The Great War

By Gerald Liles

What we know as World War I began in Europe as the Great War. This conflagration would destroy empires, monarchies, and tens of millions of lives. It began with the death of one man and one women--the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife. What is the connection between a political murder in Sarajevo, then within the territory of Austria-Hungary, and the mobilization of some 65 million soldiers all around the world? The answer, in brief, is European imperialism. In 1914, approximately eighty-five percent of the earth’s surface was a European protectorate, dependency, dominion, commonwealth, or (former) colony.¹

Europeans fought because of their empires, and their empires fought because of them. It was not only one incident that caused the war, imperialism and a number of other developments increased tensions among European powers. The need to control territories across the globe had caused a naval race among great powers. Efforts to build faster, better armored, and more deadly ships made each nation questions the others intentions. Tensions over these issues prompted European powers to create alliances. France and Russia created an alliance, as did Germany and Austria Hungary. Exacerbating these tensions, the decline of the Ottoman Empire headquartered in what is today the nation of Turkey. As it lost control of its empire, other European countries, particularly Russian and Austria-Hungary, bickered over the fate of the Balkans in Eastern Europe. Much of this tension reflected local citizens attempts to control their own fate. In Serbia, nationalists wanted to expand their nation into areas controlled by Austria-Hungary. It was one of these men that killed the heir to the Austria-Hungarian throne and his wife.

In the classic treatment on the subject, Barbara Tuchman spends more than 150 pages on the background and first month of the war.² Briefly, the war came when Serbian nationalists killed the archduke in response to Bosnia’s incorporation into the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1908; the Austro-Hungarians fought for vengeance and to strengthen their empire; the Russians fought to defend the Serbians because they shared a slavic identity; the Germans fought to honor their alliance with the Austrians, the French joined their ally Russia to get back at the Germans for their loss decades earlier in the Franco-Prussian War; the Italians fought to gain territory; the Ottomans fought to keep from losing territory; and the British fought to defend neutral Belgium and guide the war’s outcome to one favorable to their interests.

When war came at last, it was horrific beyond any of these participants’ imagination. After the initial failure of the Germans and their allies to knock the French and their allies out of the war, it devolved into a stalemate on the Western Front and a highly mobile bloodbath on the Eastern Front in Poland and Russia. Campaigns in Italy, Turkey, Africa, and the Middle East added hundreds of thousands to the casualty lists. Rifles, Machine Guns, Artillery, U-Boats, Aircraft, and Chemical Weapons destroyed an entire generation of Europeans and their allies. Why would the United States became involved in this disaster?

Further Information

Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper Collins, 2012.

Magdoff, Harry. Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present. New York: Monthly Review, 1978.

Meyer, G. J. A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918. New York, NY: Delacorte Press, 2006.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

© 2018, University of Central Florida