world war 1 nationalism essay

World War I

Nationalism as a cause of world war i.

Nationalism is an intense form of patriotism or loyalty to one’s country. Nationalists exaggerate the status, value or importance of their country, placing its interests above those of other countries. These sentiments were prominent in early 20th century Europe, particularly in the so-called Great Powers (Britain, France and Germany), leading many Europeans to believe their nation occupied a position of cultural, economic and military supremacy.

Sources of nationalism

The rising nationalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries came from many sources. A good deal sprang from historical events and developments. In Britain, the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century had created remarkable technological change and created new forms of wealth, while the British Empire had grown to span one-quarter of the globe. France and Germany also experienced rapid economic transformation, imperial growth and social modernisation. National successes of this kind led to excessive pride and confidence which, in turn, gave rise to nationalist sentiment. Politicians, diplomats and some royal leaders contributed to this in their remarks and rhetoric. Nationalism was also fueled by one-sided press reporting that was excessively critical of other nations but rarely critical of one’s own.

Nationalist ideas were also perpetuated and advanced by popular culture – from the high art of painters and sculptures down to common forms of entertainment like cheap literature and music hall comedy. Music, whether in orchestral or song form, was a notable medium of nationalist sentiment.

Inflated confidence

The product of this brewing nationalism was an inflated confidence in one’s nation, government and military power. In matters of foreign affairs or global competition, many became convinced that their country was fair, righteous and without fault or blame.

In contrast, nationalists demonised rival nations, caricaturing them as aggressive, scheming, deceitful, backward or uncivilised. Nationalist press reports convinced many that the interests of their country were threatened by the plotting, scheming and hungry imperialism of its rivals. Nationalist and militarist rhetoric assured Europeans that if war did erupt, their nation would emerge victorious.

In concert with its dangerous brothers, imperialism and militarism, nationalism contributed to a continental delusion that war was not only justified, it was easily winnable. In its most extreme form, this aggressive patriotism was known as ‘jingoism’, taking its name from a British music hall song of the 1870s:

We don’t want to fight but by Jingo, if we do We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true The Russians shall not have Constantinople!

Europe’s ambivalence to war

By the start of the 20th century, many Europeans seemed indifferent to the dangers of war. This was partly due to their lack of exposure to it. Aside from the Crimean War (1853-56) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), the second-half of the 1800s was a century of comparative peace in Europe. With the exception of France, which was defeated by the Prussians in 1871, the Great Powers had not experienced a significant military defeat for at least two generations.

For most Europeans, war was a distant memory. The British and French had fought colonial wars in Africa and Asia but they were brief conflicts against disorganised and under-equipped opponents in faraway places. Militarism and nationalism revived the prospects of a European war and created naivete and overconfidence about its likely outcomes.

Nationalism also bred some delusion about the military capacity of the Great Powers. The British believed their naval power, supported by the economic might of the Empire, offered them the upper hand in any war. German leaders placed great faith in Prussian military efficiency, Germany’s growing industrial base, new armaments and her expanding fleet of battleships and U-boats (submarines). If war erupted, the German high command had supreme confidence in the Schlieffen Plan, a preemptive military strategy for defeating France before Russia could mobilise to support her.

In Russia, the tsar believed his empire was sustained by God and protected by a massive standing army of 1.5 million men, the largest peacetime land force in Europe. Russian commanders believed the country’s enormous population gave it the whip hand over the smaller nations of western Europe. The French placed their faith in the country’s industries and defences, particularly a wall of concrete barriers and fortresses running the length of its eastern border.

Stereotypes and ‘invasion literature’

By the late 1800s, some Europeans were almost drunk with patriotism and nationalism. Britain, to focus on one example, had enjoyed two centuries of imperial, commercial and naval dominance. Britain’s empire spanned one-quarter of the globe and the lyrics of the popular patriotic song Rule, Britannia! trumpeted that “Britons never never will be slaves”.

London had spent the 19th century advancing her imperial and commercial interests and avoiding wars – however, the unification of Germany, the speed of German armament and the bellicose ambitions of Kaiser Wilhelm II caused concern for British nationalists. England’s ‘penny press’ – a collective term for cheap, serialised novels – intensified foreign rivalries by publishing incredible fictions about foreign intrigues, espionage, future war and invasion. The Battle of Dorking (1871), one of the best-known examples of ‘invasion literature’, was a wild tale about the occupation of England by German forces.

By 1910, a Londoner could buy dozens of tawdry novellas warning of German, Russian or French aggression. This invasion literature often employed racial stereotypes or innuendo. The German, for example, was usually depicted as cold, emotionless and calculating; the Russian was an uncultured barbarian, given to wanton violence; the Frenchman was a leisure-seeking layabout; the Chinese a race of murderous, opium-smoking savages.

Penny novelists, cartoonists and satirists also mocked the rulers of these countries. The German Kaiser and the Russian Tsar, both of whom were frequent targets, were ridiculed for their arrogance, ambition or megalomania.

German nationalism

German nationalism and xenophobia were no less intense, though they took different forms. Unlike Britain, Germany was a comparatively young nation, formed in 1871 after the unification of 26 German-speaking states and territories. The belief that all German-speaking peoples should be united in a single empire, or ‘Pan-Germanism’, was the political glue that bound these states together.

The leaders of post-1871 Germany relied on nationalist sentiment to consolidate the new nation and gain public support. German culture – from the poetry of Goethe to the music of Richard Wagner – was promoted and celebrated. German nationalism was also underpinned by German militarism: the strength of the nation was sustained by the strength of its military forces.

The new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, became the personification of this new, nationalistic Germany. Both the Kaiser and his nation were young and ambitious, obsessed with military power and imperial expansion. The Kaiser was proud of Germany’s achievements but nervous about its future. He was envious of other powers and desperate for national success.

To the Kaiser, and to many other Germans, Britain was the main obstacle to German progress and expansion. Wilhelm was envious of Britain’s vast empire, commercial enterprise and naval power – but he thought the British avaricious and hypocritical. The British government oversaw the world’s largest empire yet manoeuvred against German colonial expansion in Africa and Asia.

As a consequence, Britain became a popular target in the pre-war German press, painted as expansionist, selfish, greedy and obsessed with money. Anti-British sentiment intensified during the Boer War of 1899-1902, Britain’s war against farmer-settlers for control of South Africa.

Independence movements

As the Great Powers beat their chests and rode this wave of self-righteousness and superiority, a second type of nationalism was on the rise in southern and eastern Europe. This nationalism was not about supremacy or empire but the right of ethnic groups to independence, autonomy and self-government.

With the world divided into large empires and spheres of influence, many regions, races and religious groups sought freedom from their imperial masters. In Russia, more than 80 ethnic groups in eastern Europe and Asia had been forced to speak the Russian language, worship the Russian tsar and practice the Russian Orthodox religion.

For much of the 19th century, China had been ‘carved up’ and economically exploited by European powers; resentful Chinese formed secret and exiled nationalist groups to rid their country of foreign influence. Nationalist groups contributed to the weakening of the Ottoman Empire in eastern Europe, by seeking to throw off Muslim rule.

Serbian nationalism

No nationalist movement had a greater impact on the outbreak of war than Slavic groups in the Balkans. Pan-Slavism, the belief that the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe should have their own nation, was a powerful force in the region.

Slavic nationalism was strongest in Serbia, where it had risen significantly in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pan-Slavism was particularly opposed to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its control and influence over the region. Aggravated by Vienna’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, young Serbs joined radical nationalist groups like the ‘Black Hand’ ( Crna Ruka ). These groups hoped to drive Austria-Hungary from the Balkans and establish a ‘Greater Serbia’, a unified state for all Slavic people.

It was this pan-Slavic nationalism that inspired the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, an event that led directly to the outbreak of World War I.

“A new and aggressive nationalism, different from its predecessors, emerged in Europe at the end of the 19th century… The new nationalism engaged the fierce us/them group emotions – loyalty inwards, aggression outwards – that characterise human relations at simpler sociological levels, like the family or the tribe. What was new was attaching these passions to the nation… In its outward-looking dimension, the new nationalism was fully a movement of the ‘age of imperialism’ – of the ‘great game’, the ‘scramble for Africa’, the enterprise of great powers.” Lawrence Rosenthal, historian

1. Nationalism was an intense form of patriotism. Those with nationalist tendencies celebrated the culture and achievements of their own country and placed its interests above those of other nations.

2. Pre-war nationalism was fuelled by wars, imperial conquests and rivalry, political rhetoric, newspapers and popular culture, such as ‘invasion literature’ written by penny press novelists.

3. British nationalism was fuelled by a century of comparative peace and prosperity. The British Empire had flourished and expanded, its naval strength had grown and Britons had known only colonial wars.

4. German nationalism was a new phenomenon, emerging from the unification of Germany in 1871. It became fascinated with German imperial expansion (securing Germany’s ‘place in the sun’) and resentful of the British and their empire.

5. Rising nationalism was also a factor in the Balkans, where Slavic Serbs and others sought independence and autonomy from the political domination of Austria-Hungary.

Citation information Title: ‘Nationalism as a cause of World War I’ Authors: Jim Southey , Steve Thompson Publisher: Alpha History URL: https://alphahistory.com/worldwar1/nationalism/ Date published: April 5, 2017 Date updated: December 20, 2023 Date accessed: June 10, 2024 Copyright: The content on this page is © Alpha History. It may not be republished without our express permission. For more information on usage, please refer to our Terms of Use .

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Last updated 08 october 2014, nationalism.

This article offers an overview of the progress of nationalism and the national idea starting with its origins as a mass political programme during the French Revolution and tracing its passage up to the beginning of the First World War. It looks at a number of "pivotal" points in the history of nationalism: notably the French Revolution itself and its aftermath, the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the European Revolutions of 1848-49, the unifications of Germany and Italy in the latter-part of the 19 th century, and the apparent rising tide of nationalism in the Ottoman Balkans, especially in the last quarter of the 19 th century. Throughout, the idea of nationalism's uni-linear and irresistible rise is challenged, and this article shows instead the role of accident and contingency, as well as alternative programmes of political organization that challenged the national idea.

Table of Contents

• 1 Introduction
• 2 Ideologies of Nationalism, 1789-1815
• 3 The Era of Metternich, 1815-1848
• 4 The “Springtime of Peoples”, 1848 and its Aftermath
• 5 German and Italian Unification, 1860-1871
• 6 The Eastern Question up to 1878
• 7 Towards Sarajevo
• 8 Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

Introduction ↑.

The history of nationalism in the pre-1914 period has often been refracted through the outcome of the First World War: 1918 is the point of departure, and preceding events and developments are selected and laid out in order to explain our arrival at this final station. The historiographies of the new nation-states of eastern and central Europe, and especially the war’s “victor states” of Poland , Romania , Czechoslovakia , and Yugoslavia , are very often representative of such national teleologies. Like the English Whig tradition, they tell of the forward and irresistible march of the national spirit, overcoming myriad obstacles and difficulties en route to its final affirmation. A corollary to the irresistible rise of the national idea is the decline of its imperial counterpart. Thus, historians have often looked for and found harbingers of imperial doom in the pre-war years. An early and influential study of Austria-Hungary’s last years saw a “multi-national” state wracked by “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces, with the latter eventually proving terminal. [1] Even more dire was the case of the Ottoman Empire , whose decline was evident perhaps as soon as the early-modern period and could not be arrested by the various attempts at political, military, and bureaucratic reform in the 19 th century. [2] The Sarajevo assassination that sparked the First World War becomes an over-determined event: Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este’s (1863-1914) death at the hands of Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918) symbolizes the death blow dealt to Austria-Hungary by Serbia , which in turn symbolizes the death of the imperial, dynastic principle and its replacement with nationalism.

In reality the story is not so uni-linear: nationalism was one of many political forces at play in the pre-war period; a potent force, to be sure, but one with powerful opponents, and one whose all-conquering victory in 1918 was far from pre-ordained, owing as it did much to the war itself and its unexpected outcome. This article charts the expansions and contractions of nationalism and the national idea throughout the 19 th century by highlighting a series of pivotal points in the modern period (post-1789), wherein nationalism as ideology and political programme took shape. Those points are: the revolution in France and its impact throughout Europe, 1789-1815; the liberal and national revolutions of 1848-1849 and their aftermath (especially in the Habsburg lands); the national unifications of Italy and Germany in the second half of the 19 th century and their consequences on the system of alliances in international relations in the latter-half of the 19 th century; and, in the same period, the “Eastern Question”, that is, the diminishing authority of the Ottoman Empire in Europe and the attempts of the remaining Great Powers to manage the changes to the balance of power in international relations that this caused. The final section covers the decade before the outbreak of the war, focusing primarily on developments in the Balkans (especially during the wars of 1912-1913 ) and this region’s role in international relations on the eve of the First World War. The intention throughout is to undercut the “inevitability” thesis of both the rise of nationalism and the decline of empire , and to show instead that whilst nationalism seriously unsettled internal politics and international relations in Europe before the war, there were many who believed it could be suppressed, or managed, or even reconciled to the existing order. Only the violence of the war and its outcome shattered such beliefs.

Ideologies of Nationalism, 1789-1815 ↑

The ideology of nationalism is intimately connected to the revolutionary turmoil that began in France at the end of the 18 th century and thereafter spread across Europe. The end of Bourbon rule in France offered a glimpse of a political order in which sovereignty was not concentrated in a single monarch, divinely ordained, but instead resided at a popular level, with the people: the “nation.” The levée en masse and the Napoleonic wars that followed the revolution swept these ideas throughout the continent and beyond, bringing the revolutionary programme as far as Spain in the west, partitioned Poland in the east, and Dalmatia in the south. The many locations inscribed unto the Arc de Triomphe in Paris are a testament to the military prowess of the levée en masse and the Napoleonic armies; they also give a partial sense of how many lands and peoples came into contact with the revolution’s programme and ideals. Partial, because the Arc does not include any locations in the Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Empires, regions that were not occupied by the Napoleonic armies, but where the ideals of the French Revolution also spread. The radical challenge of the French Revolution to the absolutist order throughout Europe provoked a response, a “counter-revolution”, in which various international coalitions attempted to halt the revolution’s progress. In these conflicts at the beginning of the 19 th century, the counter-revolution was eventually triumphant, and absolutist rule was re-asserted and confirmed at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. However, as we shall see, the men who conducted the Congress of Vienna could not erase the memory of the revolutionary years, and the forces of revolution and counter-revolution, of absolutism and Enlightenment, and of nation and empire would continue to collide throughout the 19 th century. Political sovereignty and political organization were now hotly contested spheres, and this was true not only in Paris, but also in Vienna, Warsaw, Moscow, and Constantinople. Nationalism, then, introduced a disequilibrium into the political order throughout Europe, one that would continue to shape international relations until the outbreak of the First World War.

The French Revolution was the child of the Enlightenment, but it was also the parent of modern and mass politics. The notion that sovereignty was the property of the people obviously called for a much broader level of political participation and mobilization than had existed previously. No longer were the people the passive subjects of absolutist rule, they were the “nation”, the very life-blood of the body politic. The success of the levée en masse and the French army’s victories throughout Europe (at least until 1815) seemed to provide a living example of this maxim. Indeed, the orthodox opinion (not entirely undisputed) amongst theorists is that nationalism is a modern phenomenon. [3] Moreover, its successful dissemination and promotion at a mass level requires a modern infrastructure of communicative technologies and institutions, literacy, print culture, at least a primary level of education, and perhaps some form of associational life. [4] Thus, according to the influential study by Eugen Weber (1925-2007) , Peasants into Frenchmen , the spread of the national idea throughout France was not achieved until towards the end of the 19 th century, when education, print culture, and literacy, the vessels of the national idea, had taken root across the country, dissolving the local and regional identities of French men and women and replacing them with a unitary sense of national identity. [5]

The men of the French Revolution were educated bourgeoisie, lawyers, journalists, acting and speaking on behalf of the masses, but themselves part of a social elite. Their job, and that of their successors, was to help the national idea trickle down to the broader strata of the nation itself: “the masses.” This was true wherever a national programme existed. In an important sociological study of the spread of nationalism in East Central Europe, Miroslav Hroch identifies a three-stage process to the dissemination of the national idea, starting with its incubation within a tiny group of intellectuals, moving to a broader strata of patriots and nationalist activists, and finally permeating the population at large. [6]

The spread of nationalism, then, could be helped or hindered depending on the extent to which the lands in question had been touched by modernization. Nationalism penetrated more slowly, or not at all, in pre-industrial and agrarian parts of the country, East Central and South Eastern Europe, Russia, the Ottoman lands in Anatolia, and so on. [7] Thus, nationalist activists, promoters of the national cause in “pre-awakened” societies, might face two obstacles: on the one hand, from above, the conservative forces of empire and absolutism, attempting to suppress the national idea, and on the other, the people themselves, the material of the nationalists' political project who did not (at least not yet) acknowledge their national identity, embracing instead local or regional identities. Moreover, nationalist activists in central and eastern Europe were both impressed by the progress of national programmes in the industrialized and modern parts of Europe to their west, and were also somewhat ashamed that their own societies were falling behind. National ideologies spread unevenly throughout Europe in the 19 th century, but the states in which they had made most advances (France, and later Italy and Germany ) became the blueprint for less developed “nations.” Looking forward, the post-war settlement of 1918 reflects to a great extent the aspirations of nationalist activists in central and eastern Europe to “catch up” with their western neighbors, a desire which had remained constant throughout much of the 19 th century.

