The inevitability of WWI

[Lord Baal]

Moderator Action: Split off from this thread.

I don't think all history is inevitable. But WW1 and the WW2 clash between Japan and the US in the Pacific both probably were

WWI most certainly was NOT inevitable; in fact, it was very nearly completely avoided. Some sort of clash between Serbia and Austria-Hungary was pretty much inevitable, but that's probably it. As for WWII, it was inevitable so long as Hitler was in power. There was a pretty good chance until around May 1939 that the military resistance would overthrow him though. The successful occupation of Czechoslovakia and the refusal by the British and French of overtures from the German resistance sealed the coup attempt's fate though.

As for the incident under discussion, America going toe-to-toe with Japan in the Pacific; it was by no means inevitable, but it was very unlikely to be avoided. In Japan the military was setting policy - and seldom intelligently - while in Washington the British were pushing to get the US involved in the war for all they were worth, with many in FDR's own cabinet openly supporting them. FDR could possibly have avoided war with Japan, but it would have been very difficult, and not really worth the effort. Japan, after all, was not much of a threat.

 

[BuckyRea]

I don't think the Balkan zone of conflict necessarily had to be the spark. But when I say WW1 was "inevitable" I'm thinking of two underlying tensions that came to the surface in the 1910s.

The British-German conflict was, I think, heading in the direction of some kind of show down. It could've taken a few more years and it could've been triggered over Africa or over (more likely) competition for Middle Eastern oil, which is why Germany was getting so snuggly with Turkey and Britain so chummy with Persia. But German aspirations to replace England as Europe's dominant power and the Franco-Russian alliance's aspirations to stop them were together going to find some perfect storm to start fighting over.

The other trigger that wasn't going to wait was Russia. A big revolution was brewing there long before war conditions aggravated the situation. Russia's eventual collapse and descent to anarchy was going to have ripple effects. The resulting wealth of regional instabilities would have provided a host of trigger points for a general war.

 

[Tee Kay]

The other trigger that wasn't going to wait was Russia. A big revolution was brewing there long before war conditions aggravated the situation. Russia's eventual collapse and descent to anarchy was going to have ripple effects. The resulting wealth of regional instabilities would have provided a host of trigger points for a general war.

The Russian Revolution wasn't inevitable either.

 

[Dachs]

I don't think the Balkan zone of conflict necessarily had to be the spark. But when I say WW1 was "inevitable" I'm thinking of two underlying tensions that came to the surface in the 1910s.

The British-German conflict was, I think, heading in the direction of some kind of show down. It could've taken a few more years and it could've been triggered over Africa or over (more likely) competition for Middle Eastern oil, which is why Germany was getting so snuggly with Turkey and Britain so chummy with Persia. But German aspirations to replace England as Europe's dominant power and the Franco-Russian alliance's aspirations to stop them were together going to find some perfect storm to start fighting over.

The Anglo-German naval race died in 1912. Over the next two years, the UK and Germany cooperated profitably in several endeavors, including the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, and acted jointly to help defuse the crises surrounding the first two Balkan Wars. Contemporary authors regarded this as the effect of the two alliance system "leaders" using the system to promote stability. This is, of course, as much of a crock as the statement that the alliances promoted tensions; they only reduced everybody's options (not that having more diplomatic, military, and geopolitical options is a good or bad thing). Quite conveniently, one finds statements of "place in the sun" where one would expect them, and exhortations of working with the UK, not against it, where one would expect them too. Sometimes from the same people. Indeed, before the war, the noted industrialist and shipping magnate Hugo Stinnes was a dyed in the wool ultranationalist, and insisted to the Alldeutsche leaders that supremacy must be sought over Britain (preaching to the choir), but only during peace, as war would be devastating (which the ADV wasn't so keen on, they wanted a good destructive war). After war started, he immediately shifted gears and decided that the war would be good for business if he could adjust to the wartime situation, and had intimate relations with the German state's economic management teams through the war, even playing a role in the response to the 1923 Ruhr Crisis. There were always pressures for war and countervailing ones for peace (or, if you like it that way, vice versa).

Of course, more to the point, inevitability is so 1960s.

 

[BuckyRea]

Of course, more to the point, inevitability is so 1960s.

Ouch.

Uncle.

 

[Traitorfish]

The Anglo-German naval race died in 1912. Over the next two years, the UK and Germany cooperated profitably in several endeavors, including the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, and acted jointly to help defuse the crises surrounding the first two Balkan Wars. Contemporary authors regarded this as the effect of the two alliance system "leaders" using the system to promote stability. This is, of course, as much of a crock as the statement that the alliances promoted tensions; they only reduced everybody's options (not that having more diplomatic, military, and geopolitical options is a good or bad thing).

Isn't there a bit in Blackadder Goes Forth about that?

Blackadder: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent a war in Europe, two super-blocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side; and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast, opposing armies, each acting as the other's deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.
Baldrick: Except, well, this is sort of a war, isn't it?
Blackadder: That's right. There was one tiny flaw in the plan.
George: Oh, what was that?
Blackadder: It was bollocks.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

To think, that poor ostrich died for nothing.

 

[BuckyRea]

The Anglo-German naval race died in 1912.

"Died" is a little strong. "Ran out of money" would be a better descriptor. Of course the ships themselves still managed to hang around to be a part of everybody's power calculations. It seems to me that the German shift toward building U-boats is simply a continuation of that competition. Anyway, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a historian who wouldn't say the arms race, navies included, didn't play a significant role in escalating tensions prior to WW1. I can't think of a reason why it'd cease to have that effect after 1914.

Over the next two years, the UK and Germany cooperated profitably in several endeavors, including the Berlin-Baghdad Railway

Oh, I don't doubt that some British commercial interests sought to economically benefit from the Railway. Business is business, after all. But it seems unrealistic to me to think that, had the Germans managed to complete that rail line (which was predominantly a German financed project) that it wouldn't introduce an element of potential German threat into British interests in Persian Gulf oil. When did world powers ever quit fighting over oil?

