Why do you think it was inevitable?
Alliance systems in and of themselves don't start war. The Anglo-German naval race was cooling down, not getting worse, at the time of the war, as the German government slowly came to the realization that competition along this line was futile. The Balkans were unstable because they had fought two major, region-changing wars immediately prior - after a short time they would settle down again. (And of course, periods of instability do not necessarily lead to Great Power wars - if the Powers cooperate in resolving the instability, they can actually lead to warmer relations in some cases. See the period after the Congress of Vienna, for instance.) And French revanchism is just as nebulous as any other nationalistic impulse - certainly not shared by all, and discarded by those who do profess themselves nationalists when it becomes profitable to do so.
I really don't want to derail this thread, but I will
Liberalism isn't from communism. Liberalism is from...well...liberalism. Which is from Adam Smith
Fascism isn't from communism, in fact it's against communism. The Nazis killed communists and Mussolini was kicked out of the Socialist Party.
Communism is the ideal which is to be brought about by socialism. One didn't "come from" another.
Well, considering that von Tirpitz's funds were starting to be cut off and that the 1912 bill had decreased naval spending, and that von Tirpitz's cunning strategy of creating a fleet that wasn't being used much outside of war and wouldn't be of use in a war in order to increase his own personal power and autonomy was becoming increasingly apparent to the Reichstag deputies, I think the slowdown would have continued. The decline of all three states - the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian - sounds like a retroactive statement to me. All states were increasing in power before 1914, and for the Ottomans in particular, now that the troublesome minorities in the Balkans had largely been jettisoned, a slightly leaner, more powerful state was being constructed. Ottoman performance in the war, while never to be overstated by those such as the many, many admirers of Mustafa Kemal, wasn't bad at all for an allegedly dying empire... Anyway, it's all too easy to read "decline" into the history of a state prior to its collapse, but it is ultimately a teleological path that has no place in history; some states, believe it or not, do collapse through exogenous shock with no fatal cleavages on the inside, such as the Visigothic state, the Tsarist empire, the Achaemenid empire, and the Habsburg one. For these allegedly declining empires to restore some form of stability to the peninsula, a cooperative agreement on the whole thing was needed, such as the Austro-Russian agreement of 1897, which had proved so successful in putting the Balkans on ice for a decade. There's no reason that another cooperative agreement along those lines would be impossible in the decade after. "Official policy of the republic" did not prevent the Far Eastern Triplice from forming even after von Bismarck was out of office, and certainly did not prevent the Ferry administrations from acting in concert with Germany during von Bismarck's tenure.
So it wasn't inevitable?LightSpectra said:
