World War I

People, Politics, and Power

Britannica Educational Publishing, William Hosch

• Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781615300488
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Beginning with the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, World War I, sometimes called the Great War, spiraled into a struggle lasting four years, leaving ten million dead, and affecting the lives of millions more. This investigation of World War I begins in the shaky political climate that helped foment a massive conflict that swept up the world, follows through battles of import and their outcomes, and includes plenty of side focuses on such concepts as trench warfare and the Schlieffen Plan.

CHAPTER 1

THE ROOTS OF WORLD WAR I

After forty-three years of peace among the Great Powers of Europe, an act of political terrorism on June 28, 1914 provoked two great alliance systems into mortal combat. The South Slav campaign against Austrian rule in Bosnia, culminating in the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand—the Habsburg heir apparent—at Sarajevo, catalyzed a rapid chain reaction leading to War. This local crisis quickly engulfed all the powers of Europe through the mechanisms of the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, diplomatic arrangements meant precisely to enhance the security of their members and to deter potential aggressors. The long-term causes of the war can therefore be traced to the factors that impelled the formation of those alliances, increased tensions among the Great Powers, and made at least some European leaders desperate enough to seek their objectives even at the risk of a general war. These factors include the forces of militarism and mass mobilization, instability in domestic and international politics occasioned by rapid industrial growth, global imperialism, popular nationalism, and the rise of a social Darwinist world-view. However, the question of why World War I broke out should be considered together with two further questions: why did this period of peace between the Great Powers of Europe finally end, and why did it end in 1914 rather than before or after?

A portrait of Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire, c. 1880. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

INDUSTRIALISM AND IMPERIALISM

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PATTERNS OF POPULATION

In the 19th century, both demographic and industrial growth in Europe were frantic and uneven, with both qualities contributing to growing misperceptions and paranoia in international affairs. The European population grew at the rate of 1 percent per year in the century following 1815, an increase that would have been disastrous had it not been for the outlet of emigration and the new prospects of employment in the rapidly expanding cities. However, as the distribution of Europe’s peoples changed radically, the military balance among the Great Powers also shifted. In the days of Louis XIV, France was the wealthiest and most populous kingdom in Europe, numbering 25,000,000 to Britain’s 14,500,000 as late as 1789. When the French Revolution unleashed this national power through rationalized central administration, meritocracy, and a national draft predicated on patriotism, it achieved unprecedented organization of force in the form of armies of millions of men.

The size of the French population was greatly diminished after the loss of more than a million citizens during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars from 1792 to 1815. Demographic growth in France, alone among the Great Powers, was almost stagnant thereafter; by 1870, its population of 36,000,000 was nearly equal to that of Austria-Hungary and already less than Germany’s 41,000,000. By 1910, Germany’s population had exploded to a level two-thirds greater than France’s, while vast Russia’s population nearly doubled from 1850 to 1910 until it was more than 70 percent greater than Germany’s. While Russia’s administrative and technical backwardness offset to a degree its advantage in numbers, the demographic trends clearly traced the growing danger for France vis-à-vis Germany and the danger for Germany vis-à-vis Russia. From the early 19th century perspective, should Russia ever succeed in modernizing, it would become a colossus compared to the European continent.

Population pressure was a double-edged sword dangling above the heads of European governments in the 19th century. On the one hand, fertility meant a growing labour force and potentially a larger army. On the other hand, it threatened social discord if economic growth or external safety mechanisms could not relieve the pressure. The United Kingdom adjusted to growth through urban industrialization as well as emigration to the United States and the British dominions. France felt no such pressure but was instead forced to draft a higher percentage of its manpower to fill the army ranks. Russia exported an estimated 10,000,000 people to its eastern and southern frontiers and several million more (mostly Poles and Jews) overseas. Germany, too, sent large numbers abroad, and no other nation provided more new industrial employment from 1850 to 1910. Still, Germany’s landmass was small relative to Russia’s and its overseas possessions unsuitable to settlement. Furthermore, its sense of beleaguerment was acute in the face of the “Slavic threat.” Demographic trends thus helped to implant in the German population a feeling of both momentary strength and looming danger.

INDUSTRIALIZATION AND TRADE

Industrial trends in the 19th century magnified the demographic. As with population growth, Germany was far and away the fastest-growing economic power on the Continent. This was so not only in the basic industries of coal, iron, and steel, but also in the advanced fields of electricity, chemicals, and internal combustion. Germany’s swift development strained the traditional balance of power in its own society and politics. By the end of the century, Germany had become a highly urbanized and industrial society, complete with large, differentiated middle and factory-proletariat classes. However, it was still governed largely by precapitalist aristocrats who were becoming increasingly threatened by vocal demands for political reform.

Industrialization also made it possible to outfit and supply mass armies drawn from the growing populations. After 1815, the monarchies of Europe had shied away from arming the masses in the French revolutionary fashion, and the events of 1848 further justified their fear of an armed citizenry. But the reserve system of Prussia provided a means of making a rapid mobilization of the citizenry possible, without the risk to the regime or the elite officer corps posed by a large standing, and idle, army. (In Austria-Hungary, the crown avoided disloyalty in the army by stationing soldiers of one ethnic group on the soil of another.) After Prussia’s stunning victory over France in 1871, sooner or later all the Great Powers came to adopt the German model of a mass army, supplied by a national network of railways and arms industries coordinated in turn by a general staff. The industrialization of war meant that planning and bureaucracy, technology and finance were taking the place of bold generalship and esprit in the soldier’s craft.

