R4.6 Europe and the First World War (1871–1923)

Between 1871 and 1923 Europe moved from a long peace among the great powers to the most destructive war it had yet known, and then to a settlement that redrew its map. The First World War killed about nine to ten million soldiers, destroyed four empires and created the conditions in which communism and fascism grew.

The overview timeline divides the period into four phases: Bismarck’s system to 1890, the formation of two blocs to 1914, the war, and the peace settlement.

A new great power: Europe after 1871

The German Empire was proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles on 18 January 1871, while Prussian troops still besieged Paris. It brought together twenty-five states under the King of Prussia, now German Emperor (Kaiser) Wilhelm I, with Otto von Bismarck as chancellor. With about 41 million people, the largest army in Europe and fast-growing industry, the new empire was the strongest power on the continent.

The unification of Germany upset the balance that had been set up at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and maintained, loosely, through the Concert of Europe, the practice of the great powers meeting to settle disputes together. A strong state now sat in the centre of Europe, with France to the west and Russia to the east. If those two ever combined, Germany would face a war on two fronts.

France and Alsace-Lorraine

The Treaty of Frankfurt (May 1871) forced France to pay an indemnity of five billion francs and to give up Alsace and part of Lorraine, territory with about 1.5 million people and important iron and textile industries. The loss left a lasting desire for revenge, or revanchism, in French politics, although by the 1880s most French governments were cautious about acting on it. France paid the indemnity early, in 1873, which showed how quickly it could recover.

Bismarck’s aims

Bismarck described Germany after 1871 as a "satiated" power that wanted no more territory in Europe. His aim was to protect what had been won. In practice this meant keeping France isolated, so that it could never find an ally for a war of revenge, and preventing a coalition of the other powers against Germany.

In the Kissingen Dictation of June 1877, a memorandum dictated to his son Herbert during the Balkan crisis, Bismarck set out his ideal: a situation in which every power except France needed Germany and was kept from combining against it by its quarrels with the others. Germany would act as the pivot of Europe, the friend whose support each rival wanted.

The Three Emperors’ League and the War in Sight crisis

Bismarck’s first step was to link the three conservative eastern monarchies. In 1873 the emperors of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia agreed to consult each other on common problems and to resist revolution. This Dreikaiserbund ("Three Emperors’ League") was a loose understanding, not a military alliance, and it depended on Austria-Hungary and Russia avoiding a quarrel in the Balkans.

The limits of German influence appeared in 1875. Alarmed by the speed of French rearmament, the Berlin newspaper Die Post published an article in April 1875 under the headline "Is war in sight?", widely believed to have been inspired by Bismarck. Britain and Russia both made clear that they would not accept a second German attack on France. The War in Sight crisis showed Bismarck that the other powers would not allow France to be crushed, so isolation had to be achieved by diplomacy, not threats.

The Eastern Question and the Congress of Berlin, 1875–1878

The greatest threat to Bismarck’s plans came from the south-east. The Ottoman Empire still ruled much of the Balkan peninsula, but it was weak, in debt and challenged by the national movements of its Christian subjects. The Eastern Question, what would happen to Ottoman territory as the empire declined, set Russia, which hoped to gain influence over the Balkan Slavs and the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, against Austria-Hungary and Britain, which wanted to stop it.

The Great Eastern Crisis

Revolts against Ottoman rule in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1875) and Bulgaria (1876) began a three-year crisis. The brutal suppression of the Bulgarian rising, in which thousands of Christians were killed, caused outrage across Europe; in Britain William Gladstone’s pamphlet on the "Bulgarian Horrors" (1876) turned public opinion against the Ottoman government. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in April 1877 and by early 1878 its armies were close to Constantinople (Istanbul).

The Treaty of San Stefano (3 March 1878), dictated by Russia, created a large autonomous Bulgaria reaching to the Aegean Sea. Britain and Austria-Hungary saw this "Big Bulgaria" as a Russian satellite that would give Russia control of the Balkans, and both threatened war. The Ottoman side of the crisis, including the reforms and losses of the empire, is part of the regional study of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Türkiye. For the balance of power, the crisis mattered for what it did to relations between the great powers.

