The origins of the first world war involve so many nations in so many languages, that historians are still trying to piece it together. The conflict was so horrific and destructive in scale that it ended up destroying the foundations of many of the leading states of the conflict. At the beginning of the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II was among the most famous figures in the world, by the end, he became, overnight, a mere footnote as a result of a revolution which broke out in Imperial Germany and the start of The Weimar Republic. The dramatic collapse, the sudden revolution, and rapid changes in governments, states, borders that followed the peace further overshadowed and buried the circumstances that led to this conflict. Likewise the new states that emerged had various political agendas. The Soviet Union for instance argued that the war was caused by Capitalism and Imperialism, and of course it suited their agendas to blame everyone including Tsarist Russia, obviously, and claim that the only option is to end all nationalism and join the international brotherhood of Communism, and welcome Communist cadres and parties in all nations. On the other side, politicians in Imperial Germany actually doctored their archives and destroyed some evidence and forged other documents. During The Roaring '20s, the Weimar Republic directly promoted either the "collective guilt" idea or that "Germany was a victim of the Entente" and was fighting defensively (even if they declared war and invaded first) and that the other nations were jealous of Germany's rise and progress. Historians with similar views (even, or especially from, America) were encouraged and directly funded in some cases, while those who questioned it were stifled and ignored, in a manner not dissimilar to the way the Confederate States manufactured and promulgated the "Lost Cause" thesis. The debate about the war was politicized in the years leading to World War II, and while it isn't as politicized and deadly today, and mercifully a more academic issue than it used to be, it's still something that sparks a lively debate. The irony in academic history is that, these days, among German academic historians, the consensus is that Imperial Germany knowingly launched into a war of aggression in 1914 while non-German historians believe that the war was a case of Poor Communication Kills, bad diplomacy, or collective guilt. In the hundred years between 1815, the end of the Napoleonic Wars after Waterloo, and the start of World War I, there had been many wars in Europe, many Civil War, and many revolutions. An objective record of the 19th Century and even The Edwardian Era, belies the claim that this was truly "la Belle Époque" designated by European thinkers and writers after World War I. That the great crises of this era, whether its the Revolutions of 1848, the Crimean War, the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War did not start an all out continental war with the corresponding scale of violence can be ascribed and credited to the limited destructive capacity of the weapons despite its steady advancement, the solidity of the diplomatic norms established after Waterloo that allowed it to withstand multiple cracks, or sheer dumb luck. None of this is to state that World War I was inevitable or inherent to the foundations of Europe, merely that the history of Europe was so constantly violent and had been so for centuries, that a periodic occurrence and recurrence of "small wars" was seen as tolerable and preferable so long as it didn't affect the social foundations and regional boundaries the way the wars of the 18th Century did (the Seven Years' War and the French Revolutionary-Napoleonic Wars). This explains why at the outset of World War I, some of its leading participants expected a "short war" or a limited war. There was little reason to think at the outset that this wouldn't be something similar to one of those "small wars", a few of which had been forgotten even at the time. The true origins of the war, at least in terms of outlining the scale, length and nature of impact, lies in the lopsided nature of social development across Western and Eastern Europe, and the means by which order in these states was maintained. Until the middle of the 19th century, Great Britain was the unquestioned commercial and military superpower of Europe, the cradle of Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the home of "free trade" and the possessor of most of the world's colonies. France, formerly the most powerful continental power (having been supreme in the late 17th century under Louis XIV and of course at the beginning of the 19th under Napoleon) and an ex-rival of Britain, occupied a happy second place and likewise joined the colonial game with gusto, out of both economic competition, and as a means to combat its instability and multiple changes in its form of government. It likewise became the second major nation in the continent to industrialize and transform itself,note Belgium and the Netherlands beat France to industrialization, but neither was a power player completely embracing both popular government and free-market capitalism. This