Pre-1914
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The Causes and Effects of World War I Essay

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Introduction

The effects of World War I can be seen around the world even now, more than one hundred years after its end; however, there is still no consensus as to its cause. In the words of Alfred Korzybski, “the destruction was brought about by nationalism, entangled alliances, narrow ethnic concerns, and desires for political gain – forces that are still with people today.” (cited in Levinson, 2014). Even though the majority of United States citizens did not have the direct experience of the terrific upset that the war caused in Europe, it can be argued that the country’s concern with championing democracy around the globe is one of its products (Levinson, 2014).

Many historians agree that an atmosphere of twentieth-century Europe was conducive to the creation of a complex mixture of economic, social, and political reasons that translated into powerful forces of imperialistic, nationalistic, and militaristic movements leading to the diplomatic crises of 1914 (Donaldson, 2014). Therefore, it can be said that the blame for the war could not be assigned to any individual country or a group of countries.

Nonetheless, the issue of responsibility was the main focus of the world in the years following the Armistice of 1918 (Donaldson, 2014). To this end, the Commission on the Responsibility of the Authors of the War and the Enforcement of Penalties met in Paris in 1919 (Donaldson, 2014). The investigation conducted by the commission showed that Germany and Austria, along with Turkey and Bulgaria as their allies, were responsible for the aggressive foreign policy tactics that led to the precipitation of the war (Donaldson, 2014).

The start of World War I was precipitated by the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914 (Mulligan, 2010) The elimination of the high-standing official was carried out by the group of secret society members called Black Hand and directed by Bosnian Serb Danilo Ilić (Storey, 2009). The political objective of the murder was to separate Austria-Hungary’s South Slav provinces to combine them into Yugoslavia (Storey, 2009).

In response to the killing of their official, Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia that commanded its government to prosecute the assassins. The objective of the ultimatum was to make its terms so strict that Serbia would be forced to reject it, thereby giving an excuse for launching a small war against it (Storey, 2009). Taking into consideration that Serbia had diplomatic relationships with Russia strengthened by their shared Slavic ties, the Austro-Hungarian government decided to take precautions against the two countries declaring war on it and allied with Germany. It is agreed that Germany was not opposed to Austro-Hungarian bellicosity, but rather supported and encouraged it, thus providing one more reason for the precipitation of the Great War (Levinson, 2014).

Even though Serbia’s response to the ultimatum was placating, Austria-Hungary decided to take aggressive action and declare war. It is argued that the main reason for World War I was the web of entangling alliances among the countries having an interest in the conflict between Austro-Hungary and Serbia (Storey, 2009). Following the Austro-Hungarian declaration of war, the Russian monarch mobilized his army because of the binding commitment of the treaty signed by the two countries.

As a result, on August 3, 1914, Germany declared war on the Russian Empire (Levinson, 2014). France was bound by treaty to Russia, and, therefore, had to start a war on Austria-Hungary and Germany. Even though a treaty tying France and Britain was loosely worded, the latter country had “a moral obligation” to defend the former (Levinson, 2014). Therefore, Britain and its allies Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, Japan, and the Union of South Africa also took a bellicose stance against Germany and offered their assistance in the military action against the country (Levinson, 2014). Thus, a gigantic web of entangling alliances pushed numerous countries to the precipice of war over what was intended to be a small-scale conflict between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

Numerous other reasons led to World War I. The conflicting political interests of Russia and Japan over Manchuria and Korea resulted in a military defeat of Russia (Levinson, 2014). Therefore, the country wanted to restore its dignity by a victorious war. During the same period, a lot of small nations were seething with discontent over the Turkish and Austro-Hungarian rule, thereby providing an opportunity for the Russian Empire further to stir resentment by firing up nationalistic zeal under a pretense of pan-Slavic narrative (Levinson, 2014).

Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, sought an opportunity to establish its influence over a vast territory of mixed nations; the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne provided them with a perfect excuse for the initiation of the war. Political clashes in Germany were a reason for the country’s government to resort to the military conflict as a way of “averting civil unrest” (Levinson, 2014). Another factor that caused World War I was the desire of France to revenge a military defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 (Levinson, 2014).

It is impossible to name a single reason for the initiation of World War I. However, it is clear that the entangling web of alliances among numerous parties participating in the war, as well as complicated plots of governments and empires, led the small-scale dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia escalating into a military conflict that swept the entire world.

Donaldson, P. (2014). Interpreting the origins of the First World War. Teaching History , 155 (4), 32-33.

Levinson, M. (2014). Ten cautionary GS lessons from World War I. Et Cetera, 71 (1), 41-48.

Mulligan, W. (2010). The origins of the First World War . Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Storey, W. (2009). The First World War . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

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Thinking the Causes of World War I

John Keiger is a Professor and the Director of Research in the Department of Politics And International Studies, University of Cambridge. A different version of this article appeared as “The War Explained: 1914 to the Present” in John Horne (ed) A Companion to World War I (2010).

