When World War I began, in the first days of August 1914, the world didn't see it coming. It was a shock. For some people it was a glorious shock. For some people it was horrifying. It was a shock. Now historians look back on it. You open up any kind of world history textbook. And you'll see though that looking back on it, we see all sorts of explanations for World War I. There's a whole list of them. Usually we'll start with international rivalry. Every book will say something about the fact that Europe was divided into these two different alliances. Let's take a look at the map of Europe. You see the basic structure of this. The two key alliances were the Central Powers, the core members of the Central Powers these two countries: Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; on the other side, the Entente. And the key Entente powers were also two countries: France allied with Russia. France and Russia had been allied against Germany and Austria-Hungary since 1894. Now this map, if you look at it, shows Great Britain also as part of that alliance. This is actually not quite right. Great Britain was not a formal member of the Entente at the beginning of the war, though it was clearly on a friendly basis with France. If France was attacked, there was a good chance that Britain would come in, but it wasn't locked into it by formal treaty of alliance. After the war began, Great Britain became part of the Triple Entente. So the basic rivalry is France and Russia versus the aptly-named Central Powers. Other countries would later line up on the side of one or the other. But okay, back to the different causes of World War I. I've thrown a list of the causes here on this slide. International rivalry. These two competing alliances in Europe facing each other, amassing huge armies, buying weapons and so on. Second, you'll see a lot of references to a general atmosphere of militarism, the arms race, as each country is building up its armies and its navies looking for competitive advantages. You'll read about the hair trigger military plans that each of the sides built up. You'll read a lot about that. You'll read about imperial rivalries. We talked about the imperial races, especially in the late 1800s. And clearly some of those rivalries for colonies and colonial markets and resources. That's still going on. Economic rivalry, yep sure. Especially as most of these countries are building up trade barriers. You'll see also in all the books nowadays, a significant emphasis on how insecure some of the dynastic empires were: like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, and the German Empire. And you know what? All of these explanations have a fair degree of truth in them. But gosh, with so many explanations, so many true explanations, why was this a shock? In retrospect, it just seems obvious that there's going to be a huge general war. There's so many causes for it. Yeah, so then why were people surprised when it happened? They were really surprised. A good way of measuring the surprise that historian Niall Ferguson has used is he looks at the bond markets. See here's where businessmen are actually literally placing bets with their money on the stability of countries. Because the price at which their going to basically loan people money. If they think your country's about to go to war, they might charge a higher price, so to speak, in order to lend you money. Ask for a little more interest rates. So if you look the bond markets, you can get some indication of whether businessmen think instability is coming. But if you look at the bond markets in the summer of 1914, you don't see any sign that war is coming. The richest men in the world, the businessmen who are supposedly pulling the strings of all these governments, they're not expecting a war. They're not betting on a war. So, it's a shock. If the causes are so abundant, why the shock? They expected peace. So let's flip this question. Why would most well informed people expect peace in the summer of 1914, when you can look back and see so many causes for the war? Well, they expected peace, first off, because Europe had been pretty darn peaceful. It had been peaceful for a year, 5 years, 10 years, 20, 30, 40 years. There had been some wars in the Balkans, true. Back in 1870-1871, there had been a big war between France and Prussia, and so on. But general war in Europe? There had been a war between some of the powers waged in the Crimea, back in the 1850s, but a general war encompassing Europe, touching on commerce on the seas.. you had to go back to the Napoleonic Wars nearly 100 years earlier, so peace seemed like the norm. But another reason people expected peace is because peace was profitable. This was actually a period of general economic growth and a lot of economic activity. Very influential books were published saying that it was increasing inconceivable that there could even be a general war, because the condition of peace was so much in the interest of business. Did people understand that there were chronic tensions, imperial rivalries, military buildups? Sure. They all understood that. They'd had that for years, and those sorts of things were managed, that kind of tension, that rivalry, managed in a variety of different ways. For instance, when you turn on your automobile, inside your engine, there are hundreds, thousands of controlled little explosions. How come all these explosions, people setting fire to gasoline under the hood of your car, doesn�t just blow up all these automobiles all the time? Well, because we perfected over time ways of managing all of that combustion. Channeling all that combustion. And people thought: well we've learned how to manage chronic tensions in Europe. So if you look at 1914, you want to look at how they're managing chronic tensions and ask yourself: What changed? What was it about the way they always managed these tensions that suddenly is no longer working? Another kind of question you might ask yourself also comes from the old world of automotive engines. Many kinds of engines have on them a sort of governor. The purpose of the governor is to keep the engine from running too fast, for example. Sometimes in electric circuits there's a such a thing called a circuit breaker. So if the circuit gets too hot, the electricity will just cut out. In other words, people thought that something would intervene. That there would be some sort of governor that would keep war from happening. So, looking at 1914, what was the governor, so to speak, that had been there in the past, that suddenly failed? So what I'm doing is turning the question around. Instead of saying, Why was there a war?, and then you list the causes and it seems like, well then the war was bound to happen, I'm asking: Since most people expected peace, why did they turn out to be wrong in 1914? Another interesting way of looking at that question is to ask: Who was it that was not surprised when war happened in 1914? There were a few people who did kind of see it coming. They had, so to speak, inside information. But the next step in unpacking this little detective story is to examine very closely one of the principle players: the German empire. In the next presentation, we'll take a hard look at Imperial Germany. See you then.
