Just about 100 years ago, on 28th of June 1914, a bullet was fired that put entire world order into turmoil and hence initialized a massive chain of events that would eventually led to a dramatic change in world Geo- politics. According to plenty of historians World War I was just a start of a series of wars that only ended with the disintegration of Soviet Union in the nineties. The following are some selected paragraphs from Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Empire where in the chapter from Peace to War, he quite eloquently explains the political condition of Europe just before the years of assassination of the Arch Duke. Quite dramatically he, in his very own unique style explains how a small bullet fired by a young nationalist brought traditional rivals into one camp and caused catastrophe all over the world. For the sake of understanding I have altered the places of some paragraphs. Sincere apologies in advance if reader finds any ambiguity for it.
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From Peace to War
Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Empire
To the end of his days Galvino Prinĉip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could not believe that his tiny match put the world in flames. The final crisis in 1914 was so totally unexpected, so traumatic and, in retrospect, so haunting, because it was essentially an incident in Austrian politics which Vienna felt, required ‘teaching Serbia a lesson’. The international atmosphere seemed calm. No foreign office expected trouble in June 1914, and public persons had been assassinated at frequent intervals for decades. In principle, nobody even minded a great power leaning heavily on a small and troublesome neighbour. Since then some five thousand books have been written to explain the apparently inexplicable: how, within a little more than five weeks of Sarajevo, Europe found itself at war. The immediate answer now seems both clear and trivial: Germany decided to give Austria full backing, that is to say not to defuse the situation. The rest followed inexorably. For by 1914 any confrontation between the blocs, in which one side or the other was expected to back down, brought them to the verge of war. Beyond a certain point the inflexible mobilizations of military force, without which such a confrontation would not have been credible, could not be reversed. ‘Deterrence’ could no longer deter but only destroy. By 1914 any incident, however random-even the action of an inefficient student terrorist in a forgotten corner of the continent-could lead to such a confrontation, if any single power locked into the system of bloc and counter-bloc chose to take it seriously. Thus war came, and, in comparable circumstances, could come again.
The argument about the origins of the first world war has never stopped since august 1914.probably more ink has flowed, more trees have been sacrificed to make paper, more type writers have been busy, to answer this question than any other in history-perhaps not even excluding the debate on the French revolution. As generations have changed, as national and international politics have been transformed, the debate has been revived time and again. Hardly had Europe plunged into catastrophe, before belligerents began to ask themselves why international diplomacy had failed to prevent it, and to accuse one another of responsibility for the war. Opponents of the immediately began their own analysis. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which published the secret documents of tsarism, accused imperialism as a whole. The victorious Allies made the thesis of exclusive German ‘war guilt’ the cornerstone of the Versailles peace settlement of 1919, and precipitated a huge flood of documentation and historical propagandist writings for, but mainly against, this thesis. The Second World War naturally revived the debate, which took on yet another lease of life some years later as a historiography of the left reappeared in the German federal Republic, anxious to break with conservative and Nazi German patriotic orthodoxies, by stressing their own version of Germany’s responsibility. Arguments about the dangers to the world peace, which have for obvious reasons, never ceased since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inevitably seek for possible parallels between the origins of past world wars and current international prospects. While propagandists preferred comparison with the years before the Second World War (“Munich”), historians increasingly found the similarities between the 1980s and the 1910s troubling. The origins of the First World War were thus, once again, a question of burning, immediate relevance. In these circumstances any historian who tries to explain, as a historian of our period must, why the First World War occurred plunges into deep turbulent waters.
Yet it is absolutely certain that no government of a great power before 1914 wanted either a general European war or even – unlike the 1850s and 1860s- a limited military conflict with another European great power. This is conclusively demonstrated by the fact that where the political ambitions of the great powers were in direct opposition, namely the overseas zone of colonial conquests and partitions, their numerous confrontations were always settled by some peaceful arrangement. Even the most serious of these crises, those on Morocco in 1906 and 1911, were defused. On the eve of 1914 colonial conflicts no longer appeared to raise insoluble problems for the various competing powers-a fact which has, quite legitimately, been used to argue that imperialist rivalries were irrelevant to the outbreak of the First World War.
