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. The new Germany changed the scale of the European problem. Its population grew from about 41 million in 1871 to about 65 million by 1910, while France’s remained near 39 million. By 1913 it produced more than twice as much steel as Britain. The largest population west of Russia and Europe’s fastest-growing industry did not determine a particular alliance; they did require other powers to decide how to live beside a formidable neighbor. Bismarck’s system was one answer.

Alsace-Lorraine and the French grievance. Germany’s victory brought unity at the price of a lasting French grievance. Under the Treaty of Frankfurt, France surrendered Alsace and most of Lorraine, with about 1.5 million inhabitants, and owed five billion francs in indemnity. It paid within three years, but could not recover the provinces. Their loss remained a wound in French politics, and Bismarck devoted twenty years to containing the hostility the victory had helped create.

The Eastern Question. The Ottoman Empire had governed the Balkans for centuries. As it retreated, diplomats asked who would inherit its lands: this was the Eastern Question. Russia saw itself as protector of Orthodox Slavs and wanted free passage for its warships through the Straits. Austria-Hungary feared that strong Slav states on its border would unsettle Slavs within its own empire. Both were German partners, so each Balkan crisis threatened to set Bismarck’s allies against one another.

The Kaiser’s new course. Wilhelm II became emperor in 1888 at twenty-nine and intended to rule in person. He forced Bismarck to resign in March 1890. His new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and foreign office adviser Friedrich von Holstein wanted simpler, more transparent commitments; they saw the Reinsurance Treaty as incompatible with the Austrian alliance. Dropping it made Germany’s policy easier to state, while removing a secret link that had discouraged Russia from seeking France. Within two years Bismarck’s system had ended.

Chapter 2: The Balkan Crises

The Ottoman retreat. The Ottoman Empire had lost Balkan territory since the Congress of Berlin. The Young Turk revolution of 1908 and Italy’s war against the empire in 1911–12 persuaded neighboring states that they might take what remained. Each retreat revived the Eastern Question: who would inherit Ottoman lands? Austria-Hungary and Russia had competing answers, and the final Balkan settlement brought them closer to collision (Chapter 1).

Serbia’s turn toward Russia. Under the Obrenović kings, Serbia had been tied to Vienna by a secret treaty of 1881. That relationship changed in 1903, when army officers murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga and installed a dynasty looking to Russia and the union of South Slavs. Vienna tried economic pressure in the ‘Pig War’ of 1906–09, a trade boycott named for Serbia’s principal export. Serbia instead found French loans and Russian protection. The effort to restore Austrian influence helped drive its neighbor further away.

A Habsburg empire afraid for its South Slavs. About seven million South Slavs lived under Habsburg rule, including Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Bosnian Muslims. Austrian leaders feared that a successful Serbia could attract them away, as Piedmont had drawn Italians from Habsburg rule during Italian unification in the 1860s. Annexation was intended to end Serbia’s claim to Bosnia. It also gave Serbian nationalists a grievance. Unification or Death, the secret society known as the Black Hand, was founded in 1911 and recruited young Bosnian Serbs.

Russia’s need to recover face. Defeat by Japan in 1905 and the revolution that followed left Russia too weak to fight over Bosnia in 1909. Germany’s demand for acceptance of annexation became a remembered humiliation in St Petersburg. From 1910 Russia rebuilt its army with French money and returned its attention to the Balkans, sponsoring the Balkan League as a barrier to Austria-Hungary. It sought to recover influence in the region where its retreat had exposed its weakness.

Chapter 3: The Powder Keg

The alliance machine. Bismarck had used alliances to isolate crises. By 1914 the opposing alignments could spread one. An Austrian attack on Serbia threatened Russian interests; German support for Austria raised the prospect of war with Russia; and Germany's plan for that war included an attack on France. A network meant to deter an enemy could thus carry a local quarrel into several countries.

Timetables as destiny. Staffs expected the first army to concentrate to gain a decisive advantage. Germany's Schlieffen Plan aimed to defeat France in roughly six weeks, before Russia completed its slower mobilization. The railway schedules were hard to change, and fear of losing time pressed against negotiation. “Mobilization means war” captured the danger, though it did not remove political leaders' choices.

Austria-Hungary’s existential fear. The Dual Monarchy contained eleven nationalities under an aging emperor. On the map, much of its territory is not Austria or Hungary. Leaders in Vienna saw South Slav nationalism, encouraged from Belgrade, as a threat to the empire's survival. Some already wanted a local war to destroy Serbian power; the assassination supplied an occasion to act.

Germany’s closing window. Russia was expanding its railways with French financing, and German planners feared that their relative advantage would diminish after 1917. If war with Russia was expected, some concluded that it would be better fought sooner. Fischer emphasized German ambitions; other historians see reckless brinkmanship, accompanied by hope that Britain would stay out. Whatever the balance of motives, Berlin backed escalation in July.

Guardians and revisionists. The new map gave governments different interests in its survival. France allied with Poland in 1921 and later signed treaties with the Little Entente—Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia—to support the settlement. Germany, Hungary and Bulgaria wanted revision, and Fascist Italy, a disappointed victor, increasingly joined them. Most guardians of the settlement were new, small states with divisions of their own; among the revisionists was the strongest economy on the continent. The balance favored those seeking to redraw the map.

Minorities as pretexts. Some 25 to 30 million Europeans lived in another nation’s state. Treaties supervised by the League promised them equality before the law and schools in their own language, but a promise needed a means of enforcement. League procedures were slow, many complaints were set aside, and governments in Warsaw, Bucharest and Belgrade pressed assimilation. In the 1930s Nazi Germany used German minorities’ grievances in Czechoslovakia and Poland as pretexts to break up the settlement. Minority protection had become a weapon against the states that had undertaken it.

Hyperinflation and the radical right. By November 1923, after the Ruhr crisis drove German inflation out of control, a lifetime’s savings could not buy a loaf of bread. That month Adolf Hitler, the leader of a small Munich party, believed the republic was about to fall. He attempted to seize power in the Beer Hall Putsch, an armed coup launched from a Munich beer hall. It failed, and he went to prison. For millions of Germans, however, occupation and hyperinflation left the treaty, the republic and ruin linked 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. The Lausanne exchange gave that belief international approval. In 1944 Winston Churchill cited it when defending the expulsion of Germans from lands Poland would gain; the policy was carried out in 1945, after Nazi Germany’s war of conquest and occupation. The next war had begun in 1939 over Danzig, the German port made a Free City by the peace, and the Polish Corridor, which cut East Prussia off from Germany. The settlement had drawn those fault lines years earlier.