EconAir

    Otto von Bismarck   The recent excellent histories on the factors leading up to World War One don’t go back far enough in time.   The main contention of this essay is that the road to World War One begins with the long-run consequences of the policies and strategies of Otto von Bismarck and the way he created the First German Reich in 1871.   The heart of the Treaty of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) was the “Holy Alliance,” an agreement of the monarchs of Russia, Prussia (later Germany) and Austria (later Austria-Hungary) to stamp out any return to the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. The three monarchies cooperated until the Crimean War.   The Crimean War (1853-56) was triggered by Russian attempts to expand its influence around the Black Sea, force the Ottoman Empire to allow Russian warships through the Dardanelles and increase influence in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire retreated. To keep Russia bottled u...

SVG  Map_Europe_alliances_1914-fr.svg   ORIGINS OF THE WAR This is an extraordinarily complicated story. One reason is that it is difficult for the modern reader to understand the mentality of the key decision-makers – their prejudices, mental frameworks, how they reacted to threats and stress. Fortunately, there are several excellent books that attempt to describe the key players’ assumptions, mentality and motivations.   World War I was started by the decisions of a very small number of men, often in secret, implementing secret agreements and understandings, who represented the most reactionary or conservative groups in their countries and governments. Most were incompetent, narrow-minded, myopic and/or delusional. They thought going to war - appealing to nationalist sentiments - would solve or subsume social problems and political challenges that were mostly the result of industrialization and rapid economic  and social change. All planned to win in short off...