Bismarck as "honest broker"

Bismarck offered to mediate, describing Germany in a Reichstag speech of February 1878 as an "honest broker" with no interests of its own in the Balkans. The great powers met at the Congress of Berlin (13 June–13 July 1878) under his chairmanship.

The table of outcomes shows that every power except Russia came away with something. Russian nationalists blamed Bismarck, and Tsar Alexander II complained that Germany had sided with Austria-Hungary. The Dreikaiserbund collapsed. The Congress had prevented a European war in 1878, but at the price of turning Russian resentment against Germany and placing Austria-Hungary in Bosnia, where the war of 1914 would begin.

Bismarck’s alliance system, 1879–1890

Faced with a hostile Russia, Bismarck chose a formal alliance with Austria-Hungary. This was the first of a series of mostly secret treaties that made up his alliance system.

Should, contrary to their hope, and against the loyal desire of the two High Contracting Parties, one of the two Empires be attacked by Russia the High Contracting Parties are bound to come to the assistance one of the other with the whole war strength of their Empires, and accordingly only to conclude peace together and upon mutual agreement.

Treaty of alliance between Austria-Hungary and Germany (the Dual Alliance), Article 1, signed in Vienna on 7 October 1879 (English translation, Avalon Project, Yale Law School). The treaty was secret and defensive: it named Russia as the only enemy against which full military help was promised, and against any other attacker each partner promised only benevolent neutrality. It shows that Bismarck saw Russia, not France, as the immediate danger in 1879, and that he meant the alliance to deter Russia rather than to prepare a war.

Building the system

Bismarck did not want to choose between Vienna and St Petersburg for good. In June 1881 he revived the link with Russia in the Three Emperors’ Alliance, a secret treaty by which Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia promised to stay neutral if one of them went to war with a fourth power, and agreed on spheres of influence in the Balkans. In May 1882 Italy, angry that France had seized Tunisia in 1881, joined Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance. Romania was secretly linked to the alliance in 1883.

A new Balkan crisis broke the Three Emperors’ Alliance. In 1885 Bulgaria united with Eastern Rumelia against Russian wishes, and in 1886–1887 Russia tried and failed to control the Bulgarian government. Austria-Hungary resisted Russian influence, and the alliance was not renewed when it expired in 1887. At the same time, French nationalism revived around General Georges Boulanger, the minister of war, who was popular for his talk of revenge.

Bismarck answered with two agreements in 1887. Britain, Italy and Austria-Hungary signed the Mediterranean Agreements, promising to preserve the status quo in the Mediterranean and the Near East, which meant blocking Russia at the Straits without Germany having to do so itself. Then, in June 1887, Germany signed the secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia: each would stay neutral if the other went to war, unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. Germany also recognised Russian interests in Bulgaria and at the Straits.

The diagram of the system in 1887 shows both its success and its weakness. France had no ally, and every other great power was linked to Germany or its partners. But Germany had promised to defend Austria-Hungary against Russia while also promising Russia neutrality, and the Mediterranean Agreements, which Bismarck encouraged, worked against the Russian interests that the Reinsurance Treaty recognised.

Strains in the system

Economic policy undermined the diplomacy. In November 1887 Bismarck banned the Reichsbank from accepting Russian bonds as security for loans (the Lombardverbot), partly to put pressure on Russia and partly to please German landowners who wanted protection from Russian grain. Russia turned to the Paris money market instead: the first large French loans to Russia were raised in 1888–1889. Financial ties began to link the two countries that Bismarck most needed to keep apart.

The fall of Bismarck and the end of the Reinsurance Treaty

Wilhelm I died in March 1888 and his son Friedrich III died of cancer after ninety-nine days. The new emperor, Wilhelm II (r. 1888–1918), was 29, impatient with the old chancellor and keen to rule himself. After disputes over policy towards the socialists and over the chancellor’s control of ministers, Bismarck resigned in March 1890.