This is, of course, as much of a crock as the statement that the alliances promoted tensions; they only reduced everybody's options (not that having more diplomatic, military, and geopolitical options is a good or bad thing)

Again, this is a definitional quibble... but how is the reduction in strategic options not a promoter of tensions? Wasn't the whole point of the proto-MAD alliances to box the two sides in? To switch the point of view for a second, I'd argue that Italy's diplomatic "flexibility" at the time of the outbreak was precisely the sort of tension promoter that the alliance systems created. Russian playing for loyalty among the Balkan states trapped between Turkey & Austria also shows that the institution of alliances was necessarily escalatory. I can't imagine that the Germans & Russians had permanently given up hope of swiping Persian loyalty from the English, or that the English would have been sincere about reassurances that they weren't going to surreptitiously agitate among the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire.

I just don't think we can assume everything was moving to a static equilibrium just because the powers had come to a few workable solutions in some of the areas of conflict. Lots of the areas for potential future conflict--from the degradation of Russia to whatever flare-ups might occur in China & Africa--were going to provide plenty of future opportunities for showdowns between the powers, particularly the Germans & Brits.

There were always pressures for war and countervailing ones for peace (or, if you like it that way, vice versa).

On this we agree. In real life, I'd argue, it's significant which of the opposing tendencies prevailed.

Of course, more to the point, inevitability is so 1960s.

That one still hurts.

 

[Masada]

I can't think of a reason why it'd cease to have that effect after 1914.

The Germans were beat, the British still ascendant - and both parties knew it. That alone down-shifted tensions markedly.

When did world powers ever quit fighting over oil?

That wasn't an issue at the time, really.

Russian playing for loyalty among the Balkan states trapped between Turkey & Austria also shows that the institution of alliances was necessarily escalatory.

Conversely, there were countervailing de-escalations - Adigir notably.

 

[BuckyRea]

That {oil} wasn't an issue at the time, really.

Poppycock. Of course control of Middle Eastern oil was critical. What do you think the tanks ran on? Or the planes? Or the subs? Or the dreadnaughts? What do you think the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" was about... helping the Arabs out of a sense of altruism?

Conversely, there were countervailing de-escalations - Adigir notably.

Funny thing about wars. You can defuse half a dozen causus bellis, but all you really need is one good conflict to get the shootin' match started. The relative unimportance of the issues of local autonomy for Serbians living within Austrian borders I think demonstrates that it didn't take much of an incident to get the snowball rolling down the hill.

Perhaps when people talk about de-escalations between Germany and Britain they're referring to efforts like the German guarantees made to Belgium in 1870, 1877, 1911, and 1913 that in case of war with France Belgium's neutrality would not be violated. But of course Germany had no problem going back on its word, knowing full well that it would result in Britain coming into the war.

I reiterate, not all wars are inevitable. World War One is an example of one that was. Europe was locked into an unsustainable network of delayed causes. A number of long-ignored problems were heading toward the breaking point, even without the Serbian spark. Russia was heading toward an epic collapse and that alone would have destablized the balance of power, as Germany, Britain, Austria, Japan, and Turkey clamored for a piece of the leavings. The war didn't have to take the form it eventually did, but something was going break and all the other little dominoes were just a little too neatly lined up to follow.

 

[Tee Kay]

Don't forget the post-war dispute over Mosul.

 

[Masada]

What do you think the tanks ran on? Or the planes? Or the subs? Or the dreadnaughts?

... You do realise the the Kaiserliche Marine was intended to sally out of Kiel and sacrifice itself to hopefully lift the blockade right? I'm just going to ignore the misplaced importance being assigned to the remainder.

What do you think the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" was about... helping the Arabs out of a sense of altruism?

Defeating the Ottoman Empire? It certainly wasn't about fictitious German oil interests.

You can defuse half a dozen causus bellis, but all you really need is one good conflict to get the shootin' match started.

You've kind of made my argument for me here. If the First World War was inevitable, why didn't it break out over Adigir or one of the many Balkan's Crises? We know those were resolved peacefully. The question then becomes: what special property did this particular 'causus bellis' have that inevitably drove Europe to war?

But of course Germany had no problem going back on its word, knowing full well that it would result in Britain coming into the war.

The French forward positions were in Belgium proper as well dude. Both sides full well intended to breach Belgian sovereignty regardless of what the other did. The Germans happened to do it first and the French followed very soon after.

Russia was heading toward an epic collapse and that alone would have destablized the balance of power

From what?

The war didn't have to take the form it eventually did, but something was going break and all the other little dominoes were just a little too neatly lined up to follow.

That ain't even 1960s, I'm going for 1920s.

 

[Dachs]

Isn't there a bit in Blackadder Goes Forth about that?

That's not really what I was talking about. In prewar talk, the alliances weren't necessarily important for their deterrent effect, but for the ability of the alliance leaders to more or less force their fellow alliance members to step into line by refusing to invoke the casus foederis. Indeed, deterrents are frequently only part of the picture when a state decides to go to war, and there are several examples of states entering wars despite a very strong intuition that they would lose: take Austria in 1809, for example, or even Austria in 1914.

"Died" is a little strong. "Ran out of money" would be a better descriptor. Of course the ships themselves still managed to hang around to be a part of everybody's power calculations. It seems to me that the German shift toward building U-boats is simply a continuation of that competition. Anyway, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a historian who wouldn't say the arms race, navies included, didn't play a significant role in escalating tensions prior to WW1. I can't think of a reason why it'd cease to have that effect after 1914.

Of course it escalated tensions between the UK and Germany. That is far from saying it made war inevitable. On that score, it played the same role as the arms races between the British and French navies in the 1850s and 1860s, the multilateral naval arms races of the 1920s and 1930s, or the nuclear arms race of the Cold War - reducing options, perhaps, making things a bit colder, perhaps, but certainly far from making conflict inevitable. It's just one factor, is the point, and one that gets play because the British and Germans decided to go to war in 1914, while all countervailing pressures are ignored because they may have been historical trends, but they didn't end up contributing to the ultimate outcome.