The war that began on August 4th, 1914 carried the germ of controversy before it even broke out. Before Britain declared war on the German Empire, Berlin rushed into print their White Book of diplomatic documents on the war’s causes, revealingly titled: How Russia and Her Ruler Betrayed Germany’s Confidence and Thereby Made the European War. The day after war began, Britain responded with its Blue Book putting its case, followed by the Russians in September, the Belgian Grey Book in October, and the French Yellow Book at the end of November 1914 entitled How Germany Forced the War. By the summer of 1915, the Austrian Red Book served up Vienna’s version of the war’s causes. Of course, resorting to “colored books“ was nothing new to international relations. But this war of self-justificatory diplomatic documentary ‘evidence,’ with its skillful selection, expurgation and elision of texts, was on a grander scale than ever before. Prolongation of the physical war and the war of words went hand in hand. All sides invoked the “verdict of history” to apportion blame to the war’s “guilty authors.” Intellectuals, writers, journalists, and professors put their heads above the parapet to defend their nation’s innocence and their enemy’s guilt. From the most famous German professors to French philosophers of the stature of Henri Bergson—all of them battled in terms of ‘culture versus barbarism.’ This was further instrumentalized by the wartime development of modern professional government propaganda machines to shape opinion and justify the enormous sacrifices from soldier and civilian. The ideals for which each nation claimed to be fighting quickly merged with explanations of the war’s causes: “self-defense” implied the aggression of the Other, and aggression meant responsibility. But the short term question of who dunnit could never be enough; the more fundamental question of why followed naturally, and with it a Pandora’s box of explanations that ranged from the concept of the sovereign state, to nationalism, militarism, imperialism, honor, masculinity, and so on. If the stakes in the causes of World War I were high from its outbreak—linked as they were to national honor, national sacrifice and ultimately victory—they were to be raised still further at the war’s end. It is true of many wars that nations seek to justify their participation and apportion responsibility for the outbreak, but the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war, took the unprecedented step of including Article 231, which lay sole responsibility for the outbreak of the war with Germany and her allies—the so-called “war guilt clause.” This clause became the justification for the massive war reparations Germany was to pay in the post-war period, principally to France. It followed that if Germany could show that it was not solely to blame for the war, it could challenge the validity of Article 231, and with it the payment of reparations. This it set out to do. The other power with an acute interest in the war guilt debate was the new Soviet regime, established following the Russian Revolution of 1917. It wished to heap discredit on its Tsarist predecessor for ideological reasons, in order to bolster its own legitimacy and popularity, both internally and externally. If it could show that the autocratic Tsarist regime, in collaboration with the bourgeois President of France, Raymond Poincaré, were together responsible through the Franco-Russian alliance for the outbreak of the Great War, the Soviets could kill two birds with one stone: discredit Tsarist Russia and partly justify not repaying to France the massive pre-war loans. The pragmatic Soviet approach found ideological support in Lenin’s interpretation of World War I in his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which resonated with many on the European Left. His description of war as the natural consequence of the Great Powers’ competition for colonies and investment markets logically implied that the Central Powers were not alone in shouldering responsibility for the war. In many other countries, even on the victors’ side, the notion of shared responsibility developed—largely inspired by American President Woodrow Wilson’s contention that everyone was a victim of the international system and its secret treaties. This was music to Germany’s ears, and a fillip for the revisionists. As the British wartime leader David Lloyd George later put it: “the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war.” In 1919, the American Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty and the U.S. slipped back into isolationism with murmurs of all the powers being somehow at fault. The ground for revisionism was prepared. The stakes in the Kriegsschuldfrage, or war guilt question, were extremely high. France made a most credible scapegoat on to whom the blame could be shifted—given the loss of the provinces of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany in 1871 and the fact that France’s effective leader in the two years preceding the war, Raymond Poincaré, had followed resolute policies intent on strengthening France’s links with her allies, especially Russia, and was a Lorrainer to boot. It was suggested that Poincaré had plotted a war of revanche against Germany to retrieve the lost provinces. The war guilt debate became all the more impassioned for the fact that in the post-war period Poincaré was still in power and pursuing a strict application of the Versailles Treaty and the payment of reparations. Germany began a campaign to undermine Article 231. A special office was created in the German Foreign Ministry to deal with this issue—the War Guilt Section. It organized, financed and directed two other units: the Working Committee of German Associations for Combating Lies Concerning War Responsibility, which provided the ‘right’ literature and information to organizations like trade unions and various clubs; its stable-mate was the Center for the Study of the Causes of the War, created in 1921—and which from 1923 published the influential monthly journal Die Kriegsschuldfrage, edited by historian Alfred von Wegerer. This is where the ‘serious’ historical work was done to demonstrate the inaccuracy of Article 231 by “sponsoring” journalists, editors, publicists and academics in the “cause of patriotic self-censorship.” The work of these units provided much of the impetus for the ‘revisionist school,’ which in the 1920s dominated historical writing on the war’s origins from Europe to the U.S., successfully displacing much of the blame from Germany. Paradoxically, Germany’s campaign found support in French domestic politics. The Left, notably the newly formed French Communist Party, wished to stop Poincaré returning to power by tarring him with responsibility for the war and depicting him as “Poincaré-la-guerre.” This was fertile ground for German and Soviet propaganda. Layer upon layer of myth and counter-myth, truth and lies, clouded and troubled even serious historical debate. Unlike the outbreak of World War II, where cause and responsibility were clearer and less contested, the history of the origins of the Great War went through cycles of revisionism and post-revisionism. Viewed as a trend over the hundred years since its outbreak, it could be argued that responsibility for the conflict has never stayed firmly fixed and no single country has been squarely and permanently nailed, even if the consensus has been that Germany bore primary responsibility for its outbreak—an interpretation recently referred to as “the German paradigm.” The question of national interest aside, the war’s causes have generated study for less political reasons. The war’s sheer scale, destructive power and consequences have continued to disorientate and mesmerize the intellectual community, which has sought deeper and grander explanations to match the war’s scale. The American diplomat and historian George Kennan declared in 1979 that World War I was “the great seminal catastrophe of this century.” A catastrophe, then, whose causes needed to be explained, as a duty to humanity, in order to comprehend the war’s momentous consequences: communism, fascism, the Gulag, the Holocaust, World War II and, as the well-known British historian Eric Hobsbawm put it in his Age of Extremes (1994), one of the worst centuries in the history of humanity only brought to a close by the coming down of the Iron Curtain in 1989. A further explanation to do with historical evidence has also continued to fan the flames of debate and to explain why for all the historical research carried out in the last hundred years, a strong whiff of doubt continues to surround the causes of the war. Historically, there are still areas associated with the immediate causes of the conflict where the archival evidence remains incomplete on important issues, such as the details of the discussions between the Tsar and French President Raymond Poincaré during the latter’s visit to Russia (France’s ally before the war) in July 1914. Then there is the explanation that the war’s causes have found favor with policymakers as a counter-model. The outbreak of World War I has become an object lesson in how not to conduct international politics: an example of poor “crisis management.” During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world apparently stood on the brink of World War III between the two nuclear superpowers, American President John F. Kennedy, possessing no textbook of crisis-management for presidents, ordered his close decision-making circle to read Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 book The Guns of August —which detailed the frenzied and confused international decision-making process that ended in the outbreak of the Great War—so as not to repeat the error. Kennedy’s intention in particular was to ensure that the process of decision-making did not run away with itself in the way it seemed to do in 1914, and to ensure that the lines of communication were maintained with the Soviet leadership. Before Cuba, there was little by way of an explicit theory of crisis management to guide policymakers in international relations. Since then, July 1914 has become a key example in the handbooks of management techniques for decisionmakers. The unfolding of the July Crisis is now analyzed in terms of information processing, decision-making under crisis, command and control, the coordination of diplomatic and military actions, and the problems of communication with an opponent. Evolving methodologies have also stimulated and prolonged interest in the causes debate. Analysis has moved a long way from the narrowly defined ‘diplomatic history’ accounts of the international relations of 1914 focused, in the time-worn phrase, on “what one Foreign Office clerk wrote to another.” Today, international historians borrow from a range of disciplines to understand the intricate web of causality from international relations theory, political science, and security studies, to economics, sociology, anthropology, and so on. In broad methodological terms, it might be said that how the causes of the war are studied falls into two approaches: structuralist and intentionalist causes. How do we study the causes?