The final contribution to the revolution in warfare innovation was planned research and development of weapons systems. Begun hesitantly in the French Navy in the 1850s and 1860s, command technology—the collaboration of state and industry in the invention of new armaments—was widely practiced by the turn of the century, adding to the insecurity that inevitably propelled the arms races. The demographic, technical, and managerial revolutions of the 19th century, in sum, made possible the mobilization of entire populations and economies for the waging of war.

The home of the Industrial Revolution was Great Britain, whose priority in the techniques of the factory system and of steam power was the foundation for a period of calm confidence known (with some exaggeration) as the Pax Britannica. The pound sterling became the preferred reserve currency of the world, making the Bank of England the hub of international finance. British textiles, machinery, and shipping dominated the markets of Asia, South America, and much of Europe. Together, the British Isles (again with some hyperbole) were “the workshop of the world,” and consequently led the world in promoting free trade from 1846 on. British diplomacy, proudly eschewing alliances in favour of “splendid isolation,” sought to simultaneously preserve a balance of power on the Continent and to protect the routes to India from Russian encroachment in the Middle East or Afghanistan.

However, the Pax Britannica could last for only as long as Britain’s industrial hegemony. But that period of British hegemony impelled the other European nations somehow to catch up: in the short term by imposing protective tariffs to shield domestic industries and in the longer term by granting government subsidies (for railroads and other national development work) and the gradual replication of British techniques. First Belgium, France, and New England, then Germany and other states after 1850, began to challenge Britain’s industrial dominance.

France (1860), Prussia (1862), and other countries reversed earlier policies and followed the British into free trade. However, a financial panic in 1873, attributed by some to overextension in Germany after receiving France’s billion-franc indemnity, ended the period of rapid growth. In the depression of 1873–96 (actually years of slower, uneven growth), industrial and labour leaders formed cartels, unions, and lobbies to agitate for tariffs and other forms of state intervention to stabilize the economy. Germany’s Bismarck resisted their demands until European agriculture also suffered from falling prices and lost markets after 1876, owing to the arrival of North American cereals in European ports. In 1879 the so-called alliance of rye and steel voted a German tariff on foreign manufactured goods and foodstuffs. Free trade gave way to an era of neo-mercantilism. France, Austria, Italy, and Russia followed the new (or revived) trend toward tariff protection. After 1896 the volume of world trade rose sharply again, but the sense of heightened economic competition persisted in Europe.

Social rifts between economic classes and political opponents also hardened during this period. Challenged by unrest and demands for reforms, Bismarck sponsored the first state social insurance plans. However, he also used an attempt on the Kaiser’s life in 1878 as a pretext to outlaw the Social Democratic Party. While the conservative circles of society, not only farmers but the wealthier classes as well, gradually came to distrust the loyalty of the urban working class, industrialists shared few other interests with farmers. Other countries faced similar divisions between town and country, but urbanization was not advanced enough in Russia or France for socialism to acquire a mass following. On the other hand, in Britain, agriculture had long since lost out to the commercial and industrial classes, and the working class participated fully in democratic politics. The social divisions during this period of industrialization were especially acute in Germany because of the rapidity of its development and the survival of powerful pre-capitalist elites. Moreover, the German working class, while increasingly unionized, had fewer legal recourses to state policy. All this made for a series of deadlocks in German politics that would increasingly affect foreign policy after Bismarck’s departure.

IMPERIALISM AND SOCIAL DARWINISM

The 1870s and 1880s, therefore, witnessed a retreat from the free market and a return to state intervention in economic affairs. The foreign counterpart to this phenomenon was the New Imperialism. The Great Powers of Europe suddenly shook off almost a century of apathy toward its overseas colonies and, in the space of 20 years, partitioned almost the entire uncolonized portion of the globe. Britain and France were the only capital-exporting countries in 1880, and in years to come their investors preferred to export capital to other European countries (especially Russia) or the Western Hemisphere rather than to their own colonies. The British remained free-trade throughout the era of the New Imperialism, a booming home economy absorbed most German capital, and Italy and Russia were large net importers of capital. Once the scramble for colonies was complete, pressure groups did form in the various countries to argue the economic promise of imperialism, but just as often governments had to foster colonial development. In most cases, trade did not lead but followed the flag.

Why, then, was the flag planted in the first place? Sometimes, it was to protect economic interests, as when the British occupied Egypt in 1882. More often, it was for strategic reasons or in pursuit of national prestige. One necessary condition for the New Imperialism was technological prowess. Prior to the 1870s, Europeans could overpower native peoples along the coasts of Africa and Asia, but lacked the firepower, mobility, and communications that they would have needed to pacify the interior. (India was the exception, where the British East India Company had exploited an anarchic situation and allied itself with selected native rulers against others.) The tsetse fly and the Anopheles mosquito, indigenous insects that carried sleeping sickness and malaria, were the ultimate defenders of African and Asian jungles. However, several inventions, including shallow-draft river-boats, the steamship and telegraph, the repeater rifle and Maxim gun, and the discovery (in India) that quinine is an effective prophylactic against malaria, eventually put European colonizing forces at the advantage. By 1880, small groups of European regulars, armed with modern weapons and exercising fire discipline, could overwhelm many times their number of native troops.