Part of the process of making nationalism a programme attractive and comprehensible to the masses involved veiling its modern and novel character. Often national activists would cast the nation and the national idea back into a primordial past, asserting that the nation had existed always and throughout time, instead of owning that it was a product of the modern age. Theorists of nationalism have almost uniformly rejected the idea of the nation as a perennial and primordial force; although a significant few have noted that the historical materials out of which national identities are constructed are not produced out of thin air, and that modern nationalisms have at least some basis in pre-national and pre-modern “myths” and “memories.” [8]

Such myths and memories were especially prevalent in central and eastern Europe: during the early-modern period the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian Empires had defeated and subsumed numerous medieval states in this region, upon whose ruins they now stood. Thus, Serbian nationalist awakeners stoked the embers of the medieval Serbian kingdom/empire, lost to the Serbs following the defeat of “Tsar” Lazar Hrebeljanović (1329?–1389) to the Ottomans at the Field of Blackbirds (Kosovo polje) in 1389. Bulgarian national awakeners spoke of Simeon I, King of Bulgaria’s (864?-927) great state, the largest of the medieval Balkan kingdoms. [9] Czech historian and “father of the nation” František Palacký (1798-1876) , speaking of his own nation, told of how “we were in existence before Austria and we will still be here after she is gone.” [10] The history that these nationalists selected was usually of a certain kind, as Timothy Snyder has noted: they most frequently evoked the medieval period, choosing a romanticized and, importantly, ethnically exclusive conceptions of nation over a multi-confessional or latitudinarian one. This move was most apparent in the case of Poland, where, in the 19 th century, nationalists overlooked the “multi-national” and noble early-modern kingdom of Poland-Lithuania in favor of the medieval Polish state, highlighting its victories against the Teutonic Knights. [11]

This, of course, was an eminently usable history for nations that were still subsumed into empires (Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian). Romantic nationalism of this kind tended to take the form of a triptych: the first panel depicted the glory of a golden age; the second panel, its fall; and the third, still to be painted, its restoration, which would be achieved in the near future at the expense of imperial masters. The goal was not cohabitation, which was, in most cases, already in existence, but rather the creation of an autonomous or even independent nation. The goal was to break out of the “prison of nations”, not to co-exist with other groups within it. Nationalism and national identity was in this way established as an oppositional force against empire, and was thus seen, quite correctly, as a potential threat to the imperial status quo in the Habsburg and Ottoman lands. As we shall see, this threat became ever starker as nationalism gained traction throughout Europe following the integrations of Italy and Germany in the latter part of the 19 th century.

The Era of Metternich, 1815-1848 ↑

As noted, the French Revolution sent shockwaves throughout the continent, both in terms of the immediate military successes of the Napoleonic armies and in the longer-term example of its popular challenge to the absolutist order in Europe, an example which could be emulated by peoples across the continent, even after the original revolutionary flames had been dowsed. Nowhere was this truer than in the Habsburg empire, which was at the beginning of the 19 th century an absolutist state held together through its imperial institutions and the dynastic principle, but whose subjects were divided by numerous languages, religions, and historical traditions , all of which had the potential to serve as the material for nationalist awakening in the wake of 1789. To an extent, this apparent fragmenting of imperial rule during the 19 th century along national lines was related to modernization; since nationalism and national identity are closely linked to modernity and modernization, the passing of the Habsburg monarchy into the modern era was also the passing of the traditional means of imperial rule and life and the rise of discrete national forces.

The Habsburg Empire was a member of the international coalition that defeated Napoleon in 1815, and it was in the Habsburg capital, Vienna, in the same year that the victorious forces of “counter-revolution” met to agree on the re-establishment of absolutism in post-Napoleonic Europe. One of the guiding forces behind this re-establishment was Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859) , the Austrian chancellor who saw in the French Revolution and its legacy as both a foreign and a domestic threat to the Habsburg Empire. In the wake of the revolutionary turmoil that had engulfed Europe, Metternich hoped to establish a system of international relations, a “concert”, wherein the states of Europe, in spite of their many differences and rivalries, could work together to ensure revolutionary forces were kept in check. The “Concert of Europe” became the governing factor in international relations for the entire 19 th century and up to the outbreak of the First World War. [12] It was, in fact, simply an informal arrangement between the conservative powers of Europe based on an understanding that their mutual interests outweighed their various economic and political rivalries, and that it was therefore in their interests to work together. [13]

Yet as the 19 th century wore on and the rivalries between the Great Powers became more entrenched, Metternich’s concert was increasingly unharmonious. The Great Power rivalries and vested interests tied up with the Eastern Question (see below), and the establishment of entrenched and adversarial political and (potentially) military alliances at the end of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th century, drastically diminished the common ground upon which the Concert of Europe had once stood. This, then, was Metternich’s first legacy, a less than sturdy system of international relations that, despite its successes, was perhaps incapable of bypassing the realist political and economic concerns of its members, and certainly incapable of bringing Europe back from the brink in 1914.

Metternich’s second legacy was domestic, for the Austrian chancellor recognized that the revolutionary spirit of 1789 was an example to many subjects within the Austrian Empire. The challenge of nationalism to the Habsburgs was, potentially, very severe, for the monarchy, dominated politically and culturally by its Germanic subjects, was, as noted, made up of disparate “peoples” with various languages, religions, and historical traditions. Nationalism, should it seep into the Habsburg monarchy, threatened to turn the empire from an integral state into a multi-national and fragmented empire. Metternich’s answer to this challenge was a comprehensive system of surveillance, policing, and censorship that has made his domestic policies a byword for oppression and reaction. [14] Yet Metternich’s chief concern was the risk of nationalism (and liberalism) manifesting themselves in the politics of the Habsburg empire: the chancellor considered cultural and literary expressions of national identity to be more innocuous and manageable. [15] Thus, the period of absolutist reaction after 1815 is also the period of the first flickers of cultural national renaissance in the Habsburg lands, especially among the Slav population. It marked the appearance of vernacular newspapers and reading rooms, for example, as well as early forms of nationalist associational life, sporting and singing societies, and gymnastic organizations. The impact of these initiatives was often very restricted: the actual and indeed potential readership for vernacular newspapers was in most cases very low, given the levels of literacy in certain parts of the monarchy, and membership to nationalist associations was not nearly as high as many activists had hoped. Metternich’s absolutism was often not the only obstacle standing in the nationalists’ path: there was also the “national indifference” of the very people being targeted. As Pieter Judson and others have shown, national identity in the 19 th century was very often subordinate, or even non-existent, with people turning instead to local, regional, or other forms of identification. [16]

The “Springtime of Peoples”, 1848 and its Aftermath ↑

Metternich’s energetic censorship and policing did not render the Habsburgs immune to the transnational revolutionary temper in Europe during the so-called “Springtime of Peoples” of 1848-1849, which challenged the absolutist order that had been established at the Congress of Vienna almost everywhere. [17] In many parts of Europe, the challenges to the absolutist status quo came from liberals demanding, for example, a constitution that curtailed imperial or monarchic rule, or a parliament that allowed for some kind of popular representation. The turmoil of 1848-1849 in the Habsburg lands, however, was also an attempt at national revolution, with many of the non-Germanic peoples in the Habsburg Empire calling for some kind of autonomy, even independence.

The most serious threat to the Habsburgs in this respect came from Hungary, where, during the unrest of 1848-1849, the nationalist torch passed from István Széchenyi (1791-1860) to Lajos Kossuth (1802-1892) , that is, from an evolutionary and pragmatic approach to the Hungarian national question, to a revolutionary one. [18] Just as in 1815, the international forces of counter-revolution eventually defeated the men and women of 1848-1849. Nevertheless, after the military successes of 1848-1849, and a subsequent period of “Neo-Absolutism” lasting from 1849-1860, Habsburg rulers could no longer hope to exclude outright the national question from the political sphere in the manner attempted by Metternich (who fell from power as a result of the events of 1848). A fact that was essentially acknowledged with the Ausgleich (Compromise) of 1867, when, following a disastrous defeat at the hands of Prussia (see below), the Habsburg Empire was reorganized on a dualist basis as “Austria-Hungary”, devolving large amounts of political and economic power to the Hungarians.

The Austro-Hungarian agreement showed that nationalism was not necessarily an irresistibly corrosive force seeping through the sinews of the Habsburg State. The Ausgleich complicates the notion, long-held in the historiography of the origins of the First World War, that nation and empire were diametrically opposed forces, irreconcilable to each other and thus bound to clash violently. To be sure, and as already noted, many national activists set out their programmes in strict opposition to empire, but many were also ready to accept that the national idea would need to accommodate itself within the empire, just as the more far-sighted of the monarchy’s rulers accepted the existence of nationalism and the need for it to be managed within the imperial framework. The example of Hungary’s compromise with Vienna in 1867 showed precisely this (although admittedly there had been much blood and toil on the path towards this arrangement). Timothy Snyder’s biography of Wilhelm von Habsburg, Archduke of Austria (1895-1948) , a minor figure in the Habsburg dynasty, shows how the royal family understood, at least after 1849, that nationalism could not be smothered under oppressive policing and censorship, and rather that the empire, in order to survive, would have to adapt to this new ideology. For Wilhelm’s family, this meant the sponsoring of a “friendly” nation such as the Poles, who could be enticed to work towards national goals within the empire. [19]

German and Italian Unification, 1860-1871 ↑

In the last quarter of the 19 th century, the Habsburg approach of squaring nationalist forces with imperial realities was looking increasingly anachronistic. This was not only because of the ever-greater appeal of nationalism to the subject peoples of the Habsburg Empire; it was also due to the emergence, in quick succession but under very different circumstances, of two powerful new national states onto the European stage: Italy and Germany. The emergence of Germany, in particular, dramatically altered the balance of power in Europe and changed the nature of international relations in the last quarter of the 19 th century.

The unification of Italy, however, came first in 1859-1860, following important military victories for Italian nationalist forces (in alliance with imperial France) over the Habsburgs at Magenta and Solferino. It marked the culmination of the Italian “Risorgimento” [20] of the second-half of the 19 th century, [21] a nationalist awakening with political, social, and cultural dimensions. The Risorgimento had two main tributaries in the political sphere: the liberal, political vision of Camillo di Cavour (1810-1861) , Prime Minister of Piedmont-Sardinia (the Kingdom of Sardinia), who hoped that the economically and socially disparate Italian territories would coalesce under the liberal tutelage of Piedmont; and the popular, romantic, and revolutionary vision of Giuseppe Mazzini (1805-1872) , founder of the secret society “Young Italy”, a group that hoped to galvanize the Italian masses through revolutionary action. Whereas Cavour believed that Piedmont, with its liberal politics and its constitutional monarchy, should serve as the nucleus of the new unitary Italy, enlarging its political system and institutions so as to cover the entire country, Mazzini saw such political traditions as too sterile to ignite the passions of the masses.

The unification, achieved with assistance in Sicily from the colourful adventurer and Mazzinian Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882) , left a number of matters still unresolved. The Roman Papal States, which rejected the secular forces of the Risorgimento, were now a Catholic and autonomous zone “imprisoned” in the Vatican. There were also many territories coveted by the men of the Risorgimento that remained outside of the unified Italian state: the unredeemed lands, or Italia Irredenta : the Trentino in the Austria Tyrol and various cities and towns on the Adriatic coast, most importantly the key port of Trieste. The desire for “repossession” of these lands would strongly influence the decision in favour of intervention in the war in 1915, and would continue to shape Italian foreign policy throughout the interwar period and even into the Cold War. Of even greater urgency was the fact that, in spite of the political union of Italy, many subjects of the new state did not identify strongly - or indeed at all - with the Italian nation. The great differences in social and economic fortunes in the various parts of the new state, the prevalence of regional, local, or confessional identities, were all great enemies of the Cavourian and Mazzinian dream of a united and integral Italy. The Italian statesman, novelist and painter Massimo d’Azeglio (1798-1866) wrote plaintively in his memoirs in the wake of the unification of 1861 that, “Italy has been made, now it remains to make Italians.” No doubt national activists of all stripes and from across the continent could sympathize with d’Azeglio’s desire to awaken in the masses a coherent and permanent sense of national affiliation. No doubt also there were many national activists who would have settled for a national state of the Italian kind regardless of whether the masses knew what it was or why they should be loyal to it: the work of national awakening could be carried out to great effect when the political, bureaucratic, and educational institutions of a national state were at one’s disposal.

Both the Cavourian and Mazzinian approaches to state- and nation-building served as inspiration and example to national activists throughout Europe. “Piedmont” became synonymous with the process of a political and national integration carried out under the benign and paternal leadership of a large, politically advanced region that would serve as the instrument of national unification. Many Poles came to see Galicia, in Austrian Poland, as the “Piedmont” that would embrace and assimilate the lands of Prussian and Russian Poland. [22] Once Serbia had achieved national independence in the last quarter of the 19 th century (see below), many Serbs believed it was their country’s historic role to act as the “Piedmont” of South Slav unification. There was also a Mazzinian legacy. Mazzini had seen nationalism as the way of the future not just for Italians but for all peoples throughout the continent: a universal and propulsive “young” force that would sweep away the aging and moribund European empires. “Young Italy” in this sense was just one part of a larger network of nationalist groups included in “Young Europe.” In the Mazzinian vision, Europe would achieve true harmony and equilibrium through its reorganization along national lines and into nation-states. Here was a dream of peaceful coexistence, not of violent confrontation. It was not far removed from the Wilsonian vision that was applied to Europe after the First World War. Indeed, many Europeans were duly impressed with the vigour of Mazzini and the success of this underground, conspiratorial network. Perhaps the most notorious group to try and emulate Mazzini’s example was “Young Bosnia”, the loosely-knit group of revolutionary South Slav youths whose number included Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Habsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand. [23]

The other great national unification of the second-half of the 19 th century, that of Germany, took place under very different circumstances. Whereas Italy was unified largely through the efforts of the constitutional monarchy of Piedmont-Sardinia, and thus came to adopt the liberal traditions of that state at a national level, the German principalities came together by the force of the largest pre-1871 German state, Prussia, and with the political, diplomatic, and military efforts of the Prussian Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) , Prime Minister from 1862. Prussia was a far more conservative state than Piedmont, and a far more conservative state than many of the remaining German principalities, which it dwarfed in terms of political and industrial might. The sources of political power in Prussia were almost uniformly conservative in outlook: the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty was supported by the ambitious and powerful “Junker” class, a group of large landowners vehemently opposed to liberal politics within their own state. This class was well represented in the officer corps of the Prussian army, a disproportionately large institution that enjoyed great prestige within the state. [24] Bismarck’s goal of national unification was not shared by all Junkers, many of whom remained sceptical about the subversion of Prussia within Germany.

Bismarck, himself the heir of a Junker family, sought to create a strong, unified German state under Prussian auspices, in which the autocratic political tradition from which he hailed would not be too diluted. He was an exponent, then, of the Kleindeutsch solution to the question of German unification, in which the putative German state, once unified, would exclude the Austrian lands and be dominated by Prussia. The alternate vision, the Großdeutsch solution, sought a larger German state that would include, and therefore be dominated by, Austria. Ultimately, it was Bismarck’s vision that sealed the unification of Germany. Following a series of wars that the Prussian army and government prosecuted successfully from 1864-1871, beginning in Schleswig-Holstein against the Danes , then against Austria in 1866, and finally, most spectacularly, against France in 1870-1871, the unification of the German states was completed. [25]

The triumph of the Kleindeutsch over the Großdeutsch solution to German unification was also a great triumph of the Bismarckian programme of integral nationalism over the Habsburgs’ multinational imperialism . Seen in comparison to the dynamism and potency of the newly unified German national state, Austria-Hungary looked increasingly out of step with the times, which seemed to belong to the likes of Bismarck, Mazzini, Kossuth, to name but some. The arrival of a powerful industrial state hailed a new balance of power in European international relations: a new force with which the Great Powers would have to reckon.

The Eastern Question up to 1878 ↑

The new sources of military and industrial power in Europe following the unification of Italy and, especially, Germany, also created a new climate in international relations. The Concert system established by Metternich in the first half of the 19 th century, despite its numerous successes in maintaining an equilibrium in the continent, was looking increasingly incapable of meeting the challenges of the Realpolitik of the late 19 th century and of the more solid and potentially antagonistic alliance blocks which were formed around this time. The most pressing concern in international relations in the latter part of the 19 th century was the weakening of the Ottoman Empire, a state which was apparently unable to compete in the power politics of the period. The crisis this caused was known as the “Eastern Question”, and for each of the remaining Great Powers the Eastern Question meant at best expanding their own interests and influence into the vacuum that Ottoman decline would inevitably create, especially in the Balkans. At worst, it meant maintaining equilibrium in the international balance of power by preventing any other of the Great Powers from capitalizing on the Ottoman Empire’s difficulties.

Within the Ottoman Empire itself there were a number of national activists who hoped also to capitalize on the declining power of the empire. Their work, however, was cut out by the social structure of the empire itself. It had never been a requirement of the subject peoples of the Ottoman Empire to convert to their rulers’ religion, Islam. Instead, the Ottoman Empire organized its non-Muslim peoples into broad confessional categories that were subordinate to Islamic institutions and subjects, the so-called “Millet” system. [26] Once this subordinate position in the social and political hierarchy was accepted, non-Muslim subjects could expect a level of autonomy and tolerance that was unmatched in the Christian empires (especially during the early modern period). Without the threat and practice of force there were few examples of mass and sustained conversion of Ottoman subject peoples to Islam (with notable exceptions in Bosnia, Albania and parts of Bulgaria ). The broad confessional categories created and upheld by the Millet system also stymied the development of discrete national identities and national groups, since it divided peoples not by language or territory but by religion. Greek Orthodox Christians shared a Millet with Bulgarian and Serbian Christians. Thus, national awakeners of the kind we have encountered previously were, in the Ottoman lands, faced with the challenge of disaggregating their putative national group from subject peoples with whom they shared a Millet. This was in addition to the challenges of separating their group from imperial rule itself. For this reason, the struggles of the national awakeners in the Ottoman lands were waged both against the Ottoman state and against rival programmes of national awakening. This second aspect of the national conflict became ever more pronounced in the last quarter of the 19 th century, since the entropy of Ottoman institutions and rule in Europe was becoming ever more apparent, and nationalists saw the greatest threats to the realization of their goals as coming not from the empire itself, but from other nationalists.