From a methodological point of view, most causality in history involves separating impersonal from personal actions, and assessing their relative weight. Social scientists call this the difference between structural or functional explanations of causality (economic, social, political or imperial) and intentionalist (individual decisions) explanations. In the Great War’s causality, structural (or big causes) and intentionalist (or individuals’ roles) have vied with each other for primacy. As the British historian James Joll noted: “We often feel that the reasons the politicians themselves were giving are somehow inadequate to explain what was happening and we are tempted to look for some deeper and more general cause to explain the catastrophe.” And Joll quoted the great Italian authority on the war’s origins, Luigi Albertini, who referred to “the disproportion between the intellectual and moral endowments [of the decision makers of 1914] and the gravity of the problems which faced them, between their acts and the results thereof.” This goes to the heart of the debate about human agency and structural causes in historical causality. When the German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg, remarked on the eve of war on July 30th, 1914 that the people were peaceful “but things are out of control,” does this imply that individuals could do nothing and that somehow greater forces had taken over? Or could it be that individual decision-makers can sometimes be overwhelmed by events, not because of greater forces bearing down on them, but for perfectly understandable short-term reasons—speed of events, lack of communication, error, misinterpretation, and incompetence (all of which President Kennedy sought to avoid in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis). Thus the actions of politicians and the military can be a good deal less rational than conspiracy theorists might have us believe. But absence of rationality does not mean that historians should immediately reach for structural explanations; human error, incompetence or losing control of events are legitimate causes in their own right, as the recent book with the telltale title The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013) by Cambridge historian Christopher Clark has suggested. Nationalism, militarism, Social Darwinism, public opinion, domestic causes, imperialism, the alliance systems—to name the most prominent structural causes—have at one time or another jostled for prominence against the activities of individual decision-makers, and James Joll’s Origins of the First World War (1984) provides a balanced analysis of structural versus individual causes. But what is the nature of these structural causes? While it is not possible within the constraints of this article to outline all of them, it is important to get a flavor of their nature in order to understand the wider debate on the causes of World War I. Nationalism’s role in causality is usually presented as no longer the positive and liberating nationalism that was said to characterize the French revolutionary armies, but the subsequent militaristic nationalism that asserted nationhood through conquest. This had a powerful effect when combined with philosophers identifying war as positive, such as Friedrich Nietzsche, or modelling the development of society on the discoveries of Charles Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species, with its notions of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Thus many believed that societies and peoples behaved according to the same biological laws as animals and plants, and that they survived or died out according to strength and fitness for purpose. The resulting Social Darwinism was, it is argued, powerful and pernicious, and drove elites towards war as the final test of fitness. By the end of the nineteenth century, the purely historical concept of the Nation began to be fused with the pseudo-biological concept of race, to imply a supposed superiority of certain races and a legitimization of the conquest of inferior ones. War then could be seen as a positive test of the survival of the fittest, as well as a justification for the expansion of armies and the development of a military posture. These underlying trends in European society, it is argued, played a role in the complex matrix of causality. These abstract theories entered the collective consciousness through the development of national education systems in Europe after 1870, when an increasing number of states adopted free compulsory schooling. In France, it was said to have been the Prussian schoolmaster who had won the 1870 Franco-Prussian War; Britain’s victories, it was claimed, were won on the playing fields of Eton. Increasingly, there were fewer and fewer limits on what the nation could ask of its citizens. The schools of the French Republic, Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy all cultivated notions of duty and honor, and of serving one’s country right down to the supreme sacrifice, so sardonically undermined by the war poet Wilfred Owen in his “Dulce et decorum est.” The militarization of European societies, another structuralist cause, continued apace in peace-time through compulsory military service on the European continent, where insidious propaganda reinforced notions of the glory and superiority of one’s own nation. This was instrumentalized in civil society by the popularity of military bands and tattoos, the romanticism of the soldier, rifle clubs, and para-military organizations, such as the Boy Scout movement, founded by Lt Col Baden-Powell, hero of the Battle of Mafeking, for which the uniform was an exact imitation of Baden-Powell’s own in Kashmir in 1907, and whose motto ‘Be Prepared,’ had originally been followed by ‘to Die For Your Country.’ By this process, armed forces became the incarnation of the nation. At the same time, the steady democratization of European societies resulting from the extension of the suffrage, participation in state machinery from local government to the payment of taxes, the development of a mass culture through a popular press—with newspapers such as Britain’s Daily Mail reaching an audience of one million readers by 1896—meant that citizens increasingly identified with the State, which filled the vacuum left by the decline of Religion and the Church. Citizens drew direct and tangible benefit from the State—for example through old age pensions in Germany and Britain in the 1890s and 1909, respectively. Many now had an interest and a stake in the State and were increasingly willing to defend it, even to the death. As a consequence, war was no longer the sole prerogative of kings or even political leaders, but was increasingly the focus of the people—and not just the middle classes. The music halls made ‘jingoism’ a source of fun and entertainment for the “man on the Clapham omnibus.” His political support could be conjured up for the expansion of armaments programs, as with the popular cry of “We Want Eight and We Won’t Wait,” which called for the laying down of more British Dreadnought battleships in 1909 to counter the German naval expansion program. Of course, even the structuralists would not claim that this made war inevitable, but they would suggest that it helped make the mobilization of the masses easier when a crisis or a conflict came. Public opinion, they would argue, could always be called upon to uphold the values and principles of the Nation. Hence, in 1914 when war came, all sides, the British, French and Russians on the one hand, or the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on the other, could claim that they were fighting a just war—a defensive war for the values of their nation which, after all, was superior to those of others. Thus, by 1914 war was more than ever a question of life or death, not just for individual citizens, but for states themselves, who believed that if at this moment they did not stand up to their opponents they would disintegrate, become prey to revolution or, at best, have to live in the shadow of their rivals. Such reasoning had long been a stimulant for increased military spending, the development of an arms race, and an offensive posture and strategy—with a direct impact on those who were paid to defend the nation, namely the military. They increasingly called for the nation to be prepared for any security threat from abroad. This, in conjunction with the underlying trend of technological developments in the nature of armaments (better guns, ships, and equipment), led to greater emphasis being placed on possessing a margin of superiority over one’s potential enemy. This, in turn, meant knowing one’s enemy—reflected in the development at the beginning of the twentieth century of modern intelligence agencies seeking to secure that additional information about their potential enemy’s strategy, tactics, and equipment that might give them a margin of superiority in any conflict. This contributed to the European arms race, which is also in the opinion of some an underlying or structural cause in the outbreak of war in 1914—the major powers’ total expenditure on defense rising by more than 50 percent in the years 1894 to 1896 alone. The strategic invasion plans of the major powers, from the German Schlieffen Plan to France’s Plan XVII, with their emphasis on speed of mobilization and tight logistics, heightened an already febrile international atmosphere with trigger-happy military commands—War by Timetable, as the English historian A.J.P. Taylor called it. One of the oldest structural causes is that of economic rivalry, first made famous by Karl Marx, who claimed that “wars are inherent in the nature of capitalism: they will only cease when the capitalist economy is abolished.” Certainly economic rivalry between states from the 1890s, epitomized in books such as Made in Germany or Le danger allemand (both published in 1896), in which Germany was depicted as stealing British or French markets, was a further source of tension in international relations up to 1914. Also to blame, according to Lenin, was capitalism’s offspring, imperialism. In his 1916 pamphlet Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin argued that since the turn of the twentieth century, capitalism had entered an even more aggressive phase that placed a premium on new investment opportunities that could only be developed through the control of new colonies and markets, leading to imperial rivalry between the powers. However, though both economic and imperial rivalries did exist, it should not be overlooked that there was also much economic and imperial cooperation between major powers prior to the war. In similar vein, some analyses have promoted the idea that in order to contain, overcome, or defuse social unrest or revolution at home, elites sought external war as a means of overcoming or defusing potentially dangerous domestic political situations. A large and broad structural explanation, boosted of late by political scientists and international relations theorists, has focused on the international system per se. Systemic explanations focusing on causality arising from the workings of the international system have a long history. As early as the 1920s, British classicist G. Lowes Dickinson famously described the prevailing state of international relations in 1914 as one of “international anarchy.” The end of peace has also been explained in terms of the gradual erosion of the old Concert of Europe, whereby the Great Powers from the end of the Napoleonic Wars regularly, albeit informally, concerted on problems or adjustments that needed to be made to the international system. Other systemic explanations have found favor with interdisciplinary historians working on the margins of international relations theory, such as Sir Harry Hinsley, who suggested that every general war since 1494 occurred when the international system was undergoing a massive shift in the sources and distribution of international power, no general wars have occurred outside these shifts in power. Thus, World War I resulted from an “international unsettlement” which began in the 1890s, in part characterized by the rise of Germany. Other system analysts, such as Paul Schroeder, have suggested that instead of focusing on the causes of war, scholars should analyze the causes of peace and why that peace no longer held. After all, 1914 was the first time that the European Great Powers had been at war with each other for 40 years—and that it was the first conflict involving all the Great Powers in a century. Why should it be that between 1815 and 1914, twenty-three international wars had been fought on the European continent—of which half had been small wars involving fewer than 10,000 battle fatalities—and that those conflicts had not led to a general conflagration of the Great Powers, even