Chapter 3: The First War 1914-1918

The Causes and Origins of the First World War

This section discusses the main origins and causes of the First World War. It provides an outline of the main debates regarding what factors caused the outbreak of the war in 1914.

The First World War as a Failure of the European States System

Debates about the outbreak of the First World War have continued intensely since the end of the war. In today’s literature, a general distinction is made between the causes of the war and the origins of the war. Studies on its underlying causes have focused mostly on the relations between the great powers of Europe and their struggle for superiority with each other. According to Fay, due to the French and Industrial Revolutions at the end of the 18th century, the social and behavioral structure of Europe greatly changed throughout the 19th century. While nationalism, which emerged with the French Revolution, undermined traditional state apparatuses, the Industrial Revolution also contributed to the creation of a new form of foreign policy and a political economic system that forced countries to seek foreign markets and raw materials.

On the other hand, Taylor saw the First World War as a result of the ongoing struggle between great powers on a systemic level. From the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, European states had been acknowledged as sovereign units, despite power disparities. In his model, Taylor argued that the reason for the outbreak of war in 1914 was similar to previous major wars in which various new powerful actors emerge and disrupt the balance of power. In this context, the First World War was a struggle to maintain the balance of power against a Germany attempting to disrupt the existing order. What makes the First World War special, however, was that in spite of Germany’s defeat, the traditional European balance of power could not be restored, and the transition to a new international system began.

Similar to Taylor, Ruth Henig has argued that the balance between great powers in Europe deteriorated with the chain of events that began with the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1870-1871. With the emergence of nationalism in multi-ethnic realms such as the Ottoman Empire, new ideas affected not just the Balkans or Near East, but the entire European states system. Russian expansionism and Pan-Slavism also had negative impacts on the Balkans, encouraging small nations to revolt and the already crumbling AustriaHungarian Empire to perceive a great threat to its continued existence. After the events of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878, the dangerous situation in the Balkans had the potential to draw more than these two great empires into war, as German Chancellor Bismarck and British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone especially foretold. In order to prevent an unstable situation created by Russia after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878 from exploding, Bismarck convened the Congress of Berlin in 1878 as a check and balance for the region. Berlin divided the region into two spheres of influence, with Russia to the East and Austria-Hungary to the West. The presence of the Ottoman Empire was reintroduced to Macedonia. Though it would not last forever, Bismarck’s system helped establish a temporary safety valve to prevent the Balkans from dragging the rest of Europe into war in the 19th century. The 1878 Congress of Berlin was thus one of the milestones of the pre-1914 system. The 1815 Concert of Europe, on the brink of collapse since the Crimean War, with Bismarck’s intervention lasted until 1904. While Germany’s mediator role as an “honest broker” balanced the turbulent great powers of Europe (and was recognized by Britain), its checks and balances system managed to keep order in the Balkans.

The system established by Bismarck, which enjoyed the approval of Britain and Russia, filled the power gap at the center of Europe after Austria-Hungary’s long demise. But this kind of diplomacy was also global. However, the diplomatic crises pinpointed as the main reasons for the breakout of war in 1914 continued to erode the system.

The first of the diplomatic crises was the Fashoda Crisis of 1898 between France and Britain. Though the French had pulled back in the face of a British demonstration of power, crises such as this in a remote African region showed how quickly armed conflict between great European powers might erupt, even from a distant colonial backwater. Britain’s relations with Germany further deteriorated when the German Navy began developing dreadnoughts, a race that many scholars and historians consider one of the main causes of the war. With mounting tensions from the dreadnought race already in the background, things were only exacerbated when Britain gave France a ‘blank check’ to act against Germany in the First Morocco Crisis of 1905. Once again, it seemed a European war might spring from the most trivial of colonial causes.