The problem of discovering the origins of the First World War is therefore not one of discovering ‘the aggressor’. It lies in the nature of a progressively deteriorating international situation which increasingly escaped from the control of the governments. Gradually Europe found itself dividing into two opposed blocs of great powers. Such blocs, outside war, were in themselves new, and were essentially due to the appearance on the European scene of a unified German Empire, established by diplomacy and war at other’s expense between 1864 and 1871, and seeking to protect itself against the main loser, France, by peacetime alliances, which in time produced counter alliance. Indeed the German chancellor Bismarck, who remained undisputed world champion at the game of multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years after 1871, devoted himself exclusively, and successfully, to maintain peace between powers. A system of power-blocs only became a danger to world peace when the opposed alliances were welded into permanence, but especially when the disputed between them turned into unmanageable confrontations. This was to happen in the new century. The crucial question is, why?
In 1880 the line up of 1914 was quite unpredicted. Naturally some potential allies and enemies were easy to discern. Germany and France would be on opposite sides, if only because Germany had annexed large parts of France (Alsace-Lorraine) after her victory in 1871. Nor was it difficult to preict the permanence of the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which Bismarck had forged after 1866, for the internal political equilibrium of the new German Empire made it essential to maintain the multinational Habsburg Empire in being. Its disintegration into national fragments would, as Bismarck well knew, not only lead to the collapse of the state system of central and Eastern Europe, but would also destroy the basis of a ‘little Germany’ dominated by Prussia. In fact, both of these things happened after the First World War. The most permanent diplomatic feature of the period 1871-1914 was the ‘Triple Alliance’ of 1882, which was in effect a German-Austrian Alliance, since the third partner, Italy, soon drifted away and eventually joined the anti-German camp in 1915.
Again, it was obvious that Austria, embroiled in turbulent affairs of the Balkans by virtue of her multinational problems, and more deeply than ever since she took Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, found herself opposed to Russia in that region. The southern Slav peoples were partly under the Austrian half of the Hubsburg Empire (Slovenes, Dalmatian Croats), partly under the Hungarian half (Croats, some Serbs), partly under common imperial administration (Bosnia-Herzegovina), the rest in small independent kingdoms (Serbia, Bulgaria and the mini-principality of Montenegro) under the Turks (Macedonia). Though Bismarck did his best to do his best to maintain close relation with Russia, it was possible to foresee that sooner or later Germany would be forced to choose between Vienna and St Petersburg, and could not but opt for Vienna. Moreover, once Germany gave up the Russian option, as happened in the late 1880s it was logical that Russia and France would come together-as indeed they did in 1891. Even in the 1880s Friedrich Engels had envisaged such an alliance, naturally directed against Germany. By the early 1890s two power groups therefore faced each other across Europe.
However there was one power which could not but stake its existence on the military gamble, because it seemed doomed without it: Austria-Hungary, torn since the mid-1890s by increasingly unmanageable national problems, among which those of the southern Slavs seemed to be the most recalcitrant and dangerous for three reasons. First, because not merely were they troublesome as were other politically organised nationalities in the multinational empire, jostling each other for advantages, but they complicated matters by belonging both to the linguistically flexible government of Vienna and to the ruthlessly magyarizing government of Budapest. Southern Slav agitation in Hungary not only spilled over into Austria, but aggravated the always difficult relations of the two halves of the Empire with each other. Second, because the Austrian Slav problem could not be disentangle from Balkan politics, and had indeed since 1878 been even more deeply entangled in them by the occupation of Bosnia. Moreover, there already existed an independent south Slav state of Serbia (not to mention Montenegro, a Homeric little highland state of raiding goatherds, gun fighters and prince-Bishops with a taste for blood0feud and the composition of heroic epics.) which could tempt southern Slav dissidents in the Empire. Third, because of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire virtually doomed the Hubsburg Empire, unless it could establish beyond any doubt that it was still a great power in the Balkans which nobody could mess about.
