LECTURE 2
ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Imperialism: The British wartime Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, later wrote that the nations of Europe "slithered over the brink" of war in 1914, meaning that the decisions to go to war emerged from a fog of miscalculation and muddle. Perhaps, but there was also an underlying logic to the decision-making. "Every belligerent in 1914 took up arms, either to repel a direct invasion of its territory, or to fulfill a precise obligation which could not be abandoned without shattering consequences to national prestige, morale, and interests" (Michael Howard). In other words, each of the Great Powers in the summer of 1914 made a calculation that ran something like this: by going to war, our country has a decent chance of remaining a Great Power; by refusing to take the risk of war, we will certainly forfeit our Great Power status. Better, therefore to wager on victory now than to accept a more or less rapid and irreversible decline. Each of the major players in the international system thought that an empire of some sort was an essential prerequisite for Great Power status.
"The immediate motives which led governments to decide to go to war in 1914 were not directly imperialist, but earlier imperialist policies had contributed to the frame of mind in which decisions were taken. For Russia, the lure of the Balkans, of Constantinople, and the Straits; for Germany vague aspirations to world hegemony; for England the preservation of the Empire at any cost; for the French Morocco–German ambitions, French grievances, Russian expansionism, British anxieties, Austrian fears–all combined in the decision that war was inevitable if vital national interests were to be preserved" (James Joll).
Nationalism: "The changes that took place in the map of Europe between 1859 and 1878 increased the opportunities for friction between the major powers and inflamed the resentments of minor ones. This process had been accelerated by the intense economic rivalry of the post-free trade era and the bitter competition for overseas colonies, which caused frequent crises from the 1880s onward, and by the growth of a new kind of nationalism, made possible by the spread of popular education and the birth of the yellow press–a nationalism that became increasingly ideological in nature and encouraged suspicion rather than understanding of other nations" (Gordon Craig). In other words, imperialist rivalries aroused nationalist passions in an age of mass politics. Political élites–particularly in Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia–hoped to consolidate their authority at home with an aggressive foreign policy.
Serbia, having wrested its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, was a relatively new state with large ambitions. Its leaders intended that Serbia should play the same role in the Balkans that Piedmont had played in Italy: unifying the peninsula at the expense of Austria. Serbia fought two wars in the Balkans in 1912-13, but these were not yet directed against Austria. The first war, which pushed the Ottomans out of one of their last footholds in the peninsula, was followed by one in which Serbia fought its neighbor Bulgaria for control of the territories the Ottomans had evacuated. The result was to double the size of Serbia, to the dismay of the Austrians. But the Austrians succeeded in denying Serbia access to the sea by insisting on the creation of Albania at a peace conference sponsored by the British. So Serbian nationalism was frustrated again by Austrian imperialism.
Diplomacy: "Because of mutual suspicion and insecurity, the powers became involved in alliance commitments much more extensive than at any time in their earlier history, and this created a contraposition of alliances that had none of the flexibility of those of the early 19th century. To prevent defections from their alliances, they were willing to make unreasonable commitments to their partners, which had the effect of putting the control of the alliances into the hands of the least responsible members" (Craig). Thus, the Germans backed the risky moves of the Austria-Hungary, while the Russians indulged the Serbs, and the French were determined to back the Russians. The Germans needed the Austrians to help them on their eastern flank should there ever be a war with the Russians. The Russians were committed to the Serbs not only as fellow Slavs, but also because the Balkan peninsula, with its proximity to the Black Sea and the Straits, was so important to their status as a great power. Having lost a war to the Japanese on their eastern flank in 1905, the Russians were more than ever committed to pursuing their interests on their southwestern flank. The French, facing the rapidly increasing power of Germany, badly needed Russian manpower to balance the Germans. And the Russians needed French capital to fund their industrialization and railway construction.
Militarism:"Once Europe had entered the age of the million-man army, which it did after the general adoption of systems of universal conscription at the end of the 1870s, war became too complicated for the politicians to understand, let alone control. Every army now had its general staff system in which military technicians made war plans and mobilization schedules and schemes for logistical support and schedules for weapons development and testing that were bewildering and baffling to the layman; and in time of crisis the soldiers, called into conference, could be counted on to demand the immediate implementation of their plans and to argue that the alternative would be disaster" (Craig). The "use-them-or-lose-them" mentality of the soldiers meant that the normal processes of diplomatic negotiation and delay were overwhelmed by arguments of military urgency and expediency. Everyone remembered how the Prussians had overwhelmed the Austrians in 1866 and the French in 1870 because of their superior use of the railways to ferry large numbers of troops to the front with speed and efficiency.
Austria-Hungary had annexed the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, to the dismay of the Serbs and their Russian patrons. The Archduke's visit to the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 was a formal occasion and a sort of present to his wife (it was their wedding anniversary). But the day was also a national holiday in the Serbian national calendar (the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo). The assassin was a Serbian nationalist student, Gavrilo Princip, funded by the chief of Serbia's intelligence agency, Colonel Apis. In the Balkans, as we have seen, the declining imperialism of Austria-Hungary came into conflict with the aggressive nationalism of Serbia. The Austrians decided to use this opportunity to crush Serbian pretensions in the peninsula and to extinguish the threat of Slavic nationalism to Austro-Hungarian imperialism. They issued a harsh ultimatum to the Serbs, one of the conditions of which (a full investigation into the assassination by the Austrians) would have infringed on proud Serbia's sovereignty and led to the exposure of Serbia's involvement in the crime.
