Causes of World War

We'll start with the facts and work back: it may make it all the easier to understand how World War One actually happened. The events of July and early August 1914 are a classic case of "one thing led to another" - otherwise known as the treaty alliance system....
With Britain's entry into the war, her colonies and dominions abroad variously offered military and financial assistance, and included Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa. (more.. http://www.firstworldwar.com/origins/causes.htm)

 

The conflict of interest is the only cause of any war. The rise of Germany caused Britain to fear that its interest might be violated. To protect its interest, Britain prepared for war. Making alliances is just a part of that preparation.
If one wants something from another, he would try to buff him first. If the buffing fails, then he would try to take it by force. Where diplomacy ends, war begins.

 

Britian joined the war becasue Germany invaded Belgium. Had that not happened it is hard to see Britian entering the war. France fought becaseu of the demands Germany made, Germany fought because Russia declared war on Austria. Had the Germans not made the territorial demands on France they might have ben able to avoid the two front war that they did not want.

All of this is pointless in regards to WW2. The ending of WW1 is what influenced the begining of WW2. Had Germany been allowed to keep its pre 1914 boarders less Alsace and Lorraine WW2 might not have happened. All of the land that Germany was demanding in the 30s was land that had been their for 100s of years prior to 1918.

 

The Versailles conditions were too hard for Germany. Not only did she loose her territoires but she lost her colonial empire and her territories were occupied by Foreign forces and had to pay impossible war reparations. Add to this the inflation, the 1929 recession and and it was easy to find scapegoats. But then again Versailles would not have happened without the pre WWI alliance race and I would even go back to the 19 thcentury to find the roots for the conflict

 

On the other side of the fence Italy felt they were kicked in the side as they were left out in the cold after WW1 which bought about rise of fascism in Italy turning them from Allie in WW1 to enemy in WW2.

Bad mistakes were made but at the time those who were involved must have regarded them as correct, I wonder how many of them who lay-ed down these laws on Germany realized they made an error as Hitler came to power.

 

Italy was left aside and so was Russia. As the new states, stemming from the dismantling of Austria-Hungary, they have often been tempted by fascism or been swallowed by Germany. it made a terrible coctail to say the least.

 

I disagree. The Versailles Treaty was too soft on Germany, not harsh. In WWI all nations were expecting war and all of them contributed to the initial eruption. However, Germany had most of the responsibility (something the Germans never wanted to accept) and, if we talk about harsh treaties, we should rather look the treaties imposed by Germany on Romania, Russia or Serbia.

Typical German megalomania, I'd say, contributed in great shape, to start WWI. The problem with Versailles was that it couldn't extinguish that megalomania, with its militarism and cheauvinism. Also, geographically and strategically, it didn't affect Germany's geographical, demographical nor economical advantages (in depth, this latter). France continued to have half the population and industry of Germany and not too defendable borders. France lost the WWII at Versailles, in 1919.

Also, we must consider that WWII had a very special why, unique in History, the megalomania of a man called Adolf Hitler. As Sir Ian Kershaw has put it: 'Hitler was not replaceable'. Without him, there could have been another war, but one very, very different from WWII.

 

I don't know if the Versailles treaty was too soft, but once Germany started breaking the agreements of the treaty and building an army and such, no-one enforced the treaties demands. The treaty also demanded huge reperations from Germany, so the Germans ended up getting loans from the USA, which it used to pay reperations to the UK, and the UK turned around and payed debts to the USA. It was a screwed up system, and the treaty was doomed to fail from the day it was signed. The system was also hurt by America's withdrawel from world issues during the 20's, and the non-interventionalist attitude of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations.

 

I understand that Germany as Germany did not come about until the 1870s but Poland ceased to be a nation in 1780ish. Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) was part of the Austrian Empire from 1700ish to 1918. When Austria chose to join Germany then claim could be laid against these lands.

The other idea was the Germany was unifying the German speaking people, which also closely follows the demands of Hitler.

As for Germany being "mostly responsible" for WWI how do you figure? Because they invaded Belgium? or because they came to the aid of Austria their ally? The French and Russians bear just as much responsibly as Germany if not more.

