of Austro Hungarian foreign minister Count von Berchtold, (3) Germany's carte blanche offer of support to Austria Hungary following the Sarajevo assassination, and (4) the hesitancy and inappropriate reactions of the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in the crisis that followed in the wake of the assassination. Abbot attributed the cause of the conflict in much broader terms to what he termed human thought and what he defined as racial antagonisms and national fears. Abbot, however, also identified conflicting national goals and massive armaments as causes of the war. German historian Eduard Meyer implicated the system of international alliances in Europe in 1914 as a cause of the war. Historian Marc Trachtenberg argued that the European political leaders of the day were very much in control of events, and that Austo Hungarian and German political leaders knew well that the aggressive stances taken by their states in the weeks following the assassination at Sarajevo would lead inevitably to war. Other historians have disputed Trachtenberg's assertions. Historian Dan Lazarescu attributes the "pathological vanity" of German Emperor William II as a prime causal factor for the conflict.
As the preceding problem development discussion illustrates, there is certainly no scarcity of potential candidates for the cause of the First World War. Indeed, it is likely that all of the potential causes discussed are, to some extent, valid causes of the war. The research performed for this study, however, was based on an assumption that some of the causal factors were likely of greater significance than were others. This assumption led to the following hypothesis that was tested in this study:
It is hypothesized that a combination of factors led to the initiation of the hostilities that became the First World War. This combination of factors included (1) the insensitive, arbitrary, and ineffective conduct of international relati...