The first stirrings of what would become known as the “Balkan revolutionary tradition” took place in Serbia at the beginning of the 19 th century. In these parts, an absence of centralized Ottoman control and severe corruption of local administrators created the conditions for a largely spontaneous uprising on the part of the peasant Christian subjects. This uprising, which began in 1804, was directed in the first instance not against Ottoman rule itself, but rather against the Janissaries, the Ottoman military caste who were using their considerable powers to prey upon the local population. Eventually this transformed from a local dispute against the Janissaries into a more concerted attempt to gain political autonomy from the Ottomans. A subsequent revolt lasted from 1815-1817, and ended with the Porte conceding significant measures of self-government to the Serbs, thus creating the basis for what would become the Serbian national state. Yet another attempt at “national revolution” took place in the Greek lands during the 1820s, the so-called “Greek War of Independence”. This revolt was inspired by, and related to, the Serbian uprisings of the previous decades, but in many respects it was a more sophisticated and concerted challenge to Ottoman authority. The Greeks had better cultural and political representation than the largely socially undifferentiated Serbs. Notably, the Phanariot Greeks of Constantinople (so-called because they were based in the Phanar district of the imperial capital), were able to support and direct the efforts of the Greek revolution from outside its staging ground. Importantly, the Greek war had the support of France, Britain, and Russia, who, after initial hesitation, intervened militarily on behalf of the Greeks, a decisive factor that led to the creation of an autonomous Greek kingdom in 1830. [27]

For many enlightened Europeans the national revolutions in the Balkans represented the casting off of oriental and backward Ottoman despotism and the redemption of Christian subjects through national revolution. Coming so soon after the revolutionary transformations in France, the uprisings in Serbia and Greece were seen by many as an example of the kind of universal and progressive revolution that had taken place in France. This was especially true in the case of the Greek revolution, which was understood by many Westerners as a battle of a once great, classical civilization to throw of the shackles of an infidel and primitive imperial master. Thus, for example, George Gordon Byron, Lord Byron (1788-1824) travelled to Greece in order to take part in its struggles, seeing in the War of Independence the poetry of national emancipation and the redemption of Greece’s classical heritage. As the 19 th century progressed, the cadres of national awakeners did indeed internalize the ideals of the French Revolution, and hoped that they would be able to enact them among their own peoples and in their own lands. They also internalized the romance of their own nation’s imagined past, recasting the medieval period as a time of proto-national independence, caricaturing the period of Ottoman rule as centuries-long dark age of vegetation under foreign rule, and pointing towards the redemptive future, at once a new national beginning and a return to lost glories.

The Greek War also established the pattern of Great Power intervention and involvement in Ottoman affairs and therefore, also, of Great Power involvement in the Balkan national revolutionary movements, which would continue until 1914. For this reason the national revolutions in the Ottoman Balkans were inextricably linked to the foreign policy interests of the Great Powers: they could be made and unmade through the sponsorship and support of one or more of the Great Powers. Thus, Andrew Rossos points out that Macedonia’s “non-emergence” as a national state has less to do with a lack of Macedonian national identity and a Macedonian national movement than it does with the absence of powerful foreign support of the kind enjoyed by, for example, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, during the period in question. [28] To be sure, the development/non-development of nationalism in the Ottoman Balkans owed much to local and situational factors, as historians such as Isa Blumi have argued, [29] but, as the Treaty of Berlin and the subsequent creation of an Albanian state in 1912 demonstrated, the Great Powers still had enormous sway over the borders and even the existence of the Balkan national states.

The confluence of foreign, Great Power interests and native revolution can be seen during an uprising of Christian peasants in Ottoman Bosnia which quickly spread to Serbia and Bulgaria, becoming a matter of international concern and foreign intervention when Russia declared war on the Ottomans in 1877. [30] Western leaders expressed concern at the violence of the Ottoman army’s reprisals on its Christian subjects, just as they had done during the Greek War of Independence. [31] The Great Powers’ concerns in the Balkans were not exclusively humanitarian however: the deep involvement of Russia in the military and political aspects of the Eastern Question raised the issue of competing Great Power interests in the Balkans. So too did the initial Russian-sponsored settlement, the “Treaty of San Stefano” (March 1878), which created a large Bulgarian national state, a powerful regional client for Russian interests. But the remaining Great Powers arranged for the hasty revision of San Stefano with the “Treaty of Berlin” (July 1878), a settlement intended to undo many of Russia’s gains from the previous treaty, and to create a greater balance between the interests of the Great Powers in the region. The significance of the Treaty of Berlin is great and varied: the settlement was, in a sense, a blueprint for the settlements that would decide the borders in central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. They established the nation-state as the principle of post-Ottoman political organization in the region, just as the Paris peace treaties at the end of the First World War established nation-states as the principle of post-Habsburg political organization. They also enhanced the rivalries of the Balkan states themselves, creating overlapping territorial claims and the tantalizing prospect that still more gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire would be tolerated and perhaps even encouraged. Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian nationalists all coveted Ottoman lands in Macedonia and Thrace, and each now attempted to stake a claim on these lands through the promotion of cultural work, including the establishment of churches and schools , and so on. The revision of Bulgaria’s borders established a ready-made programme of irredentism that would shape the political culture and foreign policy of the Bulgarian state all the way up to the First World War, and even beyond.

Towards Sarajevo ↑

We have already seen that the ascendant forces of nationalism in the second half of the 19 th century called into question the very fundamentals of the Austrian and Ottoman Empires, namely, the dynastic principle and the possibility of a state being able to contain numerous national groups within a single imperial framework. The decline of the Ottoman Empire as a force to be feared and reckoned with in Europe also meant the loss of the Habsburg Empire’s importance as an Antemurale Christianitatis; whilst the unification of Germany and its emergence of as a front-rank power in Europe relegated the monarchy to an even lower position in the hierarchy of the Great Powers. Austria-Hungary faced an additional problem with the establishment of an independent Serbian national state on its borders, since this risked inflaming nationalist sentiment among the monarchy’s large South Slav population.

This population, in fact, had expanded in the aftermath of the Bosnian uprising and the Treaty of Berlin. The settlement of 1878 had called for the occupation of Bosnia-Hercegovina (as it became known after the Berlin Treaty), still de jure a province of the Ottoman Empire, by Austria-Hungary. After the Austro-Hungarian army waged a costly military campaign to bring the region under imperial control, the monarchy set out its long-term occupation goals in Bosnia. Its chief concerns were the rising tides of Croatian, and (especially) Serbian nationalist sentiment, among the Catholic and Orthodox Christian populations within Bosnia, which would compete with imperial attempts to win the loyalty of the population. The monarchy’s solution to this problem was to attempt to construct and promote a Bosnian “national identity”, chiefly among the province’s Slavic Muslim population, as a means of securing the province and its population to the remainder of the monarchy. This, in fact, was an attempt to synthesize nationalist forces with imperial interests. Bosnia, then, served as a kind of laboratory wherein the Habsburgs could experiment with the process of “taming Balkan nationalism” (and perhaps taming nationalism more generally) so that it could co-exist and even strengthen the monarchy itself. [32]

Another prong of Austria-Hungary’s policies towards the Eastern Question was a diplomatic alliance with the new Kingdom of Serbia and its ruling dynasty, the Obrenovićs, according to which the Serbs would abandon territorial claims in Bosnia in favor of those in the Ottoman Balkans (principally in Macedonia). This suited the ruling houses of both states (although certain militarist and nationalist societies within Serbia sought a more belligerent line in Bosnia), but the arrangement ended soon after a military coup in Serbia in 1903 deposed the autocratic Alexander Obrenović, King of Serbia (1876-1903) , who was replaced by the exiled claimant Petar Karadjordjević (1844-1921) . [33] This change of guard in Belgrade ushered in a more aggressive stance within Serbia towards its unredeemed territories, and also a change in the foreign policy alignment of the Balkan kingdom, away from the tutelage of Austria-Hungary and towards that of Russia. This, in turn, introduced new tensions into the Eastern Question, as now Austria-Hungary was faced with a potentially antagonistic neighbour with designs on imperial territories in Bosnia, and which enjoyed the support of Russia, a great rival to Austro-Hungarian interests in the region. The years after 1903 are marked by a series of confrontations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, the most serious of which came following Austria-Hungary’s decision to annex outright occupied Bosnia (1908). [34] For many Serbs, Austria-Hungary’s annexation rudely disabused any notions that the occupation of Bosnia was a temporary measure that might be rescinded should the winds of international diplomacy change. The monarchy’s possession of these lands now seemed like a permanent arrangement, a fait accompli . In fact, after some initial bluster, the Serbian government pragmatically accepted the new realities to the west of the country and decided instead to pursue with greater vigour the “unredeemed” Ottoman lands to the south. The same could not be said of the militarist and nationalist societies in Serbia, many of which were inspired by Mazzini’s Young Italy, and many of which saw the annexation as a terrible affront to the national dignity of the Serbian state. [35]

The cycle of conflict which led to the First World War began in the Ottoman Balkans in 1912 following the formation of a shaky military alliance of the Balkan states (Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro , the so-called “Balkan League”) directing against the Ottoman Empire. This empire was significantly weakened following its defeat by Italy in Tripoli, for the purpose of “liberating” the Christian Balkans from imperial rule. [36] The rapid successes of the Balkan League soon exposed the absence of common interests between the states, aside from a mutual desire to expel the Ottoman Empire from Europe. With this largely achieved, pre-existing rivalries between the Balkan states once again came to the fore. A particularly severe dispute soon opened up between Serbia and Bulgaria over which country was entitled to territories in Macedonia that were claimed by both states. The dispute showed how inter-communal rivalries, that is, rivalries between the Christian Balkan states themselves, were just as important on the eve of the First World War as were rivalries between nation-states and empire. Bulgaria experienced its first “national catastrophe” in the summer of 1913 when it attacked Serbian positions in Macedonia and its armies were quickly routed by a combined force of Serbian, Montenegrin, Greek, Romanian and even Ottoman armies, a defeat which lost Bulgaria almost all its Macedonian territory to Serbia. Serbia, on the other hand, emerged from the two Balkan wars greatly expanded, almost doubling the size of its territory and leaving only Habsburg Bosnia among the its un-redeemed territories. The political leaders of Serbia, their state replete in victory and their army spent on the battlefield, would have looked forward to a period of consolidation and preparation for future expansion. However, such patience was not a characteristic of certain militarist and youth groups in the South Slav lands. The fruits of their collaborations fell in Sarajevo, June 1914, and with consequences felt by the entire world.

Conclusion ↑

There can be no doubt that nationalism was a potent political force in 19 th century Europe: a means of mass mobilization embraced by many millions of people; an ideology of transformation and revolution born in the French Revolution, intrinsically linked to the rapid modernization of the continent, whose spread threatened to alter the political, social, and cultural landscape of Europe. The political map of Europe in the 21 st century has changed, but it is not beyond recognition when held alongside the political map of 1918. The Europe that emerged from the First World War was utterly unlike that of 1815. Everywhere changes were wrought by the forces of nationalism: the unifications of Germany and Italy and the rise of national-states in the Balkans are prime examples of this. So it is quite right that we recognize in nationalism an historical agent of great force and consequence. It is also right, however, that we acknowledge the role played by contingency and accident in its rise. After all, the political map of Europe in 1918 was also very different from that of 1914: the War itself effected the many of the most momentous changes to Europe’s political landscape, especially in eastern and central Europe. The reforms within Austria-Hungary, the compromise with the Hungarians and the occupation of Bosnia, demonstrate that nationalism and imperialism were perhaps, after all, not irreconcilable forces. The political sphere of Europe in the 19 th century was a contested space, and in the early 20 th century, nationalism and the nation-state were the almost undisputed victors of this contest. It has been the intention of this article to show that its victory was far from inevitable.

John Paul Newman, National University of Ireland, Maynooth

Section Editors: Annika Mombauer ; William Mulligan

• ↑ Jaszi, Oscar: The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy, Chicago 1929. The inevitability of the decline of the monarchy is challenged in Sked, Alan: The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918, London 1989 and in Okey, Robin: The Habsburg Monarch c. 1765-1918, New York 2001.
• ↑ See, e.g., Lewis, Bernard: The Emergence of Modern Turkey, New York/Oxford 2002.
• ↑ The father of the modernist interpretation of nationalism is Ernest Gellner (1925-1995) . See his Nations and Nationalism, Ithaca 1983. For this approach, see also Anderson, Benedict: Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London/New York 1991; Giddens, Anthony: The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford 1990; Hobsbawm, Eric: Nations and Nationalism since 1870, Cambridge/New York 1992. For a useful overview on the various theories and debates in the study of nationalism, see Lawrence, Paul: Nationalism, History and Theory, London 2005. For a brief summary of nationalism debates see Lawrence, Paul: Nationalism. History and Theory, London 2005.
• ↑ See Anderson, Imagine Communities 1991.
• ↑ Weber, Eugen: Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914, Stanford 1976.
• ↑ Hroch, Miroslav: Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe. a Comparative Analysis of the Social Composition of Patriotic Groups among the Smaller European Nations, Cambridge/New York 1985.
• ↑ For an historical survey of these areas, see Armour, Ian: A History of Eastern Europe, 1740-1918, London 2006.
• ↑ See, ee.g, Smith, Anthony: Myths and Memories of Nation, Oxford 1999.
• ↑ On the role of myth and memory in the formation of Balkan national identity, see Todorova, Maria: Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory, New York 2004; and in the Bulgarian context, Todorova, Maria: Bones of Contention. The Living Archive of Vasil Levski and the Making of a Modern National Hero, Budapest/New York 2009.
• ↑ Cited in Sugar, Peter F.: “External and Domestic Roots of Eastern European Nationalism, in: Sugar, Peter F./Lederer, Ivo John (eds.): Nationalism in Eastern Europe, Seattle 1994, p. 38.
• ↑ Snyder, Timothy: The Reconstruction of Nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, New Haven 2003.
• ↑ On this period, see Krüger, Peter/Schroeder, Paul W.: The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848. Episode or Model in Modern History, New York 2002.
• ↑ See Taylor, A.J.P.: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1918, Oxford 1954, pp. 1-3.
• ↑ Kann, Robert A.: A History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526-1918, Berkeley 1974, p. 283.
• ↑ Taylor, A.J.P.: The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809-1918, London 1990, p. 49.
• ↑ Judson, Pieter M.: Guardians of the Nation. Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria, Cambrdige, MA 2006. See also Zahra, Tara: Kidnapped Souls. National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948, Ithaca 2008.
• ↑ On the revolutions of 1848-1849, see Pogge von Strandmann, H./ Evans, Robert John Weston: The Revolutions in Europe, 1848-1849. From Reform to Reaction, Oxford/New York 2000; Sperber, Jonathan: The European Revolutions, 1848-1851, Cambridge 2005.
• ↑ See Deák, István: The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians, 1848-1849, New York 1979.
• ↑ Snyder, Timothy: The Red Prince, The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke, New York 2008.
• ↑ “Risorgimento”, from the Italian risorgere means “to rise again”, a term that implied the rebirth of a primordial and pre-existing national identity and state.
• ↑ On the history of the Risorgimento, see Riall, Lucy: The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification, London/New York 1994.
• ↑ Davies, Norman: The Heart of Europe: The Past in Poland’s Present, Oxford 2001, p. 150.
• ↑ See Dedijer, Vladimir: The Road to Sarajevo, New York 1966.
• ↑ On Prussia throughout history, see Clark, Christopher: Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, London 2007.
• ↑ See Showalter, Dennis: The Wars of German Unification, London 2004.
• ↑ See Sugar, Peter: Southeastern Europe under Ottoman rule, 1354-1804, Seattle 1977.
• ↑ On the Serbian and Greek revolutions, see Jelavich, Charles/Jelavich, Barbara: The Establishment of the Balkan National States, Seattle 2000, pp. 26-52.
• ↑ Rossos, Andrew: Macedonia and the Macedonians. A History, Stanford 2008.
• ↑ Blumi, Isa: Reinstating the Balkans: Alternative Balkan Modernities 1800-1912, New York 2011.
• ↑ On this critical juncture in Balkan history, see: Jelavich and Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan National States 2000, pp. 141-157.
• ↑ A notable example is the British Liberal politician William Gladstone’s (1809-1898) influential pamphlet The Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East, published in 1876.
• ↑ On the Habsburg occupation of Bosnia, see the detailed study by Okey, Robin: Taming Balkan Nationalism. The Habsburg ‘Civilizing Mission’ in Bosnia, 1878-1914, Oxford/New York 2007.
• ↑ On the coup and its aftermath, see Vucinich, Wayne: Serbia between East and West. The Events of 1903-1908, Stanford 1954.
• ↑ The classic work on the annexation crisis is Schmitt, Bernadotte: The Annexation of Bosnia, 1908-1909, Cambridge 1937. See also Malcolm, Noel: Bosnia: A Short History, New York 1994; and Okey, Robin: Taming Balkan Nationalism 2007.
• ↑ The controversy about the relationship between Serbian militarist associations and the Serbian government continues into the present-day, as shown by the response to Christopher Clark’s important new work on the Balkan origins of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 1914, New York 2013.
• ↑ For a useful military history of the Balkan Wars, see Hall, Richard C.: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913. Prelude to the First World War, London/New York 2000.
• Armour, Ian D.: A history of Eastern Europe 1740-1918 , London; New York 2006: Hodder Arnold; Oxford University Press.
• Blumi, Isa: Reinstating the Ottomans. Alternative Balkan modernities, 1800-1912 , New York 2011: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Clark, Christopher M.: The sleepwalkers. How Europe went to war in 1914 , New York 2013: Harper.
• Gellner, Ernest: Nations and nationalism , Ithaca 1983: Cornell University Press.
• Hroch, Miroslav: Social preconditions of national revival in Europe. A comparative analysis of the social composition of patriotic groups among the smaller European nations , Cambridge; New York 1985: Cambridge University Press.
• Jelavich, Charles / Jelavich, Barbara: The establishment of the Balkan national states, 1804-1920 , Seattle 1977: University of Washington Press.
• Judson, Pieter M.: Guardians of the nation. Activists on the language frontiers of imperial Austria , Cambridge 2006: Harvard University Press.
• Lewis, Bernard: The emergence of modern Turkey , London, New York 1961: Oxford University Press.
• Okey, Robin: The Habsburg monarchy c.1765-1918. From enlightenment to eclipse , Basingstoke 2001: Macmillan.
• Riall, Lucy: The Italian Risorgimento. State, society and national unification , London 1994: Routledge.
• Showalter, Dennis: The wars of German unification , London; New York 2004: Arnold; Oxford University Press.
• Sked, Alan: The decline and fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918 , London; New York 1989: Longman.
• Smith, Anthony David: Myths and memories of the nation , Oxford 2009: Oxford University Press.
• Snyder, Timothy: The reconstruction of nations. Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999 , New Haven; London 2004: Yale University Press.
• Sperber, Jonathan: The European revolutions, 1848-1851 , Cambridge; New York 1994: Cambridge University Press.
• Weber, Eugen: Peasants into Frenchmen. The modernization of rural France, 1870-1914 , Stanford 1976: Stanford University Press.

