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The First World War lasted more than four years and killed between 15 and 19 million people around the planet. Each death was a human being, whether a soldier in the fight or a civilian caught up in the chaos of this violent global conflict. The war also devastated the global economy and contributed to massive disease outbreaks that killed millions more people. So it is well worth asking: why did this war happen?
Historians have generally taken three approaches to explaining the causes of the First World War. The first is specific, neatly pointing to a single event—the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The second looks for the deeper, underlying causes of the conflict by closely studying global trends that had been building over many years. The third suggests that the world just sort of fell into war, almost by mistake, through mismanagement of the crisis caused by Archduke Ferdinand's assassination. Let's look at each of these theories in turn, and ask whether the causes of this deadly worldwide conflict were simple, complicated, or accidental.
One shot: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand
You probably have already learned a bit about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro- Hungarian Empire. But its importance may not be obvious. This empire, after all, is gone. It was one of the victims of the First World War, defeated and torn apart by the end of the conflict. But in 1914, the Habsburg family had ruled this empire for almost four centuries. It was a huge, multi-ethnic empire located in the middle of Europe. Franz Ferdinand's uncle, the emperor, ruled over its many ethnic communities with difficulty. First of all, nationalism was pushing many of them to pursue independence. It didn't help that Russia and the Habsburg's other rivals were cheering them on in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways. The Serbs, one of those ethnic groups, had their own country of Serbia having achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire. But many Serbs still lived in the Habsburg province of Bosnia. Serbian nationalists, both in Serbia and Bosnia, plotted throughout the early twentieth century to get the Habsburgs out of Bosnia. Russia was generally supportive of these plots. The successful plot to assassinate Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914 was part of a bigger plan. The plotters hoped that by killing Franz Ferdinand, they would provoke the Austro-Hungarian Empire to declare war on Serbia. That is when their supportive friend Russia, they hoped, would leap to the defense of Serbia, defeat the Habsburg armies, and help the Bosnian Serbs win their independence.
To some degree, the plotters got their wish. Within two days of the assassination, the Austro-Hungarian Empire had put a list of demands before the Serbians. Known as the July Ultimatum, these unreasonable requirements would have violated Serbian national sovereignty^1
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start superscript, 1, end superscript. Serbia said thanks but no thanks, then turned to Russia for support. The Russians agreed to defend Serbia if it were invaded. Diplomatic relations between Serbia and the empire were broken off, and within a month, much of the world was at war.
Deeper trends: help me help you help me
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the immediate cause of a war between two great powers—Russia and the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. But why and how did this conflict become a world war? Some historians argue that the answer to this question lies in deeper trends—and the good news is we have already introduced many of those trends in this course.
Let's start with the alliance system. These were "communities" of nations, if you will, that all pledged to support each other. After the devastation of the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century, the large European powers wanted to avoid the devastation of big wars on the European continent. The result was a system of alliances that was supposed to keep a balance of power in Europe. It pitted two great alliances against each other. One was the Triple Entente, led by Russia and France, with Great Britain joining several years before the war. The other was the Triple Alliance, which included Austro-Hungary, Germany and Italy, and later the Ottoman Empire, eventually becoming known as the Central Powers. These opposing alliances pretty much guaranteed that if Russia and Austro-Hungary went to war, they could drag in their allies, making the conflict much larger than the two enemies that started it.
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