happened in fits and starts, but after the establishment of the Third Republic in 1870, France became the liberal-democratic capitalist republic it has been ever since then (except for the extraordinary government of 1940-44). In Central and Eastern Europe however there was a different story. You see the governments of these states generally wanted modernization and advancement, but on its own terms. They wanted development and progress while still maintaining aristocratic privileges, a strong autocratic state, wealth in the hands of a few elites and little of the social instability they feared such changes would bring. It was only defeat in the Crimean War, that led Tsar Alexander II to abolish serfdom across the Russian Empire, and even then the reforms were done in such a way that newly freed serfs could not benefit meaningfully from their liberation. The Austro-Hungarian Empire likewise maintained a multi-cultural empire of Hungarians, Czechs, Slavs, Italians, Poles, and Jews among others, and even benefited a few of them, but this was accompanied by the maintenance of a Police State and a repressive bureaucracy that only fed the desires for nationalism among many of its "subjects". The Ottoman Empire was the "sick man of Europe" yet maintaining large territory across Europe and Asia, and whose dismemberment was seen by rival powers as a Foregone Conclusion, delayed solely to ensure that one nation got a bigger piece of the pie than others, which periodically led Britain and France to intervene on their behalf (as in the case of the Crimean War) even as the latter wanted its territories in the Levant. The Wars of Unification in Italy and Germany weakened some of these empires and in the process created the newest, and most powerful, and dynamic of these powers: Imperial Germany. Under Otto von Bismarck, Imperial Germany formed itself via what the historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler called Sammlungspolitik. A complex word that defines the idea of solving domestic problems by exporting them outside, eliminating disputes by getting everyone to "rally 'round the flag". The ideology of nationalism, once opposed by many of these conservative forces came to be seen as a means of creating a unifying and majoritarian ideology that manufactured unity and control in society from the top-down. Now of course none of this was exceptional to Germany or exceptional to the 19th Century or to Europe (cf, Genghis Gambit) but the persistence of this archaic approach to statecraft alongside industrial and social development and advancement was unique. Imperial Germany formed itself via wars against local German holdouts, then against Austria, and finally and most importantly, France in the Franco-Prussian War. The latter conflict shifted the Balance of Power overnight. Germany was now the most powerful state in Continental Europe, it dictated a punitive peace on France, extorting damaging reparations that continued to hamper its economy for decades as well as grabbing the regions of Alsace-Lorraine on the Franco-German borders against the wishes of the people who were living there. This was a Shocking Defeat Legacy that toppled the Second French Empire, started a revolution, led to the formation of a Republic, and fanned a desire among Frenchmen to avenge this defeat and regain their lost territory (from which we get the term revanchism). The British meanwhile took note of a new threat across the channel, one which showed the same industrial and technological elan that they had prided themselves in, and which through rapid government-directed and supported industrialization was closing the gap between itself, England and France. Bismarck, after succeeding in his plans and gambits to unite Germany, and establish itself as a major power saw little need to alter the means of Sammlungspolitik now that its end had been achieved. As such he became heavily involved in foreign policy across Europe and used his mastery of the same to better maintain and enlarge German influence both locally and internationally, periodically playing England, France and Russia against each other to prevent an alliance forming against it on both sides. His dismissal in 1890 by Kaiser Wilhelm II is seen as a turning point in ensuring the war broke out, but critics argue that Bismarck's brinkmanship, his political adventurism, and the nurturing of what can be seen as the world's first state-supported military-industrial complex, played a determining, if not causative factor in the lead-up to the war. The major problem for Germany in the coming decades was Tsarist Russia, where industrialization had arrived later then Europe. The social upheaval that followed industrialization, namely the development of a skilled urban working class, and the growth of a middle-class was feared by the autocratic nature of the Tsarist state, which tried to divert problems by entering into a war with Japan, only to lose. Yet a stable Russia that achieved industrialization would be unbeatable for Germany, threatening its military hegemony in Eastern Europe, where it nurtured plans for settlement and expansionism in the borderland states. Vulnerability to any