France as an indefensible border: Um no. Ever heard of the Maginot Line? Germany would then be considered far more vulnerable as it maintained a similar boarder along all of its frontiers. If you think that France lost WWII in 1918 I reserve the right to disagree.

France lost in ‘40 because of French leadership.

 

All these alliances helping each other makes my head swim!

 

Tikilal has already corrected a fair bit of this, I'll just add some more information. Germany wasn't formed officially until 1871, true. However, Austria as an independent nation wasn't formed until 1918. Austria was simply the most German part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ruled by the Habsburgs. The Habsburgs were not only kings of Austria, they were also kings of Hungary and ruled Bohemia and Moravia. While the majority of the latter were Czechs, there were large German minorities on the borders next to German lands. These Germans had been there for centuries and had never been ruled by Czechs. They were Germans living in an empire that was ruled by Germans. They had never experienced being ruled by another cultural group and this is why the Sudetens voted en masse to be incorporated into Hitler's Reich later on. The big problem with the Sudetenland was that the Allies gave the area of Czechoslovakia as a whole to the new Czech state and cared not at all for the ethnic minorities throughout this territory.

With the Polish corridor, while much of this region did have a Polish majority, there were large sections of it with a German majority and Danzig was and always had been a German city, with a very small Polish minority living amongst the German majority. With East Prussia undeniably German, there was simply no way for Germany and Poland to live happily together. Germany would always want to unite East Prussia to the rest of the Fatherland through the corridor while Poland would always want an outlet to the sea. The Allies gave Poland the corridor not just because there were a lot of Poles in the region, but because they wanted to strengthen Poland (by giving it access to the sea) and in so doing weaken Germany. Only a fool could not appreciate that Germany, which had had complete control over the corridor for almost a century and a half and where Germans made up a very considerable portion of the population, would not try to recover this land as soon as they had recovered their strength.

 

The Allies were too soft on Germany if they wanted to prevent a future war of revenge by Germany. However, if they had been as hard on Germany as would have been necessary to prevent WWII they would have needed to conquer the entire nation and then act so viciously that even their own people would have been aghast.

As for responsibility for WWI, while Versailles laid blame on Germany, only those still in thrall to petty nationalism would still maintain such statements today. Austria was being unduly harsh on Serbia when it threatened to invade and that forced Russia to come to Serbia's aid, again because of petty nationalism and the accompanying pan-Slav racism. And petty nationalism and racism and the treaty system forced Germany to come to Austria's aid against the giant of Russia, and this brought in France. France was not directly threatened by a war between Russian and Germany and Austria. However, France couldn't let a germanic win further strengthen Germany. As well, it had revenge on its mind for 1870.

With this situation, Germany was forced into a very unappealing situation, forced to fight a two-front war. French defences just west of Alsace-Lorraine meant that Germany couldn't quickly strike a death-blow to Paris and so the notion took hold (Schlieffen Plan) to run through Belgium. The Germans knew that this would cast them as the aggressors and took the gamble, knowing the old adage that the victors write history and that might makes right. They didn't win and the invasion of Belgium gave Britain an excuse to declare war. I doubt the UK would have been able to maintain neutrality in the event of WWI without involving Belgium. Britain's interests were too threatened by a German win.

 

I utterly disagree, and out of conviction, not 'petty nationalism'.

There was a very dramatic course on Germany's international politics with the ascension of kaiser Wilhelm II. Otto von Bismarck's Realpolitik and pragmatism was dropped and a more agressive attitude towards its European neighbours, a Weltpolitik was adopted instead. By example, the Britsh Empire, at the dawn of the XX century, was far more sympathetic towards Germany than towards Russia or France, her traditional imperial competitors. Germany's main trade partner was Great Britain, and culturally they had more in common than with other nations. Also, the British and German imperial families were tightly united by blood and sympathy.

However, the kaiser had very different, megalomaniac and overly ambitious ideas for Germany. He seeked to compete with Great Britain in international trade and overseas territories (which involved having a great naval power), thus challenging Great Britain's supremacy at sea. And not only that, Wilhelm II cynically supported the South African Boers during their rebellion, which convinced the British Empire to side with Russia and France to prevent, as it had always wanted, a single nation from becoming overwhelmingly predominant in the continent.

