IB History: The First World War — notes, maps and essay questions

Chapter 1: Bismarck’s Europe and the Two Blocs

A new giant in the middle of Europe. Unification turned a loose group of German states into an empire with the largest population west of Russia and the fastest-growing industry on the continent. Its population rose from about 41 million in 1871 to about 65 million by 1910, while France’s stalled near 39 million, and by 1913 Germany produced more than twice as much steel as Britain. Every other power had to decide how to live beside such a neighbour, and that question, more than any single treaty, set the problem the alliance system tried to solve.

Alsace-Lorraine and the French grievance. The peace that completed German unity also guaranteed French hostility. The Treaty of Frankfurt took Alsace and most of Lorraine, with about 1.5 million people, and imposed an indemnity of five billion francs, much as a court today orders a losing party to pay damages. France paid the money within three years, but the lost provinces stayed a permanent wound in French politics, so Bismarck’s diplomacy spent twenty years containing a grievance that his own victory had created.

The Eastern Question. The slow retreat of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-ruled state that had governed the Balkans for centuries, left a vacuum that Austria-Hungary and Russia both wanted to fill. Russia saw itself as the protector of the Orthodox Slavs and wanted free passage for its warships through the Straits, while Austria-Hungary feared that strong Slav states on its border would unsettle the Slavs inside its own empire. Diplomats called the problem of who would inherit the Ottoman lands the Eastern Question, and because both rivals were Germany’s partners, every Balkan crisis forced Berlin to choose between them.

The Kaiser’s new course. The new Kaiser’s determination to rule in person ended Bismarck’s system within two years. Wilhelm II, emperor from 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, forced Bismarck to resign in March 1890. His new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and the foreign office adviser Friedrich von Holstein wanted a simpler, more transparent policy, and they judged the Reinsurance Treaty incompatible with the alliance with Austria-Hungary. Their search for clarity cut the hidden link that had kept Russia from looking to Paris, so German policy became easier to read at exactly the moment it became more dangerous.

Chapter 2: The Balkan Crises

The Ottoman retreat. The Ottoman Empire had been losing Balkan land since the Congress of Berlin, and the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the Italian war of 1911–12 convinced its neighbours that the moment to seize the rest had come. Each loss reopened the Eastern Question, the problem of who would inherit the Ottoman lands, and each answer brought Austria-Hungary and Russia closer to collision. These crises were the final settlement of that question, fought out while the great powers watched from either side.

Serbia’s turn toward Russia. Serbia changed sides in 1903, turning a client of Austria-Hungary into its rival. Its Obrenović kings had been bound to Vienna by a secret treaty of 1881, until army officers murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga that year and brought in a new dynasty that looked to Russia and to the dream of uniting the South Slavs. Austria-Hungary answered with a trade boycott, the “Pig War” of 1906–09, named after Serbia’s main export, which only pushed Serbia toward French loans and Russian protection. Economic pressure meant to bring Serbia to heel made it more defiant.

A Habsburg empire afraid for its South Slavs. Austria-Hungary, ruled by the Habsburg dynasty, governed about seven million South Slavs, the southern Slav peoples: Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims. Its leaders feared that a successful Serbia would draw them away, much as the small kingdom of Piedmont had pulled Italians out of Habsburg rule when it united Italy in the 1860s. Annexing Bosnia was meant to end any Serbian claim to the province for good, yet it handed Serbian nationalists a grievance, and secret societies such as Unification or Death, the Black Hand, founded in 1911, recruited young Bosnian Serbs. The cure Vienna chose deepened the disease.

Russia’s need to recover face. Defeat by Japan in 1905 and the revolution that followed left Russia unable to fight in 1909, and Germany’s demand that it accept the annexation was remembered in St Petersburg as a public humiliation. From 1910 Russia rebuilt its army with French money and turned its foreign policy back toward the Balkans, where it sponsored the Balkan League as a barrier to Austria-Hungary. A great power that believed it had been humiliated once was determined that the next crisis would prove it could not be ignored.

Chapter 3: The Powder Keg

The alliance machine. Bismarck built alliances to isolate crises; his successors built ones that connected them. By 1914 a Balkan quarrel mechanically summoned five great powers: Austria could not punish Serbia without Russia, Russia could not face Austria without Germany intervening, Germany could not fight Russia without first — by plan — attacking France. The system designed to deter war transmitted it instead.

Timetables as destiny. Every staff believed the next war would be won by whoever concentrated first; Germany’s Schlieffen Plan needed France beaten in six weeks before Russia’s slow mobilization arrived. That meant Germany literally could not wait out a Russian mobilization — military logic overrode diplomacy in the exact days when diplomacy needed time. “Mobilization means war” was not a metaphor; it was the operating system.

Austria-Hungary’s existential fear. The Dual Monarchy — eleven nationalities under one aging emperor; note on this map how much of it is not Austria or Hungary — saw South Slav nationalism, sponsored from Belgrade, as a mortal disease. Vienna wanted a local war to destroy Serbia while it still could. The assassination was the pretext; the policy was pre-existing.

Germany’s closing window. Berlin’s planners watched Russia’s French-financed railways and expected to be unbeatable no longer after 1917. A strong current in the leadership reasoned: if war with Russia is coming, better now. Historians still argue how deliberate this was — the Fischer thesis says very; others see reckless brinkmanship that expected Britain to stand aside. Either way, Berlin chose escalation at every branch.

Guardians and revisionists. The map of 1923 divided Europe into states that wanted to keep the settlement and states that wanted to overturn it. France allied with Poland in 1921 and went on to sign treaties with the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, while Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria demanded revision and Fascist Italy, a disappointed victor, increasingly joined them. The guardians were mostly new, small and divided among themselves, while the revisionists included the strongest economy on the continent, so the balance of the map favoured those who wanted to redraw it.

Minorities as pretexts. The new map made national minorities a standing source of conflict. Some 25 to 30 million Europeans lived in someone else’s nation-state, and treaties supervised by the League promised them schools in their own language and equality before the law. The League’s procedures were slow, many complaints were set aside, and governments in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade pressed assimilation. In the 1930s Nazi Germany used the grievances of German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland as pretexts for breaking the settlement apart, turning a promise of protection into a weapon against the states that had signed it.

Hyperinflation and the radical right. The Ruhr crisis drove German inflation out of control, until in November 1923 a lifetime’s savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That same month Adolf Hitler, leader of a small Munich party, tried to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, an armed coup launched from a Munich beer hall, convinced the republic was about to fall. He failed and went to prison, but the year of occupation and hyperinflation left millions of Germans linking the treaty, the republic and ruin in a single memory.

From Lausanne to the next war. The wars of 1919–1922 hardened the belief that stable frontiers required nations of a single people, and the Lausanne exchange gave that belief international approval. Winston Churchill cited it in 1944 to defend expelling Germans from the lands Poland would gain, a policy carried out in 1945 after Nazi Germany’s war of conquest and occupation. The next war began in 1939 over Danzig, the German port the peace made a Free City, and the Polish Corridor that cut East Prussia off from Germany, fault lines drawn in these years.