Oh, I don't doubt that some British commercial interests sought to economically benefit from the Railway. Business is business, after all. But it seems unrealistic to me to think that, had the Germans managed to complete that rail line (which was predominantly a German financed project) that it wouldn't introduce an element of potential German threat into British interests in Persian Gulf oil. When did world powers ever quit fighting over oil?

But it wasn't predominantly a German financed project; the Deutsche Bank couldn't do it all on its own and the director knew it from the start. And German political control was more or less nonexistent. This is one of the reasons the crisis was resolved so easily; the French and British got the point that the railway would in no way be an extension of the military or geopolitical power of the German state. This was nothing like the Russian railroads in Manchuria, because unlike the Russians, the German government didn't force the Ottomans to hand over control over those railways during wartime.

Again, this is a definitional quibble... but how is the reduction in strategic options not a promoter of tensions? Wasn't the whole point of the proto-MAD alliances to box the two sides in? To switch the point of view for a second, I'd argue that Italy's diplomatic "flexibility" at the time of the outbreak was precisely the sort of tension promoter that the alliance systems created. Russian playing for loyalty among the Balkan states trapped between Turkey & Austria also shows that the institution of alliances was necessarily escalatory. I can't imagine that the Germans & Russians had permanently given up hope of swiping Persian loyalty from the English, or that the English would have been sincere about reassurances that they weren't going to surreptitiously agitate among the Arabs in the Ottoman Empire.

I just don't think we can assume everything was moving to a static equilibrium just because the powers had come to a few workable solutions in some of the areas of conflict. Lots of the areas for potential future conflict--from the degradation of Russia to whatever flare-ups might occur in China & Africa--were going to provide plenty of future opportunities for showdowns between the powers, particularly the Germans & Brits.

Reducing options isn't necessarily a bad thing - or a thing that promotes tensions and, ultimately, conflict - at all. And it's important to state how flawed the prewar conception of the alliance system is, again: they really weren't monolithic blocs in which the countries were tied together with barbed wire and steel cable. Italy's defection is the most obvious example, as you mentioned; the fact that the United Kingdom was tied to France with nothing more than an informal military convention that was kept secret from the British Cabinet is another. And within the alliances, the states didn't move in lockstep at all; note France's refusal to support Russia in 1908-9, or Germany's refusal to aid Austria in the Second Balkan War. Cross-bloc agreements, like the Austro-Russian convention of 1897 that put the Balkans 'on ice', the agreement that sparked the Bosnian crisis, or the Far Eastern Triplice, existed and helped create alternate loci of geopolitical relations than the alliance structures (which hardly existed, especially in the Austro-German Dual Alliance).

You seem to have the false impression that I think things were moving towards some kind of static equilibrium. That's just my description of how one strand of prewar thought was going, not a statement that I think that way. I don't, and actually I think that the opposite was more likely. For instance, the loose relationship of France, Russia, and the UK was likely to fracture, if not break up entirely, in the next several years. What happens in 1917 when the Russian naval and ground programs have been completed - who do the British start thinking is a threat to their asinine 'balance of power'? What about tensions between the alliance members that the 1904 and 1907 ententes put on ice (like the Austro-Russian agreement of 1897 did) - when do they stop becoming relevant solutions and when do their signatories start looking at other options? Germany and Austria-Hungary had their fair share of tensions too, although I honestly can't see them parting ways at all unless the entente powers start separating first. And then there's the question of internal issues in Russia, the UK, and Austria-Hungary... The point is, in my view, 1911-1914 was a climax, a really close swerve towards war that, unlike the 1820s, 1890s, 1960s, and 1980s, did actually result in Great Power conflict.

On this we agree. In real life, I'd argue, it's significant which of the opposing tendencies prevailed.

But then you have to actually demonstrate that the opposing tendencies actually prevailed as opposed to declarations of war based on contingent events. That's pretty hard. Austria-Hungary decided on war even before the Germans agreed on the famous and misunderstood blank check - so the blank check, and alliance support, cannot be seen as being part of the matrix that drove them into war. Russia did not aid Serbia because of any kind of agreement or alliance, which is the fundamental sticking point, since it was the other of the two big steps that caused the war. Germany did use its alliance as a diplomatic justification for war, but the decision to do that was based on highly contingent events, such as the personal life of the Chancellor, a fatalistic or even laissez-faire attitude towards war on the part of much of the German foreign ministry, and the opinions of several figures in the German military - elements unconnected with the alliance that did not exist in, say, 1913. The United Kingdom decided to fight because of a myriad of concerns, some of which were wholly unconnected to the alliance system (the Home Rule crisis being the most salient one) and some of which were related to it. You see, to me, this record doesn't really support a charge of the alliances having made conflict inevitable.

Funny thing about wars. You can defuse half a dozen causus bellis, but all you really need is one good conflict to get the shootin' match started. The relative unimportance of the issues of local autonomy for Serbians living within Austrian borders I think demonstrates that it didn't take much of an incident to get the snowball rolling down the hill.

Perhaps when people talk about de-escalations between Germany and Britain they're referring to efforts like the German guarantees made to Belgium in 1870, 1877, 1911, and 1913 that in case of war with France Belgium's neutrality would not be violated. But of course Germany had no problem going back on its word, knowing full well that it would result in Britain coming into the war.

Masada's more or less said what I want to say about these things, but I have to express incredulity: first you claim that the alliance system made war inevitable, but then you say that conventions deescalating tension were inherently useless because either party could go back on its word? What made the one scrap of paper (the alliances) more binding than the other scrap of paper (the deescalations)?

 

[BuckyRea]

... You do realise the the Kaiserliche Marine was intended to sally out of Kiel and sacrifice itself to hopefully lift the blockade right? I'm just going to ignore the misplaced importance being assigned to the remainder.

...