After the First Morocco Crisis in 1905, the division in Europe became apparent, and alliance politics took precedence over the traditional congress system. This was made particularly clear with British fears of its own decline and the rise of Germany, particularly regarding the naval race. This opened the way for binding alliances both in Europe and abroad, starting with the Triple Entente, which caused a great fear of encirclement among German decision-makers. The Triple Entente was an “association between Great Britain, France, and Russia, the nucleus of the Allied Powers in World War I. It developed from the Franco Russian alliance that gradually developed and was formalized in 1894, the Anglo French Entente Cordiale of 1904, and an Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907, which brought the Triple Entente into existence. As feared, the unbalanced situation that arose from the First Moroccan Crisis deepened with the 1908 Bosnian crisis.

The Bosnia Crisis showed how the European states system could be drawn into a much larger war through a Balkan spark. Though things cooled in the Balkans in the immediate years after 1908, yet another crisis in Morocco brought the great powers of Europe close to war. The Second Morocco Crisis, also known as Agadir Crisis, was another milestone on the road to the First World War.

Before the July Crisis of 1914, the First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912-1913 once again revealed that region’s potential to drag the great powers into a broader confrontation. It was the final withdrawal of the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, which seemed to encourage more Russian intervention, that dismembered the last remnants of Bismarck’s system of checks and balances. With this gone, the European Concert had no safety mechanism on which to rely. Though the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary on June 28, 1914 by Serbian nationalist-anarchist Gavrilo Princip was a sui generis incident, the erosion of the European system since 1904 had removed too many barriers to potential armed conflict (MacMillan, 2014:27- 26). Unlike like the other two crises, developments generated in the Balkans caused a chain reaction this time.

Other Main Causes of the First World War

There were also other main causes that led to the outbreak of the war in 1914. These were militarism and armaments, nationalism, and imperialism.

Militarism and Armaments: The outbreak of the First World War has attracted many scholars and researchers since 1914. Although many of these initial studies reflected state-led perspectives, it was not long before understanding the underlying and immediate causes of war became the main objective for many researchers, rather than simply justifying one belligerent’s behavior over another. As such, militarism and armaments became one of the central arguments. This rests on the claim that the pre-war state apparatus and minds of the era’s key decision-makers in Europe became gradually more militarized. Militarism, along with the glorification of national heroism, had nearly everyone under its spell. In this context, the practice of mass popular conscription since the French Revolution was a major milestone. Its combination with nationalism, another relatively recent phenomenon, was lethal.

Industrialization was also transforming European society, not to mention the war. Massive production rates and economic expansion greatly enhanced the scale of most states’ military buildups. By the end of the 19th century, nearly European state treated its capacity to arm as an extension of its power, especially when it came to naval armaments.

Nationalism: The emergence of nationalism after the French Revolution and its spread throughout Europe during the Napoleonic Wars has long been a problematic subject for European politicians. On the one hand, the idea of self-determination and formation of nation-states was driven by major demographic changes, particularly massive migration from rural to urban areas. Selfdetermination is “The idea that each national group has the right to establish its own national state. It is most often associated with the tenets of Wilsonian internationalism and became a key driving force in the struggle to end imperialism.”

The development of industrial technologies and the overwhelming power of science and recent scientific discoveries had also European societies and politicians to believe in human superiority and mankind’s dominance over nature. The ideas of Charles Darwin, bastardized by Herbert Spencer, also began to argue that the survival of species—and later peoples—rested on constant competition and elimination. Before long, Social Darwinism was hugely popular in the minds of European diplomats, soldiers, and politicians that had grown to believe that some nations are bound by nature to rule and survive, while others are destined to perish or serve Social Darwinism is the theory that human groups and races are subject to the same laws of natural selection as Charles Darwin had perceived in plants and animals in nature. According to the theory, which was popular in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the weak were diminished and their cultures delimited while the strong grew in power and in cultural influence over the weak.

