The Significance of Impersonal Factors in Determining the Origins of the First World War

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The Significance of Impersonal Factors in Determining the Origins of the First World War

World War I resulted from an unsettlement in the international system that began in the 1870s, when the German Empire was created after France lost the Franco-Prussian War. The power that Germany achieved was sustained through a series of alliances (whose goal was to isolate France and neutralize Russia to secure German strength [49]), and through Otto von BismarckTs Realpolitik diplomacy. Bismarck is often pointed as a key individual in determining the origins of WWI because of the influence he had on the methods used for conducting international relations. While it is true that as a leader he dominated policy making, rather than pointing at him as an individual force, one must look at his methods of diplomacy as an expression of a broader rising raison (50) ideology that prioritized national interests and that was a response to the rise of nationalism in the 1850s.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, nationalism was a new and powerful source of tension since it clashed with the interests of the dominant European imperial powers. Before the establishment of the Concert of Europe in 1815, nationalist ideologies started to spread because of the philosophies brought by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars[2]. There started to be a growing popular political support towards the principle that each nation had the right to form its own independent state to fulfill the socio-economic and cultural objectives of people united by common origins, language and interests.

Conversely, the project of the Concert of Europe opposed to this call for state self-determination and suppressed nationalist revolutions while institutionalizing conservative territorial outlines in the Congress of Vienna. This suppressed the political aspirations of various nations and fueled the frustration of nationalist movements that later became unification wars, namely, in the Germanic Confederation and Italy. The successful outcomes of these wars challenged core structures set by the Concert of Europe (mainly political-territorial configurations) and thus, influenced the readjustment of balance of power and contributed to the further challenging of political structures that until then were unquestionable. Nevertheless, while in Germany and Italy the unification wars were successful, in other European countries nationalist struggles remained unsolved, contributing to the escalation of tensions. Later in the 1860s and 1870s, nationalism started to be influenced by supremacist ideas of Social-Darwinism, favoring imperial and military pursuits under the belief that war was good for nations (27). Under these conditions, nationalism created new areas of interest over which leaders of nations could compete,ppromoting methods of diplomacy like BismarckTs Realpolitik (49-50), and making movements such as Pan-Slavism fundamental to the development of the events that preceded the First World War (56).

In addition to nationalism, European imperialism should also be considered a major impersonal origin of WWI because the commercial colonization of Africa and Asia allowed European states to develop economically and industrially through the massive extraction of foreign raw materials, but in very unequal and competitive terms: England and France had the monopoly of industrial development, which generated discord and revived nationalist arguments. Because of the Industrial Revolution, imperialism promoted and facilitated significant technological advancements and industrial expansion in Europe, which fueled arms development and the construction of all types of maritime, air and terrestrial armaments and transportations specialized for war. This turned the late 19th century into an era of military competition and contributed to the anxiety that war could unleash soon. Europe lived an arms race: a power’s announcement of an increase in their defense expenses was interpreted by their rivals as a direct threat, which created a climate of distrust and mutual fears, especially between Germany and Britain (because hegemonic British imperialism was concerned about the German will to become a naval power and extend its dominance outside of Europe). Moreover, the effects of militarization started to be translated to political life, for instance in Germany and Russia, where the military became more involved in the government, influencing the decision-making of state leaders (26) and embracing the militarist-imperialist-nationalist notion that nationhood could be achieved through conquest and war. Hence, imperialism, industrialization and militarization worked together in bringing the origins of the WWI to be, overpassing the agency of the individual leaders that had to cope with the implications of these political-economic transformations.

Since the armaments race implied that each state’s military plans were judged relative to that of their neighbors, the culture of military paranoia heightened the leaders search for alliances to guarantee the security of their states. The alliance system came about because after 1870, Germany through Bismarck’s Realpolitik’ set a precedent by playing its neighbors imperial endeavors off one another in order to maintain balance of power. When Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck after the German unification, it upset the political balance between Russia, France, and Germany. European geostrategic alliances changed, not because of the fall of Bismarck as a single individual, but mainly due to a new alliance between France and Russia which served as a counterbalance to the Triple Alliance and led to the formation of a bipolar bloc of allied countries. This system of two rival alliances is the key to explain the relevance of impersonal factors in the triggering of WWI because the decision to make war was the response of the alliances leaders in their struggleto secure the balance of world power. The significance of bipolar division in creating the war is that polarization reflected corresponding interests as well as conflictive ones. Due to the power vacuum that the breakup of the Concert of Europe could pose, the same forces that were supposed to serve to keep the peace automatically transformed the war into a general conflict once it erupted. Additionally, the presence of secret alliances and the absence of an informal arbitrator revealed cracks in the international anarchic system that increased the probability of magnitude, duration and severity of the war.

While it can be argued that the alliance system did not make war inevitable, it is impossible to explain the development of the war if it is not considered as an origin. In this regard, it could also be argued that no state leader intervened primarily to defend the claims of their ally but that they mobilized for the own interests of their nations, scared by the risks that not helping their partners could pose to their own decline. For instance, Britain could not allow France to be razed and to destroy the balance of power with a German hegemony in the continent. Diplomacy, national interests and war plans explain the breaking of hostilities.

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