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The subject of the Causes of WWI has been among the most discussed issues in historiography ever since the war began in August 1914. The immediate cause is agreed to be the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian seperatist. However the assassination is also widely agreed to have been merely the overt cause (or "trigger"), where numerous hidden and implicit factors were contributing —central of these being the drives and interests of various competing nationalist elements. Implicit in any search for the causes of World War I (or, indeed, any war) is the presumption that there was a rational purpose to the actions of the combatants. There is no evidence for this presumption. Certain events seem to have led one to the next, but the search for meaning deeper than animal aggression in human nature may ultimately prove futile.

General

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph and heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, duchess of Hohenburg, were assassinated in Sarajevo, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The conspiracy involved Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student. Gavrilo Princip was part of a group of fifteen assailants, who formed the Young Bosnia group, acting with support from the Black Hand, some members of which were part of the Serbian government.

Following the assassination, the Austrain-Hungarian government, supported by their German allies, determined to punish the Serbians for the assassination, and on July 23 sent an ultimatum to the Serbs with demands so extreme that it was expected to be rejected. The Serbians, relying on the hope of support from Russia, gave an equivocal response which led to Austrian rejection, and to a declaration of war on July 28. The Russians mobilized in support of their Serbian allies. First, this was only partial mobilization, directed against only the Austrian frontier. On July 31, after the Russian high command told the emperor that this was logistically impossible, a general mobilization was ordered. The German war plan, which relied on a quick strike against the Russians' French allies while the Russian army slowly mobilized, could not afford to allow the Russians to begin mobilization without launching their attack on the west. As such, the Germans declared war against Russia on August 1 and against France two days later, immediately launching an invasion of Luxembourg and Belgium to get around the fortifications along the Franco-German border. This violation of Belgium's neutrality led to a British declaration of war on Germany on August 4. With this declaration, five of the six great European powers became involved in the first European general war since the Napoleonic Wars.

Although World War I was triggered by this chain of events unleashed by the assassination, the war's origins go deeper, involving national politics, cultures, economics, and a complex web of alliances and counterbalances that developed between the various European powers over the course of the nineteenth century, following the final 1815 defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte and the ensuing Congress of Vienna.

The reasons for the outbreak of World War I are a complicated issue; there are many factors that intertwine. Some examples are:

Fervent and uncompromising nationalism
Unresolved previous disputes
The intricate system of alliances
Convoluted and fragmented governance
Delays and misunderstandings in diplomatic communications
The arms races of the previous decades.
Rigidity in military planning
Colonial rivalry
Economic rivalry
Nationalism between the countries
Alliances formed

The various categories of explanation for World War I correspond to different historians' overall methodologies. Most historians and popular commentators include causes from more than one category of explanation to provide a rounded account of the causal circumstances behind the war. The deepest distinction among these accounts is that between stories which find it to have been the inevitable and predictable outcome of certain factors, and those which describe it as an arbitrary and unfortunate mistake.

Ideological causes

Some of the roots of the conflict arise out of specific ideologies which influenced the behaviour of politicians and other figures during the years leading up to the war.

Social Darwinism

By the late 19th century a new form of political and social thought emerged in the same context as nationalism, known as Social Darwinism. It emphasized the competition on a social scale between different national, ethnic, or racial groups. Inspired by what Charles Darwin considered a faulty understanding of his theory of evolution, expressed as 'survival of the fittest', this ideology was taken up by European political elites. The new ideology emphasised the violent struggle for existence between "races" or "nations" in which the weak would inevitably be destroyed by the stronger. These ideas were profoundly influential (see Weikart, below). Much of the German and Austro-Hungarian leadership feared what they saw as an inevitable battle between "Slavs" and "Germanic civilization." Social Darwinism as a political ideology also influenced competition amongst nation states for colonies. Colonial expansion was rationalized by the elite as important for assuring a nation's economic and military strength in the face of rivals. The British policy of 'strategic exclusion' of potential competitors was compatible with this adversarial perspective.

An aspect of late 19th century Social Darwinism was the sense of urgency it engendered. For a nation to be not growing compared to its neighbors and rivals was seen as very risky. The French looked in dismay at their birth rate, which was lower than Germany's.

