HIST350- Module 1: Assignment instructions Read: · Required o Module Notes: The World at the Turn of the 20th Century o Neiberg, M (2005). Fighting the Great War: A Global History. Harva
Module 1: Module Notes: The World at the Turn of the 20th Century
“Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans will set it off”
-Otto Von Bismark
The events that triggered the Great War did not emerge in a vacuum, but had their own complex histories. These notes are intended to expand upon the readings by offering additional information to contextualize the situation and better explain how the actions of a Serbian radical led to global warfare.
Clash of Conservatism and Liberalism in the Late 19th Century
During the 19th century, a number of competing and overlapping social and political ideologies clashed, leading to many of the events that precipitated the Great War. Key among these ideologies were Liberalism, Nationalism, Feminism, and Marxism. These ideologies had distinct differences, but were not necessarily mutually exclusive (one could be a feminist-nationalist, for example).
What they all shared in common, however, was their opposition to Conservatism. Conservatism is a political philosophy that favors the preservation of tradition over rapid change. In the 19th century specifically, this meant those who were already in power wished to maintain the longstanding imperial monarchies and prevent internal revolutions. In the century prior, the American (Links to an external site.) and French Revolutions (Links to an external site.) demonstrated to the world that people demanded to govern themselves without the interference of hereditary rulers. The major monarchies of Europe therefore spent much of the 19th century trying to remain in power. These grasps for power took shape differently in various places. In Britain, Queen Victoria’s willingness to share her authority with Parliament helped to retain the British Monarchy. In Russia, however, Tsar Nicholas II’s brutal oppression of reformers demanding more egalitarian rule eventually cost him his throne and his life.
Liberalism
Liberalism, borne out of the Enlightenment (Links to an external site.) of the 18th century, demanded an end to absolute monarchies. Primarily a middle-class movement, liberalism called for representative government, usually dominated by the propertied classes, and based the legitimacy of the government in the freely-given consent of the people. Although this vision took different shape and pursued different goals within each European state, liberals shared the common goal of gaining power by weakening or outright smashing the conservative system of the monarchy and aristocracy. How each state responded to these movements was also unique, with Russia being arguably the most oppressive and violent.
First-wave Feminism
First-wave feminism emerged in the late 18th century in Britain and France. In 1789, democratic revolutionaries neglected French women in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Links to an external site.). In response, one French feminist, Olympe de Gouges (Links to an external site.), published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. Similarly, across the channel, British women advocated for legal and political rights, including, most famously, the author Mary Wollstonecraft (Links to an external site.).
In the 19th century, the focus of feminism shifted to suffrage (Links to an external site.), or the right to vote. By the early 20th century, most Western powers had still not granted suffrage rights to women, and a more militant wing of suffragists in Britain, known as suffragettes (Links to an external site.), organized and engaged in radical demonstrations against the government. Russia became the first to grant political equality to women in 1907, but elsewhere in Europe women’s involvement in the First World War provided the rationale to sufficiently galvanize the popular and political support necessary to gain their goals.
Marxism
Marxism was a political philosophy developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 Communist Manifesto (Links to an external site.). In it, they warned against the dangers of proletarianization, or downward social mobility, whereby people move from self-employment to working for someone else for a wage. Essentially, it is when people join the proletariat (Links to an external site.), or the working class. The massive industrialization sweeping Europe in the 19thcentury created a huge demand for the unskilled wage labor Marx and Engels evaluate in the text.
However, industrialization also signaled the death of the barter economy, in which goods and services were exchanged for other goods and services without the need for currency. In its place rose the wage economy, where those who owned the means of production—the factories, raw materials, tools, and equipment—sought to make profits. This required selling consumer goods at the highest possible prices while paying the lowest possible wages. For the majority of people, their only value was their labor, which they exchanged for a wage paycheck they then spent on the very goods that they were producing. Such a system, which generated tremendous profit for business owners, created a system of inequality and ultimately alienation for the masses of unskilled wage laborers.
While this system may seem common to us now, at the time the wage economy was a massively disruptive change that had immense effects on European society. Marxists believed that this system would necessarily result in a class struggle, during which the proletariat organized to overthrow the aristocracy and take ownership of the means of production.
