World History – Causes of World War I
THE LEGACY AND CONSEQUENCES OF EUROPEAN IMPERIALISM
In 1500, European countries controlled 7 percent of the land surface of the planet; by 1800, they controlled 35 percent; by 1914, they controlled fully 84 percent. Britain had the largest empire, encompassing a quarter of the world’s population in the early years of the twentieth century. France was not far behind, controlling about 3.5 million square miles, and Germany, Belgium, and Italy controlled about 1 million square miles each. At the turn of the twentieth century, Europeans truly dominated the world.
Even the terminology of world geography reflected this domination: the terms Near East and Far East indicated the relative distances of these regions from Europe. And, in 1884, an international conference located zero longitude, the prime meridian, at Greenwich, England, near London.
Since then, all times zones across the world are expressed as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) plus or minus x hours.
The European domination of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East had both positive and negative consequences for the subject peoples. For better or worse, European language, culture, and technology spread throughout the Southern Hemisphere in the nineteenth century. The English language became the lingua franca of the political and economic elites in countries like India, Nigeria, and South Africa, and an important source of unity and identity in countries riven by ethnic and religious differences. The same was true of French in much of North and West Africa. The Europeans built ports, roads, and railroads in their colonies, increasingly opening up these countries to European trade and technology.
Cities and towns popped up in areas that had been primarily rural, and in the countryside, the production of cash crops (such as tobacco, coffee, and sugar) fostered the emergence of a cash economy. Among natives in the colonies, there was an increasing demand for European products like bicycles, radios, and clothing. A European system of education, both secular and religious, stimulated literacy and the development of an educated middle class. Missionaries spread Christianity.
All this, however, took a toll on the traditions, autonomy, independence, and pride of colonial peoples. The Europeans dominated, exploited, and subordinated the populations of Africa, Asia, and the Middle East and undermined the traditional systems of government in these areas. When the colonies eventually did achieve independence, they almost universally had difficulty establishing stable political institutions. Furthermore, a lingering resentment against the Europeans often poisoned relations between former colony and colonizer, hurting chances for trade and aid.
Ironically, the ideas of liberty and democracy that the Europeans brought with them to their colonies contributed to the end of their colonial rule. As these notions began to take hold, especially among the political and cultural elites in the colonies, they stimulated demands for freedom, democracy, and independence. National liberation and independence movements in the colonies accelerated after both world wars, when Europeans were absorbed with their own conflicts. After World War II, the cascade of independence became a flood (a topic that will be addressed further in chapter 12). Between 1947 and 1963, some 750 million British colonial subjects became citizens of newly independent states. In just one year in Africa, 1960, seventeen colonies won their independence from European states, and over the next two decades, virtually the whole continent became independent. The same was true of European colonies in South- and Southeast Asia and the Middle East. All these newly independent states, many of them radically anti-Western, became members of the United Nations, thus shifting the balance of power in that organization and altering the dynamics of international politics. The Third World, those countries that adhered neither to the Western democratic capitalist states (the First World) nor to the communist bloc (Second World), became a pivotal arena in the Cold
War struggles between East and West.
World War I
The assassination of the Austrian archduke Francis Ferdinand, in Sarajevo, in 1914, unleashed a catastrophic war that lasted four years, cost ten million lives, changed the face of the European continent, and set the stage for an even more global and destructive war a generation later.
By the end of World War I, Europe no longer dominated the globe, and by the end of World War II, Europe itself was dominated by two powers outside the core of the Continent, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Sarajevo assassination was a relatively minor incident in an obscure corner of Europe, and the resulting dispute was mostly between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, which was held responsible for the murder. But the incident quickly drew in most of the major European powers. The war was unexpected but not entirely unwelcome by many governments and citizens, and almost everyone expected it to last only a few months. It dragged on, however, in a stalemate and slaughter unprecedented in history, and did not finally draw to a close until after the intervention of the United States. With the end of the war, Europe had lost a generation of young men; the Russian, Austrian, Ottoman, and German empires were gone; a dozen new countries emerged; and Russia experienced a communist revolution.
EUROPE ON THE EVE OF WAR
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Europe’s power and prestige were unrivaled. Europeans were world leaders in almost every arena-science, culture, economics, and fashion. Their empires encompassed most of the planet. The last half of the nineteenth century had been a relatively peaceful one in Europe, managed by the balance-of-power system established after the Napoleonic wars and interrupted only by occasional wars with finite goals and of short duration (such as the wars of German unification). Most of the Continent was still controlled by monarchies, but as we have seen in earlier chapters, absolutism had been losing ground since the time of the French Revolution. In 1914, France was a republic and England a constitutional monarchy, but the other major powers-Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire-were all conservative monarchies of various degrees of rigor.
The balance of power was a system of shifting alliances meant to prevent any one country from becoming too powerful and threatening to the others, thus ensuring the overall stability of the Continent. In 1914, the main components of the balance of power in Europe were the Triple Alliance formed by Germany, Austria, and Italy, and the Triple Entente of Russia, France, and (minimally) England. Russia was also allied with Serbia in the Balkans, partly to counterpoise the influence of both the Ottomans and the Austrians in the region and partly as a way of extending protection over fellow Slavs. The Serbs, like the Russians, are Slavic peoples with a Cyrillic alphabet and a background of Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The balance-of-power system worked well through most of the nineteenth century but was strained both by Bismarck’s wars of German unification and by the emergence of a strong and united Germany in the middle of Europe. In the 1860s and 1870s, the German chancellor employed short wars with limited objectives against Denmark, Austria, and France to secure territories that were to become part of the German Empire. Bismarck adopted the notion that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means” enunciated earlier by the Prussian general and strategist Karl von Clausewitz. His quick and decisive wars seemed to prove this idea. Furthermore, Bismarck demonstrated how decisive the application of technology could be in warfare: Prussian generals relied on the railroad and telegraph to quickly move and coordinate their armies, as well as on new weapons like the breach-loading rifle. Thus, they were often able to outmaneuver and overwhelm their enemies, forcing quick surrenders with minimal loss of life.
Learning their lessons from Bismarck’s successes, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, military planners all over Europe began developing military technologies and planning for short, decisive wars in which they would overwhelm the enemy. By 1914, most European states had the largest armies they had ever maintained in peacetime. The military buildup extended to the seas as well, with a major naval arms race between England and Germany that had lasted fifteen years. Although all European states were busy enlarging and improving their militaries at the turn of the century, there was also a strong ethos of both state power and warfare. The Prussian field marshal Helmuth von Moltke, for example, wrote, perpetual peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful dream. War is part of God’s order. Without war, the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism.
In it, Man’s most noble virtues are displayed-courage and self-denial, devotion to duty, willingness to sacrifice oneself, and to risk life itself. These sentiments were shared by many ordinary citizens all over Europe, and contributed to the widespread enthusiasm for the onset of war in August 1914.
War preparations and the arms race were shaking the stability of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, but so were the forces of nationalism and their effects on the multinational empires that dominated central Europe. The Habsburg monarchy of Austria-Hungary had already been weakened by the revolts of 1848 and again by the loss of the Seven Weeks’ War to Germany in 1866. The year after that, in what was known as the Ausgleich (compromise), the Magyars (ethnic Hungarians) and Germans separated into a dual monarchy constituting essentially two separate nation-states, with the Germans making up less than half the population of Austria, as the Magyars did in Hungary. All other ethnic groups in the dual monarchy, including Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, and Croats, felt left out and oppressed under the new arrangement.
