Causes of World War I
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One of the most easily made arguments in favor of the view that World War I could have been avoided if all belligerents were democracies is the historical record: It was not, and they were not, and those facts help explain why the war came about. This was a period in which democracy had not exactly won the war of ideas among Europe's rulers or the institutions of European governance. It has also been said that communism, the antidemocratic ideology that supplanted absolute monarchy in Europe where constitutional democracies did not and that survived the Great War for most of the 20th century, nevertheless itself eventually fell to "the superior strength of a rival body of ideas, free-market democracy, which was powerful enough to hold together the 16 countries of the West's alliance through all the alarms and rigours of the cold war" ("Nation-State" 15).The constitutional monarchy of Britain might be characterized as the closest thing to a democracy in that period, compared to the states of Continental Europe, and its defensive aid to France and Belgium could be characterized as a bulwark against Austro-Hungarian and German imperialism. But the fact that Britain came into the war against the Austro-Hungarian empire, which undoubtedly pressed its imperial designs on neighboring European states and statelets before and after 1914, must be set beside its being tied to Serbia, site of the provocatively anarchic assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Ferdinand, and to Russ
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democratic structures at least enabled, even if it did not make inevitable, the Great War. Van Evera's view differs from that of Trachtenberg to the extent he argues that the progress toward war was or became uncontrollable, saying that Europe "embraced" ideas that muddled the benefits of aggressive and defensive military positions in a Social Darwinist fashion, in particular embracing the benefits of an attack-based war strategy and "belief in easy conquest [that] eventually pervaded public images of international politics" (Van Evera 63). But Van Evera and Trachtenberg agree that political as well as military calculus was implicated in the mobilization arena, "suggesting that [politicians] believed the initiative was both attainable and worth attaining" (Van Evera 79).
Van Evera argues that this mind-set, played out at the geopolitical level, at minimum aggravated the impulse toward war, including the "preemptive" mobilizations on the part of Germany, Russia, and France in 1914, and obscured sufficient appreciation of "military and political obstacles to expansion" (68, 73-5). Indeed, Van Evera concludes that World War I was a "'preventive' war, launched by the Central powers in the belief that they were saving themselves from
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Approximate Word count = 1932
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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