11.2 — Why the First World War Happened

Gavrilo Princip, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

The assassination succeeded because of a wrong turn. The conspirators' first attempt that morning — a bomb thrown at the motorcade — had failed and wounded others. Princip had given up and gone to a nearby street. The Archduke, having decided to visit the wounded in hospital, was driven back through the city; his driver took a wrong turn, stopped, and began to reverse — directly in front of Princip.

Five weeks later, five great powers were at war.

The gap between the trigger and the catastrophe is what this chapter has to explain, because a political assassination in the Balkans was not, by itself, unusual.

The structural conditions

Four, and they had been building for decades.

The alliance system

By 1914 Europe was divided into two blocs.

The Triple Alliance: Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy — and Italy did not join its allies in 1914, and later joined the other side.

The Triple Entente: France, Russia and Britain — looser, and Britain's commitment was deliberately ambiguous.

Why the alliances made things worse rather than safer. They were designed to deter by making any attack a war against a coalition. Their actual effect was to remove the possibility of a local war: any confrontation between any two members risked activating everyone.

And they were mutually reinforcing in the worst way. Germany's greatest fear was a war on two fronts, which is what the Franco-Russian alliance created. Germany's response — a plan for winning a two-front war by knocking France out fast — is what made the eventual crisis unmanageable.

Militarism and arms races

The Anglo-German naval race. Britain's Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every existing battleship obsolete at a stroke — bigger guns, all of one calibre, turbine engines. Which meant the race restarted from zero, which Germany thought it could win. It could not, and the attempt turned Britain from a country with no continental commitments into one aligned against Germany.

Army sizes rose across the continent, conscription was universal in the continental powers, and general staffs planned continuously.

And the planning is the part that matters most. War plans were detailed railway timetables. Mobilisation meant moving millions of men and their supplies to frontiers on a schedule worked out years in advance.

Which produced a fatal property: the plans could not be modified in a crisis. When the Kaiser asked in July 1914 whether the army could mobilise against Russia alone and leave France out of it, Moltke replied that it was impossible — the plan was a single integrated timetable and altering it would produce chaos.

Nationalism

Chapter 10.7 explained where it came from. In 1914 it took three specific forms.

Austria-Hungary was a multinational empire in an age that said nations should have states, which made it structurally unstable.

Serbia's ambition to unite the South Slavs meant, from Vienna's perspective, the dismemberment of the empire.

And France's determination to recover Alsace-Lorraine, taken in 1871 (Chapter 10.7).

Public opinion mattered too. A mass press, mass literacy and mass politics meant governments faced popular pressure not to back down, which had not been true in earlier diplomatic crises.

Imperial rivalry

Chapter 11.1's scramble had produced repeated confrontations — two Moroccan crises, in 1905 and 1911, in which Germany challenged French dominance and was outmanoeuvred, each of which pushed Britain and France closer.

And the Balkans. Ottoman decline had produced a series of crises and two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913, in which Serbia doubled in size. Austria regarded this as an existential threat; Russia regarded the Balkan Slavs as its sphere.

The July Crisis, day by day

The sequence matters because it shows where the decisions were.

28 June. The assassination.

5–6 July. Austria asks Germany for support. Germany gives it unconditionally — the "blank cheque". This is the single most criticised decision of the crisis. Germany was not restraining its ally; it was encouraging it, in the belief that Russia would not intervene and that a quick Austrian victory would strengthen the alliance.

23 July. Austria delivers an ultimatum to Serbia with a 48-hour deadline, deliberately drafted, in the Austrian foreign minister's own words, so that it could not be accepted.

25 July. Serbia accepts almost all of it, rejecting only the demand that Austrian officials take part in the investigation on Serbian soil. The Kaiser, reading the reply, wrote that it was a great moral victory for Vienna and that every reason for war fell away. Austria had already decided.

28 July. Austria declares war on Serbia.

30 July. Russia orders general mobilisation. This is the second critical decision. Russia had no plan for partial mobilisation against Austria alone. Mobilising against Austria meant mobilising against Germany.