Three developments turned the alliance system into a time bomb: A situation of international flux, destabilized by new problems for and ambitions within the powers, the logic of joint military planning which froze confronting blocs into permanence, and the integration of the fifth Great Power, Britain into one of the blocs. (No body worried much about the tergiversations of Italy, which was only a ‘great power’ by international courtesy.) Between 1903 and 1907, to everyone’s surprise including her own, Britain joined the anti-German camp. The origin of First World War can best be understood by tracing the emergence of this Anglo-German antagonism.
The ‘Triple Entente’ was astonishing both for Britain’s enemy and for her allies. In the past Britain had neither tradition of nor any permanent reasons for friction with Prussia-and the same seme to be true of the super-Prussia now known as the German Empire. On the other hand Britain had been the almost automatic antagonistic of France in almost any European war going since 1688. While this was no longer so, if only because France had ceased to be capable of dominating the continent, friction between two countries was visibly increasing, if only because both competed for the same territory and influence as imperialist powers. Thus relations were unfriendly over Egypt, which was coveted by both but taken over (together with the French-financed Suez Canal) by the British. During the Fashoda crisis of 1898 it looked as though blood might flow, as rival British and French colonial troops confronted each other in the hinterland of the Sudan. In the partition of Africa, more often than not the gains of one were at the expense of other. As for Russia, the British and Tsarist empires ha been permanent antagonists in the Balkan and Mediterranean zone of the so called ‘Eastern Question’, and in the ill defined but bitterly disputed areas of Central and western Asia which lay between India and the tsar’s lands: Afghanistan, Iran and the regions opening on the Persian gulf. The prospect of Russians in Constantinople-and therefore in the Mediterranean-and of Russian expansion towards India was a standing nightmare for British foreign secretaries. The two countries had even fought in the only nineteenth-century European war in which Britain took part (the Crimean war), and as recently as the 1870s a Russo-British war was seriously on the cards.
Given the established pattern of British diplomacy, a war against Germany was a possibility so remote as to be negligible. A permanent alliance with the continental power seemed incompatible with the maintenance of that balance of power which was the chief objective of British foreign policy. An alliance with France could be regarded as improbable, one with Russia almost unthinkable. Yet the implausible became reality: Britain linked up permanently with France and Russia against Germany, setting all differences with Russia to the point of actually agreeing to the Russian occupation of Constantinople- an offer which disappeared from the sight with the Russian Revolution of 1917. How and why did this astonishing transformation come about?
It happened because both the players and the rulers of the traditional game of international diplomacy changed. In the first instance, the board on which it was played became much larger. Power rivalry, formerly (except for the British) largely confined to Europe and adjoining areas, was now global and imperial-outside most of the Americas, destined for exclusive US imperial expansion by Washinton’s Monroe Doctrine. The international disputes which had to be settled, if they were not to degenerate into wars, were now as likely to occur over West Africa and the Congo in the 1880s, China in the late 1890s and the Maghreb (1906,1911) as over the disintegrating body of the Ottoman Empire, and much more likely than any issues in the non-Balkan Europe. Moreover there were now new players: the USA which, while still avoiding European entanglements, was actively expansionist in the pacific, and Japan. In fact Britan’s alliance, since the existence of that new power, which was soon to show that it could actually defeat the Tsarist Empire in war, diminished the Russian threat to Britain and thus strengthened Britain’s position. It therefore made the defusion of various ancient Russo-British disputes possible.