Newman, John Paul: Nationalism , in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2014-10-08. DOI : 10.15463/ie1418.10222 .

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

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The History Hit Miscellany of Facts, Figures and Fascinating Finds

• 20th Century

The 4 M-A-I-N Causes of World War One

Alex Browne

28 sep 2021.

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. It didn’t have the moral vindication of resisting a tyrant.

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 . That event precipitated the July Crisis, which saw the major European powers hurtle toward open conflict.

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. It’s simplistic but provides a useful framework.

The late nineteenth century was an era of military competition, particularly between the major European powers. The policy of building a stronger military was judged relative to neighbours, creating a culture of paranoia that heightened the search for alliances. It was fed by the cultural belief that war is good for nations.

Germany in particular looked to expand its navy. However, the ‘naval race’ was never a real contest – the British always s maintained naval superiority.  But the British obsession with naval dominance was strong. Government rhetoric exaggerated military expansionism.  A simple naivety in the potential scale and bloodshed of a European war prevented several governments from checking their aggression.

A web of alliances developed in Europe between 1870 and 1914 , effectively creating two camps bound by commitments to maintain sovereignty or intervene militarily – the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance.

• The Triple Alliance of 1882 linked Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy.
• The Triple Entente of 1907 linked France, Britain and Russia.

A historic point of conflict between Austria Hungary and Russia was over their incompatible Balkan interests, and France had a deep suspicion of Germany rooted in their defeat in the 1870 war.

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

‘Hark! hark! the dogs do bark!’, satirical map of Europe. 1914

Image Credit: Paul K, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Imperialism

Imperial competition also pushed the countries towards adopting alliances. Colonies were units of exchange that could be bargained without significantly affecting the metro-pole. They also brought nations who would otherwise not interact into conflict and agreement. For example, the Russo-Japanese War (1905) over aspirations in China, helped bring the Triple Entente into being.

It has been suggested that Germany was motivated by imperial ambitions to invade Belgium and France. 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.

However the suggestion that Germany wanted to create a European empire in 1914 is not supported by the pre-war rhetoric and strategy.

Nationalism

Nationalism was also a new and powerful source of tension in Europe. It was tied to militarism, and clashed with the interests of the imperial powers in Europe. Nationalism created new areas of interest over which nations could compete.

For 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. Nationalism in the Balkan’s also piqued Russia’s historic interest in the region.

Indeed, Serbian nationalism created the trigger cause of the conflict – the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The spark: the assassination

Ferdinand 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.

The historical dialogue on this issue is vast and distorted by substantial biases. Vague and undefined schemes of reckless expansion were imputed to the German leadership in the immediate aftermath of the war with the ‘war-guilt’ clause. The notion that Germany was bursting with newfound strength, proud of her abilities and eager to showcase them, was overplayed.

The first page of the edition of the ‘Domenica del Corriere’, an Italian paper, with a drawing by Achille Beltrame depicting Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo

Image Credit: Achille Beltrame, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The almost laughable rationalization of British imperial power as ‘necessary’ or ‘civilizing’ didn’t translate to German imperialism, which was ‘aggressive’ and ‘expansionist.’ There is an on-going historical discussion on who if anyone was most culpable.

Blame has been directed at every single combatant at one point or another, and some have said that all the major governments considered a golden opportunity for increasing popularity at home.

The Schlieffen plan could be blamed for bringing Britain into the war, the scale of the war could be blamed on Russia as the first big country to mobilise, inherent rivalries between imperialism and capitalism could be blamed for polarising the combatants. AJP Taylor’s ‘timetable theory’ emphasises the delicate, highly complex plans involved in mobilization which prompted ostensibly aggressive military preparations.

Every point has some merit, but in the end what proved most devastating was the combination of an alliance network with the widespread, misguided belief that war is good for nations, and that the best way to fight a modern war was to attack. That the war was inevitable is questionable, but certainly the notion of glorious war, of war as a good for nation-building, was strong pre-1914. By the end of the war, it was dead.

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• Table Of Contents

What was the main cause of World War I?

World War I began after the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand by South Slav nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914.

What countries fought in World War I?

The war pitted the Central Powers (mainly Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey) against the Allies (mainly France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, from 1917, the United States).

The Allies won World War I after four years of combat and the deaths of some 8.5 million soldiers as a result of battle wounds or disease.

Some 8,500,000 soldiers died as a result of wounds or disease during World War I. Perhaps as many as 13,000,000 civilians also died. This immensely large number of deaths dwarfed that of any previous war, largely because of the new technologies and styles of warfare used in World War I.

Four imperial dynasties—the Habsburgs of Austria-Hungary, the Hohenzollerns of Germany, the sultanate of the Ottoman Empire , and the Romanovs of Russia—collapsed as a direct result of the war, and the map of Europe was changed forever. The United States emerged as a world power, and new technology made warfare deadlier than ever before.

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World War I , an international conflict that in 1914–18 embroiled most of the nations of Europe along with Russia , the United States , the Middle East , and other regions. The war pitted the Central Powers —mainly Germany , Austria-Hungary , and Turkey —against the Allies—mainly France , Great Britain , Russia, Italy , Japan , and, from 1917, the United States . It ended with the defeat of the Central Powers. The war was virtually unprecedented in the slaughter, carnage, and destruction it caused.

World War I was one of the great watersheds of 20th-century geopolitical history. It led to the fall of four great imperial dynasties (in Germany , Russia , Austria-Hungary, and Turkey ), resulted in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and, in its destabilization of European society, laid the groundwork for World War II .

The last surviving veterans of World War I were American serviceman Frank Buckles (died in February 2011), British-born Australian serviceman Claude Choules (died in May 2011), and British servicewoman Florence Green (died in February 2012), the last surviving veteran of the war.

The outbreak of war

With Serbia already much aggrandized by the two Balkan Wars (1912–13, 1913), Serbian nationalists turned their attention back to the idea of “liberating” the South Slavs of Austria-Hungary . Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević , head of Serbia’s military intelligence , was also, under the alias “Apis,” head of the secret society Union or Death , pledged to the pursuit of this pan-Serbian ambition. Believing that the Serbs’ cause would be served by the death of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand , heir presumptive to the Austrian emperor Franz Joseph , and learning that the Archduke was about to visit Bosnia on a tour of military inspection, Apis plotted his assassination . Nikola Pašić , the Serbian prime minister and an enemy of Apis, heard of the plot and warned the Austrian government of it, but his message was too cautiously worded to be understood.

At 11:15 am on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo , Franz Ferdinand and his morganatic wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip . The chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff , Franz, Graf (count) Conrad von Hötzendorf , and the foreign minister, Leopold, Graf von Berchtold , saw the crime as the occasion for measures to humiliate Serbia and so to enhance Austria-Hungary’s prestige in the Balkans . Conrad had already (October 1913) been assured by William II of Germany ’s support if Austria-Hungary should start a preventive war against Serbia. This assurance was confirmed in the week following the assassination , before William, on July 6, set off upon his annual cruise to the North Cape , off Norway .

The Austrians decided to present an unacceptable ultimatum to Serbia and then to declare war, relying on Germany to deter Russia from intervention. Though the terms of the ultimatum were finally approved on July 19, its delivery was postponed to the evening of July 23, since by that time the French president, Raymond Poincaré , and his premier, René Viviani , who had set off on a state visit to Russia on July 15, would be on their way home and therefore unable to concert an immediate reaction with their Russian allies. When the delivery was announced, on July 24, Russia declared that Austria-Hungary must not be allowed to crush Serbia.

Serbia replied to the ultimatum on July 25, accepting most of its demands but protesting against two of them—namely, that Serbian officials (unnamed) should be dismissed at Austria-Hungary’s behest and that Austro-Hungarian officials should take part, on Serbian soil, in proceedings against organizations hostile to Austria-Hungary. Though Serbia offered to submit the issue to international arbitration, Austria-Hungary promptly severed diplomatic relations and ordered partial mobilization.

Home from his cruise on July 27, William learned on July 28 how Serbia had replied to the ultimatum. At once he instructed the German Foreign Office to tell Austria-Hungary that there was no longer any justification for war and that it should content itself with a temporary occupation of Belgrade . But, meanwhile, the German Foreign Office had been giving such encouragement to Berchtold that already on July 27 he had persuaded Franz Joseph to authorize war against Serbia. War was in fact declared on July 28, and Austro-Hungarian artillery began to bombard Belgrade the next day. Russia then ordered partial mobilization against Austria-Hungary, and on July 30, when Austria-Hungary was riposting conventionally with an order of mobilization on its Russian frontier, Russia ordered general mobilization. Germany, which since July 28 had still been hoping, in disregard of earlier warning hints from Great Britain, that Austria-Hungary’s war against Serbia could be “localized” to the Balkans, was now disillusioned insofar as eastern Europe was concerned. On July 31 Germany sent a 24-hour ultimatum requiring Russia to halt its mobilization and an 18-hour ultimatum requiring France to promise neutrality in the event of war between Russia and Germany.

Both Russia and France predictably ignored these demands. On August 1 Germany ordered general mobilization and declared war against Russia, and France likewise ordered general mobilization. The next day Germany sent troops into Luxembourg and demanded from Belgium free passage for German troops across its neutral territory. On August 3 Germany declared war against France.

In the night of August 3–4 German forces invaded Belgium. Thereupon, Great Britain , which had no concern with Serbia and no express obligation to fight either for Russia or for France but was expressly committed to defend Belgium, on August 4 declared war against Germany.

Austria-Hungary declared war against Russia on August 5; Serbia against Germany on August 6; Montenegro against Austria-Hungary on August 7 and against Germany on August 12; France and Great Britain against Austria-Hungary on August 10 and on August 12, respectively; Japan against Germany on August 23; Austria-Hungary against Japan on August 25 and against Belgium on August 28.

Romania had renewed its secret anti-Russian alliance of 1883 with the Central Powers on February 26, 1914, but now chose to remain neutral. Italy had confirmed the Triple Alliance on December 7, 1912, but could now propound formal arguments for disregarding it: first, Italy was not obliged to support its allies in a war of aggression; second, the original treaty of 1882 had stated expressly that the alliance was not against England .

On September 5, 1914, Russia, France, and Great Britain concluded the Treaty of London , each promising not to make a separate peace with the Central Powers. Thenceforth, they could be called the Allied , or Entente, powers, or simply the Allies .

The outbreak of war in August 1914 was generally greeted with confidence and jubilation by the peoples of Europe, among whom it inspired a wave of patriotic feeling and celebration. Few people imagined how long or how disastrous a war between the great nations of Europe could be, and most believed that their country’s side would be victorious within a matter of months. The war was welcomed either patriotically, as a defensive one imposed by national necessity, or idealistically, as one for upholding right against might, the sanctity of treaties, and international morality .

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World War I

By: History.com Editors

Updated: May 10, 2024 | Original: October 29, 2009

World War I, also known as the Great War, started in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918. During the four-year conflict, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers) fought against Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Canada, Japan and the United States (the Allied Powers). Thanks to new military technologies and the horrors of trench warfare, World War I saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction. By the time the war was over and the Allied Powers had won, more than 16 million people—soldiers and civilians alike—were dead.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand

Tensions had been brewing throughout Europe—especially in the troubled Balkan region of southeast Europe—for years before World War I actually broke out.

A number of alliances involving European powers, the Ottoman Empire , Russia and other parties had existed for years, but political instability in the Balkans (particularly Bosnia, Serbia and Herzegovina) threatened to destroy these agreements.

The spark that ignited World War I was struck in Sarajevo, Bosnia, where Archduke Franz Ferdinand —heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was shot to death along with his wife, Sophie, by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip on June 28, 1914. Princip and other nationalists were struggling to end Austro-Hungarian rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Great War

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The assassination of Franz Ferdinand set off a rapidly escalating chain of events: Austria-Hungary , like many countries around the world, blamed the Serbian government for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification for settling the question of Serbian nationalism once and for all.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

Because mighty Russia supported Serbia, Austria-Hungary waited to declare war until its leaders received assurance from German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany would support their cause. Austro-Hungarian leaders feared that a Russian intervention would involve Russia’s ally, France, and possibly Great Britain as well.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm secretly pledged his support, giving Austria-Hungary a so-called carte blanche, or “blank check” assurance of Germany’s backing in the case of war. The Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary then sent an ultimatum to Serbia, with such harsh terms as to make it almost impossible to accept.

World War I Begins

Convinced that Austria-Hungary was readying for war, the Serbian government ordered the Serbian army to mobilize and appealed to Russia for assistance. On July 28, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the tenuous peace between Europe’s great powers quickly collapsed.

Within a week, Russia, Belgium, France, Great Britain and Serbia had lined up against Austria-Hungary and Germany, and World War I had begun.

The Western Front

According to an aggressive military strategy known as the Schlieffen Plan (named for its mastermind, German Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen ), Germany began fighting World War I on two fronts, invading France through neutral Belgium in the west and confronting Russia in the east.

On August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the border into Belgium. In the first battle of World War I, the Germans assaulted the heavily fortified city of Liege , using the most powerful weapons in their arsenal—enormous siege cannons—to capture the city by August 15. The Germans left death and destruction in their wake as they advanced through Belgium toward France, shooting civilians and executing a Belgian priest they had accused of inciting civilian resistance. 

First Battle of the Marne

In the First Battle of the Marne , fought from September 6-9, 1914, French and British forces confronted the invading German army, which had by then penetrated deep into northeastern France, within 30 miles of Paris. The Allied troops checked the German advance and mounted a successful counterattack, driving the Germans back to the north of the Aisne River.

The defeat meant the end of German plans for a quick victory in France. Both sides dug into trenches , and the Western Front was the setting for a hellish war of attrition that would last more than three years.

Particularly long and costly battles in this campaign were fought at Verdun (February-December 1916) and the Battle of the Somme (July-November 1916). German and French troops suffered close to a million casualties in the Battle of Verdun alone.

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World War I Books and Art

The bloodshed on the battlefields of the Western Front, and the difficulties its soldiers had for years after the fighting had ended, inspired such works of art as “ All Quiet on the Western Front ” by Erich Maria Remarque and “ In Flanders Fields ” by Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae . In the latter poem, McCrae writes from the perspective of the fallen soldiers:

Published in 1915, the poem inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance.

Visual artists like Otto Dix of Germany and British painters Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash and David Bomberg used their firsthand experience as soldiers in World War I to create their art, capturing the anguish of trench warfare and exploring the themes of technology, violence and landscapes decimated by war.

The Eastern Front

On the Eastern Front of World War I, Russian forces invaded the German-held regions of East Prussia and Poland but were stopped short by German and Austrian forces at the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914.

Despite that victory, Russia’s assault forced Germany to move two corps from the Western Front to the Eastern, contributing to the German loss in the Battle of the Marne.

Combined with the fierce Allied resistance in France, the ability of Russia’s huge war machine to mobilize relatively quickly in the east ensured a longer, more grueling conflict instead of the quick victory Germany had hoped to win under the Schlieffen Plan .

Russian Revolution

From 1914 to 1916, Russia’s army mounted several offensives on World War I’s Eastern Front but was unable to break through German lines.

Defeat on the battlefield, combined with economic instability and the scarcity of food and other essentials, led to mounting discontent among the bulk of Russia’s population, especially the poverty-stricken workers and peasants. This increased hostility was directed toward the imperial regime of Czar Nicholas II and his unpopular German-born wife, Alexandra.

Russia’s simmering instability exploded in the Russian Revolution of 1917, spearheaded by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks , which ended czarist rule and brought a halt to Russian participation in World War I.

Russia reached an armistice with the Central Powers in early December 1917, freeing German troops to face the remaining Allies on the Western Front.

America Enters World War I

At the outbreak of fighting in 1914, the United States remained on the sidelines of World War I, adopting the policy of neutrality favored by President Woodrow Wilson while continuing to engage in commerce and shipping with European countries on both sides of the conflict.

Neutrality, however, it was increasingly difficult to maintain in the face of Germany’s unchecked submarine aggression against neutral ships, including those carrying passengers. In 1915, Germany declared the waters surrounding the British Isles to be a war zone, and German U-boats sunk several commercial and passenger vessels, including some U.S. ships.

Widespread protest over the sinking by U-boat of the British ocean liner Lusitania —traveling from New York to Liverpool, England with hundreds of American passengers onboard—in May 1915 helped turn the tide of American public opinion against Germany. In February 1917, Congress passed a $250 million arms appropriations bill intended to make the United States ready for war.

Germany sunk four more U.S. merchant ships the following month, and on April 2 Woodrow Wilson appeared before Congress and called for a declaration of war against Germany.

Gallipoli Campaign

With World War I having effectively settled into a stalemate in Europe, the Allies attempted to score a victory against the Ottoman Empire, which entered the conflict on the side of the Central Powers in late 1914.

After a failed attack on the Dardanelles (the strait linking the Sea of Marmara with the Aegean Sea), Allied forces led by Britain launched a large-scale land invasion of the Gallipoli Peninsula in April 1915. The invasion also proved a dismal failure, and in January 1916 Allied forces staged a full retreat from the shores of the peninsula after suffering 250,000 casualties.