Nationalism
Lastly, a distinct 19th-century brand of Nationalism took shape due to centuries of global imperialism and conquest. As imperial nation-states redrew the world map over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries in particular, the borders of states became less and less reflective of the nations that encompassed them. A state (Links to an external site.) is a territory with a physical border and a single recognized government that rules, whereas a nation (Links to an external site.)is a group of people who self-identify as a community based upon a common ethnicity, language, religion, or tradition. As the “winners” of history expanded and conquered more and more territory, multiple nations found themselves under the rule of a single state, which often did not necessarily reflect the values and beliefs of the governed people.
There were many famous examples of this nation/state disconnect in the late 19th century, including most of the major players in the Great War. For example, Britain’s massive overseas empire (Links to an external site.) held some 20 percent of the world’s landmass and 23 percent of the world’s population by the start of the Great War. The Austro-Hungarian Empire (Links to an external site.) comprised multiple languages and ethnicities, all ruled under the Hapsburg-Lorraine royal family. The Ottoman Empire (Links to an external site.) contained Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, and Greeks, over which the Turks of Anatolia ruled. Although it was a Sunni Islamic state, the Ottoman Empire contained Christians, Jews, Shiite Muslims, and other religious minorities. By the mid-19th century, Nationalists began to argue that nations ought to have their own state by right and that states ought to be representative of the nation or nations that comprised them. This belief called for nothing less than the complete destruction of imperialism; it led to wars of independence in many global colonial holdings and civil wars within other countries in which political factions vied for control of the government.
Most of the major rulers of this era were not willing simply to cede territory or voluntarily limit their own power, despite criticisms from the ideological movements discussed above. Many of the policies of the late 19thcentury that prompted the First World War were the result of conservative backlash to the liberalist, nationalist policies of their own people. While some rulers managed this era with grace and preserved their authority and crown, namely the British Monarchy, others fought and failed to reverse the changes being wrought within their states.
The Unification of Germany
An unexpected consequence of Napoleon’s (Links to an external site.) campaigns across Europe in the early 19th century was the fostering of intense nationalism in the former Holy Roman Empire. While other empires focused on expanding their overseas holdings, the state of Prussia (Links to an external site.) expanded into Central Europe during the latter half of the 19thcentury. Through a series of strategic treaties and focused, aggressive wars, Kaiser Wilhelm I and his chancellor Otto von Bismarck (Links to an external site.) brought ethnic Germans together under a single state. The creation of a unified German Empire, complete by 1871, forever changed the balance of power in Europe.
Bismarck was a master of international diplomacy, and he sought out fellow imperial powers to protect the new German Empire. The three conservative empires of Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary joined together in the Three Emperors’ League (Links to an external site.) of 1873. However, Russia’s wars with the Ottomans caused them to withdraw from the League, which was renamed the Triple Alliance (Links to an external site.) with the inclusion of Italy in 1882.
The Reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II and the Schlieffen Plan
Wilhelm I had been a capable leader, however his grandson, Wilhelm II (Links to an external site.), proved less adept to rule. Wishing to prove his empire’s strength, he set out to aggressively expand German power overseas, directly challenging the colonial holdings of France and Britain. He was responsible for triggering a naval arms race in the North Atlantic. Wilhelm II often clashed with Bismarck over foreign policy, so much so that he eventually forced the aging chancellor to resign in 1890. When Bismarck left the political scene, many of the carefully negotiated alliances collapsed, leaving Germany politically isolated and surrounded by fearful opponents. Only the alliance with Austria-Hungary remained intact.
Germany’s aggressive expansion and rapid military buildup alarmed their neighbors. France and Russia signed the Franco-Russian Alliance (Links to an external site.) in 1894 in order to threaten Germany with the prospect of a two-front war. Great Britain and France, having fought numerous wars over the previous millennia, signed the Entente Cordiale (Links to an external site.), intended to present a unified front against German expansion both in Europe and the colonies. The fact that these two ancient rivals were willing to set aside hundreds of years of animosity and violence in the face of the new power in Europe should demonstrate just how seriously they viewed Germany.