Defeating the Ottoman Empire? It certainly wasn't about fictitious German oil interests.

There is simply too much scholarship (p.137-148) in favor of competition for oil being a cause of WW1 for me to believe your reassurances that it wasn't.

You've kind of made my argument for me here. If the First World War was inevitable, why didn't it break out over Adigir or one of the many Balkan's Crises? We know those were resolved peacefully. The question then becomes: what special property did this particular 'causus bellis' have that inevitably drove Europe to war?

I think you have it backwards. If the conflict was inevitable, then the Archduke's assassination didn't have to have any "special properties." If not that casus belli, then another would have sufficed. Rather than deconstruct one incident, I think it's useful to look at the whole background and context in which the fighting occurred, which I have tried to do elsewhere in this thread.

There was a multiplicity of causes and an acceleration of destabilizing factors going on in Europe, as mentioned above. We could take any one of those situations and say, "Oh, well, wiser heads could have prevailed in problem X and the pressure for war among the Powers been diminished by gradual solution Y here." But the broader truth is that there were a whole bunch of causes pressing the Powers toward war and a network of expanding alliances in place, and these were all moving toward a showdown. To posit that the Great War was avoidable suggests not that one cause could have been forestalled, but that the preponderance of them stood a good chance of being handled peaceably.

Avoiding a war would have required most of the parties to act in concert and somehow reverse a general trend toward escalating tensions... trends that mostly involved pursuing what they saw as their natural interests (also as discussed in this thread). Against this trend toward war, all I have is your reassurance that Germany wasn't interested in oil at the very time that its war fleet was changing over from coal to gasoline.

The French forward positions were in Belgium proper as well dude. Both sides full well intended to breach Belgian sovereignty regardless of what the other did. The Germans happened to do it first and the French followed very soon after.

When you say "the French followed very soon after," I assume you're referring to the French army moving in to protect Belgium from German conquest and atrocities after Belgium became a French ally. My friend, that's not exactly the same thing as Germany's outright invasion of Belgium.

I think a quick history lesson would be useful here. Please bother to read the links--they go to fairly short articles and rather directly dispute your points. The Belgians were guaranteed neutrality by France, Britain, and Germany. The French took that guarantee more seriously than the Germans because the French were Britain's allies. Also, marching through neutral Belgium would have been widely unpopular in the French Republic.

Of all the French generals, only Joffre argued for going through Belgium. Everyone else was against it. The essentials of France's Plan 17 were:

The most important features of Plan XVII were that:

• it was based on French commitment to offensive action against Germany (regardless of the manner in which war began or where the main German assault occurred)
• it grossly underestimated the strength of Germany's army in the field because it ignored German use of reserve troops
• it misjudged the direction of Germany's initial assault - Joffre expected the main German attack in Alsace-Lorraine; he did not foresee the strong German right-wing strike through Belgium at the very beginning of hostilities.

The French plan provided for all-out offensive French action in Lorraine, that is, along the Franco-German border to France's north-east. Joffre divided the French forces into five armies. Three were to be deployed in this area; only one (the Fifth Army) was to cover the Franco-Belgian frontier. A fourth army, consisting of three infantry corps and one cavalry division, was to give some flexibility, as it could be moved either to join the main bulk of the French forces in the east or to support the army to the north. Joffre also hoped that the British Expeditionary Force would be sent rapidly to France to support the Fifth Army. However, Plan XVII was not specific about military coordination between the French and British armies.

General Joffre had, from 1911, considered the possibility of a French offensive through Belgium. However, he did not have political support for this. Successive French prime ministers ruled out the Belgian option, mainly because of its likely repercussions on the British. They did not want to endanger the Anglo-French alliance by an offensive French move into Belgium.

I have to say here that your equating French policy on the continent with German aggression against Beligium smacks of false equivalency.

From what?

Are you asking me to explain the causes of the Russian Revolution to you, too?

.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Are you asking me to explain the causes of the Russian Revolution to you, too?

.

Causes which came about largely due to the war.

 

[BuckyRea]

Causes which came about largely due to the war.

The war may have accelerated the collapse of the Russian Empire, but it was hardly the sole cause. Yes, I see your "largely" there. The czar wasn't going to hang onto power much longer. Of course whole theses are written arguing the causes and impact that WW1 had. I think they'd all agree that the seeds were planted long before the 1905 Revolution and that Czar Nicholas was doing nothing to reverse the trend.

It's just one factor, is the point, and one that gets play because the British and Germans decided to go to war in 1914, while all countervailing pressures are ignored because they may have been historical trends, but they didn't end up contributing to the ultimate outcome.

I'm not ignoring the countervailing pressures. I'm saying, at risk of tautology, that they didn't matter, given that war broke out anyway. Yes, efforts were made to deescalate tensions. They didn't work. Let's not ignore my point that there were other factors in play in the geopolitics of the 1910s that were also pointing toward war.

This whole conversation would be less obscure if someone could actually postulate here a scenario in which the war could have been avoided rather than assurances that "Oh, the boys in the Foreign Office would have hammered something out in the long run."

But it wasn't predominantly a German financed project; the Deutsche Bank couldn't do it all on its own and the director knew it from the start. And German political control was more or less nonexistent. This is one of the reasons the crisis was resolved so easily; the French and British got the point that the railway would in no way be an extension of the military or geopolitical power of the German state.

I'll refer you to Sean McMeekin's Berlin-Baghdad Express, which chronicles the role competition for control of the Middle East played in light of the expected collapse of the Ottoman Empire. McMeekin paints a far less rosy picture than you of Anglo-German relations and the Kaiser's ambitions toward Iraq.

And it's important to state how flawed the prewar conception of the alliance system is, again: they really weren't monolithic blocs...

