The First World War

The first principle

The balance of power is the idea that no single state should grow strong enough to dominate the rest, so that others combine against any power that threatens to. Before 1914 Europe's great powers had grouped themselves into two alliances to hold this balance, but the same alliances meant that a local quarrel could no longer stay local. The First World War (1914 to 1918) was the result of that structure meeting aggressive nationalism, militarism and miscalculation.

The core

Long term causes

• The alliance system. Bismarck built the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria Hungary and Italy (1882). France and Russia allied in 1894, Britain settled colonial disputes with France in the Entente Cordiale (1904) and with Russia in 1907, and the Triple Entente was complete. Germany felt encircled, and the Entente powers feared German dominance.
• Militarism and the naval race. Every power kept a large conscript army and detailed war plans. Germany's Navy Laws from 1898 challenged British sea power, and Britain answered with the Dreadnought battleship (1906), so naval rivalry turned Britain against Germany.
• Imperial rivalry. Germany sought a "place in the sun" after arriving late to empire, and the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911 pushed Britain and France closer.
• Nationalism in the Balkans. As the Ottoman Empire weakened, Serbia sought to unite South Slavs, many of whom lived inside Austria Hungary. Austria's annexation of Bosnia (1908) and the Balkan Wars (1912 to 1913) made the region the "powder keg of Europe", with Russia backing Serbia as protector of the Slavs.

The immediate cause and the July Crisis

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated at Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb linked to a Serbian nationalist network. Within five weeks the alliances and mobilisation plans turned this into a general war.

Course in brief

• Western Front. Germany's Schlieffen Plan sought to defeat France quickly through Belgium before turning to Russia, but it failed at the Marne (September 1914). Both sides dug trenches from the Channel to Switzerland, and battles such as Verdun and the Somme (1916) killed hundreds of thousands for little ground.
• Eastern Front and elsewhere. Germany defeated Russia at Tannenberg (1914), the Allies failed at Gallipoli (1915 to 1916) against the Ottomans, Italy joined the Allies in 1915, and the war spread to the Middle East, Africa and the seas.
• 1917 and 1918. Germany's unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann telegram brought the United States into the war in April 1917, while revolution took Russia out by the Treaty of Brest Litovsk (March 1918). Germany's last offensive failed, and it signed the armistice on 11 November 1918.

Dimensions

Was it fought essentially to preserve the balance of power?

• The case for. Britain entered not because it was attacked but because German victory over France and Russia would have given one power control of the continent and the Channel coast. The German invasion of Belgium, whose neutrality Britain had guaranteed in 1839, gave the occasion. The Entente itself was built to contain Germany, and Russia went to war partly so that Austria and Germany would not dominate the Balkans.
• The case against. The war began in the Balkans over Serbian nationalism, which no balance of power theory explains. Austria Hungary fought to save a multinational empire from break up, Germany's leaders, as Fritz Fischer argued in Germany's Aims in the First World War (1961), had ambitions of European and colonial expansion, and rigid mobilisation timetables left statesmen little room to stop. Italy joined in 1915 for territory promised in the secret Treaty of London, not for balance.
• A balanced view. The balance of power explains why a Balkan quarrel became a world war, since each power feared the other bloc would gain at its expense. Nationalism, imperialism and militarism explain why the quarrel arose and why it was fought to total victory rather than ended by compromise.

• Total war. Whole economies were mobilised, women entered factories, governments used conscription, rationing and propaganda, and new weapons such as machine guns, poison gas, tanks and aircraft made the war the most destructive the world had seen.

In practice

The peace settlement

• Wilson's Fourteen Points (January 1918) called for open diplomacy, free trade, reduction of arms, self determination of peoples and a League of Nations.
• Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919). Germany lost Alsace Lorraine to France, territory to Poland including the Polish Corridor, and all its colonies; its army was limited to 100,000 men; the Rhineland was demilitarised; and Article 231, the war guilt clause, made Germany accept responsibility for the war. Reparations were fixed in 1921 at 132 billion gold marks. Germans called it a dictated peace (Diktat), and John Maynard Keynes warned in The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) that it would ruin Europe's economy.
• Other treaties with Austria (Saint Germain), Hungary (Trianon), Bulgaria (Neuilly) and Turkey (Sèvres, later replaced by Lausanne in 1923) broke up the empires.

The redrawn map

• Four empires collapsed: the German, Austro Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Finland and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania emerged, and Austria and Hungary became small separate states, but many minorities, such as the Germans of the Sudetenland, were left inside new states.
• In the Middle East, the secret Sykes Picot Agreement (1916) between Britain and France and the Balfour Declaration (1917) shaped the post war order. Former Ottoman lands became League of Nations mandates: Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan under Britain, and Syria and Lebanon under France.

Case: India and the war. Over a million Indians served overseas in France, Mesopotamia, East Africa, Egypt and Gallipoli, and India also paid heavily in money and supplies. Expectations of reward led to the Montagu Declaration (1917), but price rises, forced recruitment, the Rowlatt Act (1919) and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre turned loyalty into mass nationalism under Gandhi, while the treatment of the Ottoman Caliph produced the Khilafat movement.

Issues and way forward

• Responsibility. The Versailles verdict placed guilt on Germany, the Fischer thesis supported it, and Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers (2012) spread responsibility among all the powers. Most historians now accept that Germany and Austria Hungary took the greatest risks, while the whole alliance system made escalation likely.
• A flawed peace. The settlement was too harsh to be accepted by Germany and too weak to be enforced, since the United States stayed out of the League. Self determination was applied to Europeans but not to colonies, which disillusioned nationalists in India, Egypt and China in 1919.
• Consequences. The war produced the Russian Revolution, the rise of the United States as a creditor power, the League of Nations as the first permanent body for collective security, and the grievances that fascism later exploited.
• Lessons today. Rigid alliances, arms races and automatic escalation remain risks; crisis communication, arms control and international institutions are the answers the twentieth century developed.

Common confusions

• Triple Alliance and Triple Entente. The Alliance was Germany, Austria Hungary and Italy; the Entente was France, Russia and Britain. Italy switched sides in 1915.
• Allies and Central Powers. In the war itself the Allies included Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, Belgium, Italy, Japan and later the United States; the Central Powers were Germany, Austria Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria.
• Treaty of Versailles 1919 and Treaty of Versailles 1783. The 1919 treaty ended the war with Germany; the treaties signed at Versailles in 1783 ended the American War of Independence between Britain, France and Spain.
• Armistice and treaty. The armistice of 11 November 1918 stopped the fighting; the peace treaties of 1919 to 1923 settled the terms.

For the exam

• Keyword bank: balance of power, alliance system, Dreadnought, Balkan powder keg, July Crisis, blank cheque, Schlieffen Plan, trench warfare, total war, Brest Litovsk, Fourteen Points, war guilt clause, reparations, self determination, mandates.
• Previous year questions: Practise the previous year questions on this topic →
• Use in an answer:
  • Introduction (data): Within five weeks of the shots at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, all of Europe's great powers were at war, a speed that only the alliance system can explain.
  • Introduction (quote or report): Keynes warned in 1919 that the Treaty of Versailles was a Carthaginian peace that would sow the seeds of future conflict.
  • Conclusion: The balance of power explains why the war spread, but nationalism, imperial ambition and militarism explain why it began and why it was fought to exhaustion.
  • Conclusion: By destroying four empires and leaving a resentful Germany, the war ended one balance of power without building a stable new one.