In short, international crisis and domestic crisis merged in the last years before 1914. Russia, once again menaced by social revolution, Austria, threatened by the disintegration of a politically no longer controllable multiple empire, even Germany, polarized and perhaps threatened with immobilism by her political divisions-all titled towards their military and its solutions. Even France, united by a reluctance to pay taxes and therefore to find money for massive rearmament (It was easier to extend conscript service again to three years), elected a president in 1913 who called for revenge against Germany and made warlike noises, echoing the generals who were now, with murderous optimism, abandoning a defensive strategy for the prospect of a storming offensive across the Rhine. The British preferred battleships to soldiers: the navy was always popular, a national glory acceptable to Liberals as the protector of trade. Naval scares had political sex-appeal, unlike army reforms. Few, even among their politicians, realized that the plans for joint war with France implied a mass army and eventually conscription, and indeed they did not seriously envisage anything except a primarily naval and trade war. Still, even though the British government remained pacific to the last-or rather, refused to take stand for fear of splitting the Liberal government-it could not consider staying out of war. Fortunately the German invasion of Belgium, long prepared under the Schlieffen Plan, provided London with a morality cover for diplomatic and military necessity.
“We have been decorated to victory”, thus wrote a German social democratic militant, having just won the Iron Cross in 1914. In Austria not only the dominant people were shaken by a brief wave of patriotism. As the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler acknowledged, ’even in the nationalities struggle war appears as a kind of deliverance, a hope that something different will come.’ Even in Russia, where a million deserters had been expected, all but a few thousands of the 15 millions obeyed the call to the colours. The masses followed the flags of their respective states, and abandoned the leaders who opposed the war. There were, indeed, few enough left of these, at least in public. In 1914 the peoples of Europe, for however brief a moment, went light-heartedly to slaughter and to be slaughtered. After the First World War they never did so again.
They were surprised by the moment, but no longer by the fact of war, to which Europe had been accustomed, like people who see a thunderstorm coming. In a way its coming was widely felt as a release and relief, especially by the young of the middle classes-men very much more than women-though less so by workers and least by peasants. Like a thunderstorm it broke the heavy closeness of expectation and cleared the air. It meant an end to the superficialities and frivolities of bourgeois society, the boring gradualism of nineteenth century improvement, the tranquillity and peaceful order which was the liberal utopia for the twentieth century and which Nietzsche had prophetically denounced, together with the ‘pallid hypocrisy administered by the mandarins.’ After a long wait in the auditorium, it meant the opening of the curtain on a great and exciting historical drama in which the audience found itself to be the actors. It meant decision.
Among the statesmen of the world regimes there was at least one who recognized that all had changed. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.’ Said Edward Grey, as he watched the lights of Whitehall turned off on the evening when Britain and Germany went into war.’ We shall not see them lit again in our life time.’
https://libcom.org/files/Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Empire 1875 - 1914.pdf
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From Peace to War
Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Empire
To the end of his days Galvino Prinĉip, the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, could not believe that his tiny match put the world in flames. The final crisis in 1914 was so totally unexpected, so traumatic and, in retrospect, so haunting, because it was essentially an incident in Austrian politics which Vienna felt, required ‘teaching Serbia a lesson’. The international atmosphere seemed calm. No foreign office expected trouble in June 1914, and public persons had been assassinated at frequent intervals for decades. In principle, nobody even minded a great power leaning heavily on a small and troublesome neighbour. Since then some five thousand books have been written to explain the apparently inexplicable: how, within a little more than five weeks of Sarajevo, Europe found itself at war. The immediate answer now seems both clear and trivial: Germany decided to give Austria full backing, that is to say not to defuse the situation. The rest followed inexorably. For by 1914 any confrontation between the blocs, in which one side or the other was expected to back down, brought them to the verge of war. Beyond a certain point the inflexible mobilizations of military force, without which such a confrontation would not have been credible, could not be reversed. ‘Deterrence’ could no longer deter but only destroy. By 1914 any incident, however random-even the action of an inefficient student terrorist in a forgotten corner of the continent-could lead to such a confrontation, if any single power locked into the system of bloc and counter-bloc chose to take it seriously. Thus war came, and, in comparable circumstances, could come again.
