World war 1

• Decades ago, when I studied European history in high school, I learned there were precise causes of World War I: the alliance system, arms build-up, secret treaties, nationalism, and imperialism
• More recently, historians have started to lay out a more complex road to World War I: namely, a road that passed through social and cultural change at the turn of the century
• People's lives were affected by changing family structures, by paradigm shifts in science, disruption of traditional gender roles, achievement of the vote by working men, and ongoing economic advances, and the result was disorientation, dislocation, deep resentments, and widespread fear
• Strikes, which at times grew violent, abounded across Europe—whether at the oil fields of Baku, the farms of Hungary, or the factories of Italy
• Assassinations were common--as was everyday violence against Jewish people and other oppressed ethnic minorities
• In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was tried for espionage, convicted and imprisoned on Devil's Island
• The evidence against Dreyfus turned out to be fabricated, complete with forged signatures
• Passions exploded over the case, and anti-Semitism flourished, families quarreled, and assaults took place around questions of whether Dreyfus had committed these crimes
• Newspapers took both sides as violence grew
• In 1898 famed novelist Emile Zola's article "J'accuse," exposed trumped up evidence against Dreyfus and helped build support for him
• Dreyfus was eventually pardoned in 1899, but facts were not enough to stop the growing hatred and antisemitism
• Ireland was on the brink of civil war, with both those opposing British rule and those favoring it establishing independent armies
• Between 1904 and 1908 the German army massacred between 24,000 and 100,000 Herero people, who refused to surrender their lands in southwest Africa
• Around the same time, the French closed the University of Hanoi and arrested or killed prominent teachers and intellectuals
• The Boers--that is, farmers with Dutch heritage-- of South Africa likewise rebelled against the British as the 20th century opened
• South Asians demanded reform too. They became more militantly anti-British and launched boycotts of British goods
• In 1900, a conglomerate of colonial nations massacred Chinese civilians involved in the Boxer rebellion
• Boxer activists had themselves assassinated European and Chinese Christians in an attempt to take back their empire from white invaders
• Bismarck wanted peace in Europe and so organized an alliance system to that end, binding Germany and Austria in the Dual Alliance of 1879, then adding Italy to a Triple Alliance in 1882
• Bismarck also allied Germany with Russia in the Reinsurance Treaty, another attempt to build coalitions so formidable that large wars would become impossible
• When William II, aka Kaiser Wilhelm, came to power in Germany in 1890, he rattled the sword, and called Bismarck's alliances the work of an outmoded old man
• Under William II, the treaty with Russia was canceled, which drove Russia to sign an alliance with France in 1894
• William also called for Germany to gain power around the world, expanding into tropical colonies to create a German "place in the sun"
• The French and British secretly built another alliance--the "entente cordiale" based on military cooperation and even shared military plans
• The entente became a triple entente when Russia and Britain settled their colonial differences in 1907, uniting three very different powers
• Standing armies grew to hundreds of thousands of troops. General staffs demanded larger stockpiles of weapons and got what they wanted
• Most costly were the "Dreadnoughts" or massive battleships with unprecedented firepower
• Britain launched the first of these in 1905; others followed
• The construction of battleships in these years employed tens of thousands of workers
• William II also wanted Dreadnoughts, because he hoped to win the British over to an alliance of Teutonic peoples, including especially Germans, that could defeat the "Latins" or "Gauls" of southern Europe whom he considered inferior
• William was the grandson of Queen Victoria and a staunch anglophile, much to the dismay of his generals
• William used the press coverage of himself and his regime as a monitor of successful policy
• He had tantrums and even months of nervous collapse when he was criticized in the press and elsewhere, creating an atmosphere of turmoil in German policy through erratic militarism
• In 1905, the people of Russia rose up against the tsarist regime due to a conflict between Russia and Japan over competing claims in East Asia
• The Japanese, who'd been developing a modern army and an industrial economy, attacked and crushed the Russian fleet in 1905
• Ordinary people paid the price for these losses and rebelled, but then Tsarist promises of reform, combined with armed force, eventually restored calm and preserved the Romanov grip on power--for another decade or so
• Secret societies of Balkan peoples collected arms and organized themselves against the Ottoman and Habsburg empires
• In 1908 a group of officers called the Young Turks rebelled in the name of promoting Turkish ethnicity
• The Young Turks responded to other people's nationalist dreams by squashing demands for self-rule from Balkan ethnic groups
• Austria-Hungary used the Young Turks' revolt as distraction during which it scooped up Bosnia