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Indeed, the whole course of German foreign policy since had been restless and counter-productive, calling into existence the very ring of enemies it then took extreme risks to break. Finally, what of the states at the heart of the crisis? The failure of documentary research to settle the war-guilt question led other historians to look behind the July crisis for long-range causes of the war. Surely, they reasoned, such profound events must have had profound origins.
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As early as the American Sidney B. Fay concluded that none of the European leaders had wanted a great war and identified as its deeper causes the alliance systems, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, and the newspaper press. Militarism and imperialism had fed tensions and appetites among the great powers, while nationalism and sensationalist journalism had stoked popular resentments. How else could one explain the universal enthusiasm with which soldiers and civilians alike greeted the outbreak of war?
Such evenhanded sentiments, along with the abstraction of the terms of analysis that exculpated individuals while blaming the system, were both appealing and prescriptive. In the s British statesmen in particular would strive to learn the lessons of and so prevent another war. Only a few years later, however, in , that consensus shattered. Traditionalist critics of Fischer pointed to the universality of imperialistic, social Darwinist, and militaristic behaviour on the eve of the war. The kaiser, in his most nationalistic moods, only spoke and acted like many others in all the great powers.
Joffre wonder excitedly if the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine were finally at hand, or the Primrose and Navy leagues thrill to the prospect of a Nelsonian clash of dreadnoughts? Germans were not the only people who grew weary of peace or harboured grandiose visions of empire. To this universalist view, leftist historians like the American A. If anything, internal discord made for reticence rather than assertion on the part of their foreign policy elites.
The conservative historian Gerhard Ritter even challenged the Fischer thesis in the German case. The real problem, he argued, was not fear of the Social Democrats but the age-old tension between civilian and military influence in the Prussian-German government. Politicians, exemplified by Bethmann, did not share the eagerness or imprudence of the general staff but lost control of the ship of state in the atmosphere of deepening crisis leading up to Finally, a moderate German historian, Wolfgang J.
Mommsen, dispensed with polemics altogether. Thus, the search for long-range causes, while turning up a wealth of new information and insight, ran ultimately aground. Imperial politics were simply not a casus belli for anyone except Britain. Military preparedness was at a peak, but armaments are responses to tensions, not the cause of them, and they had, perhaps, served to deter war in the numerous crises preceding Capitalist activity tied the nations of Europe together as never before, and in most leading businessmen were advocates of peace.
The alliance systems themselves were defensive and deterrent by design and had served as such for decades. Nor were they inflexible. Italy opted out of her alliance, the tsar was not bound to risk his dynasty on behalf of Serbia, or the kaiser his on behalf of Austria-Hungary, while the French and British cabinets might never have persuaded their parliaments to take up arms had the Schlieffen Plan not forced the issue.
Perhaps the crisis was, after all, a series of blunders, in which statesmen failed to perceive the effects their actions would have on the others. Perhaps a long-range view that is still serviceable is precisely the one derived from old-fashioned analysis of the balance-of-power system, forgotten amid the debates over national or class responsibility.
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This view, suggested by Paul Schroeder in , asks not why war broke out in but why not before? What snapped in ? The answer, he argued, is that the keystone of European balance, the element of stability that allowed the other powers to chase imperial moonbeams at will, was Austria-Hungary itself. The heedless policies of the other powers, however, gradually undermined the Habsburg monarchy until it was faced with a mortal choice.
At that point, the most stable member of the system became the most disruptive, the girders of security—the alliances—generated destructive pressures of their own, and the European system collapsed. To be sure, Austria-Hungary was threatened with her own nationality problem, aggravated by Serbia.
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It could better have met that threat, however, if the great powers had worked to ameliorate pressures on it, just as they had carried the declining Ottoman Empire for a full century. Instead, the ambitions of Russia, France, and Britain, and the stifling friendship of Germany, only served to push Austria-Hungary to the brink. This was not their intention, but it was the effect. This occurred naturally, as industrial power diffused, but was aggravated by the particular challenge of Germany. Situated in the middle of Europe, with hostile armies on two sides, and committed to the defense of Austria-Hungary, Germany was unable to make headway in the overseas world despite her strength.
By contrast, relatively weak France or hopelessly ramshackle Russia could engage in adventures at will, suffer setbacks, and return to the fray in a few years. Of course, Germany could have launched an imperialist war in or under more favourable circumstances. It chose not to do so, and German might was such that prior to the other powers never considered a passage of arms with Germany.