The argument about the origins of the first world war has never stopped since august 1914.probably more ink has flowed, more trees have been sacrificed to make paper, more type writers have been busy, to answer this question than any other in history-perhaps not even excluding the debate on the French revolution. As generations have changed, as national and international politics have been transformed, the debate has been revived time and again. Hardly had Europe plunged into catastrophe, before belligerents began to ask themselves why international diplomacy had failed to prevent it, and to accuse one another of responsibility for the war. Opponents of the immediately began their own analysis. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which published the secret documents of tsarism, accused imperialism as a whole. The victorious Allies made the thesis of exclusive German ‘war guilt’ the cornerstone of the Versailles peace settlement of 1919, and precipitated a huge flood of documentation and historical propagandist writings for, but mainly against, this thesis. The Second World War naturally revived the debate, which took on yet another lease of life some years later as a historiography of the left reappeared in the German federal Republic, anxious to break with conservative and Nazi German patriotic orthodoxies, by stressing their own version of Germany’s responsibility. Arguments about the dangers to the world peace, which have for obvious reasons, never ceased since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, inevitably seek for possible parallels between the origins of past world wars and current international prospects. While propagandists preferred comparison with the years before the Second World War (“Munich”), historians increasingly found the similarities between the 1980s and the 1910s troubling. The origins of the First World War were thus, once again, a question of burning, immediate relevance. In these circumstances any historian who tries to explain, as a historian of our period must, why the First World War occurred plunges into deep turbulent waters.
Yet it is absolutely certain that no government of a great power before 1914 wanted either a general European war or even – unlike the 1850s and 1860s- a limited military conflict with another European great power. This is conclusively demonstrated by the fact that where the political ambitions of the great powers were in direct opposition, namely the overseas zone of colonial conquests and partitions, their numerous confrontations were always settled by some peaceful arrangement. Even the most serious of these crises, those on Morocco in 1906 and 1911, were defused. On the eve of 1914 colonial conflicts no longer appeared to raise insoluble problems for the various competing powers-a fact which has, quite legitimately, been used to argue that imperialist rivalries were irrelevant to the outbreak of the First World War.
The problem of discovering the origins of the First World War is therefore not one of discovering ‘the aggressor’. It lies in the nature of a progressively deteriorating international situation which increasingly escaped from the control of the governments. Gradually Europe found itself dividing into two opposed blocs of great powers. Such blocs, outside war, were in themselves new, and were essentially due to the appearance on the European scene of a unified German Empire, established by diplomacy and war at other’s expense between 1864 and 1871, and seeking to protect itself against the main loser, France, by peacetime alliances, which in time produced counter alliance. Indeed the German chancellor Bismarck, who remained undisputed world champion at the game of multilateral diplomatic chess for almost twenty years after 1871, devoted himself exclusively, and successfully, to maintain peace between powers. A system of power-blocs only became a danger to world peace when the opposed alliances were welded into permanence, but especially when the disputed between them turned into unmanageable confrontations. This was to happen in the new century. The crucial question is, why?
In 1880 the line up of 1914 was quite unpredicted. Naturally some potential allies and enemies were easy to discern. Germany and France would be on opposite sides, if only because Germany had annexed large parts of France (Alsace-Lorraine) after her victory in 1871. Nor was it difficult to preict the permanence of the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary, which Bismarck had forged after 1866, for the internal political equilibrium of the new German Empire made it essential to maintain the multinational Habsburg Empire in being. Its disintegration into national fragments would, as Bismarck well knew, not only lead to the collapse of the state system of central and Eastern Europe, but would also destroy the basis of a ‘little Germany’ dominated by Prussia. In fact, both of these things happened after the First World War. The most permanent diplomatic feature of the period 1871-1914 was the ‘Triple Alliance’ of 1882, which was in effect a German-Austrian Alliance, since the third partner, Italy, soon drifted away and eventually joined the anti-German camp in 1915.
