The spark: the assassinationįerdinand and his wife were murdered in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Bosnian Serbian nationalist terrorist organization the ‘Black Hand Gang.’ Ferdinand’s death, which was interpreted as a product of official Serbian policy, created the July Crisis – a month of diplomatic and governmental miscalculations that saw a domino effect of war declarations initiated. Indeed, Serbian nationalism created the trigger cause of the conflict – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Nationalism in the Balkan’s also piqued Russia’s historic interest in the region. Watch Nowįor example, The Habsburg empire was tottering agglomeration of 11 different nationalities, with large slavic populations in Galicia and the Balkans whose nationalist aspirations ran counter to imperial cohesion. They discuss the role that masculine insecurity played in the build up to the war and also examine the construct of and myths surrounding nationalistic feeling in the pre-war years. Margaret MacMillan talks to her nephew Dan about the road to 1914. Nationalism created new areas of interest over which nations could compete. It was tied to militarism, and clashed with the interests of the imperial powers in Europe. Nationalism was also a new and powerful source of tension in Europe. However the suggestion that Germany wanted to create a European empire in 1914 is not supported by the pre-war rhetoric and strategy. Certainly the expansion of the British and French empires, fired by the rise of industrialism and the pursuit of new markets, caused some resentment in Germany, and the pursuit of a short, aborted imperial policy in the late nineteenth century. It has been suggested that Germany was motivated by imperial ambitions to invade Belgium and France.
For example, the Russo-Japanese War (1905) over aspirations in China, helped bring the Triple Entente into being. They also brought nations who would otherwise not interact into conflict and agreement. Colonies were units of exchange that could be bargained without significantly affecting the metro-pole. Imperial competition also pushed the countries towards adopting alliances. The alliance system primarily came about because after 1870 Germany, under Bismarck, set a precedent by playing its neighbours’ imperial endeavours off one another, in order to maintain a balance of power within Europe Imperialism
It was fed by the cultural belief that war is good for nations. The policy of building a stronger military was judged relative to neighbours, creating a culture of paranoia that heightened the search for alliances. The late nineteenth century was an era of military competition, particularly between the major European powers. It’s simplistic but provides a useful framework. The M-A-I-N acronym – militarism, alliances, imperialism and nationalism – is often used to analyse the war, and each of these reasons are cited to be the 4 main causes of World War One. That event precipitated the July Crisis, which saw the major European powers hurtle toward open conflict. Rather, a delicate but toxic balance of structural forces created a dry tinder that was lit by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. It didn’t have the moral vindication of resisting a tyrant. It’s possibly the single most pondered question in history – what caused World War One? It wasn’t, like in World War Two, a case of a single belligerent pushing others to take a military stand.