Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars

Probably the best podcast I've ever downloaded, and insane that it's available for nearly free.

http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-bluepri...

That Germany was 'destined' to lose is a non-starter anyways. From my understanding it was Britain's decision to enter WWI that really shaped the outcome, and that it was far from a foregone conclusion that Britain would enter a continental European war. If the British didn't get involved, Germany's chance of taking Paris is much better, denying the two front war Germany (rightly) saw as a worst case scenario.

It's worth reviewing the run-up to WWI. The pre-WWI model of Europe, an endless struggle between Great Powers which had gone on for a millennium, is Putin's model of the world. That's because it gives Russia a role in the world. As an economic power, Russia is in 12th place, behind S. Korea. In a peaceful, trade-based world, Russia is a bit player. Especially since the price of oil tanked.

Thus the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the war in Ukraine from 2014 to now. Putin's desire to be a player on the world stage drives this.

The post-WWII world was, for a long time, two superpowers with nuclear overkill capability glaring at each other but not doing much. That was surprisingly stable. But it is not, historically, a normal condition.

Right now, it's all too easy to bungle into a major war. Likely possibilities are N. Korea vs S. Korea and the US, China vs. somebody over the South China Sea, and Russia vs. Ukraine heating up.

This really made a long-lasting impression, in Austria today (so 150 years later) we still use the phrase: "the prussians don't shoot that fast". We use it when there is still time and a solution isn't ready yet.

The first was the Austro-Prussian War. Now, why would a two month war between Germanic peoples be any type of benchmark in history? Well, it becomes incredibly important once you realize that it set the stage for the Franco-Prussian War and the Unification of Germany. Those two events nearly made World War I inevitable."

Well this is silly. If the Austrians had won, then we might have had a Franco-Austrian war. There was a problem in Alsace and Lorraine, a German-speaking population under the French. This had to be settled somehow. One of the two leading German nations would have done it: either the Prussians or the Austrians. Since the Prussians had won the 7-week war, it was them.

But too many what ifs... you can't do that in history, too many branches stem away from the root of a tree of possible alternatives.

Due to already receiving negative feedback on my comment let me explain.

The assasination didn't happen in Serbia but Bosnia that was at the time occupied by Austro-Hungarian Empire. It's a huge fail by somebody who tries to explain to us what 'really happened'.

What was the German Empire doing to threaten equality, freedom, and democracy that France and England and the US weren't also doing? The argument that the US entered because it declared itself to be in favor of those ideals is quite a stretch.

> Total casualties in killed, wounded, and missing broke 100,000, with Austrian losses nearly doubling those of the Prussians.

In two months of fighting? That's crazy, and at a 1-2 rate, definitely the end of the muzzle-loaded rifle.

> Combined casualties from the combatants (killed, wounded, missing) neared the 1 million mark.

In 9 months of fighting? That's insane. Those numbers far exceed the American Civil War, which was Approx. 650,000 for the entire four years. It should have been obvious to both France and Germany that WWI was going to be much much more deadly, they both had directly experienced it a generation before. It's sad this didn't give them pause.

Weeellll, Elsaß was German (i.e., part of the Holy Roman Empire) until 1639 & Lothringen was German until 1766. They were both retaken from France in 1871, retaken by France from Germany in 1919, occupied by Nazi Germany in 1940 and restored to France in 1945. Out of the past 1,000 years, Elsaß has been de jure German for 687 and Lothringen has been German for 814.

So describing them as French territories is a bit … Francophilic.

As for the US, their only objective is to prevent the rise of a dominant european power that can compete with them. e.g. WWI prevent germany from capturing france, WWII prevent germany from occupying russia (lend-lease) and then enter the war to prevent russia from occupying europe.

So does that mean WWIII will probably never happen given that we don't have any of of these crazy causes/triggers?

There are many putative causes for WWI. Wilson, for example, favored the idea that secret treaties was what caused the mess to blow up, but the evidence is fairly against it (basically, everyone who was making the decisions either knew or correctly guessed what the countries were going to do, and the only real question in the July Crisis was what Britain would do, and the British themselves didn't seem to have made up their mind). Other theories include the idea of "timetable war": the timetables for mobilization were too inflexible such that starting them meant they had to be seen through to completion, but that's more of an excuse that the military gave to justify their actions. Franco-Prussian war comes up a lot, but as I'll shortly explain, France wasn't particularly in an offensive war mood.

To understand what caused WWI, it's helpful to see the state of the countries in the immediate years preceding the war. Britain was distracted with the Irish Home Rule crisis (so much to the point that the July Crisis didn't really get noted until after the Serbian ultimatum!), and many feared that revolution or civil war was imminent. France, for its part, had had its internal divisions sharply exposed by the Dreyfus affair, and the Third Republic was a succession of weak governments. With the memory of the Franco-Prussian war, plus a strong socialist/reactionary divide, and the embarrassing and very public Dreyfus affair, its army was heavily demoralized and was in no mood to fight an offensive war, particularly not against Germany with no allies. Russia had lost the Russo-Japanese War in a shocking defeat, and was using primarily French funds to rebuild and modernize their army (which was dooming the Schlieffen Plan, as Germany planned to knock out France while Russia was mobilizing its army). The Russian government very nearly fell after their lost loss in a war, and they didn't expect to survive the next war if they lost. Austria-Hungary was basically two countries (Austria and Hungary) who had to work together but couldn't due to deep internal divisions. Some elements of the government (including Franz Ferdinand) saw the Balkans as a way to solve the problem by creating a third internal division that could overrule Hungarian objections to everything. Italy was a weak power who everyone pretended was a great power. The Ottoman Empire was slowly crumbling and featured more or less the last virgin land for colonial expansion.