31 July–1 August. Germany demands Russia stop, does not get a reply, and declares war on Russia. Then, because its plan required it, declares war on France on 3 August.

4 August. German troops enter Belgium. Britain, which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality by treaty in 1839 and which could not accept German control of the Channel ports, declares war.

The critical feature of the whole sequence is time. Once mobilisation began, every general staff believed that a delay of days meant defeat. The diplomats needed weeks and the soldiers gave them hours. A crisis that in 1908 or 1912 had been settled by conference was, in 1914, run at railway speed.

The Schlieffen Plan

The specific mechanism that turned a Balkan crisis into a world war.

Germany's problem: a war on two fronts, with France mobilising in about two weeks and Russia — larger, less developed, with poorer railways — in about six.

The solution: defeat France in six weeks, then move the army east by rail to face Russia.

And France's frontier with Germany was heavily fortified, so the plan went around it — through Belgium, in a wide wheeling movement to encircle Paris from the north and west.

Which meant that any war with Russia automatically became an invasion of a neutral country, and therefore a war with Britain.

A plan designed to solve a military problem removed every political option. Germany could not fight Russia without attacking France, and could not attack France without attacking Belgium, and could not attack Belgium without bringing in Britain.

And it failed anyway. The German advance was halted at the Marne in September 1914, about 50 kilometres from Paris, and both sides then attempted to outflank each other northward until they reached the sea. The trenches of Chapter 11.3 are the result of a failed six-week plan.

Who was responsible

A hundred years of argument, and here is the honest state of it.

The Versailles Treaty's Article 231 required Germany to accept responsibility for the loss and damage caused by the war. It was drafted as a legal basis for reparations, not as a historical verdict, and it was read in Germany as a war-guilt clause and became a permanent grievance (Chapter 11.4).

In the 1920s and 30s, the consensus moved toward shared responsibility — the alliance system, the arms race, the mobilisation plans, and no single culprit. Lloyd George's phrase was that the nations slithered over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war.

In 1961 the German historian Fritz Fischer changed the argument. Working from German archives, he showed that German leaders had discussed and to some extent sought a war, that the September Programme of 1914 laid out extensive annexationist aims, and that Germany's blank cheque was a deliberate acceptance of the risk of general war. It caused a furious controversy in Germany.

Since then the argument has moved back toward shared responsibility without absolving Germany.

A reasonable summary of the current position, stated as a distribution rather than a verdict.

Austria-Hungary chose war with Serbia knowing the risk, and drafted an ultimatum designed to be refused.

Germany gave unconditional support, pressed Austria to act fast, and had a war plan that made escalation automatic.

Russia mobilised in full when it might have limited itself, and had no mechanism to do otherwise.

France gave Russia strong assurances and did not restrain it.

Britain's ambiguity may have contributed — a clearer commitment might have deterred Germany, or might have made Russia and France bolder.

And the structure was the largest cause. A set of alliances, plans and timetables in which the rational move for each actor, given what the others might do, was to move first. Nobody wanted the war that happened. Everybody made a decision that made it more likely, because the alternative looked worse at the time.

Where this shows up in your life

The alliance-timetable trap is studied in every strategic studies course, and it is why nuclear-armed states invest so heavily in mechanisms that slow decisions down — hotlines, verification, second-strike capability that removes the incentive to launch first.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was managed by people who had read about 1914 — Kennedy had recently read Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August and referred to it explicitly, saying he did not want anyone writing a comparable book about his crisis (Chapter 12.2).

And the lesson Norman Angell got wrong (Chapter 11.1) is worth restating: economic interdependence did not prevent the war. Germany and Britain were each other's major trading partners in 1914. The argument that trade makes war impossible was made then, is made now about China and the United States, and has one large counter-example.

What the next page covers

The plan failed and the armies dug in, and what followed was four years of a kind of war nobody had planned for or imagined. Chapter 11.3 covers the trenches — why defence dominated so completely, what a trench system actually was, what an attack involved and why the casualties were what they were, the new weapons and what each did, and what the war was like for the people in it, including the 1.3 million Indians who served.