though World War I began as a local war launched by Austria-Hungary against Serbia. Schroeder believes that the breakdown of peace requires a deeper understanding of what ‘realists’ in international relations theory would study, such as the nature of the international system, its political culture, norms, rules and practices, the existing distribution of power, the constituent states’ opportunities for maneuver, their vulnerabilities, and the power-political patterns of behavior. Perhaps less attention should be given to the states in the system whom we now know to have been at greater fault in the war’s cause—the Central Powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany—and more attention to the dominant powers— namely France and Britain—whose system it largely was, and who regulated it unofficially through the remnants of the Concert of Europe, and who held the initiative in world affairs in what was a zero-sum game. In other words, should more research be devoted to how the system was made fragile and unstable by the tension between ‘satisfied’ and ‘unsatisfied’ powers? Reflecting the way that historians write about the present when thinking about the past, models of the war’s causality have often reflected contemporary international relations. During the Cold War and the division of the world into two blocs, there was a tendency also to view the pre-World War I era as bipolar and divided between two rigidly separated and rival blocs of Triple Alliance and Triple Entente (thereby ignoring the numerous examples of Great Power détente prior to 1914). This crystallization of the two blocs became a causal explanation in which power, prestige and security were key determinants in the war’s outbreak. As British historian David Stevenson has pointed out, during the resurgence of superpower tension under U.S. presidents Carter and Reagan in the late 1970s and early 1980s, American political scientists and historians analyzed the pre-1914 system in terms of comparative and thematic studies of war plans, intelligence and armaments. This analysis turned on how far war was accidental or system-generated, and how far it was willed by governments. It could be argued that in the post-Cold War era, traditional ideological international politics have given way to ethnic nationalism, the primacy of economics, and greater reference to cultural determinants of power politics in the vein of Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992) or Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations (1996), and that this has influenced writing on the causes of World War I today. Thus, more ethno-cultural explanations of the Great War’s outbreak have come to light in the post-Cold War world. Avner Offer has underlined the importance of codes of honor and duty—right down to the supreme sacrifice—among the European elites as helping to explain the inflexibility of certain leaders and their inability to back down for fear of dishonoring themselves and their country. Thomas Lindemann has placed the emphasis on the ethno-cultural role of Social Darwinism in influencing German decision-makers and their perception of international relations. With the ‘New World Disorder’ of the opening decades of the second millennium, one might expect historians to begin thinking anew along the lines of Lowes Dickinson’s “international anarchy” to explain the origins/causes of World War I. And so the sedimentation of underlying or structural causes can go on being built up until the accumulated strata point to only one conclusion: the inevitability of the war. But such determinism still begs the question as to why the war occurred in 1914 and not before or after. In the end, it is not a structural cause that pulls the trigger. Thus some historians have preferred the intentionalist approach, focusing on the immediate short term actions of individual decision-makers and the immediate reasons why they took those decisions in 1914. They have tended to believe that these intentionalist explanations are the only ones that can be supported by documentary evidence, and that to reason in terms of structural causes is to impose a pattern on events that cannot be demonstrated on the basis of hard evidence. Nevertheless, much of the intentionalist school has taken on board James Joll’s pioneering work from the late 1960s on the “unspoken assumptions” that underly the thought processes of the decision-makers, as well as their limited freedom to choose in particular circumstances. Most would accept that individual decision-makers and governments were conditioned in their reasoning and perceptions of events by broader societal trends resulting from longer cultural, political, social or educational traditions, and that consequently their freedom to choose was limited. The tension between structural and intentionalist causes was incisively analyzed in 2003, in a collection edited by historian Holger Herwig and sociologist Richard Hamilton, who criticized the highly deterministic processes that underly structural causes and the way in which, according to them, they always yield a given outcome whatever the nature or activity of the decision-makers. They also criticize the highly selective way that certain structural explanations are highlighted while others are ignored; at fault can be the choices scholars themselves make! Thus, nationalism predominates over the forces of internationalism, militarism over pacifism, alliance systems are blamed even though the contents of many of the secret treaties were not known at the time, or public opinion is summoned up when little is known about what mass attitudes represented given the absence of opinion polling, while the press is analyzed without any explanation of readers’ reactions to it. Hamilton and Herwig come down on the side of the intentionalists, and call for greater research into the mindsets and actions of what they refer to as the “coterie of elites” among the decision-makers. While one would not disagree with that call for more research, it is to be hoped that in future the either/or accounts—even antagonism between the two—could be replaced by a more integrated analysis that brings together long-term and immediate causes so that a clearer picture of causality emerges from the given conditions with which governments necessarily live at various moments, and the actions that they and individual decision-makers take. Historians & Decision-makers

