The Causes of the First World War

[historix69]

I would just like to point out that the USSR did not decolonize; it simply fell apart. And while Russia may have lost various outlying territories, the only - and largest - area it colonized it still holds: Siberia.

Siberia has a population of around 40 million people with a rather low population density of about 3 people / km², comparable with Australia. 95% of population are slavic and indo-european, e.g. Russian, Ukrainian, German ... so there is probably no base for a de-colonisation of indigene people in Siberia.
(Situation might change when millions of illegal chinese settlers will cross the border and populate Siberia in the commimg years.)

 

[historix69]

Back to the topic of start of WW1 :

When the US as a Great Power/Super Power invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, there was no protest.

In 1914 Germany, Russia and AH were Great Powers, Serbia was a minor Power.

I do have the impression that the actions/events which led to WW1 are judged by different standards, influenced by national interests of the entente :

Destabilizing of AH by Serbia : Ok
Assassination of the Arch-Duke by Serbian supported terrorists : Ok
Austrian ultimatum against Serbia and Declaration of War on Serbia : not Ok
Russian mobilization against AH to support Serbia (and possibly) destroy AH : Ok
German support for AH : not Ok

 

[Lexicus]

I agree, to a large extent. The main difference is that Britain, France, Russia were the 'tier 1' powers , so to speak, so their interest was in maintaining the existing system while Germany's was in disrupting it.
Any of the other powers would likely have done the same thing, because all the powers were playing the same game.

As Traitorfish said the ruling class as a whole is to blame, more than any single country.

 

[Flying Pig]

I'm not sure that that doesn't excessively lump people together. I know you'll rarely find people willing to stand up for the ruling classes when they are unfairly criticised, but I find it difficult to believe that the ruling classes of (say) Spain, Britain, Germany and Italy were all equally to blame. You might as well blame 'the Europeans' - yes, that's strictly correct, but we normally want to be a bit more precise. Even then, what do we mean by 'ruling classes'? Normally people use that to go down the Marxist route, and then you have to argue that the factory-owning voters of Britain were the main culprits for the war, but the factory-working voters were not, despite both groups enthusiastically supporting it. Saying that one was an entirely active agent and so can be blamed, while the other was simply the victim of false consciousness and so cannot, seems like a double standard to me.

 

[Lexicus]

For that matter, to speak of the "ruling class" of any individual country probably lumps people in together unfairly.

These are just analytic frames, not statements about ontological reality (at least, I don't consider them statements about ontological reality).

As I've said, I believe innonimatu's analysis is basically correct- German ambition on the Continent presented a threat to British and French interests that could not be ignored. I just don't think that the Germans deserve any more blame for being willing to start a war over their ambitions, than the French or British do for being willing to fight a war to preserve their own positions. All these countries were playing the same stupid game, and I think that subsequent history (particularly the aftermath of World War II) shows that in terms of policy, changing the game was a more productive approach than blaming individual players.

 

[historix69]

I agree, to a large extent. The main difference is that Britain, France, Russia were the 'tier 1' powers , so to speak, so their interest was in maintaining the existing system while Germany's was in disrupting it.

see
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

If you check numbers for 1913, Germany had already passed most of the european Tier 1 Great Powers in regard to population, industrialization or literacy except for the missing colonial empire. Great Britain still had higher per capita industrialization but Germany had more population and its iron/steal production was 17,6 million tons compared to british 7,7 million tons.

[B]Population 1913[/B]

Russia : 175,1 million
USA : 97,3
Germany : 66,9
Austria-H : 52,1
Japan : 51,3
Great Britain : 45,6
France : 39,7
Italy : 35,1

[B]Total Industrial Potential 1913[/B]
(Great Britain 1900 = 100)

USA : 298,1
Germany : 137,7
Great Britain : 127,2
Russia : 76,6
France : 57,3
Austria-H : 40,7
Japan : 25,1
Italy : 22,5

 

[Lexicus]

Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

Ironically I read that book a matter of months ago. Kennedy supports my main point here, that Germany was the up-and-coming contender and the Entente represented the defending champions.
I was not talking in terms of actual 'hard' power but more in terms of prestige. Germany had left Russia and France in the dust in terms of production, population, etc. before WW1 started.

