Cause of the First World War

History assignment for Tuesday 6 October 2008.

Cause of the First World War

To what extend can Germany be held responsible for the outbreak of the First World War?

In five days time we will reach the 11. of November 2008, which will be the date for the ninety anniversary for the armistice between the Triple Entente and the Triple Allied.

And even though we soon will be reaching this ninety anniversary, the final cause of the First World War haven’t been testified yet.

So when we ask; to what extend can Germany be held responsible for the outbreak of the First World War, we have to consider that responsibility isn’t always, as in the Treaty of Versailles, the one who had to surrender and therefore lost.

The Treaty of Versailles was founded exactly five years after the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on the 28. of June 1914 in Sarajevo, this treaty is well known for its article 2.3.1;

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

The article implies that because Germany has the responsibility of the loss and damage, she is the one who is responsible for the outbreak of WWI. And the word outbreak can be hard to specify referring to WWI ( because of the tension in Europe after Bismarck’s unification of Germany), but mostly outbreak is used in context with Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia and Germany giving Austria-Hungary the “Blank Check”, from there to declare war on Russia and France.

It isn’t only us 89-90 years after who questions the Treaty of Versailles, actually the U.S. was a signatory in the Treaty of Versailles, but the treaty was never ratified by the U.S.Senate. A friend to Wilson, Edward Mandell House who was also present at the negotiations, wrote in his diary on the 29. of June 1919:

“I’m leaving Paris, after eight fateful months, with conflicting emotions. Looking at the conference in retrospect, there is much to approve and yet much to regret. It is easy to say what should have been done, but more difficult to have found a way of doing it. To those who are saying that the treaty is bad and should never have been made and that it will involve Europe in infinite difficulties in its enforcement, I feel like admitting it. But I would also say in reply that empires cannot be shattered, and new states raised upon their ruins without disturbance. To create new boundaries is to create new troubles. The one follows the other. While I should have preferred a different peace, I doubt very much whether it could have been made, for the ingredients required for such a peace as I would have were lacking at Paris”

Even though the treaty has its lacks, one of the arguments which implies that Germany could be held responsible for the outbreak of WWI is that on July the 6. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his Imperial Chancellor, Theobald von Berthmann-Hollweg telegrammed the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold that Austria-Hungary could rely that Germany would support whatever action was necessary to deal with Serbia. This telegram is based on the actions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary since the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand 28th of June.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Habsburg throne after his uncle ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand was heir to the Habsburg throne after his uncle Franz Joseph, but he was assassinated in Sarejevo, the capital of Bosnia, after surviving a bomb-attack from the Serbian terrorist group, The Black Hand.

The murderer was Gavrilo Princip, who also was from the terrorist group, The Black Hand.

The Austrian government therefore blamed the Serbian government and gave them a harsh ultimatum, and since Serbia couldn’t agree on these, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on the 28. of July.

In this argument you should stress the fact that Germany didn’t believe that Russia would support Serbia, if Austria-Hungary declared war, since the Russians under the Bosnia Crisis in 1908 had to with-draw their support to Serbia, since they felt too weak without France and Britain, after the Russo-Japan war in 1904-05.

Another argument which, to some extend, lies close to the first argument is the Fischer thesis in Germany’s Aims in the First World War from 1961, and Fritz Fischer implies that the German government had accepted the fact that Russian industry was expanding rapidly and they thought that in some years time they wouldn’t be able go compete with them, so they therefore rather wanted the war to come now, than later. And in The War of Illusions from 1969 Fischer implies that German actions since 1911 showed a desire, a preparation and a provocation of war, so when Germany saw its chance in the July Crisis of 1914, they went for it. A modification of this argument was led by Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann who applied the error of the German government and Generals who anticipated a short war with limited amount of casualties.

The naval race between can also be held as an argument, since it gives us an impression of Germany’s attitude towards Britain. The German government had led them influence by an American writer, Alfred Manhan, who believed that the only way to a great empire was through sea power. It therefore worried Germany that Britain navy was that bigger than hers, ex. source D table 2.1 on page 19 in the book Mastering Modern World History, third edition. Is naval statistics which shows Relative strengths of Germany and Britain in battleships and Dreadnoughts, 1907-11,

and if we look under the 1907 we can see that Britain has over twice as many battleships as German, though Germany has three more in under construction than Britain, and when we look under dreadnoughts (a battleship which was constructed by Britain and introduced in 1906, and made all other battleships seem obsolete) Britain had one and Germany none, and under construction Britain had three and Germany four. This information can easily be applied on Admiral Tripitz’s Navy Law of 1897 which should make the Germany expanding its navy, and as you can see in the table Britain are leading, but Germany is making an effort to compete with Britain. And at 1914 the new German navy could only mean one thing to the British, that Germany intended to make war out of the naval rivalry between the two countries.