Excellent point. But the "alternate loci" of international relations, I think, goes to show how unstable the situation was. Matters were in flux; nations were competing for loyalty and advantage. They were raising the stakes and expanding their alliance systems. Doing so is inherently escalatory. I kind of wonder if there had been an understanding that invading Serbia would trigger a German invasion of Belgium and a British declaration, that Austria would have backed down. Perhaps it was the uncertainty, not the certainty, of the "alternate loci" that contributed to the war. But as I've been saying, there were a multiplicity of points of conflict among the Great Powers. Containing them all or expecting them to never succeed in calling in their allies seems contrary to human nature.

You seem to have the false impression that I think things were moving towards some kind of static equilibrium.

My bad.

I don't, and actually I think that the opposite was more likely.... when do they stop becoming relevant solutions and when do their signatories start looking at other options?

As you documented, they were already looking at other options. Here's what I think wasn't going to happen: Germany was not going to quit trying to catch up to Britain in colonies, development, naval power, or access to Middle Eastern oil. France was not going to quit worrying about another German invasion and was not going to quit looking for allies to check them. Turkey and Russia were not going to quit declining and were not going to avoid the stronger powers start to pick over their peripheries when they started to fall apart--Japan, England, France and Germany had already started doing this. The Balkans were not going to quit giving Austria headaches and the Austrians were not going to let their southeastern provinces go without some violence.

Each of these matters are fertile fields for Great Power conflicts. The collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires greatly exacerbated the march toward war and shaped the way the war played out. I don't think I'm just looking at the matter with 20/20 hindsight--people at the time expected there to be a great war of some kind. British and German literature is rife with novels anticipating what a war with each other would look like.

... the famous and misunderstood blank check - so the blank check, and alliance support, cannot be seen as being part of the matrix that drove them into war.

I submit that this is a wholly novel interpretation. The Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg's Blank Check note to Austria is seen by all histories that I've read on the matter as very much a contributing factor toward the war--as was the tight personal relationship between Germany and Austria which the Kaiser's assurances were a part of.

Russia did not aid Serbia because of any kind of agreement or alliance, which is the fundamental sticking point, since it was the other of the two big steps that caused the war.

Russia did have, if I recall correctly, a protection agreement of some sort with Serbia. If it was not an alliance, the close Russian relations with Serbia is certain one of those alternate loci you mention, or one of those scramble for alliances that I mention. Russian public sentiment was very much in favor of defending Serbia and was very much part of the milieu in which events and people favored war.

Germany did use its alliance as a diplomatic justification for war, but the decision to do that was based on highly contingent events, such as the personal life of the Chancellor, a fatalistic or even laissez-faire attitude towards war on the part of much of the German foreign ministry, and the opinions of several figures in the German military - elements unconnected with the alliance that did not exist in, say, 1913.

These too are part of that inevitability thing. When leaders have "fatalistic or even laissez-faire" views about war and then come across a situation in which they believe they can win that war (and I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney!) then the odds of a war breaking out increase dramatically. This is the soul of my argument. Events and aggressive German policies were conspiring to bring about a big showdown.

The United Kingdom decided to fight because of a myriad of concerns, some of which were wholly unconnected to the alliance system (the Home Rule crisis being the most salient one) and some of which were related to it. You see, to me, this record doesn't really support a charge of the alliances having made conflict inevitable.

I think you're seeing my case as mostly resting on the alliance system. I don't think I ever said that was the only cause. It was a critical factor, obviously, in the German-Russian conflict (a) coming into play and (b) spinning out of control to envelope France and Belgium. But as I recall, this argument started with my assertion that Germany and England were cruisin for a bruisin, which was a matter existing outside of the network of alliances.

but I have to express incredulity: first you claim that the alliance system made war inevitable, but then you say that conventions deescalating tension were inherently useless because either party could go back on its word? What made the one scrap of paper (the alliances) more binding than the other scrap of paper (the deescalations)?

What made one scrap of paper more binding than the other was, as always, national interest.

I hope I've clarified my point above about the alliances. They mattered, but they were not static things. And unstable international alliances are inherently, um, destabilizing. I think there's good reason to claim that Germany might go back on its word since in the case of Belgium's neutrality it explicitly went back on its word. It was hardly unique in this, as Italy and Russia also engaged in a bit of Realpolitik double dealing.

There were escalating tensions in Europe and among the Europeans around the world. There were efforts to contain those tensions and, obviously, those efforts didn't pay off. Some conflicts did get resolved by the diplomats, of course. But the point I keep coming back to is that beyond the July Crisis there were a whole raft of other powder kegs waiting to be sparked--and that the major powers jumped on the July Crisis to gain advantage in those other areas. From Britain's plots in Arabia to Germany's Hindu plots in India, to Japan's opportunistic grab of Germany's Chinese sphere, to Italy's designs in Trieste, to Germany's sponsorship of Russia's Red exiles... a host of ripening conflicts came out into the open. Had the July Crisis been resolved, most of these served as future trigger points ready to exploit the shifting alliances and the general desire among the competing powers to put each other down.

Again, if someone can postulate a process by which all these potential time bombs could be defused, I'm open to hearing it.

 

[Dachs]

I'm not ignoring the countervailing pressures. I'm saying, at risk of tautology, that they didn't matter, given that war broke out anyway. Yes, efforts were made to deescalate tensions. They didn't work. Let's not ignore my point that there were other factors in play in the geopolitics of the 1910s that were also pointing toward war.

This whole conversation would be less obscure if someone could actually postulate here a scenario in which the war could have been avoided rather than assurances that "Oh, the boys in the Foreign Office would have hammered something out in the long run."

Halt in Belgrade, Lichnowsky's proposal to Grey on August 1, an international congress along the lines Grey proposed repeatedly in the last week of July, the Russians figuring out that the Austrians did not intend to annex Serbia, the Austrians figuring out what exactly they did want out of the war with Serbia, Franz Ferdinand not getting his dumb ass shot in the first place...

I'll refer you to Sean McMeekin's Berlin-Baghdad Express, which chronicles the role competition for control of the Middle East played in light of the expected collapse of the Ottoman Empire. McMeekin paints a far less rosy picture than you of Anglo-German relations and the Kaiser's ambitions toward Iraq.