Imperialism: With newly industrialized states bound to secure greater supplies of raw materials to maintain a high production capacity, imperialism quickly came to be seen as a leading means of seizing, controlling, or finding new markets for their products. The construction of the railroads and granting of economic privileges to less developed countries also helped create and sustain new markets, both of which further incensed imperialistic attitudes and foreign policies. One of the most important arguments for the imperialistic origins of the First World War came from Vladimir Lenin, who described the war as one of class struggle. Defining imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, he claimed that the recession-ravaged economies of Europe had come under the control of great industrialists, capitalists, and bankers seeking new markets and raw materials.

The Outbreak of the First World War and Its Development

The escalation that started with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 led to mobilization in July. By August 1, every great power but Britain was at war. When news of the German note to Belgium, which demanded safe passage of their armies across Belgian territory, was refused, the British decided to intervene on behalf of the latter, a neutral state whose independence it had guaranteed since the 1830s. After the refusal, Britain warned Germany not to invade Belgium. When Berlin ignored this, Britain declared war on Germany. Germany began the war with great speed. Employing the Schlieffen Plan, which proposed attacking through neutral Belgium in order to take out the French as quickly as possible before moving against Russia, the German high command desperately wanted to avoid a two-front war.

Schlieffen Plan: “The German pre-1914 plan for a preemptive military offensive against France, which would involve troops passing through neutral Belgium. It is named after the German army chief of staff, General Alfred von Schlieffen.”

By the end of November, the frontline in France was stabilized from the Channel Sea to the Swiss border, a line of approximately 500 miles, a burden shared by the French and British armies. When the Ottoman Empire joined the war in November on the side of the Central Powers, Russia’s position became more precarious, as the Ottomans closed the straits to the Black Sea, seriously damaging the link between the Entente Powers. Central Powers refer to the coalition of states during the First World War that consisted of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. The Central Powers were defeated by the Entente Powers at the end of the war. Entente Powers, also known Allies or Allied Powers, refer to the coalition of states during the First World War fought against the Central Powers.

In the final days of 1914, expectations for a short war had all but vanished. The battleground in the west had somehow stabilized, but continued to rage over a vast geography spreading from Eastern Europe to the Caucasus and Middle East. By 1915, each side thought they had found a solution to the first problem. While Germany shifted to a war economy aimed at utilizing the entire economy’s output for the military, the Entente powers tried to improve their industrial output and import more goods from the United States. Each side planned major offensives. The major Entente offensive aimed at the Turkish Straits was the Gallipoli Campaign (Çanakkale Battles). Though the initial naval attack failed, fighting on this front lasted until January 1916, when the Turks prevailed.

In March 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, and an interim government came to power under the leadership of social democrat Alexander Kerensky. At Kerensky’s insistence, Russia honored her alliances and remained in the war, but the Russian army was in shambles, and after a series of drawbacks a great amount of land was lost to the German summer offensives. In November 1917 (October in the Julian calendar), Bolsheviks under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin brought down the Kerensky government with a swift coup and seized power in Petrograd, plunging Russia into a bloody civil war that would last until 1922. Bolsheviks originally in 1903 a faction led by Lenin within the Russian Social Democratic Party, over time the Bolsheviks became a separate party and led the October 1917 revolution in Russia. After this ‘Bolsheviks’ was used as a shorthand to refer to the Soviet government and communists in general. With Russia out of the picture, fighting on the Eastern Front virtually ended with the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between the new Bolshevik government and the Central Powers in 1918.

It was evident that the course of the war had effectively destroyed the old ways of European diplomacy, and the belligerents lacked the necessary links to negotiate an end to hostilities. It was in that sense that US President Woodrow Wilson declared his famous Fourteen Points in January 1918 to constitute a basis for post-war peace negotiations.

The Impact of the First World War Upon the International System

The First World War was a major shock to the international system, which destroyed its structure and invalidated the old norms and values of European politics. As the European concert and balance of power proved too weak to prevent or stop a major continental war, almost every majör power felt the need for a new institutional model of international politics.

The First World War had been the greatest conflict then known to mankind: the soldiers, supplies, and casualties it elicited were greater than anything seen before. Though other conflicts had also had a global scope, nothing could match the First World War in intensity. Half of Europe became a battlefield, and millions of civilians as well as soldiers suffered the consequences. And this was hardly limited to Europe: The Middle East, Far East, and Africa also became violently contested fronts.