As Peter Simkins has put it: 'All the individual national motives [economic, political, military, cheauvinistic] for conflict and collective failures to halt the slide into the abyss cannot, howver, conceal the primacy of Germany's responsibility for war in 1914' (The First World War. The Western Front 1914-1916, Osprey, 2002). It is evident that the German military-industrial-political élite, which saw Germany's status lower than they thought she deserved, wanted nothing less than European hegemony, even at the cost of war, which would allow them, at the same time, to grow richer and more powerful both in the home and international front. (Let's not forget that this élite groups had a great deal of interest in depriving Germany of the social democratic and 'foreign' threats).

Of course, there is also Germany's rôle in the crucial summer of 1914, in activating the Alliance system and precipitating the whole of Europe into a war that shouldn't have been greater than a III Balkanic War: backing Austria's intransigent attitude towards Serbia; the menace of July 29th to Russia, which demaned the inmediate cessation of her partial mobilisation, failing which Germany would be forced to mobilise; again, on July 31st Germany's ultimatum led to the declaration of war and, therefore, to the implementation of the Schlieffen Plan, which included (no matter what Russia might do), the invasion of neutral Belgium and full war with France.

Tikilal:

The 1918 Franco-German border was that of the Treaty of Vienna of 1815, which favoured the defence of the German states, not of France. The 'Maginot Line', precisely, was built because of the lack of strong natural defences. That is one of the reasons that prevented France from attacking the Rhineland in 1939-1940.

Clemenceau accurately saw, despite how unpopular the idea might have seemed, that France was not going to be secure until the Franco-German border was the Rhine. For the US or Great Britain, it might have seemed 'imperialistic' or 'revengeful', but they didn't have in mind the defeat of 1870 or the 1,4 million dead and the devastation of 1914-1918. And Churchill agreed with this idea... (see The Gathering Storm).

 

The above comments are a very good precis of the circumstances regarding the start of both World Wars. All I would wish to add is that Britain's principal interest in protecting Belgium was because she did not want the Germans to have a Channel port. The other fact is that France's post war occupation of Germany was as cruel and repressive as almost Germany's was of their later conquered territories. The French did not commit atrocities,and certainly not in the scale of those committed by the Germans, but their treatment of German citizens was brutal, and their stripping of Germany's then very limited wealth by way of reparations was excessively greedy and way beyond the demands of the other Allies. Of course, the French had been invaded, beaten and occupied by the Germans TWICE in the previous half century, but even that was insufficient an excuse to justify the actions of the French.

 

Upon what convictions are you disagreeing?

As I noted above, Germany had no desire to fight all of Europe or anyone for that matter. When Russia declared war on Austria, Germany had to decide if it would fight and honor its alliance. Had it not, then Austria would have fallen and its ally would be no more. After the decision to go to war Germany had no desire to fight anyone other than Russia, to this effect Germany tried to secure peace with France. The terms were not the greatest, but can you put a price on peace, but France never tried to counter offer or to do anything other than go to war. You try to paint the Germans as the aggressor and for what reason? Conviction?

World War I could have been avoided at several turns:
1) Serbians had not shot anyone.
2) Austria had not retaliated
3) Russia had not declared war
4) Germany had not declared war
5) France had not chosen war
6) Germany had not invaded Belgium
7) Great Briton had not declared war

Now if France had tried to keep peace, then the biggest part of the war would never have happened, Russia would have been beaten in a year or so and Germany would have gotten some land from them.

Your quote says that it was Germanys fault but why what did Germany do to start the war? Austria activated the Alliance System, and Russia escalated it.

If the French border was so indefensible why did Germany take the time and effort to go around it in 1914? Now you are also saying that when France wrote they Treaty of Versailles they chose an indefensible border, whose fault was that. France tried to attack Germany in 39, and lost. If you think that France would not have lost WW2 if their border had been at the Rhine you are sadly mistaken. France lost in 40 because of the French, not the Germans. Also following your theory that a major river would make a good border to stop aggression why did the Germans get across the Muse?

In the end things are never done right they are done they way people want and what is right for all is seldom in line with the desires of the people in power. Germany was faulted for WWI and because of how that war ended WW2 started.

