Causation of World War One

Authors Avatar

    Analyse the different causes of the First World War saying which you think are the most important giving reasons for your answers.

   

   In 1900, almost every one would have agreed that to be a great country, you had to have a great Empire. Two such examples of this were France and Britain. Since 1800, they had been increasing their empires steadily. I will be looking at how the desire to expand Empires led up to one of the most bloody wars in history. The two other main causes that I think  led up to the start of the First World War are: Serbian Nationalism and Germany’s military build-up.

     Serbia was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  But it wanted to rule itself. Much like the modern Northern Ireland, it had it’s own Nationalist and Loyalist groups and there was a lot of friction caused by the conflicting sides. The Serbian Nationalists sought allies from  other countries including Russia who would gain from disruption within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Join now!

  At the same time, Germany was very keen to become an Imperial power(a country whose power is judged by the size of it’s empire) and , to do so, it was having to build up it’s navy extremely quickly because you couldn’t be an empire without a large navy. Britain’s may have still been the largest navy in the world,  but the sudden advances by Germany made Britain nervous. A feature of this was the race to build large, powerful battleships such as the Dreadnought.

  In 1907, Europe was divided into two alliances, each jockeying for ...

This is a preview of the whole essay