The new chancellor, General Leo von Caprivi, and the senior foreign ministry official Friedrich von Holstein decided not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty in 1890. They thought it incompatible with the Dual Alliance and believed that Russia, an autocracy, could never ally with republican France. They were wrong. French loans, a French naval visit to Kronstadt in 1891 and a military convention in August 1892 produced the Franco-Russian Alliance, ratified in December 1893–January 1894. Each promised to attack Germany if the other was attacked by it (or by its allies with German support), and both promised to mobilise if any member of the Triple Alliance mobilised. Within four years of Bismarck’s fall, Germany faced the two-front threat he had worked to prevent.

Imperial expansion and European diplomacy, 1880–1907

From the 1880s the great powers competed for colonies on a new scale. In about twenty years Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Portugal divided almost the whole of Africa between them, and the powers competed for influence in China, Persia and the Pacific. The causes and effects of the partition for Africans belong to the regional study of European imperialism and the partition of Africa. For European diplomacy, the question is how empire affected relations between the powers.

Empire as a safety valve

Imperial expansion often eased tensions in Europe. Bismarck acquired German colonies in South West Africa, Togo, Cameroon, East Africa and New Guinea in 1884–1885, partly to win votes at home and partly to improve relations with France by cooperating against Britain. He hosted the Berlin Conference of November 1884–February 1885, at which fourteen states agreed rules for claiming African territory and recognised the Congo Free State of King Leopold II of Belgium. Disputes over distant lands could be settled by drawing lines on maps, and many were.

Empire as a source of conflict

Imperial rivalry also brought the powers close to war, and the pattern of these quarrels shaped the alignments of 1914.

The table of imperial disputes shows two turning points. The Fashoda crisis convinced the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé that France had to settle with Britain, and Russia’s defeat by Japan in 1905 made it ready to settle with Britain too. Both settlements removed old colonial quarrels, and once those were gone, the shared fear of Germany could bring the three powers together.

The decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1878–1913

The Ottoman Empire, often called the "sick man of Europe", continued to lose territory. Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, and Bulgaria absorbed Eastern Rumelia in 1885. In July 1908 a group of army officers and reformers, the Young Turks of the Committee of Union and Progress, forced Sultan Abdülhamid II to restore the constitution. Their revolution prompted Austria-Hungary to annex Bosnia and Bulgaria to declare full independence in October 1908, before a reformed Ottoman state could reclaim them.

Italy attacked the empire in September 1911 and took Libya and the Dodecanese islands by October 1912. The Balkan states then struck. In the First Balkan War (October 1912–May 1913) Serbia, Greece, Bulgaria and Montenegro drove the Ottomans out of almost all their European lands; in the Second (June–August 1913) the victors fought over Macedonia and Bulgaria was defeated. Each Ottoman loss raised the question of who would gain, and drew Austria-Hungary and Russia, the two powers with most at stake in the Balkans, further into the region.

Germany under Wilhelm II: domestic conditions and foreign policy

German foreign policy after 1890 cannot be understood apart from the country’s rapid economic change and its divided politics. Historians disagree about how far domestic pressures drove the policy, but all agree that they shaped it.

An industrial giant

Germany’s population rose from about 41 million in 1871 to about 65 million in 1910, and most of the growth went to the cities of the Ruhr, Saxony, Silesia and Berlin. Germany led Europe in the new industries of chemicals and electrical engineering, and companies such as Krupp, Siemens and AEG became world names. Coal and steel output grew fastest of all.

The chart of steel output shows how quickly the balance of industrial power shifted. In 1880 Britain produced almost twice as much steel as Germany; by 1913 Germany produced more than twice as much as Britain. Many Germans concluded that such an economy deserved a world role to match, and many Britons came to see Germany as a commercial and strategic rival, even though each country remained one of the other’s best customers.