 

Good post, tikilal. (Did I ever tell you I work at an archaeological site just west of Tikal? Nice avatar.)

I think I should point out that WWI was inevitable, irregardless of who would end up starting it, and same goes for WWII. If you take the really, really big picture of world history you will see that throughout history there has been a competition amongst the various states for dominance. This competition starts at the small scale (one caveman clobbering his neighbor for a piece of his mammoth, or a piece of his cavewoman) all the way up to the modern world and states competing amongst themselves for world dominance. Right now we have but one undisputed superpower, the US. The US won the Cold War when there were only two major powers (yes, there were the Brits and French and a few other big powers, but they were all dwarfed by the US and USSR). Well, earlier there were other great powers and they've all been competing to see who gets the biggest piece of the pie; who gets to dictate borders and trade agreements etc. While peace can go on for a while ultimately, without undermining the nationalism that supports nation states, the great powers are ultimately going to come to blows in determining who gets to dictate world affairs.

And so WWI. You have Europe divided into the various Great Powers and they all wanted the upper hand. Britain and France had it earlier than Germany and Russia and the latter, especially Germany, naturally enough, wanted to be in the same political position as their western neighbors. However, both Britain and France (and Spain and the Netherlands, and to a smaller degree Portugal) had already taken most of the world as colonies in their imperial system. Germany got the dregs and Russia had to be content with the continental territory to the east that nobody else wanted.

Unless Germany wanted to permanently remain a second-rate power, taking a back seat to France and England, it had to assert itself. With Bismarck, it did so tactfully and kept Europe in peace; with Kaiser Wilhelm II Germany was far more brash and turned the western powers even more against it. Germany has the unenviable position of being smack dab in Central Europe and without any major geographical boundaries for natural defence. Because of its position Germany has naturally reared a people based on war. While western Europe had already evolved out of that medieval mindset, it still existed in Germany. Hence, not only do we have a political clash and impending military one, we've also got a cultural clash. (This is why Germans were more prone to "excesses" (atrocities) than the Western Allies, although much of the claims in WWI were exaggerated Allied propaganda).

Germany still believed that war of conquest was still an admirable thing to strive for, not only because they still carried a lot of the medieval mindset, but they also had missed the boat on imperialism and still wanted a piece of the pie. The Allies, on the other hand, had nothing to gain from a new war (they already had huge empires they were actively exploiting and which they would risk in war) and so were far less disposed to war.

And so modern folks studying modern war and society may get the notion that the Western Allies were naturally the good guys and the Germans were obviously the bad guys. However, as I've pointed out elsewhere, France and England (and Spain and the Netherlands and the other great imperial powers) didn't gain their empires through being friendly. They had already committed their fair share of attrocities. However, their attrocities were simply against blacks and Indians and Asians and other lesser races. What made Germany so terrible is that in order to conquer it's own empire it was going to be steamrolling over fellow Caucasians. That didn't stand to well in the early 20th century and so the easy propaganda for the Allies.

And so we get to the eve of WWI. I won't discuss the alliance system and why each country ended up with the allies that it did as it's all been said before. However, I will point out that Germany, in its central position between Russia and France, had to quickly knock out one or the other since in a long war of attrition Germany couldn't win. Since Russia was too big to conquer quickly (and since it mobilized more slowly than any of the other powers) Germany's obvious first move had to be to take out France. However, they couldn't quickly get over the French border defences and so Belgium became a natural option to ferry Germany's troops straight to Paris. While this would make them appear the aggressor, especially to Britain, Germany didn't have much option if it didn't want to lose the war. As the saying goes, all is fair in love and war and to the victors go the spoils, including the right of writing history. So if Germany won, their violation of Belgium's neutrality wouldn't matter (any more than the western Allies attempted violation of Norwegian neutrality in WWII or Lincoln's illegal occupations and disenfranchisement of Maryland Missouri in the Civil War). Only if they lost would this action come to haunt them.

And they lost the war and at Versailles the Allies used this obvious aggression to pin all the blame for the war on Germany. And German shame and anger at their treatment at the end of WWI led directly to the willingness of many Germans to launch WWII.