The scramble for Africa should be dated, not from 1882, when the British occupied Egypt, but from the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. The strategic importance of that waterway cannot be overstated. It was the gateway to India and East Asia, and hence, a vital interest nonpareil for the British Empire. When the Khedive of Egypt defaulted on loans owed to France and Britain, and a nationalist uprising ensued—the first such Arab rebellion against the Western presence—the French backed away from military occupation. Instead, they occupied Tunis in 1881 with Bismarck’s encouragement and moral support, thus expanding their North African presence from Algeria. Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, otherwise an adamant anticolonialist, then established a British protectorate in Egypt. When the French reacted bitterly to the sudden presence of Britain in Egypt, Bismarck further encouraged French colonial expansion in hopes of distracting them from European power dynamics, and he then took his own country into the fray by claiming four large segments of Africa for Germany in 1884. In that year, the king of the Belgians cast his eye on the entire Congo Basin. The Berlin West Africa Conference of 1884–85 was called to settle a variety of disputes involved in European colonial occupation, and over the next 10 years all the Great Powers of Europe, except for Austria and Russia, staked out colonies and protectorates on the African continent. But whatever the ambitions and rivalries of military adventurers, explorers, and private empire-builders on the scene were, the cabinets of Europe came to agreements on colonial boundaries with surprising neighbourliness. Colonial wars did ensue after 1894, but never between any two European colonial powers.

It has been suggested that imperial rivalries were a long-range cause of World War I. It has also been said that they were a safety valve, drawing off European energies that might otherwise have erupted in war much sooner. But the links between imperialism and the war are more subtle. The heyday of the New Imperialism, especially after 1894, created a tacit understanding among the European elites and the broad literate classes that the days of the old European balance of power were over. A new world order was dawning, and any nation left behind in the pursuit of world power would sink into obscurity. This intuition surely must have fed a growing sense of desperation among the Germans, and one of paranoia among Britons, about trends in global politics. A second point is that the New Imperialism, while it did not directly provoke World War I, did occasion a transformation of alliances that proved dangerous beyond reckoning once the Great Powers turned their attention away from their colonies and back to Europe.

The British naturalist Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, and within a decade his theories of natural selection and survival of the fittest had been applied—or misapplied—to contemporary politics and economics. This pseudoscientific social Darwinism appealed to educated Europeans already demoralized by a century in which religious scripture had been criticized, and they had become conscious of the competitiveness of their own daily lives in that age of freewheeling industrial capitalism. By the 1870s, books appeared explaining the outcome of the Franco-German War, for instance, with reference to the “vitality” of the Germanic peoples by comparison to the “exhausted” Latins. Pan-Slavic literature extolled the youthful vigour of that race, of whom Russia was seen as the natural leader. A belief in the natural affinity and superiority of Nordic peoples sustained Joseph Chamberlain’s conviction that an Anglo-American–German alliance should govern the world in the 20th century. Non-scholarly Anthropology during this period explained the relative merits of human races on the basis of physiognomy and brain size, a “scientific” approach to world politics occasioned by the increasing contact of Europeans with Asians and Africans. Racialist rhetoric became common currency, as when the Kaiser referred to Asia’s growing population as “the yellow peril” and spoke of the next war as a “death struggle between the Teutons and Slavs.” Poets and philosophers idealized combat as the process by which nature weeds out the weak and improves the human race.

By 1914, therefore, the political and moral restraints against war that had arisen after the period between 1789–1815 were significantly weakened. The old conservative notion that established governments had a heavy stake in peace, lest revolution engulf them, and the old liberal notion that national unity, democracy, and free trade would spread harmony, were all but dead. The historian cannot judge how much social Darwinism influenced specific policy decisions, but a mood of fatalism and bellicosity surely eroded the collective will to peace.

THE TRIPLE ENTENTE

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In 1905, the Germans seized on Russia’s temporary troubles to pressure France in Morocco. German Chancellor and Prussian Prime Minister Bernhard, prince von Bülow, believed he had much to gain. At best, he might force a breakup of the Anglo-French entente, and at worst he might provoke a French retreat and secure German rights in Morocco. But at the Algeciras Conference in 1906, when called to settle the Morocco dispute, only Austria-Hungary supported the German position. Far from breaking the Entente Cordiale, the affair prompted the British to begin secret staff talks with the French military. The United States, Russia, and even Italy, Germany’s erstwhile partner in the Triple Alliance, took France’s side. For some years, Italian ambitions in the Mediterranean region had been thwarted, and the attempt to conquer Abyssinia in 1896 had failed. The German alliance seemed to offer little to Italy’s benefit, while Rome’s other foreign objective, the Italian irredenta in...