A divided political system

The constitution of 1871 combined a Reichstag elected by all men over 25 with an emperor who appointed the chancellor, commanded the armed forces and controlled foreign policy. The chancellor was responsible to the Kaiser, not to the Reichstag, but needed Reichstag majorities to pass budgets, including money for the army and navy.

Industrial growth created a large working class, and many workers voted for the Social Democratic Party (SPD), a Marxist party committed in theory to revolution. In the election of 1912 the SPD won about 35 per cent of the vote and 110 of 397 seats, becoming the largest party in the Reichstag. To the Kaiser, the Junkers (the landowning nobility of Prussia, who dominated the officer corps and the civil service) and the leaders of heavy industry, the SPD was an enemy of the state.

Nationalist pressure groups pushed the government towards an ambitious foreign policy. The Pan-German League (founded 1891) demanded colonies and expansion in Europe; the Navy League (1898), funded partly by industrialists, campaigned for a large fleet and had more than a million members by 1914; the Colonial Society (1887) promoted empire. These groups were small in the Reichstag but loud in the press, and governments that backed down in a crisis faced their anger.

The role of Wilhelm II

Wilhelm II was intelligent, restless and theatrical. He loved the navy, wanted Germany to be respected as a world power and often spoke before thinking. Contemporaries and historians disagree about how much power he really had. He appointed and dismissed chancellors, generals and admirals, and from the late 1890s he claimed to rule personally, but he lacked the patience to direct policy day to day.

• The Kruger Telegram (3 January 1896): Wilhelm congratulated President Paul Kruger of the Transvaal on defeating the Jameson Raid, an unofficial British attack, which caused fury in Britain.

• The Daily Telegraph affair (October 1908): in an interview published by the British newspaper, Wilhelm said that large sections of the German public were unfriendly to Britain while he himself was its friend, and claimed to have sent Queen Victoria a plan of campaign for the Boer War. The interview offended opinion in both countries, and the Reichstag protested against his "personal rule". He promised to be more restrained.

• The Zabern affair (1913): after soldiers in Alsace insulted and arrested civilians, the Reichstag passed a vote of no confidence in the chancellor, which had no effect because he answered only to the Kaiser. The affair showed the limits of parliamentary control over the army.

The "New Course" and Weltpolitik

Caprivi’s "New Course" (1890–1894) sought better relations with Britain: in the Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of July 1890 Germany gave up claims in East Africa in return for the North Sea island of Heligoland. From 1897 policy changed. Bernhard von Bülow became foreign secretary (and chancellor in 1900) and Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz became secretary of state for the navy. Together they launched Weltpolitik ("world policy"), the aim of making Germany a world power with colonies, bases, a large fleet and a voice in every international question.

We are happy to respect the interests of other powers in China, secure in the knowledge that our own interests will also receive the recognition they deserve. ("Bravo!") In short, we do not want to put anyone in our shadow, but we also demand our place in the sun. ("Bravo!") True to the tradition of German policy, we will make every effort to protect our rights and interests in East Asia and West India – without unnecessary harshness, but without weakness either. (Lively applause)

Bernhard von Bülow, foreign secretary, speech to the Reichstag, 6 December 1897 (translation by Adam Blauhut, German History in Documents and Images). Bülow spoke weeks after German ships had seized the Chinese port of Kiautschou (Jiaozhou), and he was asking the Reichstag to support a policy and, soon, a fleet. The applause recorded in the transcript shows how well the language of national prestige worked with a nationalist audience; the speech is better evidence of how Weltpolitik was sold at home than of any precise plan.

The Tirpitz Plan and the Navy Laws

Weltpolitik’s centrepiece was the navy. The Navy Law of 1898 provided for a fleet of 19 battleships; the law of 1900 doubled this to 38. Supplementary laws in 1906, 1908 and 1912 increased the size of ships and the pace of building. Tirpitz’s strategy, known as the Tirpitz Plan, was to build a battle fleet in the North Sea strong enough that Britain could not risk fighting it.

