The Causes and Events of World War one
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The causes of world War One are numerous and by themselves uninteresting. When combined they form a narrative that lead to the second most terrible war in the history of the human race. The seeds of World War One were first detectably sown by Emperor Napoleon the First. Napoleon attacked Europe and gained a significant amount of land. When he was finally defeated the Congress of Vienna took this land and gave it back to those nations it had been taken from. At the time Central Europe was a collection of smell German Principalities. They had been easily taken over by the French due to their lack of unity. The leaders of Europe at the time wanted stability and they saw that for this to be achieved they would need a unified German nation.
The Austrian Empire bordered the German states and spoke German so they took it upon them selves to unify Germany. At this point Bismarck enters the scene. Bismarck was an Austrian politician who took the desperate collection of German states and turned them into one of the greatest and most powerful nations in mainland Europe. He was a student of realpolitik. He believed the needs of the state were above that of its morals. He used this thinking to realize that Germany, while prosperous was weak. He set about to create a massive army. He succeeded and with the Dutch, then Austria. They then went to war with France, which they won. The terms of the surrender forced France to give up the region called Alsace and Loraine. The German occupation of the area led to great resentment in the French people towards the eastern neighbors. Another cause was the Africa issue. This took place in the build up to the war. Africa was at the time a major source of minerals, spices, gems, and power. The more land a nation owned the more powerful they were. In Africa all the prime land had already been inducted into the British Empire. This did not matter to Germany; they took more and more land in Africa until they started to encroach on British soil. This alone would not have been enough to cause the hostilities it did, if it werent for the naval arms race that was taking place at the same time between the two nations. At the time the title of most powerful navy went to Britain. Germany had a naval presence but it was small due to the fact there was only one point that Germany reached the ocean. Germany however felt threatened by the size of the Royal navy so they began to build more warships. Word of this reached the ears of the admiralty and they began their own build up. These combined factors almost sparked off a war in Africa, but they were talked down by their respective allies.
The largest contribution was the Alliance System, so called because it joined all of Europe in a tangled web of alliances. There were two main power blocks in the years preceding the Great War. On one side was the Triple Alliance, consisting of Germany, Austria-Hungry, and Italy. On the other were the Triple Entente, Britain, France, and Russia. They were created as deterrents to war, as it would believe no one would provoke conflict knowing it would bring all of Europe into the fight. What the great powers had not foreseen was the interference of the little states in their empires. What they had not counted on was Serbia.
Serbia was a small nation in the Balkans, which at the time was a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. There was a group of terrorists in Serbia know as the Black Hand. They existed to get Serbia out of the Empire. On the twenty-eighth of June, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife the Archduchess Sophia, the airs of the Austrian-Hungarian throne, were in Sarajevo when they were assassinated by a member of the Black Hand, Gavrilo Princip after several failed assassination attempts. This caused outrage in the Empire with the people calling for the blood of Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. This caused outrage in Russia who had a secrete alliance with the Serbs and saw themselves as the motherland of all Slavic people. Russia declared war on the Austro-Hungarians in response and activated the Alliance System. Germany declared war on Russia, France declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarians. They declared war on France. Germany activated the Schlieffen Plan.
This plan involved Germany splitting their forces along two fronts. Ninety percent of their forces to