There is no sign of interest in the causes of World War I abating—quite the contrary, given the centenary. One cannot fail to notice the deluge of new books on the war, some already best-sellers (e.g. Clark’s Sleepwalkers, with 300,000 copies sold, of which 160,000 in Germany by 2014)—not to mention the media coverage. The war’s causes have been analyzed dispassionately by some outstanding scholars and historians, but also politically and polemically, from varied standpoints and with different objectives in mind. One hundred years on, are we any closer to a consensus on the causes? If the current crop of academic books and articles on the subject is anything to go by, it would seem not. Some continue to insist on Germany’s primary responsibility, others nuance or even contest it. Perhaps that is in the nature of historical enquiry into the causes of great events. But it is worth reminding ourselves of French historian Marc Bloch’s words of caution on causality in history: A graduated classification of causes, which is really only an intellectual convenience, cannot safely be elevated to an absolute. Reality offers us a nearly infinite number of lines of force which all converge together upon the same phenomenon. The choice we make among them may well be founded upon characteristics which, in practice, fully merit our attention; but it is always a choice. So, scholars too make choices, just like the men of 1914. Heaven forefend that they should ever miscalculate. Historians would do well to reflect on that from time to time when judging the decision-makers of 1914.

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World War I Research Paper

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As the inevitable outcome of nineteenth-century imperialism, local wars, and rival power blocs in Europe, World War I had tremendous consequences. It transformed territorial boundaries in Europe and destroyed three great empires. Ideas about class privilege and gender discrimination began to change. Political ideology was radicalized through communism, fascism, and socialism, and the international war debt contributed to a dire postwar economic situation.

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World War I (1914–1918) was the great climax of the age of competitive imperialism. The deepest causes of the war lay in the struggle between the major European powers for control over territories newly occupied by Europeans during the late nineteenth century, especially in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This tension also was linked to competition in armaments and a generalized sense of rivalry in industrial development. As the period of economic liberalization of the mid-nineteenth century receded, it was replaced by an age of competing tariff regimes. Rivalries produced a series of localized wars and diplomatic crises during the two decades before 1914. Some conflicts reflected global competition, such as the Fashoda Crisis (1898) in Sudan, the South African War (1899–1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904– 1906), the Moroccan crises (1905 and 1911), and the Italian invasion of Libya (1911). Some rivalries reflected long-standing tensions in southeastern Europe, such as the crisis over the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (1908–1909). These tensions in turn solidified the rival power blocs into which Europe had been divided, with Russia, France, and Britain bound in one alliance system (the Entente) and Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in another (the Triple Alliance).

Certain destructive political and economic doctrines also seduced educated opinion. Social Darwinist and geopolitical theories, which asserted the inevitability of wars to control resources, helped reconcile many people to the idea of armed conflict. Political pressure groups and the new cheap newspapers asserted imperialist and militarist values. Domestic political tensions, worsened by rapid industrialization, especially inside Germany and Russia, also tempted reactionaries to see a short and successful war as a means of escape from reformist or revolutionary movements.

On the other hand, countervailing forces existed. Both liberal and socialist internationalists promoted notions of peace through free trade or working-class solidarity. Increasing economic interdependence between the major powers caused many people to believe that war was unlikely. Some people hoped that the two Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 signaled that a new international order was in formation.

The descent into war itself had European origins. On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia, by Serbian nationalists. The Austro-Hungarian government decided to use the assassination as an opportunity to inflict a military punishment on Serbia, its rival in southeastern Europe. Promises of German support, even if the humiliation of Serbia involved risk of a wider war, were obtained. Austria-Hungary delivered an ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July, demanding drastic action against nationalist extremists. The Russian government, supporting Serbia, acted with equal vigor and instituted orders for “the period preparatory to war” on 26 July. The Austro-Hungarians opened their military campaign against Serbia on 28 July. The sequence of diplomatic events that followed during the next week ensured the escalation of a local war (between Serbia and Austria-Hungary) into a continental war (between Germany and Austria-Hungary on the one hand, and Russia and France on the other) and then a world war (when Britain declared war on Germany). All sides made errors that snuffed out hopes for peace. The Germans, whose leaders wavered between eagerness for war and a preference for a negotiated settlement, failed to press the case for mediation upon their Austro-Hungarian allies. Similarly, the British and French failed to discourage the Russians from precipitate action, always giving a higher priority to the preservation of their alliance system. The Russians recklessly ordered general mobilization on 30 July. The Germans, gambling mistakenly on British neutrality, rushed to declarations of war against both Russia and France on 1 and 3 August and violated Belgian neutrality on 3 August. The British, stung by this violation and determined to maintain their alliances against their chief imperial and commercial rival, declared war on Germany on 4 August.