Did you know? The young Winston Churchill, then first lord of the British Admiralty, resigned his command after the failed Gallipoli campaign in 1916, accepting a commission with an infantry battalion in France.

British-led forces also combated the Ottoman Turks in Egypt and Mesopotamia , while in northern Italy, Austrian and Italian troops faced off in a series of 12 battles along the Isonzo River, located at the border between the two nations.

Battle of the Isonzo

The First Battle of the Isonzo took place in the late spring of 1915, soon after Italy’s entrance into the war on the Allied side. In the Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo, also known as the Battle of Caporetto (October 1917), German reinforcements helped Austria-Hungary win a decisive victory.

After Caporetto, Italy’s allies jumped in to offer increased assistance. British and French—and later, American—troops arrived in the region, and the Allies began to take back the Italian Front.

World War I at Sea

In the years before World War I, the superiority of Britain’s Royal Navy was unchallenged by any other nation’s fleet, but the Imperial German Navy had made substantial strides in closing the gap between the two naval powers. Germany’s strength on the high seas was also aided by its lethal fleet of U-boat submarines.

After the Battle of Dogger Bank in January 1915, in which the British mounted a surprise attack on German ships in the North Sea, the German navy chose not to confront Britain’s mighty Royal Navy in a major battle for more than a year, preferring to rest the bulk of its naval strategy on its U-boats.

The biggest naval engagement of World War I, the Battle of Jutland (May 1916) left British naval superiority on the North Sea intact, and Germany would make no further attempts to break an Allied naval blockade for the remainder of the war.

World War I Planes

World War I was the first major conflict to harness the power of planes. Though not as impactful as the British Royal Navy or Germany’s U-boats, the use of planes in World War I presaged their later, pivotal role in military conflicts around the globe.

At the dawn of World War I, aviation was a relatively new field; the Wright brothers took their first sustained flight just eleven years before, in 1903. Aircraft were initially used primarily for reconnaissance missions. During the First Battle of the Marne, information passed from pilots allowed the allies to exploit weak spots in the German lines, helping the Allies to push Germany out of France.

The first machine guns were successfully mounted on planes in June of 1912 in the United States, but were imperfect; if timed incorrectly, a bullet could easily destroy the propeller of the plane it came from. The Morane-Saulnier L, a French plane, provided a solution: The propeller was armored with deflector wedges that prevented bullets from hitting it. The Morane-Saulnier Type L was used by the French, the British Royal Flying Corps (part of the Army), the British Royal Navy Air Service and the Imperial Russian Air Service. The British Bristol Type 22 was another popular model used for both reconnaissance work and as a fighter plane.

Dutch inventor Anthony Fokker improved upon the French deflector system in 1915. His “interrupter” synchronized the firing of the guns with the plane’s propeller to avoid collisions. Though his most popular plane during WWI was the single-seat Fokker Eindecker, Fokker created over 40 kinds of airplanes for the Germans.

The Allies debuted the Handley-Page HP O/400, the first two-engine bomber, in 1915. As aerial technology progressed, long-range heavy bombers like Germany’s Gotha G.V. (first introduced in 1917) were used to strike cities like London. Their speed and maneuverability proved to be far deadlier than Germany’s earlier Zeppelin raids.

By the war’s end, the Allies were producing five times more aircraft than the Germans. On April 1, 1918, the British created the Royal Air Force, or RAF, the first air force to be a separate military branch independent from the navy or army. 

Second Battle of the Marne

With Germany able to build up its strength on the Western Front after the armistice with Russia, Allied troops struggled to hold off another German offensive until promised reinforcements from the United States were able to arrive.

On July 15, 1918, German troops launched what would become the last German offensive of the war, attacking French forces (joined by 85,000 American troops as well as some of the British Expeditionary Force) in the Second Battle of the Marne . The Allies successfully pushed back the German offensive and launched their own counteroffensive just three days later.

After suffering massive casualties, Germany was forced to call off a planned offensive further north, in the Flanders region stretching between France and Belgium, which was envisioned as Germany’s best hope of victory.

The Second Battle of the Marne turned the tide of war decisively towards the Allies, who were able to regain much of France and Belgium in the months that followed.

The Harlem Hellfighters and Other All-Black Regiments

By the time World War I began, there were four all-Black regiments in the U.S. military: the 24th and 25th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry. All four regiments comprised of celebrated soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and American-Indian Wars , and served in the American territories. But they were not deployed for overseas combat in World War I. 

Blacks serving alongside white soldiers on the front lines in Europe was inconceivable to the U.S. military. Instead, the first African American troops sent overseas served in segregated labor battalions, restricted to menial roles in the Army and Navy, and shutout of the Marines, entirely. Their duties mostly included unloading ships, transporting materials from train depots, bases and ports, digging trenches, cooking and maintenance, removing barbed wire and inoperable equipment, and burying soldiers.

Facing criticism from the Black community and civil rights organizations for its quotas and treatment of African American soldiers in the war effort, the military formed two Black combat units in 1917, the 92nd and 93rd Divisions . Trained separately and inadequately in the United States, the divisions fared differently in the war. The 92nd faced criticism for their performance in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in September 1918. The 93rd Division, however, had more success. 

With dwindling armies, France asked America for reinforcements, and General John Pershing , commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, sent regiments in the 93 Division to over, since France had experience fighting alongside Black soldiers from their Senegalese French Colonial army. The 93 Division’s 369 regiment, nicknamed the Harlem Hellfighters , fought so gallantly, with a total of 191 days on the front lines, longer than any AEF regiment, that France awarded them the Croix de Guerre for their heroism. More than 350,000 African American soldiers would serve in World War I in various capacities.

Toward Armistice

By the fall of 1918, the Central Powers were unraveling on all fronts.

Despite the Turkish victory at Gallipoli, later defeats by invading forces and an Arab revolt that destroyed the Ottoman economy and devastated its land, and the Turks signed a treaty with the Allies in late October 1918.

Austria-Hungary, dissolving from within due to growing nationalist movements among its diverse population, reached an armistice on November 4. Facing dwindling resources on the battlefield, discontent on the homefront and the surrender of its allies, Germany was finally forced to seek an armistice on November 11, 1918, ending World War I.

Treaty of Versailles

At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Allied leaders stated their desire to build a post-war world that would safeguard itself against future conflicts of such a devastating scale.

Some hopeful participants had even begun calling World War I “the War to End All Wars.” But the Treaty of Versailles , signed on June 28, 1919, would not achieve that lofty goal.

Saddled with war guilt, heavy reparations and denied entrance into the League of Nations , Germany felt tricked into signing the treaty, having believed any peace would be a “peace without victory,” as put forward by President Wilson in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918.

As the years passed, hatred of the Versailles treaty and its authors settled into a smoldering resentment in Germany that would, two decades later, be counted among the causes of World War II .

World War I Casualties

World War I took the lives of more than 9 million soldiers; 21 million more were wounded. Civilian casualties numbered close to 10 million. The two nations most affected were Germany and France, each of which sent some 80 percent of their male populations between the ages of 15 and 49 into battle.

The political disruption surrounding World War I also contributed to the fall of four venerable imperial dynasties: Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey.

Legacy of World War I

World War I brought about massive social upheaval, as millions of women entered the workforce to replace men who went to war and those who never came back. The first global war also helped to spread one of the world’s deadliest global pandemics, the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 20 to 50 million people.

World War I has also been referred to as “the first modern war.” Many of the technologies now associated with military conflict—machine guns, tanks , aerial combat and radio communications—were introduced on a massive scale during World War I.

The severe effects that chemical weapons such as mustard gas and phosgene had on soldiers and civilians during World War I galvanized public and military attitudes against their continued use. The Geneva Convention agreements, signed in 1925, restricted the use of chemical and biological agents in warfare and remain in effect today.

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Nationalism and the Aftermath of World War I

Published: May 29, 2019

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At a Glance

• Civics & Citizenship
• Social Studies
• The Holocaust
• Human & Civil Rights

About This Lesson

In this lesson, students will begin to examine how the facets of human behavior they have learned about in previous lessons—including stereotypes, prejudice, and antisemitism—influenced people and events in one of this unit’s two historical case studies: Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. They will start with a brief review of World War I and an examination of the relationship between war and national pride. Then they will consider how Germany’s surrender in 1919 and the terms imposed on the nation by the Allied powers and the Treaty of Versailles shocked Germans, who felt alienated, angered, and humiliated by the conditions of the treaty, and how this contributed to conditions that would provide fertile ground for the rise of the Nazi Party in the decade that followed.

Essential Question

How can learning about the choices people made during past episodes of injustice, mass violence, or genocide help guide our choices today?

Guiding Questions

• How does war affect people’s feelings of pride in and loyalty toward their country?
• How did World War I end for Germany, and how did Germans respond to the war’s aftermath?

Learning Objectives

• Students will distinguish between patriotism and nationalism and consider the ways in which war can intensify people’s loyalty to their country and resentment toward others who they perceive as a threat.
• Students will be able to explain why the Treaty of Versailles shocked and upset many Germans.

What’s Included

This lesson is designed to fit into one 50-minute class period and includes:

• 4 activities
• 3 teaching strategies
• 1 readings,  available in English and in Spanish
• 1 map image
• 1 assessment 
• 3 extensions

Additional Context & Background

The history of World War I shows how the ways in which societies define “we” and “they” can help to precipitate war. To understand how this dynamic played out in the buildup to World War I, one must consider the ideology of nationalism and the theory of Social Darwinism. In the 1800s, the biological view of race shaped how many Europeans and Americans defined the word nation. Members of a nation shared not only a common history, culture, and language but also common ancestors, character traits, and physical characteristics. Many believed, therefore, that a nation was a biological community. Nationalists believed that their biological communities—their nations—were inherently superior to others. Through the practice of eugenics, nations sought to promote the health of their biological communities and protect them from “threat,” which they often defined as mixing with other, allegedly inferior, “races.”

How could a nation demonstrate its superiority to other nations? In the late 1800s, the answer to that question was increasingly demonstrated through competition and conflict. After Charles Darwin published his theory of evolution in 1859, many Europeans and Americans began to apply his ideas about natural selection to human society. The result was the theory of Social Darwinism, based on belief in the “survival of the fittest.” Social Darwinists believed that people who were at the top of the social and economic pyramid were society’s fittest. People at the bottom must be “unfit,” they reasoned, because competition rewards “the strong.”  

Inspired by the desire to prove that their societies were the “fittest” and enrich themselves in the process, European nations set out to extend their empires at about the turn of the twentieth century throughout Africa and Asia. To sustain this imperialism, nations devoted more and more men and resources to their armies and navies. As militaries became more powerful and competition increased between European nations, they began to form military alliances to ensure that they had the necessary support to fend off rival nations in case war broke out.  

It was in this context that the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, by a Serbian nationalist, set off the series of events that engulfed the world in war. In response to the assassination, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia. Soon after, Russia (Serbia’s ally) and Germany (Austria-Hungary’s ally) declared war on each other. Other nations, including France, England, and the Ottoman Empire, entered the hostilities soon after that.

World War I would eventually involve 30 nations and 65 million soldiers. It was a war with incredible loss of human life on every battlefront and huge damage to the land wherever fighting occurred—a conflict marked by genocide, civil wars, famines, and revolutions. By its end, more than 9 million soldiers and more than 5 million civilians had been killed. As a result of the war, three European empires fell (the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman), causing panic and displacement for millions of people.

This lesson explores the effects of World War I on Germany and how its aftermath created conditions that helped to give rise to the Nazis in the years that followed. Historian Doris Bergen writes that while World War I did not cause Nazism or the Holocaust, its aftermath left in place fertile ground for the history that followed in at least three ways:

• The destruction and brutality of World War I “seemed to many Europeans to prove that human life was cheap and expendable.”
• The trauma of World War I created in Europeans and their leaders a “deep fear of ever risking another war.”
• The war’s resolution left in place across Europe lingering resentments about the war and the terms of the peace. These resentments would later prove useful to leaders such as Adolf Hitler who sought to create “a politics of resentment that promoted a bitter sense of humiliation.” 1
• 1 Doris L. Bergen, War and Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust, 3rd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 42–43. Reproduced by permission from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group.

Preparing to Teach

A note to teachers.

Before you teach this lesson, please review the following guidance to tailor this lesson to your students’ contexts and needs.

Going Deeper into World War I

This lesson presumes that your students have already studied World War I in their history class. World War I is a substantial historical topic, one to which an entire unit could be devoted, and we have included extensions to this lesson that can be used to help review the causes and outcome of the war as well as introduce students to new topics, readings, and images that they might not have studied. Chapter 3 of Holocaust and Human Behavior includes additional resources about World War I, its impact on the home fronts, and its aftermath.

Related Materials

• Chapter World War: Choices and Consequences

Pacing This Lesson

Depending on your students’ understanding of nationalism and the events leading up to and following World War I, you may want to spend more than one class period digging into this lesson’s activities and one or more of its extensions. Students who have studied World War I recently might not need to do the first activity, which provides an opportunity to review key events and geography. Likewise, they won’t need as much time with the Treaty of Versailles reading if they have already studied its articles and conditions. However, other classes will benefit from a more in-depth review to help prepare them to fully understand the anger, humiliation, and alienation Germans felt following the signing of the armistice. For these groups, we recommend splitting this lesson over two class periods by combining the first two activities with one of the extensions in the first lesson and then doing Activities 3 and 4 (perhaps reading all of Signing the Armistice rather than just an excerpt) in the second lesson.  

• Reading Signing the Armistice

Previewing Vocabulary

The following are key vocabulary terms used in this lesson:

• Nationalism

Add these words to your Word Wall , if you are using one for this unit, and provide necessary support to help students learn these words as you teach the lesson.

• Teaching Strategy Word Wall

Save this resource for easy access later.

Lesson plan.

Analyze a Map to Review World War I

• Remind students that in the last two lessons, they learned about the rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire coupled with the violence and atrocities that the Ottoman Turks committed against the Armenian people during the Hamidian massacres and World War I. They also examined some of the ways that members of the international community responded to the reports of mass deportations and murders of Armenian men, women, and children in the region.

What information does the map provide about the two sides that fought the war? What was each side called? What countries and empires were part of each side? What information does the map provide about the nations that were formerly part of the Ottoman Empire? What else does the map suggest about the story of World War I?

• Map World War I in Europe and the Middle East

Reflect on Patriotism and National Pride

• Let students know that in this lesson, they will be examining the German response to the end of the war and the peace treaty that the world leaders signed. Start by having students respond to the following questions in their journals: What are some ways that people express pride in their country? What are some benefits of patriotism? Can feelings of national pride ever go too far?
• Have students discuss their responses using the Think, Pair, Share strategy. Make sure students understand that war almost always amplifies people’s feelings of loyalty toward their country. Encourage them to make connections between these ideas about patriotism and loyalty and what they learned about the creation of “we” and “they” groups during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Armenian Genocide.
• Remind students that the countries that fought in World War I were motivated by a belief that the people of their nations were superior to the people of the nations they fought. This more extreme form of patriotism, called nationalism , involves the belief that one group of people is distinct from and superior to another.
• Teaching Strategy Think-Pair-Share

Evaluate the Treaty of Versailles

• Explain to students that even though an armistice (truce) ended fighting on November 11, 1918, the war was not officially over until a treaty was signed. The Allies determined the terms of the treaty in negotiations in 1919, and Germany and other Central powers had no choice but to sign the treaty in 1920. 

To what are the victors entitled at the end of a war? How should the countries that surrendered and lost a war be treated?

Based on the information you have about the Treaty of Versailles, what do you think its goals were? What were some of the ways that the Allied countries punished Germany in the treaty? Who benefited from the treaty? How? Who was harmed by the treaty? How? Do you think the treaty was fair? What makes you say that?

• Reading Negotiating Peace

Consider the Impact of the War on National Pride

How do you think the outcome of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles might have affected Germans’ feelings about their nation? How might people respond to evidence that their belief in their nation’s superiority is wrong?

• Then, to help students understand the extent of the Germans’ anger following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, project or pass out and read aloud the following passage from the Signing the Armistice reading: The armistice was a shock for many Germans because they had begun the war with a strong sense of national superiority and the expectation that their country would win. Few blamed the generals or the kaiser for the nation’s defeat. Instead they placed the blame on the people who signed the armistice—the Social Democrats and the Catholic Center Party. Historian Richard Evans notes: “All of this was greeted with incredulous horror by the majority of Germans . . . Germany’s international strength and prestige had been on an upward course since unification in 1871, so most Germans felt, and now, suddenly, Germany had been brutally expelled from the ranks of the Great Powers and covered in what they considered to be undeserved shame.” 2  In the years that followed, many of Germany’s generals, including Hindenburg, would claim that the country’s new leaders, as well as socialists and Jews, had “stabbed Germany in the back” when they signed the armistice.
• Finally, tell students that they will be working with a partner to write a newspaper headline , in 15 words or less, that summarizes the impact of the Treaty of Versailles on Germany. Have half of the pairs imagine that they are German reporters writing the lead story about the signing of the treaty for their country’s newspaper, while the other half of the pairs are French reporters writing for their own country’s newspapers. Challenge students to try to capture their country’s feelings about the treaty.
• Invite pairs to share their headlines using the Wraparound teaching strategy, noting any differences between the French and German perspectives that students captured. 
• 2 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003), 66. Reproduced by permission from Penguin Random House UK and Penguin Press.
• Teaching Strategy Create a Headline
• Teaching Strategy Wraparound

Check for Understanding

• Evaluate students’ headlines about the Treaty of Versailles to look for evidence of their understanding of the war, the treaty, and the impact on Germany. You can either listen to the headlines as students share them in the Wraparound activity, or you can ask students to turn them in on a notecard.
• Listen carefully to students’ contributions to the Wraparound activity that closes the lesson to hear how they are thinking about the impact of nationalism coupled with a strong sense of resentment and humiliation following the loss of World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. 

Extension Activities

To deepen students’ understanding of the world-historical scope of this conflict, consider selecting one or more of the following activities to add to this lesson or assign as homework.