Though a strong political movement for women’s rights had existed before the war, the war intensified women’s fight for equal rights. As men were taken from factories, women were integrated into the labor force. The more their contribution to civilian life became visible, the more they fought for equal rights. The international system was also transformed economic terms. The US now exported most of the commodities sought on the international market, and the war’s end left the victorious states in huge debt to the US. In order to fund these debts, the victors demanded a great sum of reparations from the defeated, which in turn put serious strain on the post-war international system throughout the 1920s.

The End of the First World War and Peace Treaties

During the war, civilian administrators were in a secondary position to soldiers, no matter the regime. By its end, however, civilian politicians once again had a voice in the policy-making process. The armistices signed with the Central Powers ended hostilities, and the quest for peace began under the Anglo-American misnomer to call the First World War “the war to end all wars”. As such,the Paris Peace Conference was convened on January 18, 1919 in order to shape the content and terms of post-war peace settlements with the defeated countries, namely Germany, Austria- Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.

However, differences between the victors began to appear almost immediately. For starters, the conference was chaired by a committee called “the Council of Ten,” which was composed of two delegates from each power: Britain, France, Italy, the US, and Japan, the chief victors of the Entente. Within this council, Britain, France, Italy, and the United States were represented by Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau, Vittorio Orlando, and Woodrow Wilson, respectively. However, any mutual accord was short-lived.

When Wilson asked the US Congress for a declaration of war in April 1917, he already had a US-dominated peace process in mind. However, he quickly found himself outmaneuvered by Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Though they in theory agreed with his Fourteen Points, they whittled with the text so much that they had scarcely any relevance by the end. Despite the fact that secret treaties were prohibited by Wilson’s Fourteen Points, the territories received from the defeated states via the peace treaties had long been determined within the framework of previously signed secret agreements. Arrangements made for the Ottoman Empire, for example, had been determined during the war.

On July 28, 1919, the first peace agreement was signed with Germany in the famous Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. It was here that Alsace- Lorraine was returned to France, and the Eupen and Malmedy regions ceded by Germany to Belgium. Germany also lost territory in the East, as the new state of Poland was to include Posen and certain West Prussian lands. The Treaty also imposed restrictions on the German army. Later that autumn, the Treaty of Neuilly was signed between the Allied powers and Bulgaria on November 27, 1919. As a result, Bulgaria ceded Dobruja to Romania, West Macedonia to the newly created kingdom of Yugoslavia, and Western Thrace to Greece. The Bulgarian army was not to exceed 20.000 soldiers. On June 4, 1920, the Treaty of Trianon was signed with Hungary, now an independent state after the dismantling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The treaty the Allies had planned regarding to the Ottoman Empire was postponed until the rest were concluded, mainly because of the secret agreements made regarding the fact of the Ottoman Empire during the course of the war. For this reason, a conference was convened in San Remo, Italy in April of 1920 to reconcile each party’s position. On August 10, 1920, the Treaty of Sevres was signed between the Allies and Ottoman representatives. With Sevres, the Ottoman Empire would lose all of its land except a small corner confined to Istanbul and Central Anatolia. Considering the small and landlocked area left for the Turkish population after the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire, a great discontent arose among them that eventually turned into a mass nationalist independence movement under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal. With the victory of Turkey at the end of the Turkish National War of Independence, the Treaty of Sèvres was invalidated once and for all. When the Lausanne Peace Treaty was signed on July 24, 1923, a lasting peace was finally achieved between the Allies and the newly founded Turkish Republic. Turkey achieved irrevocable political and economic independence and membership in the international community.

From a macro perspective, the League of Nations was formed to ensure the endurance of the international system engendered by the peace, but was soon dominated by Britain and France. Under these circumstances, fascism and authoritarian ideas found a particularly receptive audience in the revisionist states before long.