Causes of WWI

1. Causes of WWI A look back at what started the Great War

2. Vocabulary • Tsar/Tzar Nicholas II • Hapsburgs • “Sick Man of Europe” • Weltpolitik • The “Great Game” • Tirpitz’s Risk Theory • July Crisis (1914) • Alsace-Lorraine • Fritz Fischer • John Keegan • James Joll • Niall Ferguson

3. The Great Game • If the iron dice must roll, may God help us. • Theobald Von Bethmann-Hollweg German chancellor, August 1, 1914 • The great game was challenging whether other countries would risk going to war to protect their interests.

4. Weltpolitik – World Policy • "In one word: we do not want to place anyone into the shadow, but we also claim our place in the sun.” • German Foreign Secretary Bernhard von Bulow

5. Tirpitz – Risk Theory • He expected that Germany would not need to outbuild the Royal Navy in order to pose a threat to Britain, since British sea power was committed worldwide. • Britain could beat Germany but they would have to risk ships that might be needed elsewhere. • Thus Britain would run a risk if it went to war with Germany, and its diplomacy would have to take a more supportive attitude toward German colonial aims. • A comparatively small but efficient German battle fleet concentrated in the North Sea would represent a diplomatic lever and deterrent. Tirpitz assumed that the German ships would be superior to the British vessels and that their crews would be better trained.

6. Alsace-Lorraine • 1766: Lorraine becomes part of France. • 1871:Alsace and part of Lorraine ("German Lorraine") are annexed by Germany • Bismarck takes from Napoleon III the French controlled region.

7. Franz Josef I – Last of the Habsburgs • Franz Josef I (English: Francis Joseph) Emperor of Austria, king of Hungary, (1830-1916), born in Vienna. The last significant Habsburg monarch. • By the time Franz Josef stepped onto the throne, Austria's position as a European "great power" was already in serious decline • 1.Austria's "betrayal" of Russia in the Crimean War (1853-1856) was a factor in the July (1914) Crisis which led to the outbreak of WWI. • 2.The unification of Italy provided a new threat - Austria lost nearly all of its Italian possessions, such as Lombardy and Venetia. • 3.The rise of Prussian dominance - Austria's loss of the Austro-Prussian war in 1866. German unification in 1871 made Austria the lesser of the two German powers.

8. Not such a great ending • Franz Josef's later years were marked by a series of tragedies in his family. • In 1889 his only son and heir to the throne, Archduke Rudolf, committed suicide; • Franz Josef's second younger brother, Karl Ludwig, had died in 1896 from illness due to bad water he drank while on a holy lands pilgrimage; • in 1898 Elizabeth was assassinated by an Italian anarchist. • Following the suicide of Franz Josef's only son Rudolf, the next in succession would have been Franz Josef's younger brother Maximillian. Maximillian, however, had been executed by a firing squad in Mexico in 1867 after a 3 year reign as Emperor of Mexico. • Karl Ludwig's oldest son, Franz Ferdinand replaced Rudolf as heir to the throne.Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist inSarajevo in June 1914. The assasination precipitated a crisis which led to the outbreak of World War I. • Franz Josef died on November 21, 1916. He did not live to see Austria's defeat in the war. 

9. Sick Man of Europe • The Ottoman Empire known as 'the sick man of Europe', a sign that the once-great power was crumbling.  • On the eve of the First World War, Turkey was ruled by the Young Turks, a group of military officers who rebelled against the ruling Sultan and deposed him in 1909.  • The Young Turks hesitated to declare war in August 1914 and the British hoped they might remain neutral. Britain, conscious of the threat the Turks posed to the Suez Canal, wanted to keep her out of the war and avoid splitting their forces between Eastern and Western fronts. 

10. Impact of the Suez Canal • The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was instrumental in directing Britain's foreign policy towards Egypt and the Middle East for the next 100 years. This man-made waterway halved the journey time for ships sailing between Britain and India, vital in times of peace for imperial trade and even more vital in wartime for the movement of troops.  • Britain feared the consequences of declaring war on an independent Muslim nation. A jihad - a call to arms for Muslims the world over against the Allies -would threaten Britain's position in both India and Egypt.  • A secret anti-Russian alliance, signed by Germany and Turkey in August 1914, was to push the Turks over the edge. With mounting German pressure to enter the fray, the Turks finally abandoned their neutrality accepting two battleships from the Kaiser which they used to bombard Russian ports in the Black Sea on October 29, 1914.

11. July Crisis

12. Historiography • Fritz Fischer - Grasp for World Power, 1961 • 1.   there was a 'will to war' amongst the leaders of Germany, • 2.   the German government wanted events to slide into war in 1914, • 3.   the German government had a plan of expansion very similar to that of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, • 4.   this was as a result of social and economic factors inside Germany - the ATTITUDE of Germans - as much as it was the result of any fears about foreign policy or the international scene. • John Keegan – Face of Battle, 1976 • Exposed what battle was like for the common soldier during the Battle of the Somme

13. Historiography (continued) • James Joll - The Causes and Aims of WWI, 1984 • Believed that the war was the culmination of a wide variety of factors, “reject[ing] all attempts at any long-term, wide-ranging explanation in terms of general social, economic, or intellectual factors.” • Instead, Joll argued that historians are limited to assigning blame for the war solely on “individual responsibility” by political leaders among the belligerent powers. • Niall Ferguson – The Pity of War, 1999 • Revisionist Historian – argues that Germany was forced into the war and challenges the view of Germany as the aggressor