Explore the Beginning of World War I

The reading The Beginning of World War I introduces some important factors that helped lead to the war (and continued to affect Europe and the rest of the world after the war), and it describes the event that ignited the fighting.  

Consider reading the overview aloud with the class, pausing so that students can locate the following places on the map World War I in Europe and the Middle East : Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, France, Serbia, and Sarajevo.

After you finish reading, ask students to use the information to write working definitions for militarism , nation , and military alliance in their journals. Then discuss how each of those factors (militarism, nations, and alliances) contributed to the outbreak of World War I.  

• Reading The Beginning of World War I

Analyze Statistics, Eyewitness Accounts, Art, and Literature 

Use statistics to help students get a sense of the brutality of World War I by having them analyze the reading The Brutal Realities of World War I . Use a teaching strategy like 3-2-1 or S-I-T to help frame students’ analyses of the information. You can supplement this reading by providing firsthand accounts of the battlefield, paintings by soldiers and observers, and literary responses to the war to offer other avenues for learning about the profound impact of the war on the bodies and minds of those who experienced it. The following resources provide a sampling of these kinds of responses to the war:

Image: John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1917 Image: Otto Dix, Wounded Soldier, 1924 Reading: Disillusion on the Battlefield

You can have students analyze and discuss these resources using the Jigsaw strategy. Use the following question to focus their analysis:

What does this text or image suggest about the impact, physical and emotional, that World War I had on this work’s creator and on the world in general?

• Reading The Brutal Realities of World War I
• Teaching Strategy 3-2-1
• Teaching Strategy S-I-T: Surprising, Interesting, Troubling
• Reading Disillusion on the Battlefield
• Image Otto Dix, Verwundeter (Wounded Soldier), 1924
• Image John Singer Sargent, Gassed, 1919
• Teaching Strategy Jigsaw: Developing Community and Disseminating Knowledge

Explore the Signing of the Armistice and the “Stab in the Back” Myth

The signing of the armistice shocked many Germans. It gave rise to the dangerous assertion that Germany’s new leaders, as well as socialists and Jews, had “stabbed Germany in the back” when they signed the armistice. The reading Signing the Armistice explores the terms of the agreement and the vicious rumors that swirled in its wake.

Materials and Downloads

Explore the materials, world war i in europe and the middle east, negotiating peace, introducing evidence logs.

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Why Did World War I Happen?

In this free resource on World War I, explore the causes and effects of the Great War to understand how the conflict shaped world history.

Soldiers of the Royal Irish Fusiliers in the trenches on the southern section of Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915.

Source: Ernest Brooks via Australian War Memorial

Perhaps it comes as no surprise, but the 2017 box office hit Wonder Woman took a few creative liberties in its depiction of World War I. For instance, the film portrayed Ares, the god of war, as the evil mastermind behind the conflict. In reality, it was not the gods who pushed humanity toward conflict. World War I was caused by the actions of ordinary people and political leaders. However, World War I was so violent, costly, and traumatic that it is tempting to blame an all-powerful deity bent on humanity’s destruction.

A Short History of World War I

More than twenty countries that controlled territory on six continents would declare war between 1914 and 1918, making World War I (also known as the Great War) the first truly global conflict. On one side, Britain, France, and Russia formed the Triple Entente (also known as the Allied powers or, simply, the Allies). On the other side, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy made up the Triple Alliance (also known as the Central powers). Those alliances, however, were hardly static, and during the war Italy would change sides; the United States, Japan, and many other nations would join the Allied powers; the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria would join the Central powers; and Russia would withdraw altogether due to revolution back home.

Source: Atlas of World History.

By the war’s end in 1918, the Allied powers emerged victorious. However, both sides were left reeling from the scale of the violence. New technologies like chemical gas and long-range artillery drove conflict to cruel new heights. Nine million soldiers died while the civilian death toll likely exceeded ten million. Infectious diseases also ran rampant, fighting leveled infrastructure, and the financial toll of the war was immense. Following the conflict, most of the European continent was left in economic disarray.

In trying to make sense of this death and destruction, one obvious question stands out: Why did World War I break out in what had been a mostly peaceful and prosperous continent? 

How did World War I start?

Experts continue to fiercely debate this question. Yes, the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, triggered a series of declarations of war. However many scholars argue that several other factors had been creating the conditions for conflict in Europe for decades prior. As the military historian Liddell Hart wrote, “Fifty years were spent in the process of making Europe explosive. Five days were enough to detonate it.”

This resource explores the factors that led to the outbreak of World War I and how the conflict reshaped society.

Origins of World War I

To understand the origins of World War I, let’s first go back to the early 1800s. 

For centuries, a competing patchwork of European empires and kingdoms had waged near-constant war with each other. These conflicts were generally fought over land, colonies, religion, resources, and dynastic rivalries. As a result, the borders within the continent shifted frequently.

However, after the defeat of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who had conquered most of Europe, representatives from several European powers were eager to end the cycle of war. In 1814 and 1815, these representatives met in Vienna to establish a framework for peace.. What emerged was a series of agreements and understandings that ushered in an unusual period of relative stability for the continent. The resulting diplomatic system, known as the Concert of Europe, sought to preserve peace by supporting existing dynasties over revolutionary movements.

With peace at home, Europe enjoyed a century of immense progress and global influence. Technological innovations—like the development of machine production, steel, electricity, and modern chemistry—enriched the continent. Meanwhile, improvements in shipping, railroads, and weapons allowed countries to project their power farther abroad. As a result, Europe’s strongest empires—namely, Belgium, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and, later, Germany, Italy, and Russia— controlled much of the world throughout the nineteenth century.

However, this period of European peace and prosperity would not last forever. Many historians believe things began to unravel in the mid-1800s. The various regional conflicts and wars to unify the countries of Germany and Italy reintroduced costly warfare to the continent. But, unequivocally, Europe’s century of stability had come to a cataclysmic end with World War I.

Let’s explore three factors that brought about this great unraveling.

Three Causes of World War I

The rise of germany.

Following the Napoleonic Wars, Europe experienced a rough balance of power on the continent. In other words, the region’s strongest countries typically avoided massive conflicts with each other. The odds of conflict were mitigated because Europe’s largest powers were fairly equal in strength. This meant that the costs of going to war would almost certainly outweigh any expected benefits.

Initially, the strength of Austria, Britain, and Russia preserved peace and order. Later, Britain and Prussia (which would become part of Germany in 1871) maintained this balance as the continent’s strongest countries. The two nations both had large populations, towering economies, and robust militaries.

However, power dynamics shifted in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Britain—the world’s largest empire and the biggest naval and economic power—saw its relative strength begin to fade in the mid- to late-1800s. For generations, Britain had enjoyed global primacy through its strong trade ties, unparalleled navy, and sprawling empire. Britain's imperial power provided access to natural resources and markets around the world. However, the costs of maintaining such a vast, globe-spanning empire began to mount. Additionally, by the end of the nineteenth century, rapidly industrializing countries like the United States and Germany began to outcompete Britain. As a result, Britain’s technological and manufacturing edge over the rest of the world faded.

Germany only emerged as an independent country in 1871 when Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck unified the nation. Prior to unification, Germany had been thirty-nine independent states—made up of a group of people fairly unified in language and culture, though not religion—into a single political unit. This new, united Germany would soon become exceedingly wealthy through industrialization . The country quickly began to showcase its power on the global stage through the acquisition of colonies in Africa.

Otto von Bismarck proclaiming German unification in Versailles on January 18, 1871, as depicted in an advertisement for Liebig's Meat Extract, published in 1899.

Source: Culture Club via Getty Images

Although Bismarck worked to preserve peace on the continent by balancing among the other powers, later leaders began to assert German dominance. Notably, historians describe Kaiser Wilhelm II as insecure and arrogant. Wilhelm possessed  unbridled ambition to claim Germany’s “place in the sun.” However, his desire to improve Germany’s international standing ultimately translated into recklessness. For example, he abandoned the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890, which led to Russia becoming friendly with France—an old enemy to Germany—and then with Britain.

Wilhelm spoke openly—and belligerently—about his desire for German economic and military supremacy and endeavored to make this vision a reality. In particular, he invested heavily in military spending. Wilhelm hoped to build a navy that could challenge Britain’s globally renowned fleet. This rapid militarization ignited an arms race on the continent, which unsettled Europe’s balance of power.

Nationalism

Nationalism is a powerful force that unites people based on ethnic, linguistic, geographic, or other shared characteristics. In certain contexts, it can serve as a basis of unity, inclusion, and social cohesion for a country. But when taken to extremes, nationalism can fuel violence , division, and global disorder.

In the lead-up to World War I, nationalism fueled intense competition in Europe. The continent’s most powerful countries frequently tried to best each other through their empires, militaries, and technological innovations. Meanwhile, governments, the new mass print media, and schools and universities reinforced messages of each country’s superiority.

With memories of the Napoleonic wars long since faded, countries viewed war as a quick and easy way through which to achieve glory. In fact, some Europeans celebrated the arrival of World War I. Parades and cheering spectators sent off their soldiers to the front lines. Young men rushed to recruiting offices eager not to miss the opportunity to serve. Most people believed that “the boys will be home by Christmas.” Few imagined that the war would drag on for four years in such horrific fashion. 

Nationalism unified countries like Britain, France, and Germany—albeit to dangerous extremes. However,the same force also pulled other European empires apart. In particular, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Russia struggled to promote a cohesive national identity. Given their populations’ vast internal differences along ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious lines, these once-great European empires began to fracture.

In fact, the first shot of World War I—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria—came at the fault lines of one of those multiethnic empires. Ferdinand’s assassins executed their attack in the name of Slavic nationalism.

Alliance Networks

The assassination of Franz Ferdinand could have remained a small, localized affair. After all, the attack did not directly affect the continent’s greatest forces such as Britain, France, Germany, or even Russia. Rather, it involved two lesser powers: Austria-Hungary and Serbia.

However, European leaders had spent years prior to the assassination constructing a network of alliances. These agreements were built on the promise of collective security, or the idea that an attack on one country would be treated as an attack against the entire alliance.

In theory, those alliances were intended to serve as a deterrent to conflict; a stronger country would be less inclined to attack a weaker one if the latter had the support of a powerful ally. In reality, the alliance networks had the opposite effect. The complex alliance network in Europe expanded local issues into a continent-spanning crisis. Behind Austria-Hungary stood Germany, behind Serbia stood Russia, and behind Russia stood Britain and France.

One week after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II pledged unconditional support to Austria-Hungary, however it chose to respond to the attack. With this so-called blank check assurance, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on July 28, 1914. Within days, France, Germany, and Russia announced their own cascading declarations of war.

A 1912 political cartoon depicting the web of alliances that led to World War I.

Source: Nelson Harding/Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Thus, Europe marched toward war—or, rather, as one historian describes the consequences of careless decision making, the continent found itself “sleepwalking” its way to World War I.

How did World War I change the world?

World War I was incredibly destructive. But perhaps most tragic of all, the “war to end all wars'' ultimately did nothing of the sort. Historians assert that both the conflict and its aftermath sowed the seeds for a second—and even deadlier—world war just two decades later.

Although World War I did not curtail future conflict, it nevertheless transformed society across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa. Let’s explore a few examples:

New Age of Warfare: World War I ushered in a new age of lethal military technology. These military innovations include landmines, flamethrowers, submarines, tanks, and fighter planes. Aerial photography allowed both sides to create sophisticated maps of their opponents’ positions. Long-range artillery gave soldiers the ability to shoot at enemies they could not see. And the introduction of weapons of mass destruction, including chemical gas, were used to break through the dug-in stalemates of trench warfare. The scale and severity of such combat led tens of thousands of veterans to experience debilitating psychological trauma. This condition, then known as shell shock, is now commonly referred to as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In addition, although previous wars were largely confined to the battlefield, World War I was a “total war.” The conflict saw the complete erosion of the distinction between civilian and military targets. Germany, for example, used submarines to attack civilian ships and used airships known as zeppelins to bomb cities in Britain. The war also featured mass killings and expulsions of particular ethnic groups. For example, Armenians were violently excluded from the Ottoman Empire, a practice that many scholars would later term genocide .

Senate Sergeant at Arms Charles Higgins turns forward the Ohio Clock for the first Daylight Saving Time, while Senators William Calder (NY), William Saulsbury, Jr. (DE), and Joseph T. Robinson (AR) look on in the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. in 1918.

Source: Library of Congress.

Innovations Beyond the Battlefield:  In addition to new forms of weaponry, many medical practices and common household items have their origins in war. During World War I, doctors began using sodium citrate to stop blood from clotting. Doctors also performed some of the first successful skin grafts, which paved the way for modern plastic surgery. Additionally, the invention of splints greatly reduced the lethality of certain injuries: before the war, four out of every five soldiers with a broken femur died; after the introduction of the splint, four out of every five survived.

The Great War also led to the development of Kotex, one of the first branded sanitary products (used as a cheaper and more absorbent wartime alternative to cotton bandages), the popularization of exercises like pilates (invented by a captured German bodybuilder to stay fit), and the rise in print cartoons (used both as military propaganda and to help civilians and veterans process the horrors of war).

Daylight Saving Time : Daylight saving time (DST) was developed during World War I to conserve energy and free up more daylight hours for battle. Although DST was meant to be a temporary fix, essays dating back decades argued for its implementation; in 1794, Benjamin Franklin made the case in financial (candle cost-savings), productivity (longer workdays), and moral (a remedy for laziness) terms. Although most of the world repealed DST when the first World War ended, World War II led to its quick re-adoption. DST was popularized as a long-term solution following the end of that conflict decades later. The year-round DST we observe in the United States was introduced in the winter of 1973 amidst a global energy crisis.

Vegetarian Sausage : : Before World War I, these modern grocery store staples didn’t exist. Vegetarian sausage was created in sausage-loving Germany during the war as a cheap way to add protein to meals amidst frequent food shortages. Cologne’s then-mayor Konrad Adenauer made his Kölner Wurst or “Cologne sausage” using soya, flour, corn, barley, and ground rice. Despite its use in wartime, the sausages were infamously bland. Meat substitutes available today have made big gains in texture and taste but rely on many of the same ingredients from Adenauer’s original recipe.

Plastic Surgery : Before World War I, people who experienced disfiguring wounds had limited options to choose from. However, as the number and magnitude of facial disfigurations skyrocketed among soldiers fighting in the First World War, the medical community worked quickly to invent reconstruction procedures. Dr. Harold Gillies is credited with the idea to use patients’ own facial tissue to decrease the chance of transplant rejection, leading to rapid innovation in the field of plastic surgery. Following this innovation, treatment capabilities ranged from successful skin grafts to the first sex reassignment surgeries.

Everyday Words and Phrases : Next time you “ace” a test, unexpected news leaves you “shell shocked,” or that highly anticipated movie turns out to be a “dud,” you’re using language directly handed down from wartime. From World War I, English gained words like “lousy,” which transformed from an adjective to describe lice infestations to mean weary. The British also refashioned the term“trench coat,” which transitioned from battlefield necessity to universal fashion statement. World War II added household brands Spam (a mashup of “spiced” and “ham”) and Jeep (from the initials GP, which described its wartime roots as a general purpose vehicle). The global entanglement also created a melting pot of cultural ideas and terms. For example, describing something comfortable or privileged as “cushy,” is a direct contribution to the English language from Indian troops who fought alongside the British in World War I.

Wristwatches : Before we could check the time with the phones in our pockets, most people had to dig out their pocket watch to accomplish this essential task. That proved to be quite inconvenient for soldiers in the trenches, who were also operating without church bells and factory whistles to orient themselves in time. Wristwatches, the obvious solution to this problem, were seen as feminine accessories before World War I, a perception that changed rapidly as they became a crucial part of soldiers’ gear. The phrase “synchronize your watches” came to symbolize their importance on the battlefield where fighting had to be precisely scheduled and timing was a vital tool for communication and survival.

Newsreels : The advent of the twenty-four-hour news cycle stems from one of the earliest forms of broadcast: newsreels. Without televisions, cell phones, or social media, people would line up at movie theaters to watch hour-long loops of news and entertainment features. Early video cameras were bulky, so newsreels rarely included war reporting at the start of World War I. Instead, early war news covered parades, sports events, and cultural moments like royal weddings. Yet as the war progressed and the public hungered for updates, newsreels began to include footage from the conflict. Video cameras produced unprecedented imagery for the time, including the launch of military ships, civilians fleeing their villages, prisoners of war , and cratered battlefields. Video documentation  led to a new awareness about wartime destruction.

A group of cameramen filming an event in June 1916.

Source: Topical Press Agency via Getty Images.

Changing Roles for Women: As Europe’s militaries sent millions of men to the front lines, women played an increasingly important role in professional life back home.

Thousands of women gained a taste of personal and financial independence as they staffed factories, offices, and farms to support the war effort. Pointing to these valuable contributions, women’s rights groups successfully lobbied for suffrage (voting rights) in numerous countries between 1917 and 1920. (Workers’ rights groups also highlighted these efforts—from both men and women—to push for stronger unions and greater collective bargaining power).

Women’s fashion even changed during the war too. Metal shortages led governments to ask women to stop buying corsets, leading to the creation of brassieres. And as more women began to work outside the home, they increasingly adopted factory-safe attire such as pants.

Certainly not all women experienced economic advancement during this time. World War I widowed at least three million women. As a result, these women were left to face extreme financial hardship after the conflict.

Rise and Fall of Powers: The end of World War I marked a shift in global powers. The war culminated with the fall of major empires, such as the Ottoman Empire, and the rise of a new global power, the United States .

Source: National Geographic.

The End of World War I

World War I brought about the collapse of four empires: the Austro-Hungarian, German, Ottoman, and Russian.

In many cases, the victors of World War I absorbed territory from those former empires. Britain and France carved up land belonging to the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Germany was forced to cede its colonies in Africa and the Pacific as part of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. This peace treaty set the terms for the end of World War I in 1919. The breakup of these empires also resulted in the creation of new countries in Europe such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia in addition to the reemergence of old ones like Poland.