German Domestic Politics

Left wing parties, especially the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) made large gains in the 1912 German election. German government at the time was still dominated by the Prussian Junkers who feared the rise of these left wing parties. Some authors feel that they deliberately sought an external war to distract the population and whip up patriotic support for the government. Other authors feel that German conservatives were ambivalent about a war, worrying that losing a war would have disastrous consequences, and even a successful war might alienate the population if it were lengthy or difficult.

French Domestic Politics

The situation was quite the opposite in France, but with the same results. More than a century after the French Revolution, there was still a fierce struggle between the left wing French government and its right wing opponents, including monarchists, "bonapartistes" and the Catholic church. A "good old war" was seen by both sides (with the only and remarkable exception of Jean Jaures) as a way to solve this crisis thanks to a nationalistic reflex. Everyone thought the war would be short and would lead to an easy victory. The left side government thought it would be an opportunity to implement social reforms (income tax was created in July, 1914) and the right side politicians hoped that their connections with the army's leaders could give them the opportunity to regain power.

Structural or Systemic Causes

Some of the causes of the war lie in the structure of European society at the time, and the way it functioned.

Unifications of Germany and of Italy

In the years that followed the Congress of Vienna, conflicts began springing up all over Europe between those who cried out for change, and those who resisted it. By the mid-1800s, nationalism had become an evident force. A wave of unrest was seen across the continent in the Revolution of 1848. The 1860s and early 1870s saw two great changes to the map: the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany. These two nations were formed on the basis of nationalism. German Unification was brought about by Prussia's "Iron Chancellor", Otto von Bismarck, through a series of wars from 1864–1871. Italy was finally unified in 1866 after a long struggle under leaders Cavour and Garibaldi. The addition of two great powers in Europe fundamentally altered the balance of power.

Changes in Austria

In 1867 the Austrian Empire fundamentally changed its governmental structure, becoming the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. For hundreds of years the Empire had been run in an essentially feudal manner with a German-speaking aristocracy at its head. However, with the threat represented by an emergence of nationalism within the empire's many component ethnicities, some elements, including Emperor Franz Joseph, decided that a compromise would have to be made in order to preserve the power of the German aristocracy. In 1867 the Ausgleich was agreed upon which made the Magyar elite in Hungary almost equal partners in the government of the Empire.

This arrangement fostered a tremendous degree of dissatisfaction amongst many in the traditional German ruling classes. Some of them considered the policy to have been a calamity for their Empire because it often frustrated their intentions in the governance of the Empire. For example, it was extremely difficult for the empire to form a coherent foreign policy that suited the interests of both the German and Magyar elite.

Throughout the fifty years from 1867 to 1914 it proved difficult to reach adequate compromises in the governance of the empire, leading many to search for non-diplomatic solutions. At the same time a form of social darwinism became popular amongst many in the Austrian half of the government which emphasised the primacy of armed struggle between nations, and the need for nations to arm themselves for an ultimate struggle for survival.

As a result at least two distinct strains of thought advocated war with Serbia, often unified in the same people.

In order to deal with political deadlock, some reasoned that more Slavs needed to be brought into the empire in order to dilute the power of the Magyar elite. With more Slavs, the South Slavs of the Empire could force a new political compromise in which the Germans would be able to play the Magyars against the South Slavs. Other variations on this theme existed, but the essential idea was to cure internal stagnation through external conquest.
Another fear was that the South Slavs, primarily under the leadership of Serbia, were organizing for a war against Austria-Hungary, and even all of Germanic civilization. Some leaders, such as Conrad von Hötzendorf, argued that Serbia must be dealt with before it became too powerful to defeat militarily.

A powerful contingent within the Austro-Hungarian government was motivated by these thoughts and advocated war with Serbia long before the war began. Prominent members of this group included among them Leopold von Berchtold, Alexander Hoyos, and Janós Forgách Graf von Ghymes und Gács. Although many other members of the government, notably Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph, and many Hungarian politicians did not believe that a violent struggle with Serbia would necessarily solve any of the multinational empire's problems, the hawkish elements did exert a strong influence on government policy, holding key positions..

