This research discusses the outbreak of World War I. The focus is on determining who was responsible for the outbreak. The determination is controversial. The Great War is a difficult war to classify because of the many forces that went into its inception and because the war itself solved no problems and so cannot be judged in terms of clearly defined issues and resolutions.
As Holger Herwig notes, the end of World War I produced the tensions and environment that would lead to World War II:
By placing the blame for the war on Germany and its allies, and by stipulating that they were to pay for the damages incurred by all combatants, the victorious Allied and Associated Powers crippled the Weimar Republic from birth and provided Adolf Hitler and his fellows with a grand propaganda weapon in their campaign to "revise" the Treaty of Versailles (Herwig 2).
Was Germany responsible as claimed at the end of the war, or was some other force at work in the beginning of the war?
The July 1914 crisis was the immediate reason for the beginning of World War I, and it has been enmeshed in the issue of war guilt, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles with several references to Germany's responsibility for the war. James Joll finds that the reasons for the war may lie in the personalities of those who were part of the crisis and who had to react to it, and he finds that it is understandable that their motives might be muddied and unclear:
When political leaders are faced with the necessity of taking decisions the outcome of which they cannot foresee, in crises which they do not wholly understand, they fall back on their own instinctive reactions, traditions and modes of behavior. . . Even when we have records of what was said, we do not always know the tone of voice in which the words were spoken. . . In moments of crisis, political leaders fall back on unspoken assumptions, and their intentions can often only be judged in t...