Every Great Power Fought World War One For A Different Reason
At least among the Great Powers who declared at the start.
There’s a nice, simple throughline narrative for World War Two: A bunch of countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, the USSR) wanted to conquer lots of territory. The countries they tried to push around didn’t like it and formed a coalition to stop them. Add in the thieves’ quarrel in 1941 and remember there were some countries that joined up with the bad guys out of fear, and you’ve got a nice, simple story that tells you why it started and how it ended.
World War One was not like that. There’s a simple narrative that goes in the textbooks, sure. But the narrative is about how the war went, not how it started. The narrative is the murderous grinding of trench warfare and the failure of every attempt to break the stalemate - but there’s no equivalent story to explain the start of the war. People telling the story in as little space as possible tend to handwave the question of why they went to war; they talk about interlocking networks of alliances and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, but without explaining why shooting one Austrian sent half the planet into war. Giving an explanation is something that Barbara Tuchman got a Pulitzer for boiling down to only one book. I’m going to see if I can do it in one essay.
So. World War Two was a product of the failures of World War One; that, too, is simple. World War One is similarly a product of the failures of the Congress of Vienna, and the Congress of Vienna came out of the fact that at least once every fifty years, the Great Powers of Europe would get together to fight a really huge war. After the Napoleonic Wars1 the Great Powers sent representatives to Vienna to try to just make the wars stop. The Congress of Vienna negotiated a long-term peace settlement in Europe designed to minimize war and revolution. It took about a century and a lot of specific incentives for it to collapse badly enough that Great Power Wars returned to Europe. When the spark finally came (as described in my previous post), each of the five Great Powers that began the war had its own reason why it preferred to fight here and now rather than let the Austrians invade Serbia.
Austria: When a Bosnian assassin murdered the heir to the Austrian throne, the Austrians saw red. They knew the Serbian government had equipped the assassin (even if they couldn’t prove it) and they wanted blood.
They didn’t act on their rage, though, not immediately. The Russians had guaranteed the independence of Serbia, and so they knew the invasion might provoke the Great War that everyone feared - an industrial killing ground. Could the Austrians really do this to the world? Would their allies support them?
Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, head of the Austrian general staff, thought they could do it, and, indeed, had to.2 The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a multiethnic state in an age of nationalism, founded on no particular principle other than that it consisted of the territories the house of Hapsburg had happened to accumulate. The Serbian attempt to detatch the Empire’s South Slavic population to form a separate state threatened its entire reason for existence - the Serbs wouldn’t stop their terrorism until they were crushed or got what they wanted, and if they could get all the South Slavic lands through terrorism, wouldn’t everyone else copy them? Wouldn’t this just open the door to Hungarian and Italian and Czech separatists and so destroy the Empire? And therefore the Serbs had to be crushed.
Hotzendorf also had another reason, a really stupid one. After his wife’s death, he’d fallen in love with Virginia von Reininghaus, an Italian aristocrat. She liked him back, but she was married with six children and she didn’t like him nearly enough to leave them behind. Somehow the sixty-year-old general concluded that she’d leave her family for him if he was a glorious war hero, and so he assured everyone that he had brilliant strategic plans for a victory within six weeks and there was nothing to worry about - as long as Germany would back them up, they could declare war without worrying about Russia or France.
France: In 1870, Bismarck (chief minister of Prussia) was partway through uniting the German states in one nation. What he needed was a war that would unite them all, and helpfully the French were extremely opposed to unification3 and would be easy to push over the line to war. Bismarck therefore arranged for two summaries of a meeting between the French ambassador to Prussia and the Prussian king to be released, one in French and one in German. In the French one, word choice implied the Prussian king insulted the French ambassador; in the German one, it similarly implied the French ambassador insulted the King of Prussia. The French newspapers flew into a rage and demanded war, which the Prussians gathered a vast coalition of German states for and quickly won.4
After the war, the new German empire imposed humiliating peace terms on the French. As well as demanding reparations, they annexed the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine on the grounds that they had a sizable German population.5 The French were furious, and in their rage, plotted revenge.
The one thing all French political parties could agree on was that the war would one day resume and when it did they wanted their land back. French textbooks for children explained that the reason their country had unusually severe conscription policies was that they needed them to have the numbers to get back Alsace-Lorraine one day. They were willing to ally with anyone else to get revenge against Germany, even old enemies like Russia and Britain. When the time came that a war with Germany would break out, the French were the most eager member of the anti-German coalition.