Wonderful. A bit of sensationalist twaddle you found in a couple minutes' Googling. Never mind, of course, that the Kaiser may have entertained all sorts of ridiculous ambitions towards all sorts of countries, because he was an erratic little weirdo with delusions of grandeur - and other statesmen of the time entertained similarly ridiculous ambitions (witness, for instance, Salisbury's proposal to the Russians on the occasion of the 1890s massacres in Armenia, whereby Russia and the UK would partition the Ottoman Empire). That doesn't indicate that a project under virtually no control from the German state was in fact a secret plot by said state to take over the Fertile Crescent and thereby obtain the oil hidden therein (which was only dimly understood to be there at the time, anyway) to use on their coal-fired navy. Next we'll be comparing the "almost" imperial adventure in Ottoman Iraq to the modern American one, with some rather heavy-handed and severe lessons for us all, am I right? I'll stick with Norman Rich and James Joll, thanks; whatever problems of interpretation either has (and Joll acknowledges that his interpretation is kinda...old-school), both of them get most stuff right about most of the outbreak.

Excellent point. But the "alternate loci" of international relations, I think, goes to show how unstable the situation was. Matters were in flux; nations were competing for loyalty and advantage. They were raising the stakes and expanding their alliance systems. Doing so is inherently escalatory. I kind of wonder if there had been an understanding that invading Serbia would trigger a German invasion of Belgium and a British declaration, that Austria would have backed down. Perhaps it was the uncertainty, not the certainty, of the "alternate loci" that contributed to the war. But as I've been saying, there were a multiplicity of points of conflict among the Great Powers. Containing them all or expecting them to never succeed in calling in their allies seems contrary to human nature.

"Matters in flux" does not translate to inevitable war; if that were the case, why was no Great Power war fought in the 1890s, for instance? Or, hell, why didn't the Cold War go hot in the 1980s and during the 1989-91 collapse of the USSR? The same reasons I've been harping on for the entire thread: contingent events. That trends contribute to the long-term causes of events does not mean that those trends make those events inevitable.

As for the information failure in the July Crisis, well, I doubt that would have helped for very specific reasons: several people in the Habsburg war council thought that they would probably lose the war, maybe even lose the monarchy - but they kept going, regardless. Information failures that might have mattered include the Germans' faith in localization and the Russians' inability to understand that Austria didn't want to annex Serbia. The latter is hard to fix because, as I mentioned, the Austrians didn't know themselves what they wanted out of the war with any real certainty. If they were so confused about the war themselves, the Russians can hardly expect to be any less confused.

As you documented, they were already looking at other options. Here's what I think wasn't going to happen: Germany was not going to quit trying to catch up to Britain in colonies, development, naval power, or access to Middle Eastern oil. France was not going to quit worrying about another German invasion and was not going to quit looking for allies to check them. Turkey and Russia were not going to quit declining and were not going to avoid the stronger powers start to pick over their peripheries when they started to fall apart--Japan, England, France and Germany had already started doing this. The Balkans were not going to quit giving Austria headaches and the Austrians were not going to let their southeastern provinces go without some violence.

Each of these matters are fertile fields for Great Power conflicts. The collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires greatly exacerbated the march toward war and shaped the way the war played out. I don't think I'm just looking at the matter with 20/20 hindsight--people at the time expected there to be a great war of some kind. British and German literature is rife with novels anticipating what a war with each other would look like.

Well, that's a rather hackneyed discussion of prewar trends. Anglo-German rivalry to continue and/or escalate, despite already having climaxed in 1912, and despite the very real specter of civil war in the UK - Russia to "decline" despite everything Norman Stone has done for us all in the last several decades - the Ottomans to "decline" as well, never mind the new CUP government and renewed commitment to reform - France to stay the Poincaré course despite all previous intimations of ignoring, if not dropping, the Alsace-Lorraine Question (Ferry, anyone?) - Austria unable to find a new solution to its problems of foreign and domestic relations despite efforts at doing same (the most famous, albeit unworkable, being Popovici's "USGA" concept)... The forecasts are more or less irrelevant as a tool for figuring out how things might actually have gone in the absence of war, but they are a useful window into how you're thinking about things.

As for invasion literature, well, does the vast amount of fiction about World War III in the 1980s - The Third World War, August 1985...Red Storm Rising...Red Army...Team Yankee - prove that the "Cold War Goes Hot" scenario was inevitable? At least the writers of the 1980s fiction had reasonable insights into NATO's strategy. Invasion literature mostly ended up being nonsense divorced from the military thought of any side, written with an eye to the spectacular or the heartwarming to differentiate itself from the competition. Wells did a fantastic job of satirizing the lot of them in his War of the Worlds.

I submit that this is a wholly novel interpretation. The Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg's Blank Check note to Austria is seen by all histories that I've read on the matter as very much a contributing factor toward the war--as was the tight personal relationship between Germany and Austria which the Kaiser's assurances were a part of.

Then you should read the two books which ought to be the first stop for anybody looking for academic discussion of the outbreak of the war, James Joll's Outbreak of the First World War and the collection of articles in Hamilton and Herwig (eds.), Decisions for War, 1914-1917. With somewhat greater literary merit, Dennis Showalter's Tannenberg covers all of that on the German-Russian side, plus the campaign in the title of the book, rather brilliantly. Alternatively, the first chapter of Hew Strachan's The First World War Part I: To Arms makes for a summary of causes and events about as long as Joll's entire book, and much more up-to-date. In summary, the Austrians held a kind of war council before sending the request for support to the Germans, and there they decided on war, save for Tisza, the Hungarian, who came around for reasons unrelated to German support. The reception of news about the blank check came after the Habsburg government had made its decision for war. Whatever histories you've been reading are probably the usual tropetastic crap reliant on old assumptions. Perhaps you've been reading books tainted by the Sonderweg, which has been out of style for well over a decade. That's probably where a lot of your "inevitable" comments come from, come to think of it.