With World War I leaving even Europe’s victors badly weakened, the global center of power began shifting across the Atlantic to the United States. Even before the war, the United States had surpassed Britain to become the world’s strongest economy. After the war, the United States emerged in an even more powerful position. In 1919, Washington was uniquely situated to shape the new international order. However, the nation balked at the opportunity, as the American public was largely uninterested in international leadership at the time. Instead,the country retreated into a period of isolationism.

It would take a second world war two decades later for the United States to fully become the global power it is today.

• Modern History

The four MAIN causes of World War I explained

The First World War was the first conflict that occurred on a staggering scale. World War I (WWI) was unprecedented in its global impact and the extent of its industrialization.

However, the reason why the war originally began is incredibly complex. To try and explain the causes of the war, historians have tried to simplify it down to four main causes.

They create the acronym: MAIN. 

Imperialism

Nationalism.

This simplified acronym is a useful way to remember the four MAIN causes of the war.

However, we will explain each of these concepts out of order below.

One of the most commonly discussed causes of WWI was the system of alliances that existed by 1914, the year the war started.

An 'alliance' is an agreement made between two countries, where each side promises to help the other if required.

Most of the time, this involves military or financial assistance. When an alliance is created, the countries involved are known as 'allies'.

By the dawn of the First World War, most European countries had entered into one or more alliances with other countries.

What made this an important cause of WWI, was that many of these alliances were military in nature: that if one country attacked or was attacked, all of their allies had promised to get involved as well.

This meant, that if just one country attacked another, most of Europe would immediately be at war, as each country jumped in to help out their friends. 

Imperialism, as a concept, has been around for a very long time in human history. Imperialism is the desire to build an empire for your country.

This usually involves invading and taking land owned by someone else and adding it to your empire. 

By the 19th century, many European countries had been involved in imperialism by conquering less advanced nations in Asia, the Americas or Africa.

By 1900, the British Empire was the largest imperial power in the world. It controlled parts of five different continents and owned about a quarter of all land in the world.

France was also a large empire, with control over parts of south-east Asia and Africa.

By 1910, Germany had been trying to build its own empire to rival that of Britain and France and was interested in expanding its colonial holdings.

This meant that when an opportunity for a war of conquest became available, Germany was very keen to take advantage of it.

Militarism is the belief that a country's army and navy (since air forces didn't exist at the start of WWI) were the primary means that nations resolved disagreement between each other.

As a result, countries like to boast about the power of their armed forces.

Some countries spent money improving their land armies, while others spent money on their navies.

Some countries tried to gain the advantage by having the most number of men in their armies, while others focused more on having the most advanced technology in their forces.

Regardless of how they approached it, countries used militarism as a way of gaining an edge on their opponents.

An example of this competition for a military edge can be seen in the race between Britain and Germany to have the most powerful navy.

Britain had recently developed a special ship known as a 'dreadnought’. The Germans were so impressed by this, that they increased their government spending so that they also had some dreadnoughts.

The final of the four causes is 'nationalism'. Nationalism is the idea that people should have a deep love for their country, even to the extent that they are willing to die for it.

Throughout the 19th century, most countries had developed their own form of nationalism, where they encouraged a love of the nation in their citizens through the process of creating national flags and writing national anthems.

Children at schools were taught that their country was the best in the world and that should it ever be threatened, that they should be willing to take up arms to defend it.

The growing nationalist movements created strong animosity between countries that had a history of armed conflict.

A good example of this is the deep anger that existed between Germany and France.

These two countries had a recent history of war and struggling over a small region between the two, called Alsace-Lorraine.

Germany had seized control of it after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, which the French were deeply upset by.

As a result, France believed that they should be willing to fight and die to take it back.

Conflicts and Crises

In the two decades before WWI started in 1914, there were a number of smaller conflicts and crises that had already threatened to turn into global conflicts.

While these didn't eventually start the global war, it does show the four causes mentioned above and how they interacted in the real world.

The Moroccan Crisis

In 1904, Britain recognized France's sphere of influence over Morocco in North Africa in exchange for France recognizing Britain's sphere of influence in Egypt.

However, the Moroccans had a growing sense of nationalism and wanted their independence.

In 1905, Germany announced that they would support Morocco if they wanted to fight for their freedom.

To avoid war, a conference was held which allowed France to keep Morocco. Then, in 1911, the Germans again argued for Morocco to fight against France.

To again avoid war. Germany received territorial compensation in the French Congo in exchange for recognizing French control over Morocco.

The Bosnian Crisis

In 1908, the nation of Austria-Hungary had been administrating the Turkish regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina since 1878, but they formally annexed it in 1908, which caused the crisis.

The country of Serbia was outraged, because they felt that it should have been given to them. As a result, Serbia threatened to attack Austria-Hungary.

To support them, Russia, who was allied to Serbia, prepared its armed forces. Germany, however, who was allied to Austria-Hungary, also prepared its army and threaten to attack Russia.

Luckily, war was avoided because Russia backed down. However, there was some regional fighting during 1911 and 1912, as Turkey lost control of the region. 

Despite this, Serbia and Austria-Hungary were still angry with each other as they both wanted to expand into these newly liberated countries.

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World History Project - Origins to the Present

Course: world history project - origins to the present   >   unit 7, read: what caused the first world war.

• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Britain and World War I
• WATCH: Britain and World War I
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Southeast Asia and World War I
• WATCH: Southeast Asia and World War I
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: The Middle East and World War I
• WATCH: The Middle East and World War I
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: How World War I Started
• WATCH: How World War I Started
• READ: The First World War as a Global War
• READ: World War I — A Total War
• READ: The Mexican Revolution
• READ: The Power of One — The Russian Revolution
• BEFORE YOU WATCH: Armenian Genocide
• WATCH: Armenian Genocide
• READ: Capitalism and World War I
• World War 1

First read: preview and skimming for gist

Second read: key ideas and understanding content.

• Who killed Franz Ferdinand? Why did they kill him?
• How did the European alliance system help start the war?
• How did imperialism help start the war?
• Why does the author argue that industrialization made the war inevitable once preparations were started?
• How might the First World War have happened on accident?

Third read: evaluating and corroborating

• This article gives several examples of how transformations in the nineteenth century led to the war. Things like nationalism (communities frame), industrialization (production and distribution frame), and outdated diplomatic technology (networks frame) are blamed for the war. Can you think of any transformations during the nineteenth century that might have helped prevent war?

What Caused the First World War?

World war why, one shot: the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand, deeper trends: help me help you help me, accidental war: missed the memo, hit the target.

• Yes, these terms can get confusing. Nationalism was introduced to you as the idea that a state should govern itself, and not have some empire as its boss. But at some point, that feeling that you should get to govern yourself can turn into the idea that you are better than other nations, and becomes a kind of extreme patriotism. We call that nationalism as well. As we will see, nationalism is a pretty flexible thing, and it can be used for lots of different purposes.
• Top map by Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_the_German_Empire_-_1914.PNG
• Bottom map by Andrew0921, CC BY-SA 3.0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:British_Empire_in_1914.png

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First World War: Causes and Effects Essay

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Introduction

The causes of world war one, the effects of the war.

World War one seems like an ancient history with many cases of compelling wars to many people, but amazingly, it became known as the Great War because of influence it caused. It took place across European colonies and their surrounding seas between August 1914 and December 1918 (Tuchman, 2004). Almost sixty million troops mobilized for the war ended up in crippling situations.

For instance, more than eight million died and over thirty million people injured in the struggle. The war considerably evolved with the economic, political, cultural and social nature of Europe. Nations from the other continents also joined the war making it worse than it was.

Over a long period, most countries in Europe made joint defense treaties that would help them in battle if the need arose. This was for defense purposes. For instance, Russia linked with Serbia, Germany with Austria-Hungary, France with Russia, and Japan with Britain (Tuchman, 2004).

The war started with the declaration of war on Serbia by Austria-Hungary. This later led to the entry of countries allied to Serbia into the war so as to protect their partners.

Imperialism is another factor that led to the First World War. Many European countries found expansion of their territories enticing.

Before World War One, most European countries considered parts of Asia and Africa as their property because they were highly productive. European nations ended up in confrontations among themselves due to their desire for more wealth from Africa and Asia. This geared the whole world into war afterwards.

Competition to produce more weapons compared to other countries also contributed to the beginning of World War One. Many of the European nations established themselves well in terms of military capacity and eventually sought for war to prove their competence.

Desire for nationalism by the Serbians also played a crucial role in fueling the war. Failure to come to an agreement about Bosnia and Herzegovina led the countries to war. Both countries wanted to prove their supremacy.

Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Austria-Hungary sparked the war. Tuchman (2004) reveals that the Serbians assassinated Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914 while protesting to the control of Sarajevo by Austria-Hungary. The assassination led to war between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. This led to mobilization of Russian troops in preparation for war.

The already prepared Germany immediately joined the war against Russia and France. On the other hand, Russians declared war on Austria and Germany. The invasion of the neutral Belgium by Germany triggered Britain to declare war against Germans.

Earlier, Britain had promised to defend Belgium against any attack. The British entered France with the intention of stopping the advancement of Germany. This intensified the enmity among the countries involved (Tuchman, 2004).

Tuchman (2004) argues that the French together with their weak allies held off the fighting in Paris and adopted trench warfare. The French had decided to defend themselves from the trenches instead of attacking. This eventually gave them the victory.

Although The British had the largest number of fleet in the world by the end of 1914, they could not end the First World War. The Germans had acquired a well-equipped fleet. This helped them advance the war to 1915. However, many countries participating in the war began to prepare for withdrawal from the conflict. The war had changed the social roles in many of the countries involved.

For instance, women in Britain performed duties initially considered masculine so as to increase their income (Tuchman, 2004). In the Western Front, the innovated gas weapons killed many people. In the Eastern Front, Bulgaria joined Austria-Hungary as the central power leading to more attacks in Serbia and Russia. Italy too joined the war and fought with the allied forces.

The British seized German ports in 1916. This led to severe shortage of food in Germany. The shortages encountered by the Germans led to food riots in many of the German towns. The Germans eventually adopted submarine warfare. With the help of this new tactic, they targeted Lusitania, one of the ships from America.

This led to the loss of many lives, including a hundred Americans, prompting America to join the war. On 1stJuly the same year, over twenty thousand people died and forty thousand injured. However, in the month of May the same year, the British managed to cripple the German fleet and eventually take control of the sea (Tuchman, 2004).

The year 1917 marked a remarkable change in Germany. Attempts to convince Mexico to invade the United States proved futile. Germany eventually lost due to lack of sufficient aid from their already worn-out allies. Towards the end of 1918, British food reserves became exhausted. This reduced the intensity of the warfare against Germans. It was in this same year that they established “Women Army Auxiliary Corps”.

It placed women on the forefront in the battlefield for the first time. On the Western Front, the Germans weakness eventually led to their defeat. The war came to an end. The British eventually emerged the superior nation among all the European nations.

The signing of the Treaty of Versailles on twenty eighth June 1919 between the Allied powers and Germany officially ended the war. Other treaties signed later contributed to the enforcement of peace among nations involved in the war (Tuchman, 2004).

First World War outlined the beginning of the modern era; it had an immense impact on the economic and political status of many countries. European countries crippled their economies while struggling to manufacture superior weapons. The Old Russian Empire replaced by a socialist system led to loss of millions of people.

The known Austro-Hungarian Empire and old Holy Roman Empire became extinct. The drawing of Middle East and Europe maps led to conflicts in the present time. The League of Nations formed later contributed significantly in solving international conflicts.

In Britain, a class system arose demarcating the lower class from the advantaged class whereas, in France the number of men significantly reduced (Tuchman, 2004). This led to sharing of the day to day tasks between men and women. First World War also caused the merger of cultures among nations. Poets and authors portray this well. Many people also ended up adopting the western culture and neglecting their own.

In conclusion, the First World War led to the loss of many lives. These included soldiers and innocent citizens of the countries at war. The First World War also led to extensive destruction of property. The infrastructure and buildings in many towns crumbled. It contributed to displacement of people from their homes. Many people eventually lost their land.

The loss of land and displacement of people has substantially contributed to the current conflicts among communities and nations. However, the First World War paved way to the establishment of organizations that ensured that peace prevailed in the world. It also led to the advancement of science and technology. It led to the realization that women too could perform masculine tasks.

Tuchman, W. B. (2004). The Guns of August : New York: Random House Publishing Group.

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Home — Essay Samples — History — Imperialism — Main Causes of World War 1: Discussion

Main Causes of World War 1: Discussion

• Categories: Imperialism Nationalism

About this sample

Words: 645 |

Updated: 16 November, 2023

Words: 645 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

The essay explores the causes of World War 1, which took place from 1914 to 1918. It begins with a brief overview of the war's timeline and the major countries involved, including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Italy, Romania, Japan, the United States of America, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. The essay then delves into the four main causes of the war: Militarism, Nationalism, Imperialism, and Alliances.

Militarism is discussed as the policy of maintaining a strong military force and a readiness to use it aggressively for defense. The significant arms buildup and military spending by various countries, including Germany, are highlighted as contributing factors to the outbreak of the war.

Nationalism is described as the strong attachment to one's own nation and culture. It is explained how nationalism led to conflicts, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which triggered Austria's desire for revenge.

Imperialism, the expansion of a nation's power by dominating other countries, is presented as a factor due to the competition among European powers over control of African resources and territories.

Lastly, the essay discusses the role of Alliances, where countries formed partnerships to defend each other, often resulting in a domino effect of declarations of war.

Table of contents

• Causes of World War 1

Video Version

Causes o f world war 1, nationalism and imperialism.

A Good Hook Examples for WWI Essay

• A Glimpse into the Trenches: Step back in time and experience the chilling reality of life in the trenches of World War I. In this essay, we’ll immerse ourselves in the harrowing tales of soldiers who faced the horrors of the Great War.
• The War to End All Wars: Explore the monumental impact of World War I on global history. In this essay, we’ll dissect the events that led to the war, the key players, and the lasting consequences that continue to shape our world today.
• The Poetry of Conflict: World War I inspired a generation of poets to capture the raw emotions of battle. Join us as we analyze the powerful verses and poignant imagery that emerged from the trenches.
• Lessons from the Great War: As we commemorate the centennial of World War I, it’s crucial to reflect on the lessons learned from this catastrophic conflict. This essay delves into the war’s impact on diplomacy, technology, and the human spirit.
• Unsung Heroes of WWI: Beyond the famous generals and political leaders, there were countless unsung heroes in the Great War. In this essay, we’ll shine a light on the remarkable stories of bravery and sacrifice from the trenches to the home front.
• Strachan, H. (2014). The First World War: To Arms. Oxford University Press.
• MacMillan, M. (2013). The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. Random House.
• Fay, S. B. (1928). The Origins of the World War (Vol. 1). The Macmillan Company.
• Gildea, R. (2003). Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914. Harvard University Press.
• Kennedy, P. M. (1980). The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914. Allen & Unwin.

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The Causes of WWII

The origins of the Second World War (1939-45) may be traced back to the harsh peace settlement of the First World War (1914-18) and the economic crisis of the 1930s, while more immediate causes were the aggressive invasions of their neighbours by Germany, Italy , and Japan . A weak and divided Europe , an isolationist USA, and an opportunistic USSR were all intent on peace, but the policy of appeasement only delivered what everyone most feared: another long and terrible world war.

The main causes of WWII were:

• The harsh Treaty of Versailles
• The economic crisis of the 1930s
• The rise of fascism
• Germany's rearmament
• The cult of Adolf Hitler
• The policy of appeasement by Western powers
• Treaties of mutual interest between Axis Powers
• Lack of treaties between the Allies
• The territorial expansion of Germany, Italy, and Japan
• The Nazi-Soviet Pact
• The invasion of Poland in September 1939
• The Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbour

Treaty of Versailles

Germany was defeated in the First World War, and the victors established harsh terms to ensure that some of the costs of the war were recuperated and to prevent Germany from becoming a future threat. With European economies and populations greatly damaged by the war, the victors were in no mood to be lenient since Germany had almost won and its industry was still intact. Germany remained a dangerous state. However, Britain and France did not want a totally punitive settlement, as this might lead to lasting resentment and make Germany unable to become a valuable market for exports.

The peace terms were set out in the Treaty of Versailles, signed by all parties except the USSR on 28 June 1919. The Rhineland must be demilitarised to act as a buffer zone between Germany and France. All colonies and the Saar, a coal-rich area of western Germany, were removed from German authority. Poland was given the industrial area of Upper Silesia and a corridor to the sea, which included Danzig (Gdánsk) and cut off East Prussia from the rest of Germany. France regained the regions of Alsace and Lorraine. Germany had to pay war reparations to France and Belgium. Germany had limits on its armed forces and could not build tanks, aircraft, submarines, or battleships. Finally, Germany was to accept complete responsibility, that is the guilt, for starting the war. Many Germans viewed the peace terms as highly dishonourable.

The settlement established nine new countries in Eastern Europe, a recipe for instability since all of them disputed their borders, and many contained large minority groups who claimed to be part of another country. Germany, Italy, and Russia, once powerful again after the heavy costs of WWI, looked upon these fledgling states with imperialist envy.

In the 1920s, Germany signed two important treaties. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 guaranteed Germany's western borders but allowed some scope for change in the east. The 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed by 56 countries. All the major powers promised not to conduct foreign policy using military means. In 1929, Germany's reparations as stipulated by the Treaty of Versailles were reduced from £6.6 million to £2 million. In 1932, the reparations were cancelled altogether. This was all very promising, but through the 1930s, the complex web of European diplomacy began to quickly unravel in a climate of economic decline.

Economic Crisis

The Great Depression, sparked off by the Wall Street stock-market crash of 1929, resulted in a crisis in many economies through the 1930s. There was a collapse in world trade , prices, and employment. In Germany in 1923, there was hyperinflation, which made savings worthless, a blow many of the German middle class never forgot. The regular loans from the United States (the Dawes Plan), upon which the German economy depended, stopped. There was a hostile attitude amongst many states as international trade collapsed. The USA, the world's most important money lender, pursued an isolationist strategy. Britain and France looked only to their empires. Protectionism and trade tariffs became the norm.