No Quick Victories

The first months of fighting were marked by rapid military movements. The first battles, however, failed to deliver quick victories to those taking the offensive. On the western front the German invasion of Belgium and France was halted at the Battle of the Marne in France in September 1914. On the eastern front the Russian invasion of East Prussia was halted at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August. After the first Battle of Ypres in Belgium in November, a vast line of trenches in the west stabilized. By this time the war had escalated globally. Japan entered the war on the Entente side in August in order to secure German possessions in the Pacific and China. Turkey entered on the side of the Central powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) in November, hoping to profit at the expense of Russia, Turkey’s old antagonist. During the first months of the war Britain and its imperial allies conquered the bulk of Germany’s colonial empire.

During 1915 horrors multiplied. In Turkey the most appalling in a list of atrocities unleashed by the war occurred: the Armenian people endured an attempted genocide. On the western front a series of offensives by the British and French failed to dislodge the German forces. Similarly, in April the Turks repulsed an Entente attempt to seize the Dardanelles strait by landing at Gallipoli, and the invasion force withdrew in December. In May Italy was induced to enter the war on the Entente side but enjoyed no military breakthrough. On the eastern front German and Austro-Hungarian campaigns were more successful, and Russian Poland was occupied in the summer. Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central powers in September, and a subsequent German-led offensive in Serbia was also successful. An Entente counteroffensive from Salonika in Greece in October stalled, and British forces also retreated from Baghdad. Whereas the “war map” favored the Central powers, the Entente was successful in economic warfare. Britain’s decision to impose an economic blockade on Germany in March 1915 began the process of Germany’s internal debilitation.

Vast battles of attrition, in a war now based upon industrialized killing, characterized the fighting in 1916. In the west both a German attempt to take Verdun, France (February–July), and a British counterattack at the Somme River in France (July–November) ended in costly failures. Romania entered the war on the Entente side in August but was soon overrun by German forces. A Russian offensive in the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia (June–August) was more successful. A vast naval battle between the British and German fleets off the Jutland (Jylland) peninsula of Denmark in May had an indecisive outcome. German surface vessels, however, were unable to challenge the British blockade after that date. In addition, in response to U.S. pressure, Germany was forced to moderate its use of submarines against merchant ships in the Atlantic. U.S. sales of war material, overwhelmingly to the Entente side, continued to grow. The Central powers again dominated in territorial terms in 1916, but the blockade steadily worsened shortages of domestic food and materiel.

In pursuit of unity at home, both sides promised their people that they were fighting defensive wars. Diplomatically, however, both sides made deals involving promises of annexations, either to shore up or to widen their alliances. By the Straits Agreement of March 1915, Britain and France promised Russia possession of Constantinople, Turkey. In April 1915, with the Treaty of London, Britain promised significant annexed territories on the Adriatic coast to Italy. In October 1915 Britain promised the Sharif of Mecca that Britain would support independence for the Arab peoples under Ottoman rule if the Arabs rose in revolt. The exact boundaries of future independent Arab states, however, were not made clear. In February 1916 France and Britain agreed to divide the bulk of the former German colonies. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, France and Britain agreed on the partition of the bulk of the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Germany prepared plans for annexations in both east and west in the so-called September Program of 1914. Germany’s leaders of army and navy steadfastly insisted on annexations in Belgium and France for strategic security. In securing Bulgaria’s adhesion to the Central powers in September 1915, Germany promised Bulgaria gains in Macedonia. Most importantly, in 1915 and 1916 Germany and Austria-Hungary also agreed on annexations in eastern Europe at Russia’s expense. In a major step toward this goal, in November 1916 Germany and Austria-Hungary proclaimed a new kingdom of Poland, carved out of Russian Poland.

Politics Polarized

The war polarized politics. The increasing demands of war meant that liberal ideals were at a discount. From the political right in each warring nation arose pressures for more authoritarian policies and an all-consuming military mobilization. The ultrapatriotic newspapers called incessantly for victory at any cost through the suppression of dissent, the expulsion of aliens, and radical economic nationalism. Politicians and military figures promising an intensification of the war rose to prominence and displaced moderates. For example, in Germany Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg were appointed to the Supreme Command in August 1916. The two generals overshadowed the civilian government, and their political intriguing eventually secured the resignation of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg in July 1917. In Britain the Liberal government of H. H. Asquith steadily retreated from free speech, free service, and free trade. Conscription was introduced in January 1916. The Paris Resolutions, decided upon at an interallied conference of British, French, and Russian delegates in Paris in June 1916, threatened Germany with a postwar economic boycott. David Lloyd George, promising to wage war more vigorously until achieving a “knock-out blow” against Germany, displaced Asquith as prime minister in Britain in December 1916.

