Was World War I really an avoidable tragedy? (2023)

key point: Imperial Germany wanted to be a superpower.

The centenary of the outbreak of World War I has revealed a huge gulf between the general public's perception of the war and that of historians, at least in the English-speaking world. Experts, commentators and politicians often say that World War I was an unnecessary and inevitable catastrophe, which is repeatedly linked to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb terrorist in Sarajevo on the 28th. The general impression among the general public is that nobody was blamed for the greatest conflagration in world history before World War II. Literary and cinematic masterpieces like Remarguenothing new in the westand Kubrickpaths of gloryreinforced the perception that the conflict demonstrated the absurdity of war. The lesson is that war is like catastrophic climate change: a destructive force to be avoided and in which everyone is an accomplice.

In the English-speaking world, this popular interpretation of the First World War has deep roots in isolationism, in the international peace campaigns of the early 20th century and, above all, in Woodrow Wilson's call for a "peace without victory". In the European Union it is certainly useful to treat World War I as a product of abstract forces like the arms race or nationalism in order to minimize national animosity.

But unlike lectures, most historians have published since Fritz FischerGermany's Goals in World War I(1961) tend to agree that the main cause of World War I was Imperial Germany's determination to become a "world power" or superpower by fighting Russia and France in what it hoped would be a short and decisive war, like the War Franco-Prussian of 1870. /71. After the Archduke's assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia's satellite Serbia as a pretext for a general war aimed at establishing German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939: a government in Berlin wanted a war, but not the war it ended up with.

The German government's secret "September Program" of 1914 envisaged separating territories from France and turning Germany's neighbors into "vassal states" (a term used for Belgium in the document). The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated between Germany and the Soviet government it helped establish in Moscow, pulled Russia out of the war, gave Germany the Baltic states and part of Belarus, and turned an independent Ukraine into a satellite. German. Summing up the September program and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, one has a startling vision of a German continental empire as vast as Hitler envisioned, although in contrast to Hitler's genocidal empire of German colonists, the Kaiser's empire was a traditional vassals. German-dominated states.

Advocates of the "everyone's fault" interpretation of World War I point out that Germany's enemies also had expansive war aims, and that Britain and France divided the Ottoman Empire after the war. But that is beside the point. The alliance between Russia, France, and Britain was a defensive one, sparked by Germany's warmongering drive to become a global power, not just a regional one. There had been numerous wars in the Balkans in the preceding decades, and the conflict between Austria and Serbia might have been limited to the Balkans if Berlin had chosen that option. Instead, German rulers used Sarajevo as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway: become a "world power" by dominating Europe through war.

British historian Niall Ferguson once suggested that if Britain and the United States had stayed out of World War I, aEuropa Centralfounded by himEmpireIt could have evolved into something like the current European Union. Absurd. Within the German Empire, victory would have strengthened authoritarian militarists and weakened the forces of liberalism and democracy. The political culture would not have been that of today's bourgeois Germany, but that of a Latin American banana republic or that of today's Thailand or Egypt, illiberal regimes in which generals and colonels pull the strings.

A German victory in World War I would have created a European superpower that, while less insane and murderous than Hitler's abortive superstate, would have been far more formidable than the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia was a backward nation that controlled the poorer half of Europe during the Cold War. Had it won World War I, Imperial Germany would have been the most advanced nation in Europe and would dominate the richest region in the world.

Was this new superpower, created in a bloody war of aggression by Berlin, a power of the status quo? It seems more likely that the German imperial elite, emboldened by success, rushed to wage a Cold War against the British Empire and the US in the Western Hemisphere. In any hypothetical German-American Cold War, Imperial Germany could have mobilized superior scientific and technological resources, including areas such as chemistry and space science in which it was a world leader. And in contrast to the Hitler regime, a triumphal marchEmpirehe probably would not have allowed distinctions between "Jewish science" and "Aryan science" to stand in the way of developing nuclear weapons.

Bismarck's Germany was a status quo power. Post-Bismarck Germany was a rogue state. Wilhelm II did not dream of exterminating the Jews and enslaving the Slavs, but in his cruelty and radicalism he was a proto-Hitlerian. To achieve the goal of creating a German superpower, Wilhelm and his officers tried to paralyze Britain and France by fomenting a global Muslim jihad and to ensnare the US in a border war with Mexico (the Zimmerman Telegram). Last but not least, Imperial Germany successfully crippled Russia by supporting Lenin's Communist coup in October 1917. The Emperor and his soldiers and diplomats were not prudent Old World statesmen, chess players. They were radical revisionists who turned the tables and trampled on the pieces.

for what? What was the alternative so horrible, so unimaginable that the Imperial Regime and then the Third Reich were willing to plunge the world into two wars that killed a total of 75 to 100 million people and devastated Germany in the process? The unthinkable alternative for the imperial German ruling class was that a peaceful status quo in Germany within its 1871 borders would be no more than the richest country in a rich and peaceful Europe enjoying cooperative relations with Britain and the United States. United.

in your bookEuropa Central[Central Europe] (1917) Friedrich Naumann - himself a moderate German national liberal - considered and discarded the option that Germany could be a European regional power linked to the English-speaking world:

For emotional reasons, despite all the "hate songs" of the war, it is easier for us to think of a lasting union with the British superpower [than an alliance with Russia]. In that case, as one of my friends says, we became a minority partner in the English World Company, supplying confidential agents and servants, building ships and sending masters to the colonies, supplying the English trading centers with German goods, well made and well made. done, paid for, speaking English outside your own four walls, enjoying English internationalism and fighting future English battles against Russia... All this would be resolved the English way in quite reasonable and pleasant ways, but our history of the German Reich would have become a territorial history, like that of Saxony today or that of Württemberg. A great nation only does this when there is nothing else to do. We know that most of the world's nations have no choice but to pursue this alliance, one way or the other, but a greater goal draws us through our strength and experience: to become a focal point ourselves!

(Video) Was World War I inevitable?

Nauman was wrong. Like the leaders of West Germany after World War II and of reunified Germany after the Cold War, the leaders of Germany a century ago should have chosen the alternative of being an honest, highly paid junior partner in "the company." -American. If they had, the world would have been spared World War I, World War II, and probably Soviet Communism and the Cold War as well.

It's time to dispel the myth that World War I was a senseless and preventable tragedy, while World War II was a just and necessary crusade. World War I and World War II had the same cause: the desire of German elites to transform Germany from a regional power into a world superpower through aggressive warfare, and the same result: the defeat of Germany at the hands of a defensive group. coalition of Russia, Great Britain, France and United Kingdom United States. If correct, the German conquest of Europe by theFührer, it was also correct to prevent the German conquest of Europe by the Kaiser. Fortunately, the world today had what the world needed in 1914 and 1939: a European Germany, not a German Europe.