Meanwhile the Germans had given their alliance partner Austria-Hungary the green light to pursue a showdown with the Serbs. If the Serbs were humiliated without a war, that would be a victory for German power in the region as well. If the Serbs decided to fight, then German backing might intimidate that Russians, as it had done in 1908. But Great Powers do not like to retreat from the same threat more than once. The Russians knew, via interceptions of German cables, that the Germans had imperialist ambitions in the Middle East, where Russia had traditionally sought access to the sea at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. The Germans knew that the Russians were building railroads and increasing their military strength in anticipation of a showdown. Better to face the Russian threat now rather than later, when rapid Russian mobilization might threaten Germany's plan for a two-front war (against France in the west and Russia in the east).
That plan was the legacy of General Schlieffen, chief of the German general staff a decade earlier. It called for a swing through Belgium to knock out France in six weeks, followed by a shift to the eastern Front against Russia, which was supposed to mobilize much more slowly. This was "war by timetable," and it depended on the railroads to deliver millions of men to the fronts on strict schedules. For Germany, unlike the other powers, mobilization and war were identical.
Otto von Bismarck, the great Prussian-German chancellor of the 19th century, had done everything he could to avoid this situation by emphasizing a few general principles: (1) alliance with Austria, but no backing for Austria's ambitions in the Balkans (which were, he said, not worth the bones of a single German soldier); (2) friendship with Russia, which he pursued with secret treaties; (3) aloofness from the competition for overseas empire, which he regarded as a distraction rather than an essential national interest; and (4) the "rule of three"–i.e., never become dependent on a single ally, always have more than one. But Bismarck's successors had abandoned all of these principles, shifting from Realpolitik (the ruthless pursuit of a limited agenda) to Weltpolitik (the risky pursuit of an unlimited agenda of imperialist goals). For them imperialism had two functions: it would enable Germany to compete with other superpowers (Britain, and the burgeoning power of the United States and Russia), and it would cement the alliance at home between Prussian militarism and German heavy industry at the expense of democratic and socialist parties. But everything depended, in the event of a crisis, on the success of the Schlieffen Plan.
Admiral Tirpitz was almost as important as General Schlieffen in setting the stage for WWI. He had advocated construction of a great German navy for two reasons: (1) to force the British to take Germany seriously as an imperialist power; (2) to give contracts and funds to heavy industry and secure their backing for the policy of Weltpolitik. The great ships turned out to be useless in WWI, but the arms race helped to push the British into the camp of the French and the Russians. The Germans had hoped to have their showdown without involving Britain, but their invasion of Belgium (to which Britain had longstanding treaty obligations) and their threat to France were impossible for the British to ignore. In any case, the fundamental principle of British foreign policy for centuries had been to prevent a single European power from achieving hegemony over the continent. Hence, any activation of the Schlieffen plan was bound to turn a local crisis into a general European crisis.
In the years between the Bosnian crisis of 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War, four trends forced a reassessment and tightening of the alliance system in Europe. First, the further decline of Ottoman power and the expansion of Serbia threatened the Austrians and strengthened the resolve of the Russians to protect their interests and status by backing the Serbs. Second, there was a growing realization by many people in British government circles that German naval building was a threat to Britain's imperial interests. Third, the Germans were increasingly worried about the viability of their Austrian ally and their military plan for a two-front war. And they wanted to take some decisive action to break out of the "encirclement" that threatened them and to open up the possibilities for imperial expansion before the balance of power turned against them. Finally, the French were more than ever committed to their Russian alliance as the only way of balancing the power of the Germans. But in 1914, it was the Austrians and the Germans who took the risks that led to war.
The war was supposed to be determined by great sweeping offensives in a matter of months. But once the Schlieffen Plan failed it became a war of attrition. On the Western Front the defense, owing to the state of technology–the dominance of the machine gun on the battlefield, the primitive state of tanks and planes–prevailed, and the war bogged down in thousands of miles of trenches. Battles, the generals came to believe, would not be won by brilliant or subtle tactics, but rather by more men and bigger guns, a bit push to snap the enemy's front line. But there was no major breakthrough in the West for four years, and the extravagant expenditure of lives (more than 6000 per day, almost 10 million altogether) and of resources eventually caused empires and economies to collapse. The aftershocks–inflation, the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and of National Socialism–are all intricately bound up with the catastrophe of the Great War. The war dealt a terrible blow to the liberal civilization of the 19th century; it would require thirty years and many millions more lives before liberalism could recover. The great French socialist leader, Jean Jaurès, assassinated by a nationalist fanatic on the eve of the war, had predicted its outcome in 1905: "From a European war a revolution may spring up and the ruling classes would do well to think of this. But it may also result, over a long period, in crises of counter-revolution, of furious reaction, of exasperated nationalism, of stifling dictatorships, of monstrous militarism, a long chain of retrograde violence."
On the other hand, Adolf Hitler later recalled that when he heard the news of the outbreak of war, "I sank to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart that it had granted me the good fortune to be alive at such a time." And Hitler's reaction was not uncommon. Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer who, as a Jew would later become an exile from Hitler's Europe, remembered the feeling of fraternity among the crowd in Vienna: "Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning." For most Europeans (unlike Hitler) such feelings of exaltation would not survive the brutal experience of trench warfare.