Nonetheless, in late 1916 diplomats attempted to resolve the war by negotiation. On 12 December, Germany offered to end the war by a diplomatic settlement. On 18 December, U.S. president Woodrow Wilson, a dedicated liberal internationalist, urged all sides to specify their war aims, hoping to increase pressure for negotiations. Britain, Russia, and France rejected the German offer on 30 December. Wilson pressed the case for “peace without victory” in a major address to the U.S. Senate on 22 January 1917. The Germans, however, undercut his effort, announcing a resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare for 1 February 1917. This resumption threatened the lucrative U.S. trade in war materiel with the Entente. Wilson cut off diplomatic relations with Germany. But not until the collapse of the czarist regime in the first Russian Revolution of mid-March did Wilson make his final decision on war. Characterizing the war as a democratic crusade, Wilson took the United States into the war against Germany on 6 April 1917.

During 1917 military stalemate persisted. Major campaigns were persisted with—in part to forestall rising public pressure for the revision of war aims and peace. The German U-boat war in the Atlantic was initially successful but was countered by the convoy system. The French attempted an advance in the west under General Nivelle in April, but this soon faltered, and mutinies followed. The Russians mounted a last major advance in July, but it ground to a halt within a fortnight. The British followed with a major offensive in Flanders, in Belgium (July–October), also to no avail. The Italians, too, suffered a major reverse at the village of Kobarid (Caporetto), Slovenia, in October. The British success in taking Jerusalem in December was one of the few Entente military successes in 1917. Only the promise of U.S. assistance gave grounds for hope.

In political terms rivalries intensified between the political right, demanding victory at any cost, and the political left, now demanding peace by negotiation or revolution. In Germany widespread strikes were staged in April 1917 (and later in January 1918). German liberals and socialists seeking domestic reform and peace succeeded in passing the Peace Resolution through the Reichstag (parliament) in July 1917. The new Russian government pressed unsuccessfully for an interallied conference to revise war aims. European socialists proposed to hold a conference in Stockholm, Sweden, to draw up the basis of a compromise peace, but the western powers refused to allow their socialist parties to be represented. Britain experienced serious industrial unrest in April, and in August the British Labour Party swung around to support the idea of an international socialist conference at Stockholm. Faced with continuing disputes among moderate and revolutionary socialists, however, and the decisions of the U.S., British, and French governments denied passports to their socialist delegates, and the organizers eventually abandoned their efforts to summon a broadly representative socialist conference in Stockholm. This intensified domestic political tensions still further. For example, the French socialist party left the government in September in protest at annexationist politics. The Papal Peace Note of August 1917 was one of many diplomatic opportunities for peace during the year. In Russia the Bolshevik Revolution of November eventually brought about an armistice on the eastern front in December.

War Aims Widened

Behind the scenes, however, diplomacy again widened war aims during 1917. In February, France and Russia agreed on gains at German expense in east and west in the Doumergue Agreement, and Britain and Japan agreed on the disposal of Germany’s colonies in the Pacific. In April, Britain and France offered Italy a share of the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. At three conferences at Bad Kreuznach, Germany, in April, May, and August 1917, again Germany and Austria-Hungary agreed upon annexations, principally in Eastern Europe. On the other hand, diplomats made secret attempts at a diplomatic settlement. In September German Foreign Minister Kuhlmann approached Britain, offering to give up Germany’s gains in the west for a free hand in the east.

During the winter of 1917–1918 the peace talks between the Russians and Germans provided another opportunity for a general peace. The western powers resisted any peace of compromise brokered by socialists. Instead, in separate addresses in January 1918, Lloyd George (his Caxton Hall speech) and Wilson (his Fourteen Points speech) reaffirmed their liberal democratic ideals. Germany eventually imposed a harsh peace on the defeated Russians through the Brest-Litovsk Treaty of March 1918.

In spite of growing domestic discontent inside Germany, the German Army High Command insisted on a vast offensive to achieve a victory in France before U.S. troops could arrive in strength. The offensive was launched on 21 March 1918 and was initially successful. Allied counterattacks in July and August threw back the offensive, however, and an inexorable German retreat began. By September the military crisis was so serious that the German Army High Command buckled. A reformist government of liberals, democrats, and socialists was formed under Prince Max of Baden to pursue both domestic democratization and a negotiated peace. This government applied to Wilson for an armistice. The armistice was signed on 11 November 1918.

The consequences of the war for Europe and the rest of the world in the twentieth century were enormous. The war transformed the territorial boundaries of Europe: three great conservative empires—the Russian, the German, and the Austro-Hungarian—were swept away. New states were created in Eastern Europe, most notably Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. Huge social changes were starkly revealed. The “socialism of the trenches” undermined notions of class privilege. Democratic expectations were heightened, but disenchantment followed. The idea of “separate spheres” in gender relations was both challenged by women’s wider experience of work and reinforced by war propaganda lauding masculine militarism. The war radicalized the political ideologies of the prewar era. Liberalism wilted. The schism between democratic and revolutionary socialists became unbridgeable. Communism, promising liberation from capitalism and imperialism, was catapulted into world politics. Fascism (and National Socialism) erupted in response, promising salvation from Communism through militarist values, authoritarian politics, and racial purity. The propaganda techniques so ruthlessly deployed during the war to manage the masses inspired the dictators of the interwar years. The enormous cost of the war, which produced huge internal and international debts, contributed to the persistent postwar economic dislocation. In cultural terms the war provoked a pervasive cynicism, tension between the generations, religious doubt, and a profound antimilitarism. A vibrant and critical modernism emerged.

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