nation on its East or its West, left them open to invasion and partition. To this end, a few German planners such as the Chief of the General Staff, Moltke the Younger, proposed plans to start a war and cripple and weaken Russia, and destabilize its Empire before it completes and achieves industrialization. This crisis of encroaching modernization and the threat it could pose to preexisting hegemony, operated behind the scenes over a series of diplomatic struggles between European powers in the decades leading up to war. These diplomatic struggles was accompanied by secret treaties and other deals, leading to the formation of an alliance between England-France and Russia on one hand, and an alliance between the Germans, the Ottomans, the Austrians, and briefly, the Italians on the other hand. Accompanying this diplomacy was a massive scheme of industrialization and armament, an arms race, between the great powers as each sought to match and/or check the advantage of the other. Emerging nationalism was a cynical tool that both sides took advantage of, even if either Power Bloc was comprised of massive empires that denied the rights of basic sovereignty to many of its subjects. The idea was to promote and nurture nationalism in a way that would destabilize and distract the other side. To that end, Imperial Germany supported and nurtured the nationalistic aspirations in multiple nations, from Poland to Finland to Ireland, while the other sides did the same, including supporting their very own partition of Poland against others, while the British and French encouraged Arab Nationalism as a means to break the Ottoman Empire. This climate of micro-nationalism had deadly consequences in the Ottoman Empire, where the emerging modernizing state-builders, the Three Pashas, created and promoted Turkish hegemony by directing and mobilizing hatred and violence to the Greek, Kurdish, Assyrian and Armenian minorities. The height of this cynicism would be the famous gesture made by Imperial German officials, to allow Vladimir Lenin to pass from Switzerland to Russia in a sealed train, in the hopes that it would add to the destabilization of Tsarist-Russia towards the end of the war. The war finally broke out over the issue of the Balkans. Tsarist Russian support of the Orthodox-worshipping nations of Greece, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro against the Ottomans and the Austro-Hungarian empires. Russia's sense of itself as the defender of the Orthodox faith sparked the Crimean War, and this recurred again in a series of conflicts in the Balkan region. The first of this destabilized the Ottoman Empire's European hegemony, which in turn enlarged Russian hegemony and which in turn panicked Germans, who leaned on the weak Austro-Hungarian Empire to pick up the slack in the regional Balance of Power, which in turn made the Austro-Hungarians the enemies of Serbia, which now saw itself as the new emerging great nation in Europe. This informed the background of the Assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was carried out by agents supported by the Serbian government, and the diplomatic tussle that followed led Russia to support the Serbians, and the Germans to support the Austro-Hungarians. On 8th December 1912, Kaiser Wilhelm II summoned a cabinet meeting of the Imperial Council where they noted that the present situation could not be allowed to continue, since accompanied by Russian industrialization, it would in time erode their advantages and gains. The Kaiser's generals agreed that if a war was inevitable, then it was best it broke out sooner rather than later. If it happened soon, then Imperial Germany could press and defend its position and advantage. These were the only options available to Imperial Germany for it to persist and remain in the same form and the same system of government. These were also the options for Tsarist Russia which was destabilizing at home, weakened by military defeats, and facing many problems that the autocratic state either didn't want to deal with, or were incapable of dealing with: chiefly the tensions of class leveling and the specter of revolution and the greater gains of the worker's movement and their desire to convert it into political gains. It was common practice for everyone at that time to deal with these problems by Sammlungspolitik. World War I was a war of empires, and a war to defend the concept of empire and imperialism, in a world that was already becoming so interconnected by transport and communication, that it has come to be defined as "the first globalization". Economic theorists of the time harbored under what Norman Angell called "The Great Illusion" (which inspired the title of the famous World War I film). The idea that a world of economic competition ended the need of war automatically cancelled the possibility of war. Angell, contrary to general opinions, argued that a political order needed to be established to prevent war, and that war could be practiced, and continued to be practiced for political expediency. That Great Illusion would be replaced by the illusion of "the war to end all wars".
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