Germany: Bismarck had known that he was making an enemy of France, but so long as he only had one enemy he wasn’t too worried - Germany beat France in the Franco-Prussian War, and now France had two fewer provinces. Bismarck’s top priority was therefore to keep Germany friends with everyone else to avoid any coalition against him forming. He wasn’t Emperor, though, and held his appointment only at the monarch’s pleasure. When the king he’d served died, Bismarck was swiftly fired by his grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who wanted to do his own diplomacy.
Bismarck had been a great statesman and diplomat, but Wilhelm II was one of the worst diplomats the world has ever known. Think Trump, but more. His entire reign was an endless stream of boasts, threats and gaffes that enraged all of his neighbors. Bismarck had thought a colonial empire irrelevant to Germany’s needs; Wilhelm thought Germany was so great it deserved an enormous sphere of influence, vast numbers of colonies and a huge fleet. By the time he’d been in power twenty years, Bismarck’s network of alliances was in tatters and the only great power still sticking with Germany was the Austro-Hungarian Empire. When the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated, therefore, the German leadership thought that if they didn’t back the Austrians up, they would have no alliances left and a French-led coalition would destroy them at its leisure.
There was one other reason. The German general staff had been planning the next war since the last one ended, mathematically calculating optimal attack routes and ratios of state strength. They were (correctly) confident Russia would be on the other side, and by their calculations the ratio of Austro-German strength to Franco-Russian strength was it its apex in 1914. If the war broke out in even so little as four years, the Russians would have stronger military industries and a more complete railroad network, allowing them to put larger, better-equipped armies into the field much faster and to supply them more reliably. The general staff told the Emperor that now was the time to fight if they had to fight, and the German government gave the Austrians a blank check. It was time to fight the French and the Russians.
Russia: The first and foremost thing to understand about the Russian government is that Tsar Nicholas II was very bad at his job, and the second was that he was not secure on his throne. Russia possessed vast tracts of land, immense natural resources and a huge population, but it did not possess capable leaders, as the Russo-Japanese War would demonstrate.
Russia and Japan were both trying to build their own spheres of influence in northern China and Korea, and the Russian government wanted a quick, easy victory to bolster their domestic reputation and thought the Asians would be pushovers. Their racism blinded them to the fact that the Japanese were quite as modern as they were, excellent fighters and were able to supply their troops in Korea and Manchuria directly from the sea, instead of needing to ship supplies across more than five thousand miles of rail. The Russian government told its subjects the war would be easy and were then beaten on sea and on land, leaving the Russian people disgusted and outraged. If the Tsar couldn’t even win this war, how incompetent was he? Tsar Nicholas was forced to grant his subjects a parliament to quiet them down, and while it had little power this was a worrying sign of how much support the government had lost.
They couldn’t afford to back down again. If any of their allies or client states needed a hand, the Russians would have to back them up, or Nicholas might lose control of his own government. Besides, it’s not like the Russians would ever lose a war. God would help Nicholas if he ever really needed it, right? The war would be a disaster for Russia, in spite of everything France and Britain could do.
Britain:
Britain had traditionally supported Austria and Germany against France, France being the old enemy, but Britain’s first and foremost loyalty was self-preservation. Self-preservation meant being the world’s leading naval power - whoever it had to ally with or against. The official rule the British government made was that it had to have a navy bigger than the two leading non-British powers combined.
So when Germany decided it was now the world’s leading country which deserved the world’s biggest fleet, this really pissed the British government off. Every time the Germans built a battleship the British would need to build one, too, and this was a huge drain on the treasury. The Anglo-German special relationship (dating back to Frederick the Great!) went to pieces as the British navy started building a navy not just to defend the home islands, but to beat the leading rival naval power, Germany.
This didn’t mean they would go to war, though. The British military planners hated the Germans and discussed war plans with the French against them, but Britain wasn’t run by the Admiralty, it was run by a Parliamentary government elected by universal suffrage. Would the British people actually support war with Germany to support France and Russia and Serbia? Wouldn’t they rather just live in peace? When declarations of war started to fly, the British government dithered instead of declaring.
Then German troops marched, and the British had another reason for war. Just as Britain had always tried to make sure it has the strongest navy, so it had always kept a wary eye on the Strait of Dover - the narrowest part of the English Channel. British foreign policy had oriented around making sure whoever controlled the key Channel ports from which an invasion could be launched was either friendly or powerless, preferably both. They had finally accomplished their goal in 1830 when the London Conference established an independent Belgian state6, its independence guaranteed by every one of the Great Powers of Europe. An independent Belgium would never have the naval power to invade Great Britain, and so the Brits could be safe so long as they kept a close eye on French Calais.
But the Germans looked at the narrow Franco-German border and saw that an invasion of France through Belgium would be much simpler and an easier way to get to Paris, ignoring the rough forests near the Franco-German border and letting them fight on the broad plains of northern France. The British public was outraged by this blatant aggression against a neutral country - Serbia might have done something wrong (who knew?) and Russia and France were making war on Germany, but what had Belgium done? The realpolitik of the German military planners met the idealism of the British voting public and hit a wall, and the war was on.