 

[Flying Pig]

I suggest that by 1914 - and certainly by 1939 - a large amount of the power that Britain, and I suspect the other colonial empires, had was based on prestige and reputation rather than 'hard power'. That doesn't mean that it wasn't power all the same, mind you.

 

[Lexicus]

Well WW1 accelerated the process of the US becoming the dominant economic power.
I think the US surpassed Britain's share of world manufacturing in 1916 though I could be wrong about that.

 

[historix69]

see
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

[B]Relative Share of World Industrial Production 1880 / 1900 / 1913
[/B]
Great Britain : 22,9% / 18,5% / 13,6%
USA : 14,7% / 23,6% / 32,0%
Germany : 8,5% / 13,2% / 14,8%

Russia : 7,6% / 8,8% / 8,2%
France : 7,8% / 6,8% / 6,1%
Austria-H : 4,4% / 4,7% / 4,4%
Italy : 2,5% / 2,5% / 2,4%

In 1913 USA was 1st, Germany 2nd and Great Britain already 3rd place.

 

[Flying Pig]

Second by more than a factor of two, which I think is worth making obvious.

 

[Tahuti]

It's noteworthy how back then very few if anyone were musing how the US would take over the UK because of its higher GDP, compared to today's excitement/fear of China's eclipse of the US.

 

[r16]

the colonies weren't British only in name , if you allow yourself to see things in odd coloured spectacles .

 

[historix69]

As far as I know the British used their colonies in 17th to 19th century mostly for producing agrarian goods and exploiting resources which were shipped to the UK, refined and then shipped back to the colonies to be sold there, for the wealth of the english upper class. So british industry was probably concentrated in the UK and negligible in the colonies around 1900 and industrialization in most colonies was delayed into 20th century.

 

[r16]

oh , that's my quite gibberish way of saying that London had extreme confidence in using US assets when they were required .

 

[Kyriakos]

The Goeben and the Breslau is to blame for the FULL war



Ie the germans again, as usual.

 

[r16]

ah yes , the fault of Churchill and the lot for their forthcoming massive victory , as if they just couldn't agree to divide the Ottomans after the surrender of Germany .

 

[Yeekim]

No, it was an outright german land grab. Self-determination my ass.

Indeed. At least for Latvia and Estonia, self-determination required kicking out Germans by force.

The modern nations of Belorussia and the Ukraine are even today a bad joke, or if you want to be very optimistic "nations in construction" in term of identity.

Belorussia and Ukraine both have their problems, but lack of national identity certainly does not count among them. Please don't echo Russian chauvinist propaganda.

 

[Dachs]

Yeah, Dance of the Furies was great, wasn't it? I don't know if you saw but Mike just published an article with Robert Citino in "The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies" (BOSS). I haven't read it yet (I'm not really a Bruce Springsteen fan), but it made me chuckle anyway.

I think you're a bit too harsh on Annika. I don't think it is at all fair to say she 'doesn't understand' military minutiae (at least I don't recall ever feeling that way reading her Moltke book). On the other hand, I don't have any time for Zuber (that may be because I'm in the UK, and we've mostly had a negative reaction to his work).

For me it is simple: would France have ever invaded Germany? No. Nothing in French planning suggested a pre-emptive war under any circumstances. Far less so Britain or little Belgium. You know who was planning on a pre-emptive war? Germany. Without German aggression the First World War never happens. Absolute worst case is yet another (and possibly bigger) Balkan war. Obviously you have many complex phenomena taking place, both in Europe and around the world (the colonial context is absolutely key) but at the end of the day none of the other issues or flash-points amount to war without Germany taking the plunge. At least, that's my opinion.

For full disclosure I work on France, so that no doubt colours my view of all this.

Springsteen is the artist for Historians of a Certain Age, I suppose. It's the same with sportswriters, bizarrely enough. This forum's very own downtown can attest to that.