Germany became determined to reach self-sufficiency and not rely on world trade partners, a policy that required the acquisition of natural resources through military occupation. Germany saw the route out of the financial mess as one of massive rearmament which would create jobs in factories and the armed forces. The policy involved not only stockpiling weapons but also creating an economy geared towards total war, where the armaments industry was given priority in terms of resources, energy, factories, and skilled workers.

Hitler & the Nazi Party

Nationalist fascist parties were doing well across Europe. From 1922, Italy was ruled by Benito Mussolini (l. 1883-1945), leader of the fascist party there. By 1939, Spain had a fascist ruler in General Franco (l. 1892-1975). In Germany, Adolf Hitler (l. 1889-1945) was the leader of the fascist National Socialist Party (Nazi Party), the largest party after the July and November elections of 1932. There were even fascist parties in democracies like Britain. Charismatic leaders were turning popular nationalist feelings into a much more sinister way of thinking: fascism. Fascist parties, although not exactly the same in different countries, did have some key goals in common. Fascist leaders wanted absolute power and to achieve this new order they emphasised "conformism, hostility to outsiders, routine violence, contempt for the weak, and extreme hatred of dissident opinions" (Dear, 274). Fascist parties initially gained popularity as opponents to communism, seen as a threat by many ever since the Russian Revolution of 1917. Indeed, in Western countries, a deep suspicion of communism prevented a powerful political and military alliance from being formed with the USSR, which might ultimately have avoided war.

Hitler promised the humiliation of Versailles would be revenged and that Germany would be made great again. Many Germans believed they had been betrayed by the high command of the army in WWI and were tired of the endless round of ineffective coalition governments since the war. Hitler, with no connections to the established elite, offered a new beginning, and most of all, he promised jobs and bread in a period when unemployment and poverty were at extremely high levels. The Nazi party promised a dynamic economy which would power German expansion, seen as a glorious endeavour, with the virtues of war championed. Nazism called for Lebensraum (living space) for the German people – new lands where they could prosper. Nazism identified its principal internal enemies as Jews, Slavs , Communists and trade unionists, all people who were holding Germany back from realising its full potential the Nazis claimed. Nazism called for an international struggle where Germans could achieve their destiny and prove themselves the master race. Such ideas, none of which were radically new, meant war was inevitable. The argument that totalitarian regimes require wars and liberal democracies require peace to prosper may be simplistic but has some validity. Hitler promised the new Third Reich would last for 1,000 years and, using propaganda, show, and brutal repression of alternative ideas, many believed him as he expertly tapped into long-held views in Germany and Austria. As F. McDonough states, "Hitler was the drummer of an old tune accompanied by modern instruments" (93).

In January 1933, the German President Paul von Hindenburg (l. 1847-1934), having run out of all other options, invited Hitler to become Chancellor. After systematically crushing any opposition, Hitler began to put his domestic policies into practice and establish a totalitarian regime, everything he had written in his book Mein Kampf ( My Struggle ) back in 1924. When Hindenburg died in August 1934, Hitler effectively merged the positions of President and Chancellor and declared himself Germany's leader or Führer. Hitler had become the state, and all that was now needed for him to achieve his impossible dream was a rearmed Germany.

Germany's Rearmament

Hitler was determined to rebuild the nation's armed forces. Rearmament rocketed despite the restrictions of Versailles, which Hitler formally repudiated in March 1935. The army was already four times bigger than permitted. Eventually, Western powers were obliged to take a damage-limitation approach. In June 1935, the Anglo-German Naval Agreement was signed, which capped the German navy's strength to 35% of the Royal Navy and allowed Hitler to build giant new ships like the battleship Bismarck .

In another instance of the cult of Adolf Hitler, all armed forces personnel had to swear allegiance to Hitler personally. Thanks to rearmament, Germany had achieved near-full employment by 1938. Hitler had fulfilled his promises to the German people. Germany's new war machine came at a cost. Rearming necessitated huge imports of raw materials, and these could not be bought for much longer as Germany's balance of payments went into tilt from 1939. Occupying territories where these resources could be found seemed a simple solution to the problem. Crucially, Germany had an arms advantage over its enemies, but this situation would not last long. For Hitler, the time to strike was now.

Appeasement

Allowing Germany to rearm was part of the policy of appeasement: giving reasonable concessions to avoid the total disaster of war. Appeasement, which was pursued by Britain, France, and the United States, did not mean peace at any price, but the problem with the policy was that it did give, step by step, aggressive powers the impression that their continued aggression might not necessarily lead to a wider war. To review these steps, we must look at global politics in the early 1930s.

The League of Nations (forerunner of today's United Nations) was established after WWI to ensure international disputes were settled and world peace was maintained. Although US President Woodrow Wilson (in office 1913-21) was instrumental in forming the League, crucially, the United States never joined it, seriously weakening the organisation. Germany joined in 1926 but left in 1933; Japan left the same year. The League proved to be utterly incapable of achieving its aims, as was shown most starkly by its failure to prevent Japan's invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 and Italy's invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935. Hitler no doubt watched these events and the League's total lack of a military response with particular interest as, with his own armed forces rejuvenated, he prepared to expand Germany's borders.

From 1933 to 1935, Hitler had pursued an ambiguous foreign policy, sometimes promising he had peaceful intentions. He caused confusion with such diplomatic conjuring tricks as a peace treaty with Poland in January 1934 and a statement later the same year that he had no intention of merging Austria into the Reich. Then, from 1935, his plans became ever clearer, even if some historians maintain the Führer actually had no plans at all but was merely seizing opportunities as his enemies presented them. Some historians claim Hitler was not entirely free to act as he would wish, due to constraints within the rather chaotic and factional Nazi party. In March 1935, the Saar was reunified with Germany following a plebiscite. The same year, conscription was announced. In March 1936, Germany occupied the Rhineland. In October, Germany and Italy became formal allies with the Rome -Berlin Axis. In November 1936, Italy and Germany (and later Japan) signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, a treaty of mutual cooperation in empire -building and a united front against communism. In March 1938, Hitler achieved the Anschluss, the formal unification of Germany and Austria. Encouraged by the League of Nations' lack of a strong response, Hitler then occupied the Sudetenland, the industrial area of Czechoslovakia which shared a border with Germany, the excuse being a German minority there was being repressed. Again, the Western powers made no military reaction despite France and the USSR having signed a treaty of assistance with the Czechs. The Munich Agreement of September 1938 was signed between Germany, France, Italy, and Britain, which accepted Germany's new, expanded borders. The USSR was not invited, a lost and last opportunity to present a united front against fascism – perhaps here was the real price of pursuing a policy of appeasement to the exclusion of any other possible strategies. The British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (served 1937-40), fluttering before journalists a piece of paper Hitler had signed, confidently declared that he had achieved "peace with honour" (Dear, 597) and that we now had "peace in our time" (McDonough, 121). Chamberlain was nominated for that year's Nobel Peace Prize.

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Appeasement was an attractive policy to Western leaders since the horrors of the last war were still fresh in everyone's minds. France, in particular, was politically weak in this period, experiencing 16 coalition governments through the 1930s. Britain feared losing its empire if weakened by another great war. Public opinion was overwhelmingly against war and rearmament in Britain, France, and the United States. Further, it was by no means certain that Hitler would continue to expand Germany's borders; certainly, he had promised he had no additional ambitions beyond restoring Germany to its previous territories before WWI. Finally, appeasement, even if not actually believed to be a policy with any chance of success, did gain crucial time for Western powers to follow Germany's lead and rearm. In Britain and France, there were, too, strong lobbies which considered rearmament a waste of resources in economically turbulent times and pointed out that Germany was Britain's fifth largest customer for its exports. Hindsight has shown that appeasement was folly since Hitler was intent on occupying as much of Europe as he possibly could, and his track record of breaking treaties proved negotiation was pointless. Keeping the Czech heavy industry out of German hands was probably a better point to go to war over than the subsequent invasion of Poland, but Britain, France, and the USSR were simply not then equipped for war. Not until 1939 did these countries seriously begin to establish economies geared to war.

Invasion of Poland

In 1939, there was further significant activity by Germany and Italy in their quest to occupy more and more of Europe. In March 1939, Germany absorbed the rest of Czechoslovakia and Memel (part of Lithuania) into the Third Reich. Increasingly appalled by the Nazis' attacks on German Jews, Western powers now began to question if negotiating with such a regime could ever be justified on moral grounds. Appeasement was finally dead.

On 31 March, Britain and France promised to guarantee Poland's borders, and in April, this was extended to Romania. Turkey and Greece also began talks of mutual protection with Britain and France. It had finally dawned on leaders in Britain and France that the fascists were intent on territorial expansion at any cost. There was already a localised war going on, the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, which directly involved German and Italian military hardware on the one side and Soviet aid on the other. In April, Italy occupied Albania. At the end of the same month, Hitler repudiated the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In May 1939, Italy and Germany signed a military alliance, the ‘Pact of Steel'.

In August 1939, Germany agreed a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (Nazi-Soviet Pact), named after the foreign ministers of each state. The Soviet leader Joseph Stalin (l. 1878-1953) was increasingly aware that Britain and France seemed perfectly willing to appease Hitler as long as he moved eastwards in his direction. The possibility of 'collective security' (Britain, France, and the USSR working together) was not realised because of a lack of trust between the parties. The Nazi-Soviet Pact, in contrast, allowed Stalin to grab eastern Poland and keep the USSR out of a war for a while, gaining precious time for rearmament. Perhaps, too, the possibility for Germany to wage war only in the West against Britain and France – Stalin's 'blank cheque' for Hitler – would sufficiently weaken all three so that they could no longer threaten the USSR.

Europe was a tinder box awaiting a single spark that would explode it into war. The spark came soon enough with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939. The next day Chamberlain warned Hitler war would follow if Germany did not withdraw. Hitler ignored the ultimatum. On 3 September, Britain and France, in order to protect free and independent nations, declared war on Germany. Italy, waiting in the wings to see what might happen to its advantage, remained neutral for the time being. The world, too, awaited with bated breath to see what would happen next. The unexpected answer was nothing at all.

The 'phoney war', when the Allies and Axis powers did not directly confront each other, lasted until April 1940 when Germany invaded Norway. In May, Germany invaded the Low Countries and France. Germany proved unstoppable, and by the end of June, France had fallen. In October, Italy invaded Greece. In 1941, Germany occupied Yugoslavia. Britain was left alone to fight for its survival until Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).

The war became a global conflict when Japan attacked the US naval fleet at Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, on 7 December 1941. Japan had already invaded Eastern China over concern at the rise in Chinese nationalism and then occupied most of South East Asia in search of imperial glory and natural resources, especially oil, whose import was restricted by a US embargo. Japan perhaps hoped events in Europe would prevent any direct reaction against them, but the United States did finally join the conflict. Peace would not be achieved until the world had suffered four more long and bitter years of war.

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Bibliography

• Dear, I. C. B. & Foot, M. R. D. The Oxford Companion to World War II. Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Dülffer. Nazi Germany, 1933-1945 - Faith & Annihilation by Dülffer, Jost [Paperback ]. Blomsbury USA, Paperback(2009), 2009.
• Holmes, Richard. The World at War. Ebury Press, 2007.
• Liddell Hart, B. History of the Second World War. Caxton, 1989
• McDonough, Frank. The Origins of the First and Second World Wars . Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. Simon & Schuster, 1997.
• Taylor, A.J.P. The Origins of The Second World War. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

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World War 1 Essay | Essay on World War 1 for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

World War 1 Essay: World War 1 was started in July 1914 and officially ended on November 11, 1918. Conflicts emerged among the most powerful forces in the modern world with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany and the Ottoman Empire (and briefly Italy) on one side, and Britain, France, Russia, and later the United States on the other side during the war.

The war took the lives of some 20 million people and the world’s great empires fell. Czarist Russia turned into reinstated as the communist Soviet Union. Imperial Germany turned into reinstated as the Weimar Republic and lost some parts of its territory in the East and West.

You can also find more  Essay Writing  articles on events, persons, sports, technology and many more.

Long and Short Essays on World War 1 for Students and Kids in English

We are providing students with essay samples on a long essay of 500 words and a short of 150 words on the topic of World War 1 for reference.

Long Essay on World War 1 Essay 500 Words in English

Long Essay on World War 1 Essay is usually given to classes 7, 8, 9, and 10.

World War 1 started with a European conflict and gradually it developed into a World War. Militarism, nationalism, imperialism, and alliances increased the tensions among the European countries. The first reason, militarism, is known as the trend toward developing military resources, both for national defense and the protection of colonial interests.

Militarism indicated a rise in military disbursement and it extended to military and naval forces. It put more impact on the military men upon the policies of the civilian government. As a solution to problems militarism had a preference for force. This was one of the main reasons for the First World War. The second reason is there were too many alliances that frequently clashed with each other. Every country was pawning to safeguard others, creating intertwining mutual protection schemes.

They made alliances in secret, and they created a lot of mistrust and intuition among the European powers. Their general intuition stopped their diplomats to find a proper solution to many of the crises leading to war. Imperialism was the third reason for the First World War. As some areas of the world were left to colonize, nations were competing for subsisting colonies, and they were looking for enlarging their borders with adjacent countries. The fourth cause was nationalism. Nationalism is frequently insinuated to as identification with one’s own country and support for the country. Nationalism contains a strong recognition of a group of personnel with a political entity.

The support of individuals for their own country can become of one’s nation can become hatred of other nations. These were just some of the basic reasons for the war. Many people think that the instant reason for the war was because of the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand, the successor to Austria-Hungary’s throne. Archduke Ferdinand was fired and murdered due to what was thought to be a political conspiracy. The Austro-Hungarian Empire suddenly doubted Serbian conspiracy in the assassination and looked to frame a response that would both punish Serbia, and make the world respect Austria-Hungary’s prestige and determination.

You can now access more Essay Writing on this topic and many more.

The Great War lasted four years. The war was finally over after four years and it took the lives of many people. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, a cease-fire went into effect for all fighters. Though the war has been finished, the effects, are still seen perceptible in the world today.

In the aftermath of World War 1, the political, cultural, and social order of the world was drastically changed in many places, even outside the areas directly involved in the war. Old nations were removed, new nations were formed, international organizations set up, and many new and old ideas took a stronghold in people’s minds.

As Europe fell in debt from war investment, inflation beset the continent. In addition to this, the buoyancy of previous decades was relinquished and a discouraging, gloomy outlook on life was adopted after people had experienced the ferocity of warfare and the effects of the war were brutal.

Short Essay on World War 1 Essay 150 Words in English

Short Essay on World War 1 Essay is usually given to classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The War took the lives of approximately 20 million people and put a break in the economic development of several nations. The war happened between two parties consisting of more than one hundred nations. Though all of them did not send armed forces to the battlefield, they were a hoard of commodities and human resources and provided moral support to their companions. It continued for 4 long years from 1914 to 1918. Indian soldiers also took part in World War 1 as a colony of Britain from Africa and West Asia.

India had an aspiration that they might win independence. World War 1 war laid down the economy of the world. It led to food shortage, an outbreak of a pandemic, scarcity of vital items, etc. At the end of 1918, the war came to an end. The Allied Powers won the war. Both parties signed the Peace Treaty called an armistice.

10 Lines on World War 1 Essay in English

1. The First World War was instigated in 1914 by Serbia. 2. The cause of the war was a competition between countries to acquire weapons and build military powers. 3. In 1914, Serbia aroused anger by assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of Austria-Hungary throne. 4. The Allied Powers, and the Central Powers fought against each other. 5. The Central Powers include countries, such as Germany, Bulgaria, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire, and Turkey. 6. The Allied Powers consisted of Serbia, Russia, The United Kingdom, France, Italy, Japan, and Belgium. 7. India, as a British colony, supported Britain. 8. The German adopted a militaristic Schlieffen approach. 9. World War 1 was fought from trenches, so it is also called the Trench War. 10. The War ended in 1918 after both allies signed an armistice.

FAQ’s on World War 1 Essay

Question 1. List the names of the two allies of the First World War 1914-1918.

Answer: The Allied Powers and the Central Powers.

Question 2. Who declared the First World War?

Answer: Austria-Hungary.

Question 3. Name the countries of Allied Powers.

Answer: Britain, Japan, France, Italy, Russia, the USA.

Question 4.  Why did the First World War end?

Answer: The First World War ended in November 1918 when both allies signed the Peace Treaty known as an armistice.

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Biden and Macron Talk Togetherness, With No Mention of Discord Over Gaza

The two presidents, in a brief appearance before reporters, declined to take questions, in a departure from tradition.

By Michael D. Shear and Peter Baker

Reporting from Paris

President Biden and President Emmanuel Macron of France stressed on Saturday how much they agreed with each other about world affairs, including the war in Ukraine, even as their countries have expressed sharply different views of the fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

Appearing briefly together in front of reporters after two days of D-Day remembrances and hours before a lavish state dinner at the Élysée Palace in Paris, the two presidents declined to take any questions and papered over their stark differences about the Middle East. Instead, they both asserted the enduring strength of the American-French partnership on climate, the economy, European security and cultural ties.

“Today, I proudly stand with France to support freedom and democracy around the world,” Mr. Biden said, as the two men emerged from a closed-door meeting at the Élysée Palace.

“We see eye to eye on this war raging in Ukraine,” Mr. Macron noted, and he added that he hoped “all members of the G7 will agree to a $50 billion solidarity fund for Ukraine,” referring to the Group of 7 industrialized nations.

The French president’s comments suggested that the two leaders had reached common ground over a plan to leverage proceeds from frozen Russian assets to provide an upfront loan of up to $50 billion to Ukraine. American officials had said heading into the meeting that France was the main holdout for such a plan and that they were hoping to win support during the Paris visit.

On Gaza, Mr. Macron noted his government’s support for an Israeli cease-fire proposal that Mr. Biden has strongly backed. But the French president also directly challenged Israel to do more to deliver aid to Palestinians suffering from the government’s bombardment.

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