Imperialism

Historically, many of the economic causes of the war can be attributed to a growing material dependency of advancing European nations on imperialism. Nations such as Great Britain and France maintained thriving domestic economies in the late 19th century through their control of foreign resources, markets, territories, and people. As a late arrival on the world stage, the German Empire was geographically locked out of the most valuable colonial regions in Africa and the Far East. In addition, the rapid exhaustion of natural resources in many European nations began to slowly upset the trade balance and make nations more eager to seek new territories rich in natural resources. Between emerging economic powers and the incumbent great powers, intense rivalries developed.

Colonial Expansion

Map of the world with the participants in World War I. The Allies are depicted in green, the Central Powers in orange, and neutral countries in grey.

Rivalry among the powers was exacerbated from the 1880s by the scramble for colonies which brought much of Africa and Asia under European rule in the following quarter-century. Under pressure from certain groups, even Bismarck agreed to the chase for overseas Empire, adding to Anglo-German tension as German acquisitions in Africa and the Pacific threatened to impinge upon British strategic and commercial interests. However, Bismarck knew that if the German state were to exist and thrive in spite of a clearly hostile France, it would be neccessary to isolate France both diplomatically and militarily from the other European powers. Part of Bismarck's strategy was to allow France to pursue its own colonial interests without German fetters. It could even be argued that Bismarck support French colonization in Africa because it diverted government attention away from continental Europe. In spite of all of Bismarck's deft diplomatic manuevering, in 1890 he was forced to resign by the new Kaiser (Wilhelm II) and it wouldn't take long for the new German colonial policy to irritate the other European Powers. Within a few short years, France gained diplomatic control in Europe, attaining alliances with both England and Russia. Wilhelm's support for Moroccan independence from France, Britain's new strategic partner, provoked the Tangier Crisis of 1905. During the Second Moroccan or Agadir Crisis (1911), a German naval presence in Morocco tested the Anglo-French coalition once again. These two crises led to negotiations, which Germany arguably 'lost'. Not only did Germany fail to achieve its aims during the conferences, it also failed to gain support from the other European Powers (except Austria-Hungary). Wilhelm, like Bismarck, threatened the use of German military power in an attempt to "strong-arm" the other European Powers into compliance. The difference between the two statesmen, however, was that Bismarck had his enemies isolated and his allies tightly wrapped around his diplomatic finger. Wilhelm II, by contrast, had the neither and as a result, Germany was not viewed as a political/military superpower worthy of due consideration, but rather as a militaristic beligerent nation.

Web of alliances

A very tight web of alliances bound the European nations:

Treaty of London, 1839, about the neutrality of Belgium,
German-Austrian treaty (1879) or Dual Alliance,
Italy joining Germany and Austria in 1882,
Franco-Russian Alliance (1894),
"Entente" (less formal) between Britain and France (1904) and Britain and Russia (1907) forming the Triple Entente,

File:Causesworldwar1.png

Basic representation of the alliances centred on the Balkans.

Russia proclaiming herself the "protector of the Southern Slavs" in the Balkans through several treaties.

This complex set of treaties binding various players in Europe together prior to the war is sometimes thought to have been misunderstood by contemporary political leaders. Mobilization by a relatively minor player would have a cascading effect that could rapidly run out of control, involving every country. Yet leaders discussed the crisis between Austria-Hungary and Serbia as if it were a localised issue. This is how Austria-Hungary's declaration of war against Serbia resulted in Britain declaring war on Germany:

July 28: Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia.
July 29: Russia's treaties with Serbia commit it to mobilize against Austria-Hungary in Serbia's defense.
August 1; Germany declares war against Russia under the terms of the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary.
August 1: Germany, expecting that France will come in on the side of Russia, mobilizes against France.
August 1: France mobilizes against Germany under the terms of the Franco-Russian Alliance.
August 3: Germany declares war on France.
August 4: Germany invades Belgium. (The Schlieffen Plan for a war with Russia and France commits Germany to attacking France first, then turning against Russia when France is defeated. The roads of Belgium are needed for the German army to outflank the French.)
August 4: Britain declares war on Germany under the terms of the Treaty of London, 1839 which guarantees the neutrality of Belgium, and to support the Triple Entente.
With Britain's entry, the remainder of the British Imperial colonies and dominions are drawn in offering financial and military assistance. These were Australia, Canada, India, Newfoundland, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa.
August 23: Japan, honouring the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, declares war on Germany.