As for the characterization of Austro-German relations as a "tight personal" affair, I have to laugh. In 1912, the Germans had basically ordered the Austrians in no uncertain terms to hold off on war with Serbia, and forced them to submit their Albanian and Montenegrin proposals to the London conference instead. Germany and Austria didn't even tell each other what their war plans were in the event of conflict with Russia and France (which helped lead to Austria's defeat in Galicia in 1914).

Russia did have, if I recall correctly, a protection agreement of some sort with Serbia. If it was not an alliance, the close Russian relations with Serbia is certain one of those alternate loci you mention, or one of those scramble for alliances that I mention. Russian public sentiment was very much in favor of defending Serbia and was very much part of the milieu in which events and people favored war.

Russia essentially told Austria that they wouldn't tolerate any Serbian territory being lost to the Dual Monarchy. That's the only real standing diplomatic commitment, and it certainly does not preclude an Austro-Serbian war. I doubt this can be realistically seen in the light of alternate commitments and alliance-building causing friction. Remember, Russia had essentially created the Balkan League of 1912 out of nothing to boost its prestige and influence in the peninsula, then promptly lost control of it as the Greeks, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Montenegrins swarmed into Ottoman Macedonia in direct contravention of anything the Russian foreign ministry had planned. That particular alliance-building effort had caused tension, but the tension was diffused at London, and the Russians were left with a few shards, such as their guarantee of Serbian territorial integrity.

These too are part of that inevitability thing. When leaders have "fatalistic or even laissez-faire" views about war and then come across a situation in which they believe they can win that war (and I'm looking at you, Dick Cheney!) then the odds of a war breaking out increase dramatically. This is the soul of my argument. Events and aggressive German policies were conspiring to bring about a big showdown.

Ah, yes, here we have it! The worm turns! It's a resurrection of the Sonderweg, exposing you for what you really are. Frankly, more comprehensive (and entertaining) demolitions of the Sonderweg have been done in the pages of journals and on the Internet than I could attempt in a discussion of the First World War in a thread that was supposed to be about something else, so I'll just leave Strachan's and Showalter's books here and bid you read those. But I have to comment on your juxtaposition of "laissez-faire" German policies and "aggressive" German policies - entertaining, no? At once, Bethmann is seen to be the helmsman of an aggressive policy that threatened European peace...and to have left his duties derelict to mourn his late wife, threatening European peace with a Germany that had no concrete policy direction. Well then!

I think you're seeing my case as mostly resting on the alliance system. I don't think I ever said that was the only cause. It was a critical factor, obviously, in the German-Russian conflict (a) coming into play and (b) spinning out of control to envelope France and Belgium. But as I recall, this argument started with my assertion that Germany and England were cruisin for a bruisin, which was a matter existing outside of the network of alliances.

I should like to know what made this Anglo-German conflict any more inevitable than any of the others in history that did not happen despite signs that war was coming. (And why the Anglo-German conflict did not happen until a series of contingent events, such as the Balkan crisis, set it off.) You have done an admirable job of demonstrating that certain trends leading up to the war contributed to its likelihood. You have done a somewhat less admirable job of addressing my complaint that this hardly made war inevitable. Inevitability is a strong claim. Perhaps a historiographical claim: your belief that anything was inevitable, fated, or impossible to stop, is in line with the thought processes of an earlier age of historians, as I alluded earlier, and as such we are talking past each other, with little chance of convincing anybody. Oh, well.

What made one scrap of paper more binding than the other was, as always, national interest.

I hope I've clarified my point above about the alliances. They mattered, but they were not static things. And unstable international alliances are inherently, um, destabilizing. I think there's good reason to claim that Germany might go back on its word since in the case of Belgium's neutrality it explicitly went back on its word. It was hardly unique in this, as Italy and Russia also engaged in a bit of Realpolitik double dealing.

There were escalating tensions in Europe and among the Europeans around the world. There were efforts to contain those tensions and, obviously, those efforts didn't pay off. Some conflicts did get resolved by the diplomats, of course. But the point I keep coming back to is that beyond the July Crisis there were a whole raft of other powder kegs waiting to be sparked--and that the major powers jumped on the July Crisis to gain advantage in those other areas. From Britain's plots in Arabia to Germany's Hindu plots in India, to Japan's opportunistic grab of Germany's Chinese sphere, to Italy's designs in Trieste, to Germany's sponsorship of Russia's Red exiles... a host of ripening conflicts came out into the open. Had the July Crisis been resolved, most of these served as future trigger points ready to exploit the shifting alliances and the general desire among the competing powers to put each other down.

Again, if someone can postulate a process by which all these potential time bombs could be defused, I'm open to hearing it.

A huge problem with your elucidation of conflicts is that the overwhelming majority of them were made in the alternate environment of war. I alluded to this earlier with the experience of Hugo Stinnes (see the excellent essay by Gerald Feldman in Boemeke, Chickering, and Förster (eds.), Anticipating Total War, for more on Stinnes): states and people could support radically different policies and ideas during the war than they had before the war, because the context of the war itself changed much of their basic assumptions. Stinnes shrank from the prospect of war (although he continually prepared for its potential effect on his shipping companies), but as soon as the war started, he immediately turned to the project of using the war to expand Germany's economic power. Representing him as a dyed-in-the-wool ultranationalist in support of claims that Germany wanted to conquer new lands in Europe and outside it before the war would be quite easy...if you only looked at his actions during and after the war. Rather like the matter of many of the things you mention: the Japanese actions in German East Asia, the Germans' plans for global Muslim jihad against the British, the Italians' goal of irredenta, the Sealed Train, even French goals in Alsace-Lorraine - all of them are colored by the experience of the war itself, and can't be reasonably used to demonstrate prewar goals and prewar existing trends.