Last of all is Germany. By 1910, Bismarck's foreign policy had been completely torn up, and Germany saw itself surrounded by the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia. Its only allies were Austria-Hungary, which looked dangerously unstable if it lost a war, and Italy, which had more or less adopted a policy of be-friendly-to-everyone and couldn't be counted on to join in a war (in 1914, it did declare its neutrality). Internally, Germany had a rather sharp revolutionary/reactionary divide, a rather common feature in Europe. German foreign policy in the early 1900s was especially bad, as Germany started antagonizing most players, not helped by the tendency of Kaiser Wilhelm II to say things without consulting advisers or considering any coherent policy (which sounds unfortunately familiar to present times). Britain's traditional policy with respect to Europe had been to maintain a splendid neutrality and only intervene to maintain a balance of power on the continent; Germany hoped to convince Britain that France and Russia were greater threats and to bind itself to an alliance with Germany--which was shockingly naive, especially after Germany decided to try for naval parity with Britain in the naval race. The most Britain would have been willing to commit to would have been to stay out of certain offensive wars and to help mediate disputes and restrain other countries, which was far less than Germany wanted, given its fears of Franco-Russian two-front war.

In the lead-up to WWI, there are a series of instructive crises. The first is the Moroccan Crisis, when Kaiser Wilhelm objected to French influence in Morocco, with the hope of being able to break the Entente Cordial (prelude to the Triple Entente) between France and Britain. It didn't, and Germany found no one willing to support its side, so it was forced to back down with no real gains. A few years later, Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia, to which Russia stridently objected; this time, France and Britain convinced Russia to back down with no real gains from the issue. Then France moved to formalize its status in Morocco as a protectorate, to which Germany (not without reason) objected. Germany bungled the issue by asking for unreasonable demands in compensation (great way to lose support!), and was ultimately forced to settle with minimal compensation. Then Italy invaded the Ottoman Empire to get itself a colony in Libya, which convinced the Balkan minor states that it was finally open time to carve the Ottoman Empire up. The great powers were so terrified of the resulting destabilizing effects that they forced the war to a conclusion, but the Balkan states themselves, upset with who had gotten the spoils, immediately fought each other within a few months to change hands.

In these various crises, major powers had mobilized and prepared for war, sometimes as a bluff, sometimes a fear of war being declared on them (better to mobilize before war gets declared on you), and sometimes as a genuine attempt to get to war first. So when a Serbian terrorist assassinated the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, many observers more or less expected that yet another muddling-through would happen. So why didn't it?

It's worth noting that all the major countries had major internal divisions, and governments generally saw war as a way to bring their country in unity--and, ironically, also saw the divisions in other countries as indicating that they wouldn't come together in war (the first part ended up being the case--only the Ottoman Empire failed to see unity in the war, and even then, the Arabs mostly did decide to wait until after the war to move forward on their grievances). There was also a general sense, particularly among the military, that war was inevitable and that it should be timed opportunely. The change in the relative qualities of the armies mattered too: the German's war plan (emphasis on the singular) had them defeating France while Russia mobilized, so the fact that the Russian army was improving, and the military logistics in European Russia in particular were improving, meant that their time frame for defeating France was shrinking.

Ultimately, it was the July Crisis that started the war. Austria-Hungary, after dithering a bit, made up its mind to go to war against Serbia and crush it. The ultimatum it gave was made with the express purpose that it would be so insulting that it wouldn't be accepted. When Serbia did fail to fully accept the ultimatum, Austria-Hungary suddenly got cold feet, but the German high command pushed Austria-Hungary to actually declare war and defeat Serbia before anyone had time to respond. Even then, the initial reaction of countries like Britain and Russia was to try to push Austria-Hungary to achieve just a limited war ("halt in Belgrade"), which Austria-Hungary rejected. Russia's reaction was initially to mobilize against just Austria-Hungary, before the military convinced the tsar to include Germany as well. Germany seems to have made up its mind to go to war against Russia before the declaration of Russian general mobilization, although it delayed its announcement until after the war. Germany's war plan meant invading France and Belgium, and the Belgians and French made their preparations for mobilization for defense at the same time, although France was very careful to maintain that the war would be purely defensive for the purposes of British opinion. Italy decided it couldn't handle another war in the aftermath of its Libyan campaign, and declared its neutrality fairly early on. Britain throughout the entire crisis dithered and essentially deadlocked on whether or not to go to war. The German invasion of Belgium provided enough incentive to get Britain to join the war against Germany (the Germans were distraught, having thought the entire time that Britain would remain neutral).

So what caused the war? In the end, it's hard to boil it down to a single statement that does justice to the situation. My best attempt is that WWI was caused ultimately because the people who had been keeping the peace suddenly decided to not do so this time. There are many reasons why the countries thought that war was justified, indeed potentially useful, and there are many reasons why the countries ended up dividing Europe into two main opposing alliances. Such a situation, however, need not lead to war: the Cold War is a great example of how a dueling alliances need not break out into general war (and the reasons why are similarly debated).