Arms Race

As David Stevenson has put it, "A self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness ... was an essential element in the conjuncture that led to disaster ... The armaments race ... was a necessary precondition for the outbreak of hostilities." David Herrmann goes further, arguing that the fear that "windows of opportunity for victorious wars" were closing, "the arms race did precipitate the First World War." If the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in 1904 or even in 1911, Herrmann speculates, there might have been no war; it was "the armaments race ... and the speculation about imminent or preventive wars" which made his death in 1914 the trigger for war. (Ferguson 1999 p 82)

The naval strength of the powers in 1914
Country	Personnel	Large Naval Vessels	Tonnage
Russia	54,000	4	328,000
France	68,000	10	731,000
Britain	209,000	29	2,205,000
TOTAL	331,000	43	3,264,000
Germany	79,000	17	1,019,000
Austria-Hungary	16,000	3	249,000
TOTAL	95,000	20	1,268,000
Source: Ferguson 1999 p 85

The German naval buildup is seen by some historians as the principal cause of deteriorating Anglo-German relations. The overwhelming British response, however, proved to Germany that its efforts were unlikely to equal the Royal Navy. In 1900 the British had a 3.7:1 tonnage advantage over Germany; in 1910 the ratio was 2.3:1 and in 1914, 2.1:1. Ferguson (1999 p 83-85) argues that "so decisive was the British victory in the naval arms race that it is hard to regard it as in any meaningful sense a cause of the First World War." This ignores the self-evident fact Kaiserliche Marine had narrowed the gap by nearly half, and the Royal Navy had long felt (reasonably enough) a need to be stronger than any two potential oppenents; the United States Navy was in a period of growth, making the German gains very ominous, indeed.

Over by Christmas

The belief that a war in Europe would be swift, decisive and 'Over by Christmas' is often considered a tragic underestimation — the theory being, that had it been widely appreciated beforehand that the war would open such an abyss under European civilization, no-one would have prosecuted it. This account is less plausible on a review of the available military theory at the time, especially the work of Ivan Bloch, an early candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. Bloch's predictions of industrial warfare leading to bloody stalemate, attrition, and even revolution, were widely known in both military and pacifist circles. Some authors such as Niall Ferguson argue that the belief in a swift war has been greatly exaggerated since the war. He argues that the military planners, especially in Germany, were aware of the potential for a long war, as shown by the famous Willy-Nicky telegraphic correspondence between the Emperors of Russia and Germany. He also argues that most informed people considered a swift war unlikely. Moreover, it was in the governments' interests to feature this message widely in their propaganda, for this encouraged men to join the offensive, made the war seem less serious, and promoted general high spirits.

Primacy of the Offensive and War by Timetable

Military theorists of the time generally held that seizing the offensive was extremely important. This theory encouraged all of belligerents to strike first in order to gain the advantage. The window for diplomacy was shortened by this attitude. Most planners wanted to begin mobilisation as quickly as possible to avoid being caught on the defensive.

Some analysts have argued that mobilisation schedules were so rigid that once it was begun, they could not be cancelled without massive disruption of the country and military disorganisation. Thus, diplomatic overtures conducted after the mobilizations had begun were ignored.

The Schlieffen Plan

Germany's strategic vulnerability, sandwiched between its allied rivals, led to the development of the audacious Schlieffen Plan. Its aim was to knock France instantly out of contention, before Russia had time to mobilise its gigantic human reserves. Germany could then turn her full resources to meeting the Russian threat. Although Alfred Graf von Schlieffen initially conceived the plan well prior to his retirement in 1906, Japan's defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 exposed Russia's organisational weakness and added greatly to the plan's credibility.

The plan called for a rapid German mobilization, sweeping through Holland, Luxembourg and Belgium into France. Schlieffen called for overwhelming numbers on the far right flank, the northernmost spearhead of the force with only minimum troops making up the arm and axis of the formation as well as a minimum force stationed on the Russian eastern front.