Instead, Triple Entente diplomacy served to undermine Austria-Hungary. Yet no one did anything about it. Russia brazenly pushed the Slavic nationalities forward, thinking to make gains but never realizing that tsarism was as dependent on Habsburg survival as Austria-Hungary had been on Ottoman survival. And indeed it had done so before—in —22, , and But now the British chose vaguely to encourage Russia in the Balkans, letting Austria-Hungary, as it were, pay the price for distracting Russia from the frontiers of India. So by Austria was encircled and Germany was left with the choice of watching her only ally collapse or risking a war against all Europe.
Having chosen the risk, and lost, it is no surprise that the Germans as well as the other powers gave vent to all their prewar bitterness and pursued a thorough revision of world politics in their own favour. World War I has aptly been called a war of illusions that exposed in sharp relief all the follies of the prewar generation. The war plans of the generals had misfired at once, and expectations that the intensity of modern firepower would serve the offense, or that the war must be brief, proved horribly false. Germany expected to achieve hegemony in Europe as a step toward world power, and instead world powers were called into play to prevent hegemony in Europe.
Socialists thought war would bring general strikes and revolution, and instead the war inspired patriotic national unity. Monarchists hoped war would bolster the old regimes, and instead it cast down the remaining dynasties of eastern Europe. Liberals hoped that war would promote the spread of freedom, and instead it forced even democratic governments to impose censorship, martial law, and command economies subordinated to the dictates of centralized bureaucracy. Each nation in its own way sacrificed one by one those values it claimed to be fighting for in the belief that final victory would make good all the terrible cost.
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And with terrible irony World War I also ended in various plans for peace as illusory as the plans for war had been. World War I can be divided, without undue violence to reality, into three periods: the initial battles, struggles for new allies, and mobilization on the home fronts, occupying the period from to ; the onset of ideologized warfare in the Russian revolutions and American entry in ; and the final four-way struggle of among German imperialism, Allied war-aims diplomacy, Wilsonian liberal internationalism, and Leninist bolshevism.
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The first months of war resounded with the collision of the war plans pored over for decades by the general staffs of Europe. The original German plan for a two-front war, drafted by Helmuth von Moltke the elder, had called for taking the offensive against Russia and standing on the defensive in the rugged Rhineland. The plan showed military prudence and complemented the stabilizing diplomacy of Bismarck.
His plan, conceived in and completed by , envisioned a massive offensive in the west to knock out the compact French forces in six weeks, whereupon the army could shift eastward to confront the plodding Russians. But a quick decision could be achieved in France only by a vast enveloping action.
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The powerful right wing of the German army must descend from the north and pass through the neutral Low Countries. This would virtually ensure British intervention. But Schlieffen expected British aid to be too little and too late. In sum, the Schlieffen Plan represented a pristine militarism: the belief that all factors could be accounted for in advance, that execution could be flawless, that pure force could resolve all political problems including those thrown up by the plan itself.
In the event, the Germans realized all of the political costs of the Schlieffen Plan and few of the military benefits. Like the Germans, the French had discarded a more sensible plan in favour of the one implemented.
23 April 2017 News Archive
French intelligence had learned of the grand lines of the Schlieffen Plan and its inclusion of reserve troops in the initial assault. General Victor Michel therefore called in for a blocking action in Belgium in addition to an offensive into Alsace-Lorraine. But this required twice the active troops currently available. France would either have to give up the Belgian screen or the offensive.
The new chief of staff, J. Joffre, refused to believe that Germany would deploy reserve corps in immediate combat and gave up the screen. By October all the plans had unraveled. After the German defeat in the Battle of the Marne, the Western Front stabilized into an uninterrupted line for miles from Nieuwpoort on the Belgian coast south to Bapaume, then southeast past Soissons, Verdun, Nancy, and so to the Swiss frontier.
Both sides dug in, elaborated their trench systems over time, and condemned themselves to four years of hellish stalemate on the Western Front. The situation was little better on the other front. A necessary assumption of the Schlieffen Plan was the inadequacy of the Russian rail network to support a rapid offensive. By , however, railroads through Poland were much improved, and the Russian general staff agreed to take the offensive in case of war to relieve the pressure on France.
Austria also had a two-front war, however, and an army too small to fight it. Owing to penury and its nationality problems, the monarchy fielded fewer battalions in than it had in the war of Austria failed to penetrate Serbian defenses, while the Germans smashed the Russian attack into East Prussia.
In the east, too, stalemate set in. By mid the Germans had overcome supply problems and were better prepared for trench warfare than the Allies.