A different argument which goes further back than the two others is that the Bismarckian System ruined some kind of invisible peace settlement in Europe when it started to “unite” Germany.

The Bismarckian System also believed in ‘À trois in a Europe of five powers’ which was an assumption made by Otto von Bismarck that said that there were five major European powers (Germany, Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain) and that Germany’s security would be remained if Germany maintained an alliance with two of them. So an alliance of three would be stronger than an alliance of two. So therefore German attitude towards Europe was divided into alliances and powers, and as a result of that Germany couldn’t comprehend the thought of a united Europe.

The burden of the responsibility for the outbreak of the war doesn’t only lie upon the shoulders of Germany; some might argue that the tensions in Serbia and Austria-Hungary played a more important role than Germany did.

The tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary have its roots en Serbian nationalism and Austria-Hungary’s fear that the Great Serbia (Yugoslavia) would arise if Serbia gained more power.

First of all the Serbian nationalism cause of friction already started in 1882 where the Serbian government of King Milan had been pro-Austria, and his son Alexander, who came of age in 1893, followed the same policy. The Serbian nationalists had become resentful after the Treaty of Berlin signed in 1878, where Serbia had allowed Austria to occupy Bosnia, an area which meant a great deal to the Serbian nationalists because they saw Bosnia as a part of their future dream, the Great Serbia (Yugoslavia). So therefore the Serbian nationalist saw Alexander as a traitor, and in 1903 he was assassinated by a group of army officers, who put Peter Karageorgevic on the throne. Some of these Serbian nationalists also called themselves The Black Hand (mostly army officers and so on).

This change of regime also made a drastic change in Serbian policies; they were now pro-Russian and they continued their dream if an united South Slav Kingdom (The Great Serbia/Yugoslavia), but their only problem was that the Habsburg Empire’s population contained a lot of Serbs and Croats and they knew that the Habsburg Empire wouldn’t let go of these easily because it would ruin their empire because if the Serbians and Croats got their independence, the other nationalities would also fight for theirs.

So consequently the only outlet the Austrian could see was a “preventive war” to destroy Serbia before she became too strong.

So as a conclusion on the tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary would be that it was caused by Serbian nationalism and Austro-Hungarian paranoia.

Another argument could be that the French resented the loss from the Franco-Prussian war 1871, where France was compelled to pay a war indemnity of 5 billion francs over a period of three years and also the loss of Alsace Lorraine; this was all signed under the treaty at Frankfurt on 10 May 1871.

And an argument coming from Marxist historians would be that the war as an outcome from the final stages of monopoly capitalism and confrontation between countries because of selfishness. Lenin supported this argument for the cause of WWI, and in his essay from 1916 Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism he say that the war was inevitable result of the capitalism which ruled most of the European countries with their search for raw materials and colonies.

All these perceptions have one thing in common, greediness. No matter who is blamed, the greediness still stands back. Ex. naval race, Bosnia, territory, etc. It can be interpretated as the European empires all had gained their colonies, their industrialisation and their power, but at last they couldn’t find room for each other. The industrialisation had increased the effectiveness of all the empires, and no one stood back as the loser, therefore they needed to find one, by war, the first “total war”. And even though they had found their loser at the Treaty of Versailles the winning empires was greedier than ever. As a result of the treaty Germany’s territory was reduced by about 13%, and it had to pay an enormous war indemnity in the time of seventy years.

And to conclude, the Versailles Treaty filled everybody’s mouths, but one nation didn’t achieve as much, the U.S. Mainly because of Wilson’s believe in “victory without victory”, in his opinion they didn’t need to take all resources away from Germany to show who won.

But I believe that the question; to what extent can Germany be held responsible for the outbreak of the First World War? Will stay an unanswered question.

This version complied from versions published by the Australasian Legal Information Institute, the Avalon Project (Yale University) and Brigham Young University Library.

A telegram from the German Kaiser which encouraged Austria-Hungary to declare war on Serbia, and promising that the Germans would help without any conditions attached.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles#Shandong_Problem

Mastering Modern World History, Third edition by Norman Lowe, from Palgrave, Source D, page 19, table 2.1 under War and international relations, part 1. source of that; R. Wolfson, Years of change (Arnold, 1978)