Again, it was obvious that Austria, embroiled in turbulent affairs of the Balkans by virtue of her multinational problems, and more deeply than ever since she took Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, found herself opposed to Russia in that region. The southern Slav peoples were partly under the Austrian half of the Hubsburg Empire (Slovenes, Dalmatian Croats), partly under the Hungarian half (Croats, some Serbs), partly under common imperial administration (Bosnia-Herzegovina), the rest in small independent kingdoms (Serbia, Bulgaria and the mini-principality of Montenegro) under the Turks (Macedonia). Though Bismarck did his best to do his best to maintain close relation with Russia, it was possible to foresee that sooner or later Germany would be forced to choose between Vienna and St Petersburg, and could not but opt for Vienna. Moreover, once Germany gave up the Russian option, as happened in the late 1880s it was logical that Russia and France would come together-as indeed they did in 1891. Even in the 1880s Friedrich Engels had envisaged such an alliance, naturally directed against Germany. By the early 1890s two power groups therefore faced each other across Europe.
However there was one power which could not but stake its existence on the military gamble, because it seemed doomed without it: Austria-Hungary, torn since the mid-1890s by increasingly unmanageable national problems, among which those of the southern Slavs seemed to be the most recalcitrant and dangerous for three reasons. First, because not merely were they troublesome as were other politically organised nationalities in the multinational empire, jostling each other for advantages, but they complicated matters by belonging both to the linguistically flexible government of Vienna and to the ruthlessly magyarizing government of Budapest. Southern Slav agitation in Hungary not only spilled over into Austria, but aggravated the always difficult relations of the two halves of the Empire with each other. Second, because the Austrian Slav problem could not be disentangle from Balkan politics, and had indeed since 1878 been even more deeply entangled in them by the occupation of Bosnia. Moreover, there already existed an independent south Slav state of Serbia (not to mention Montenegro, a Homeric little highland state of raiding goatherds, gun fighters and prince-Bishops with a taste for blood0feud and the composition of heroic epics.) which could tempt southern Slav dissidents in the Empire. Third, because of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire virtually doomed the Hubsburg Empire, unless it could establish beyond any doubt that it was still a great power in the Balkans which nobody could mess about.
Three developments turned the alliance system into a time bomb: A situation of international flux, destabilized by new problems for and ambitions within the powers, the logic of joint military planning which froze confronting blocs into permanence, and the integration of the fifth Great Power, Britain into one of the blocs. (No body worried much about the tergiversations of Italy, which was only a ‘great power’ by international courtesy.) Between 1903 and 1907, to everyone’s surprise including her own, Britain joined the anti-German camp. The origin of First World War can best be understood by tracing the emergence of this Anglo-German antagonism.
The ‘Triple Entente’ was astonishing both for Britain’s enemy and for her allies. In the past Britain had neither tradition of nor any permanent reasons for friction with Prussia-and the same seme to be true of the super-Prussia now known as the German Empire. On the other hand Britain had been the almost automatic antagonistic of France in almost any European war going since 1688. While this was no longer so, if only because France had ceased to be capable of dominating the continent, friction between two countries was visibly increasing, if only because both competed for the same territory and influence as imperialist powers. Thus relations were unfriendly over Egypt, which was coveted by both but taken over (together with the French-financed Suez Canal) by the British. During the Fashoda crisis of 1898 it looked as though blood might flow, as rival British and French colonial troops confronted each other in the hinterland of the Sudan. In the partition of Africa, more often than not the gains of one were at the expense of other. As for Russia, the British and Tsarist empires ha been permanent antagonists in the Balkan and Mediterranean zone of the so called ‘Eastern Question’, and in the ill defined but bitterly disputed areas of Central and western Asia which lay between India and the tsar’s lands: Afghanistan, Iran and the regions opening on the Persian gulf. The prospect of Russians in Constantinople-and therefore in the Mediterranean-and of Russian expansion towards India was a standing nightmare for British foreign secretaries. The two countries had even fought in the only nineteenth-century European war in which Britain took part (the Crimean war), and as recently as the 1870s a Russo-British war was seriously on the cards.
Given the established pattern of British diplomacy, a war against Germany was a possibility so remote as to be negligible. A permanent alliance with the continental power seemed incompatible with the maintenance of that balance of power which was the chief objective of British foreign policy. An alliance with France could be regarded as improbable, one with Russia almost unthinkable. Yet the implausible became reality: Britain linked up permanently with France and Russia against Germany, setting all differences with Russia to the point of actually agreeing to the Russian occupation of Constantinople- an offer which disappeared from the sight with the Russian Revolution of 1917. How and why did this astonishing transformation come about?