Zuber's one of those authors whose tone makes him really difficult for most academics to engage with. He's very dismissive of opinions that don't mesh with his own; some of the things he has to say about other historians in Inventing the Schlieffen Plan and The Real German War Plan are frankly pretty savage (to say nothing of how he treats many sources written by people who are fortunately dead), and he's combative enough to go on years-long academic tirades about his opinions in the journals. I've never attended conferences or met the man personally but it's easy to see how his writing is off-putting. It's like reading Geoff Wawro on anything to do with Austria(-Hungary).

At the same time, it's hard for me to discount the actual content of his work because he's shown that an incredible amount of information on German war planning and on the fighting in 1914 is based on poor sources. His efforts to incorporate German sources into the narrative have been particularly valuable, especially regimental histories and things like Krafft's Sixth Army Aufmarschanweisung. I think that Zuber's shown that the Schlieffen Plan narrative that was sustained in various forms by Groener, Ritter, Fischer, and others doesn't hold water. As I understand it, Holmes, his sparring partner, agrees with him, at the very least on that critical point.

On the subject of France, I have to disagree. I think that the correlation between French war planning and the outbreak of war is remarkably close. War broke out within a few years of France's adoption of an offensive war plan, and shortly after Russian and French mobilization coordination provided for immediate and synchronized offensives by both sides within a specific time frame after the beginning of mobilization. French troops mounted the first offensive of the war, in Alsace; French troops completed mobilization before the Germans did; the French offensives in the Ardennes and in Lorraine were the opening great battles of the war. The Great War is inseparable from the aggressive aims of the French government, to which it happily admitted then and since: the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland.

The German military was well aware of this, because it was one of the foundations of their war planning: if war broke out, they would not be able to fight the French outside of the fortress line unless the French had aggressive aims, and war would not occur unless the French had aggressive aims. In the event, the Germans were correct: the French army launched two offensives, which provided the Germans ample opportunity to destroy the French army outside of its fortresses, opportunities that the German field commanders promptly wasted in search of good ordinary victories.

I give the German discussions before the war about a preemptive strike the same amount of weight as I do the Russian and French discussions about carving up Austria-Hungary. They happened, sure. They also had an impact on state policy, in that people in government were aware that they had happened and that they were an option. But they did not actually cause the war, which I would not characterize as either a German preemptive war or a Russo-French attempt to dismember the Habsburg Empire.

Germany purposefully held out on mobilisation to appear like the victim. It was a politically calculated move. Nothing more.

This is difficult for me to credit as meaningful. On the one hand, Russia had already begun a secret mobilization on 25 July or even earlier; Germany did not even need to delay mobilization to have started late and corps headquarters intelligence instruments in East Prussia were aware of the Russian "period preparatory to war" a day after it started. On the other hand, I have a really hard time believing that mobilization was purely a politically calculated move because of how important the potential of stealing a march on the other side was. Furthermore, the pressure both Moltke and Falkenhayn were putting on the kaiser and Bethmann to declare mobilization, or at least an alert of imminent danger of war, in the last days of July, is also well-documented, as is Moltke's consternation at the delay imposed by the kaiser's attempts to negotiate with Britain.

But even if Germany's mobilization was delayed solely to create an advantageous political situation...so what? Delaying mobilization until after the other side has already begun to mobilize requires the other side to already begin to mobilize. If the whole thing was a trap for the Russians and French to make them look like the aggressors, the Russians and French could have avoided it by, y'know, not mobilizing. Yet they did mobilize, and started the countdown on an inevitable offensive against Germany.

 

[Pangur Bán]

I agree, to a large extent. The main difference is that Britain, France, Russia were the 'tier 1' powers , so to speak, so their interest was in maintaining the existing system while Germany's was in disrupting it.
Any of the other powers would likely have done the same thing, because all the powers were playing the same game.

This is surely the best explanation and level of analysis for general historical purposes. You have three establishment powers with big, healthy empires, and a newcomer that hadn't been 'unified' until the very late days of colonial aggrandizement but now that it was unified is the strongest power: the big kid with no sweets who arrived at the candy store too late, the prison bear with no cigarettes, etc. The bottom line is that Germany wanted what England, France and Russia weren't prepared to concede. A tension that had to be resolved somehow. Of course, there are different levels of analysis. You could put it down to at one end to a shooting, or to human greed or 'the Problem of Scarcity' at another.