These alliances did not terribly concern Kaiser Wilhelm II, however, as the Germans had a plan to manage a two-front war involving France and Russia. Named after the chief of the German General Staff, General Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the Schlieffen Plan (Links to an external site.) called for a quick, decisive attack into France before the Russian military could mobilize. This necessitated invading Belgium, the independence of which was guaranteed by the British. Schlieffen argued that once France was defeated, Britain would avoid committing to a war on the continent, and German field armies would then be sent via railroad to the east where they could then face Russia. It was an aggressive strategy that drew inspiration from the German Wars of Unification, in which the Prussian military had swiftly and defeated its opponents in a series of short, aggressive wars.
Italy, the latest addition to the Triple Alliance, negotiated secret deals with France in direct contradiction to their public treaty agreements with Germany. The combination of entangling alliances and secret deals proved to be dangerous, as world leaders were forced to decide which agreements to honor when it came time for war.
The Russo-Japanese War and the First Moroccan Crisis
In 1904, another war caused the German Kaiser to question just how committed his rivals were to their new alliances. The Russo-Japanese (Links to an external site.) War was a short, decisive conflict between the Russian Empire and the newly-emerged Meiji Japan. Japan shocked the world by soundly defeating the Russians on both land and at sea in a year and a half, having gone from being an isolated, medieval state to a modern, industrial powerhouse in only three decades. France did not intervene on behalf of their Russian allies, and the British did not come to the aid of the Japanese. With Russia weakened by war, including the first Russian Revolution (Links to an external site.), and Britain and France revealing an unwillingness to commit, Wilhelm II was left with the assumption that these powers might back down if tested. And test them he did, in 1905 in Morocco.
Morocco was a French protectorate in North Africa. Wilhelm himself travelled there to promote Moroccan nationalist movements and encourage their independence from France. The response was overwhelming and swift. Britain, France, the United States, Russia, and even Italy condemned his actions. The solidarity of the other major powers left Wilhelm feeling isolated, pushing him ever closer to Austria-Hungary as Germany’s only true ally. To the rest of the world, this event demonstrated Germany’s aggressive policies and willingness to interfere in the overseas holdings of European empires. In order to provide a better front against Germany, Britain joined France and Russia formally as allies in the creation of the Triple Entente, which solidified two (Links to an external site.)competing alliances. Take a look at the complex alliances before the war in the map above.
Austria-Hungary, the Balkans, and the Assassination that Killed Millions
Southeastern Europe—known as the Balkans—was a hotbed of nationalist violence in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. First, a series of wars against the aging Ottoman Empire in 1912 and 1913, the Balkans Wars (Links to an external site.), drove the Turks out of Europe.
But it was what resulted from the wars that drew the attention of world leaders around Europe. The Balkan League, comprised of Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria, and organized for the purpose of defeating the Ottoman Empire, shattered. The former allies began to cannibalize one another for land and power, with Serbia emerging as the clear winner. This alarmed Austria-Hungary, who feared that a powerful Serbian state might challenge their authority over southern Europe.
Ethnic nationalism also played a role in uniting the states of southeastern Europe against the Turks. If nationalism could destroy the Ottomans, then it might unravel the Austria-Hungarian Empire as well. The Austro-Hungarians were eager to crush this new regional upstart, but they faced a powerful opponent: Russia. Russia viewed Serbia as fellow ethnic Slavs (Links to an external site.) and as such Serbia could expect on Russian support in any conflict with Austria-Hungary. Additionally, Russia was keen to support other nationalist movements in southeastern Europe, especially those that challenged the power of the Ottomans and Austria-Hungary.
Thus it was—when Gavrilo Princip killed the heir to the Imperial Throne of Austria, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Links to an external site.), and his wife in Sarajevo—that what should have been a regional conflict snowballed into a global crisis.
Austria-Hungary saw the event as a casus belli for war against Serbia, but would not commit without German assurance in the event that Russia intervened. Germany feared that war with Russia would bring with it a two-front war with France and Britain as well, but felt confident that they could be defeated using Germany’s war plans, namely the Schlieffen Plan.
Next, please introduce yourself in the Welcome & Introductions discussion and then proceed to the first discussion, M1D1: Imperialism and the State of Europe before WWI.