It happened because both the players and the rulers of the traditional game of international diplomacy changed. In the first instance, the board on which it was played became much larger. Power rivalry, formerly (except for the British) largely confined to Europe and adjoining areas, was now global and imperial-outside most of the Americas, destined for exclusive US imperial expansion by Washinton’s Monroe Doctrine. The international disputes which had to be settled, if they were not to degenerate into wars, were now as likely to occur over West Africa and the Congo in the 1880s, China in the late 1890s and the Maghreb (1906,1911) as over the disintegrating body of the Ottoman Empire, and much more likely than any issues in the non-Balkan Europe. Moreover there were now new players: the USA which, while still avoiding European entanglements, was actively expansionist in the pacific, and Japan. In fact Britan’s alliance, since the existence of that new power, which was soon to show that it could actually defeat the Tsarist Empire in war, diminished the Russian threat to Britain and thus strengthened Britain’s position. It therefore made the defusion of various ancient Russo-British disputes possible.
In short, international crisis and domestic crisis merged in the last years before 1914. Russia, once again menaced by social revolution, Austria, threatened by the disintegration of a politically no longer controllable multiple empire, even Germany, polarized and perhaps threatened with immobilism by her political divisions-all titled towards their military and its solutions. Even France, united by a reluctance to pay taxes and therefore to find money for massive rearmament (It was easier to extend conscript service again to three years), elected a president in 1913 who called for revenge against Germany and made warlike noises, echoing the generals who were now, with murderous optimism, abandoning a defensive strategy for the prospect of a storming offensive across the Rhine. The British preferred battleships to soldiers: the navy was always popular, a national glory acceptable to Liberals as the protector of trade. Naval scares had political sex-appeal, unlike army reforms. Few, even among their politicians, realized that the plans for joint war with France implied a mass army and eventually conscription, and indeed they did not seriously envisage anything except a primarily naval and trade war. Still, even though the British government remained pacific to the last-or rather, refused to take stand for fear of splitting the Liberal government-it could not consider staying out of war. Fortunately the German invasion of Belgium, long prepared under the Schlieffen Plan, provided London with a morality cover for diplomatic and military necessity.
“We have been decorated to victory”, thus wrote a German social democratic militant, having just won the Iron Cross in 1914. In Austria not only the dominant people were shaken by a brief wave of patriotism. As the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler acknowledged, ’even in the nationalities struggle war appears as a kind of deliverance, a hope that something different will come.’ Even in Russia, where a million deserters had been expected, all but a few thousands of the 15 millions obeyed the call to the colours. The masses followed the flags of their respective states, and abandoned the leaders who opposed the war. There were, indeed, few enough left of these, at least in public. In 1914 the peoples of Europe, for however brief a moment, went light-heartedly to slaughter and to be slaughtered. After the First World War they never did so again.
They were surprised by the moment, but no longer by the fact of war, to which Europe had been accustomed, like people who see a thunderstorm coming. In a way its coming was widely felt as a release and relief, especially by the young of the middle classes-men very much more than women-though less so by workers and least by peasants. Like a thunderstorm it broke the heavy closeness of expectation and cleared the air. It meant an end to the superficialities and frivolities of bourgeois society, the boring gradualism of nineteenth century improvement, the tranquillity and peaceful order which was the liberal utopia for the twentieth century and which Nietzsche had prophetically denounced, together with the ‘pallid hypocrisy administered by the mandarins.’ After a long wait in the auditorium, it meant the opening of the curtain on a great and exciting historical drama in which the audience found itself to be the actors. It meant decision.
Among the statesmen of the world regimes there was at least one who recognized that all had changed. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe.’ Said Edward Grey, as he watched the lights of Whitehall turned off on the evening when Britain and Germany went into war.’ We shall not see them lit again in our life time.’
https://libcom.org/files/Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Empire 1875 - 1914.pdf
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