Schlieffen was replaced by Helmuth von Moltke and in 1907-08 Moltke adjusted the plan, reducing the proportional distribution of the forces, lessening the crucial right wing in favor of a slightly more defensive strategy. Also, judging Holland unlikely to grant permission to cross its borders the plan now called for a direct move through Belgium and an artillery assault on the Belgian city of Liège. With the rail lines and the unprecedented firepower the German army brought Moltke did not expect any significant defense of the fortress.

The significance of the Schlieffen Plan is that it forced German military planners to prepare for a pre-emptive strike at the first sign of war; otherwise Russia would have time to mobilize, and Germany would be crushed by Russia's massive army. At the last minute, Kaiser Wilhelm II attempted to cancel the plan and avoid a war, he found that it was too late — to scrap the plan would require a re-organization of the German army that would leave Germany vulnerable for several months.

It appears that no war planners in any country had considered Germany's options, prepared for anything like the Schlieffen Plan, or advised politicians accordingly.

Specific Events

The Crimean War (1853-1856)

The Crimean War, in which Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire defeated Russia, radically changed the diplomatic structure of Europe. Austria had been allied to Russia following mutual assistance during the Revolutions of 1848. Fearing Russian power at the mouth of the Danube and in Constantinople, however, Austria waffled and then sided with the Allies in the crisis leading up to the Crimean War. Following the war, Austria was diplomatically isolated, allowing it to be defeated in the Second Italian War of Independence and in the Austro-Prussian War, losing its influence in most German-speaking lands. Soon after, Austria allied with Germany, and Russia more aggressively supported pan-slavism in the Balkans, creating some of the conditions that would lead to World War I.

The Franco–Prussian War (1870–1871)

Napoleon III and Bismarck after the 1870 Battle of Sedan, of the Franco-Prussian War.

Many of the direct origins of World War I can clearly be seen in the results and consequences of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. This conflict brought the establishment of a powerful and dynamic German Empire, causing what was seen as a displacement or unbalancing of power: this new and prosperous nation had the industrial and military potential to threaten Europe, and particularly the already established European powers. Germany’s nationalism, its natural resources, its economic strengths and its ambitions to "find a place in the sun" sparked colonial and military rivalries with other nations, particularly the Anglo-German naval arms race.

A legacy of animosity grew between France and Germany following the German annexation of parts of the formerly French territory of Alsace-Lorraine. The annexation caused widespread resentment in France, giving rise to the desire for revenge, known as revanchism. French sentiments wanted to avenge not only military and territorial losses, but also the displacement of France as the pre-eminent continental military power. French defeat in the war had sparked political instability, culminating in a revolution and the formation of the French Third Republic. Bismarck was wary of this during his later years, and tried to placate the French by encouraging their overseas expansion. However, anti-German sentiment remained. A Franco–German colonial entente that was made in 1884 in protest of an Anglo–Portuguese agreement in West Africa proved short-lived after a pro-imperialist government under Jules Ferry in France fell in 1885.

The 'War in Sight' crisis

France quickly recovered from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian war. France paid its war renumerations and began to build its military strength again. Bismarck leaked that Germany was planning a preventative war against France so that this recovery could not be realised. However the Dreikaiserbund sided with France rather than Germany, humiliatingly forcing Bismarck to back down.

The Rise of Kaiser Wilhelm II

Under the political direction of its first Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, Germany secured its new position in Europe by an alliance with Austria-Hungary and a diplomatic understanding with Russia. Bismarck began pursuing alliances and peace treaties. He made peace with almost every nation in Europe except France. He feared greatly that a war might destroy the newborn nation he had created in the 1860s. By the time of Wilhelm I's death, a system of alliances kept a tight peace in Europe.

The ascension (1888) of Kaiser Wilhelm II brought to the German throne a young ruler determined to direct policy himself, despite his rash diplomatic judgement. After the 1890 elections, in which the centre and left parties made major gains, and due in part to his disaffection at inheriting the Chancellor who had guided his grandfather for most of his career, Wilhelm engineered Bismarck's resignation.