Germany also pursued influence elsewhere: a lease on Kiautschou in China (1898), Pacific islands bought from Spain (1899), a share of Samoa (1899), and the concession for a railway from Constantinople to Baghdad, which alarmed Britain and Russia. Wilhelm visited Constantinople and Damascus in 1898 and presented himself as a friend of the world’s Muslims.

How the other powers responded, 1898–1914

German policy after 1897 was meant to make Germany more secure and more respected. Its effect was to bring together three powers that had been rivals for most of the nineteenth century.

Britain: the end of "splendid isolation"

For most of the nineteenth century Britain had avoided permanent alliances, relying on the Royal Navy and a policy later called splendid isolation. The Boer War exposed the danger of having no friends, and the German fleet threatened the naval supremacy on which Britain’s security and trade depended. Attempts at an Anglo-German agreement in 1898–1901 failed, partly because Germany asked too high a price.

Britain made three agreements instead. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance (January 1902) protected British interests in East Asia and let the navy bring ships home. The Entente Cordiale (8 April 1904) settled colonial disputes with France: France recognised British control of Egypt and Britain recognised French interests in Morocco. The Anglo-Russian Convention (31 August 1907) divided Persia into Russian and British spheres of influence and settled disputes over Afghanistan and Tibet. None of these was a military alliance, but together with the Franco-Russian Alliance they formed the Triple Entente.

The chain from Weltpolitik to the two blocs shows the unintended consequences of German policy. Each step was a reaction: Britain looked for partners because of the German fleet, and the clumsy German attempt to split Britain from France at Tangier in 1905 instead brought the two closer. In 1907 the senior Foreign Office official Eyre Crowe argued in a memorandum that Germany aimed at dominance in Europe, whether by design or through the drift of its policy, and that Britain should stand firm.

The naval race

In February 1906 Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, an all-big-gun battleship faster and more heavily armed than any ship afloat. It made existing battleships obsolete, including Britain’s own, and so gave Germany a chance to compete on equal terms. The race became a public obsession. In the naval scare of 1909, when the British government feared that Germany was secretly speeding up its building, the popular slogan "We want eight and we won’t wait" pushed the government to order eight new capital ships.

Britain won the race. By August 1914 the Royal Navy had about 29 dreadnoughts and battlecruisers in service against about 17 German ones (counts vary with how ships are classified). In February 1912 the British war minister Lord Haldane visited Berlin to seek a naval agreement, but Germany wanted a promise of British neutrality in a European war, which Britain would not give. By 1913 Tirpitz accepted a ratio of 16 to 10 in Britain’s favour. The naval race had failed in its own terms and turned Britain against Germany.

France, Russia and Austria-Hungary

The table of responses shows that each power acted out of fear more than ambition. France and Russia wanted protection against Germany, Austria-Hungary feared for its survival, and Britain wanted to keep any single power from dominating the continent. German leaders, seeing these responses, felt surrounded. The result was a spiral of insecurity in which each side’s defensive measures looked aggressive to the other.

The diplomatic crises, 1905–1913

Between 1905 and 1913 five crises tested the two blocs. None led to a general war, but each left the powers more suspicious and more ready to fight next time.

The First Moroccan Crisis, 1905–1906

Germany decided to test the new Entente Cordiale while Russia was at war with Japan. On 31 March 1905 Wilhelm II landed at Tangier and declared his support for the independence of the Sultan of Morocco, challenging France’s claim to the country. Delcassé was forced to resign, but at the international conference at Algeciras (January–April 1906) only Austria-Hungary supported Germany. France and Spain were given control of Morocco’s police and France the largest share in its new state bank, and Britain began secret military talks with France. Germany had tried to break the Entente and strengthened it.