There are flashpoints around the world that did exist before the war, all of which had potential solutions or might have gone away themselves in time. The Balkans, for instance, and Austria's problems with internal competing nationalisms, might be solved, as in 1897, by Austria and Russia simply agreeing to place the area 'on ice' while they attended to domestic problems - seeing as those domestic problems were quite serious, as you yourself mentioned, that's not an unreasonable option, no? Both states had theoretical reform proposals, such as Austria, which had the option of creating a tripartite monarchy or a federal program as espoused by Popovici and others. The Great Powers could always redirect their energies to a partition of China, which was having its own problems, or to one of the Ottoman Empire, if the CUP's reforms really did fall to pieces - if, that is, you subscribe to Social Darwinism. The United Kingdom had the potential to be entirely removed from the diplomatic scene by a civil war, which may or may not have been confined to Ireland (probably not) and by serious social tensions up to and including revolution. And among the Great Powers themselves, potential for diplomatic realignment existed, with the UK's colonial ententes at risk (especially in Iran). Yet you seem to want to ignore all of these alternate plans, many of which circulated at the time, as "unworkable", perhaps because of the self-proving circle that they were unworkable because war was inevitable, and war was inevitable because they were unworkable...?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

The war may have accelerated the collapse of the Russian Empire, but it was hardly the sole cause. Yes, I see your "largely" there. The czar wasn't going to hang onto power much longer. Of course whole theses are written arguing the causes and impact that WW1 had. I think they'd all agree that the seeds were planted long before the 1905 Revolution and that Czar Nicholas was doing nothing to reverse the trend.

Considering that the seed was the conflict of absolutism with the rising bourgeoisie, yes, but that hardly spells an imminent and epic collapse like you said. There are a hundred ways it could have turned out.

I won't even address the comment about "balance of power" since I wouldn't want to deny Dachs the fun of obliterating it.

 

[ParkCungHee]

British and German literature is rife with novels anticipating what a war with each other would look like.

I should also point to the flood of novels depicting a conflict pitting the European powers against a combined alliance of the Chinese and Japanese was far more prescient (and better) at the time, as Invasion Literature really died out after Wells did it.

 

[Masada]

There is simply too much scholarship (p.137-148) in favor of competition for oil being a cause of WW1 for me to believe your reassurances that it wasn't.

... man it required a seriously unlikely set of events - the Goeben and Breslau incident - to even get the Ottomans to move at all. If that was difficult in 1914, even with the 'binding' Ottoman-German Alliance, then I don't see how Germany of 1913 (let alone earlier) could expect to get the Ottomans to, in effect, declare war against Britain, France, Russia and Persia. This is quite apart from the obvious fact that this benefited Germany exclusively, quite what the Ottomans were going to derive from invading Persia is beyond me. Remembering all the while that the Ottomangs are the supposed sick men of Europe and whatever other descriptive twaddle one is inclined to throw around.

This is quite apart from the profound lack of merit in the suggestion that oil was integral to either sides ability to wage war. What was oil going to do? Feed the millions of horses, power the steam trains, fill the coal bunkers, run the still non-existent tanks...?

I think you have it backwards. If the conflict was inevitable, then the Archduke's assassination didn't have to have any "special properties." If not that casus belli, then another would have sufficed. Rather than deconstruct one incident, I think it's useful to look at the whole background and context in which the fighting occurred, which I have tried to do elsewhere in this thread.

... if the war was inevitable, then the onus is on you to prove why it was that this time was inevitable and not that time a few years before that and before that and before that...

There was a multiplicity of causes and an acceleration of destabilizing factors going on in Europe, as mentioned above. We could take any one of those situations and say, "Oh, well, wiser heads could have prevailed in problem X and the pressure for war among the Powers been diminished by gradual solution Y here." But the broader truth is that there were a whole bunch of causes pressing the Powers toward war and a network of expanding alliances in place, and these were all moving toward a showdown. To posit that the Great War was avoidable suggests not that one cause could have been forestalled, but that the preponderance of them stood a good chance of being handled peaceably.

And there were a whole lot of factors mitigating against war - we've discussed some of them already.

Avoiding a war would have required most of the parties to act in concert and somehow reverse a general trend toward escalating tensions... trends that mostly involved pursuing what they saw as their natural interests (also as discussed in this thread).

Which they had actually, you know, done.

Against this trend toward war, all I have is your reassurance that Germany wasn't interested in oil at the very time that its war fleet was changing over from coal to gasoline.

You really need to look up what Tirpirtz's idea of naval strategy actually was. It involved the Kaiserliche Marine sacrificing itself in the hope that it could force the the Britfags to lift the blockade. That was about as far as German naval planning got and that alone mitigates against German dependence on oil.

But that still doesn't explain why Germany would waste resources on securing Persian oil, if it was never going to able to use... 'inevitable' British involvement and blockade and all that janx.

Besides, we already know about all the available options Germany had. If she had managed somehow to bring Persia under her orbit, there's no reason to suppose that it wouldn't have simply gone the way of Togoland. Even allowing for an Ottoman intervention (itself an unlikely thing as already discussed) it doesn't follow that the Ottomangs were actually going to be able to drive the Brit-fags out of Persia to begin with. We know this because... that's what happened!

When you say "the French followed very soon after," I assume you're referring to the French army moving in to protect Belgium from German conquest and atrocities after Belgium became a French ally. My friend, that's not exactly the same thing as Germany's outright invasion of Belgium.

France full-well intended to invade Belgium regardless of what Germany did. Even the Belgians picked up on this and opted for a defensive strategy that allowed it to respond to French, German and even British attacks. The point being that French forward positions were actually in Belgium.

Are you asking me to explain the causes of the Russian Revolution to you, too?

I'm asking why Russia was inevitably doomed to undergo the Revolution. It had pretty effectively stymied the 1905 one and even improved on its domestic situation in the period between. It isn't a coincidence that Lenin spent the period in exile in Switzerland. I suppose the 1905 Revolution is rather instructive in that required a major defeat - this time against Japan - to bring it to fruition. Even then, it failed despite the seemingly 'inevitable' collapse of Russia right?