Much of the fallen Chancellor's work was undone in the following decades, as Wilhelm failed to renew the 1887 Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, presenting republican France with the opportunity to conclude (1891–94) a full alliance with the Russian Empire. Worse was to follow, as Wilhelm undertook (1898–1900) the creation of a German navy capable of threatening Britain's century-old naval mastery, prompting the Anglo-French Entente Cordiale of 1904 and its expansion (1907) to include Russia in the Triple Entente.

Anglo–German Naval Race

As mentioned above, Wilhelm II nurtured a desire to construct a German navy capable of challenging the maritime dominance of the Royal Navy. Such a navy would tie in with German ambitions in the colonial and commercial spheres, threatening British pre-eminence in these areas. The Kaiser entrusted the establishment of this German navy to his Naval Minister and close advisor, Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz.

Motivated by Wilhelm's backing and his own enthusiasm for an expanded navy, Tirpitz championed four Fleet Acts from 1898 to 1912 that set Germany on constructing a fleet capable of matching the strength of British naval forces. The German program was enough to alarm the British and drive them into the above-mentioned alliances with France and Russia.

Under the direction of Admiral Jackie Fisher, the First Sea Lord from 1905 to 1910, the Royal Navy embarked on its own massive expansion to keep ahead of the Germans. The cornerstone of British naval rearmament was to be the revolutionary battleship Dreadnought, which was launched in 1906. From then on until 1914, the British and Germans vied with each other to construct superior numbers of battleships, submarines, and other naval vessels and weaponry, constituting the main (but by no means only) bone of contention between Great Britain and Germany. Ironically, Germany's shipbuilding is one of the reasons why Germany lost the war. Shipbuilding took immense amounts of resources, which could have been used for the land army.

Historiography

The exact causes of the war have been debated with some intensity since the time the war began.

Immediately after the war much academic work that blamed Germany entirely for the war was produced in Allied countries. However, academic work in the later 1920s and 1930s blamed all participants more or less equally. Starting in the mid-1920s, a number of American historians opposed to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles such as Sidney Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes produced works that claimed that Germany was not responsible for war, and as such, Article 231 of the Versailles which had seemingly assigned all responsibility for the war to Germany and thus justified the Allied claim to reparations was invalid. The objective of Fay and Barnes was to put an end to reparations imposed on Germany by attempting to prove what they regarded as the moral invalidity of Article 231. Both Fay and Barnes were provided with generous use of the German archives by the German government.

In the inter-war period, various factors such as the network of secret alliances, emphasis on speed of offence, rigid military planning, Darwinian ideas, and the lack of resolution mechanisms were blamed by many historians. These ideas have maintained some currency in the decades since then. Famous proponents include Joachim Remak and Paul Kennedy. At the same time, many one sided works were produced by politicians and other participants often trying to clear their own names. In Germany these tended to deflect blame, while in Allied countries they tended to blame Germany or Austria-Hungary. The debate over "German war guilt" was quite emotional and topical in the interwar years, and some lingering resentment within Germany may well have contributed to the rise of the Nazi party, which denied German war guilt.

In 1961 Fritz Fischer wrote the enormously influential Griff nach der Weltmacht in which he blamed Germany for the war. Fischer believed that many members of the German government had overtly expansionist plans, formulated in the aftermath of Social Democratic gains in the election of 1912. He alleged that they hoped to use external expansion and aggression to check internal dissent and democratization. Some of his work is based on Bethmann-Hollweg's "September Programme" which laid out Germany's war aims. Fischer's work created a whole school of analysis in a similar vein, emphasising domestic German political factors. Some prominent scholars in this school include Imanuel Geiss, Hans-Ulrich Wehler,Wolfgang Mommsen, and V.R. Berghahn.

The "Berlin War Party" thesis and variants of it, blaming domestic German political factors became something of an orthodoxy in the years after publication. However, many authors have attacked it.

At first the idea prompted a strong response especially from German conservative historians such as Gerhard Ritter who felt the thesis was dishonest and inaccurate. Writing in the 1960s Ritter believed that Germany displayed all the same traits as other countries and could not be singled out as particularly responsible.