The Bosnian crisis, 1908–1909

In October 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which it had administered since 1878. The Austrian foreign minister Alois von Aehrenthal had discussed the move with his Russian counterpart Alexander Izvolsky, who expected Austrian support for opening the Straits to Russian warships in return; he did not get it. Serbia, which hoped to gain Bosnia’s Serb population, protested and mobilised. In March 1909 Germany demanded that Russia recognise the annexation, and Russia, still weak after 1905, gave way.

The crisis had three lasting effects. Russia felt humiliated and began to rebuild its army; Serbian nationalists turned to secret organisations; and Austria-Hungary learned that German backing could force Russia to retreat, a lesson it would apply in 1914.

The Agadir crisis, 1911

When French troops entered Fez in 1911 to put down a revolt, Germany sent the gunboat Panther to the Moroccan port of Agadir on 1 July, claiming to protect German interests and seeking compensation elsewhere in Africa. On 21 July the British chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, until then known as a critic of military spending, warned in a speech at the Mansion House in London that peace bought by letting Britain be treated as of no account would be "a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure". In the agreement of November 1911 Germany accepted a French protectorate over Morocco in return for a strip of the French Congo.

Agadir hardened attitudes on all sides. In Germany, nationalists denounced the settlement as a humiliation, and the government passed new army and navy laws in 1912. Britain and France agreed in 1912 that the French fleet would concentrate in the Mediterranean and the British in the North Sea, which gave Britain a moral obligation to protect France’s northern coast.

The Balkan Wars and the "war council" of December 1912

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 transformed south-eastern Europe. Serbia almost doubled its territory and population. Austria-Hungary blocked Serbia from gaining an outlet on the Adriatic by insisting on the creation of an independent Albania, and in October 1913 forced Serbian troops out of Albanian territory with an ultimatum, backed by Germany. Russia, not ready for war, again accepted the outcome.

On 8 December 1912, during the First Balkan War, Wilhelm II met his senior army and navy commanders after hearing that Britain would not stay neutral in a continental war. The chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, said that war was unavoidable and the sooner the better. No decision for war was taken, and the chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, was not present. Historians still argue about the meeting’s importance, a question for the debates on responsibility.

Reasons for the First World War

The war that began in August 1914 had long-term causes going back to 1871 and short-term causes in the crises of 1905–1913, but it was started by decisions taken in five capitals in five weeks.

Austria-Hungary, Russia and Balkan nationalism

Serbia changed in 1903, when army officers murdered King Alexander Obrenović, whose policy had been friendly to Austria-Hungary, and brought Peter I of the rival Karađorđević dynasty to the throne. Serbian policy turned towards Russia and towards the dream of uniting the South Slavs. Austria-Hungary answered with economic pressure: in the "Pig War" of 1906–1911 it closed its border to Serbian livestock, Serbia’s main export, but Serbia found new markets and became more hostile.

After the annexation of Bosnia in 1908, Serbian nationalists founded the Narodna Odbrana ("National Defence"), which spread propaganda and trained volunteers. In 1911 a group of army officers formed a secret society, Unification or Death, better known as the Black Hand, led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević ("Apis"), the head of Serbian military intelligence. Serbia’s victories in 1912–1913 made it more confident and Vienna more afraid.

For Austria-Hungary the danger was existential. Germans and Magyars together made up less than half of its people; the rest were Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Romanians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Italians. Many of its leaders believed that a successful South Slav state on the border would pull the empire apart, and that only a war to crush Serbia would stop it. Russia, for its part, could not let Serbia be crushed without losing its standing as protector of the Slavs and its influence in the Balkans, where it had already retreated in 1909 and 1913.

The arms race and the war plans

From 1911 the land arms race accelerated. Germany passed army laws in 1912 and 1913; the 1913 law was the largest increase in the army’s history. France replied with the Three-Year Law (1913), and Russia began the Great Programme, which would make its army much the largest in Europe by about 1917. Russian railways to the western border, financed with French loans, would cut the time Russia needed to mobilise.