More countries would join the war, afterwards. Italy wanted Austrian Trento and Trieste, the Ottomans and Americans revenge7, the Romanians Austrian Transylvania. But the six powers - five Great Powers and Serbia - had each had their own reasons for it, and those reasons had been enough to break the Treaty of Vienna, end the long peace and plunge the world into the horrors of the worst war in European history.
Which lasted ten years, 1805-1815, more if you count the French Revolutionary Wars, and laid the continent waste.
Others offered most of the same arguments, though he, being the guy in charge of planning the war, had a greater role than many.
For largely realpolitik reasons.
Some historians - this may be the current majority belief, I’m not sure - think that this is the version of the story Bismarck deliberately spread to make himself look invincible, and war was inevitable anyway. I’m not convinced they’re wrong and I’m not convinced they’re right; the tinder was gathered, Bismarck lit it and the only question is if someone would have scattered it without him.
I don’t know if they were majority French or majority German; the last time I saw wild speculation it suggested Alsace was majority German and Lorraine was majority French?
Belgian had formerly been Dutch (1814-1830), then French (1795-1814), then Austrian (1714-1797), then Spanish (1556-1714), then It’s Complicated.
On different countries, for different and complicated reasons.
Excellent summary of why the war happened. Some additional factors that I think were relevant were omitted, but realistically. If you included every relevant thing, it would fill up a library.
Part of the reason war happened is because the Austrian crown Prince was also the leader of the peace faction in Austria. His murder did not just make them sea red, it also dramatically weakened the peace faction in government and left them leaderless. Also part of the reason Russia was unwilling to back down was because they had already backed down in 1908 and doing that again, would just be an unacceptable loss of face and might make their allies in Southeast Europe Begin to worry that they were a paper tiger unwilling to back up their support with armies. Also just about everybody appears to have dramatically overestimated the power of Russia and I think it was probably a huge surprise to the government How badly the army performed. Not that the central powers didn’t also have a bunch of negative surprises.
I think that while Britain entering the war, so early was probably because of Belgium, it was pretty much guaranteed that they would at the very least be hostile to Germany, even if they didn’t enter the war so early. Germany was the leading continental power, and Britain has always had a dislike of one power being dominant on the continent, which is why they famously try to always maintain a balance of power on the continent. Even back in the 1870s, they made it clear that Germany taking hostile action against France was not acceptable because while they still had a good relationship with Germany, Germany, defeating France and weakening it would just leave it too powerful. Victorious France was simply less of a threat than victorious Germany, even before the Germans decided to threaten everybody into ganging up on them. Even if the Germans did not attacked Belgium, I think Britain might very well Enter the war later, although that would likely be delayed by the fact that it will be France attacking Belgium, which Britain might not approve of although they would tolerate it better from France. also I am under the impression that the war could only have happened around this time because even in the previous decade, the French had made it clear that they would not join Russia in a war over something in Southeast Europe. And even five years later, Russia’s army would have grown large enough that Germany would be reluctant for such a war, not to mention that the commitment problem would have been solved by simple expediant of Russia already being too strong to stop. Of course, in that case, France and Russia might start things, but I think Britain would be more worried about this future Russia and also Germany was trying to improve relations with Britain, although they had not yet had much success. I also think with enough time, France might eventually reconcile itself to the territorial loss. Also, even without war, I don’t think the Russian government is long for the world as long as Nicholas is emperor. Social tensions in Russia were just far too high, and that guy was just a disastrous combination of against reform but also incompetent. Eventually, some crisis would happen and he would mess it up.
Honestly, World War I reminds me of your comment that states can just be stupid. It’s not just the fact that the two sides could never reach a mutually acceptable arrangement while they were wasting so much resources, but also the fact that Austria and Russia were so heavily involved in starting it when they were the least stable great powers, and hence worst positioned to survive the pressures of war. And in terms of stability, I think Germany would probably be number three in terms of least stable, although that might not be so obvious, unlike in the case of Austria and Russia. Honestly, the world war was pretty much a disaster for everybody involved, except maybe Japan.
I enjoyed this quite a lot! I would like to make a minor correction that the UK did not have Universal Manhood Suffrage until 1918. In 1914 they still limited voting rights by amount of property held or by the amount of annual rent paid. Amusingly the German Empire had written Universal Suffrage into it's constitution. I don't think this impacts the point much as the majority of people in the UK could vote and , while the Germans had relatively free and fair elections, the executive was in no way responsible to the Reichstag.