In the 1960s, two new rival theories emerged to explain the causes of World War One. The first one, championed by the West German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that in 1914 a “calculated risk” on the part of Berlin had gone horribly awry. Hillgruber argued that what the Imperial German government had attempted to do in 1914 was to break the informal Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain by encouraging Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia and thus provoke a crisis in an area that would concern only St. Petersburg. Hillgruber argued that the Germans hoped that both Paris and London would decide the crisis in Balkans did not concern them and that lack of Anglo-French support would lead the Russians to reach an understanding with Germany. In Hillgruber’s opinion, the German government had pursed a high-risk diplomatic strategy of provoking a war in the Balkans that had inadvertently caused a world war.

Another theory was A.J.P. Taylor's “Railroad Thesis”. In Taylor’s opinion, none of the great powers wanted a war, but all of the great powers wished to increase their power relative to the others. Taylor argued that by engaging in an arms race and having the general staffs develop elaborate railroad timetables for mobilization, the continental powers hoped to develop a deterrent that would lead the other powers to see the risk of war as being too dangerous. When the crisis began in the summer of 1914, Taylor argued, the need to mobilize faster than one's potential opponent made the leaders of 1914 prisoners of their own logistics – The railroad timetables forced invasion (of Belgium from Germany) as an unavoidable physical and logistical consequence of German mobilization. In this way, Taylor argued, the mobilization that was meant to serve as a threat and deterrent to war instead relentlessly caused a world war by forcing invasion. Many have argued that Taylor, who was one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, developed his Railroad Thesis to serve as a thinly veiled admonitory allegory for the nuclear arms race.

Other authors such as Arno Mayer, in 1967, agreed with some aspects of the "Berlin War Party" theory, but felt it isolated Germany from its historical context. Mayer believes that all states acted more or less as Germany did in the years before the war. Samuel R. Williamson lays most of the blame with the Austro-Hungarian elites rather than the German in his 1990 book, Austria-Hungary and the Coming of the First World War. Another recent work is Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War which completely rejects the Fischer thesis, laying most of the blame on diplomatic bumbling from the British. Recently, American historian David Fromkin has allocated blame for the outbreak of war entirely to Germany and Austria-Hungary in his 2004 book Europe's Last Summer. He theorized that the German military leadership, in the midst of a European arms race, believed that they would be unable to further expand the German army without extending the officer corps beyond the traditional Prussian aristocracy. Rather than allowing that to happen, they manipulated Austria-Hungary into starting a war with Serbia in the expectation that Russia would intervene, giving Germany a pretext to launch what was in essence a pre-emptive strike.

External links

Russia - Getting Too Strong for Germany by Norman Stone
France, Germany and the Struggle for the War-making Natural Resources of the Rhineland Explains the long term conflict between Germany and France over the centuries, which was a contributing factor to the both World Wars.

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 {{For|the war in general|World War I}}
-The subject of the  Causes of WWI has been among the most discussed issues in [[historiography]] ever since the war began in August [[1914]]. The immediate cause is agreed to be the [[assassination in Sarajevo]] of [[Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria|Archduke Franz Ferdinand]] of Austria-Hungary by [[Gavrilo Princip]], a Bosnian seperatist. However the assassination is also widely agreed to have been merely the overt cause (or "trigger"), where numerous hidden and implicit factors were contributing &mdash;central of these being the drives and interests of various competing [[nationalism|nationalist]] elements.
+The subject of the  Causes of WWI has been among the most discussed issues in [[historiography]] ever since the war began in August [[1914]]. The immediate cause is agreed to be the [[assassination in Sarajevo]] of [[Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria|Archduke Franz Ferdinand]] of Austria-Hungary by [[Gavrilo Princip]], a Bosnian seperatist. However the assassination is also widely agreed to have been merely the overt cause (or "trigger"), where numerous hidden and implicit factors were contributing &mdash;central of these being the drives and interests of various competing [[nationalism|nationalist]] elements. Implicit in any search for the causes of World War I (or, indeed, any war) is the presumption that there was a rational purpose to the actions of the combatants. There is no evidence for this presumption. Certain events seem to have led one to the next, but the search for meaning deeper than animal aggression in human nature may ultimately prove futile.
 ==General==