The table of war plans shows why speed mattered so much in July 1914. German planners believed they had only one plan for a two-front war, and that plan meant attacking France and invading Belgium even if the quarrel began in the Balkans. Once Russia mobilised, Moltke argued that every day of delay helped the enemy. Military timetables did not make war automatic, but they shortened the time in which diplomats could work.

The alliance system, 1890–1914

By 1914 Europe was divided into the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente, but neither bloc was solid. Italy had secretly agreed with France in 1902 to stay neutral if France was attacked, and it declared neutrality in August 1914. Britain’s ententes contained no promise of military help, and the British cabinet was divided until the invasion of Belgium. The firmest commitments were the Dual Alliance and the Franco-Russian Alliance, and both made a local war hard to contain.

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The July Crisis, 1914

On 28 June 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb student armed with the help of the Black Hand. Vienna’s investigators quickly traced the weapons to Belgrade. The events that followed are the most studied five weeks in modern history.

Vienna and Berlin decide, 5–23 July

On 5 July Count Alexander Hoyos, a senior official of the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry, brought a letter from Emperor Franz Joseph to Berlin. That day and the next, Wilhelm II and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg promised full German support for whatever action Austria-Hungary took against Serbia, and urged it to act quickly. This was the blank cheque. Bethmann Hollweg hoped the war would stay local, but he accepted the risk that Russia would intervene, judging that it was better to fight in 1914 than after Russian rearmament was complete.

At a council of ministers on 7 July, only the Hungarian prime minister, István Tisza, opposed an immediate attack; he agreed on 14 July to an ultimatum that Serbia could not accept. Vienna then waited until the French president Raymond Poincaré and prime minister René Viviani had finished a state visit to St Petersburg (20–23 July), so that the allies could not coordinate their reply in person. The ultimatum was handed over in Belgrade on the evening of 23 July with a 48-hour deadline.

From a local war to a European war, 24 July–4 August

Russia decided on 24–25 July to support Serbia, and on 26 July began the "period preparatory to war", secret measures short of full mobilisation. Serbia’s reply of 25 July accepted most of the demands; Austria-Hungary broke off relations at once and declared war on 28 July. The British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, proposed a conference of the powers on 26 July, and Wilhelm II suggested on 28 July that Austria-Hungary should stop after occupying Belgrade (the "halt in Belgrade"). Neither proposal was pressed hard in Berlin, and Vienna ignored them.

The Kaiser and the Tsar, who were cousins, exchanged telegrams in English as the crisis grew.

In this serious moment, I appeal to you to help me. An ignoble war has been declared to a weak country. The indignation in Russia shared fully by me is enormous. I foresee that very soon I shall be overwhelmed by the pressure forced upon me and be forced to take extreme measures which will lead to war. To try and avoid such a calamity as a European war I beg you in the name of our old friendship to do what you can to stop your allies from going too far. Nicky

Nicholas II to Wilhelm II, telegram, 29 July 1914, 1 a.m. (text from the World War I Document Archive, Brigham Young University). The telegram shows a monarch who feared war but felt pushed by Russian opinion and by his own government. It also shows how the language of honour and pressure made retreat hard: the next day the Tsar told Wilhelm that Russia’s "military measures" had been decided five days earlier for defence, which Berlin read as proof that Russia was already preparing for war. The private, personal channel had little effect on decisions taken by ministers and generals.

Russia ordered general mobilisation on 30 July. Germany sent an ultimatum demanding that it stop, and on 1 August, when no reply came, declared war on Russia and began to mobilise. Because the German plan required defeating France first, Germany demanded passage through Belgium on 2 August, declared war on France on 3 August and invaded Belgium on 4 August. Bethmann Hollweg told the British ambassador that Britain was going to war over a "scrap of paper", the treaty of 1839 guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. Britain declared war on Germany at 11 p.m. on 4 August.

The chain of decisions in 1914 shows how each step narrowed the choices of the next. A different decision at any point (no blank cheque, an ultimatum Serbia could accept, a delay in Russian mobilisation, a German war plan that did not depend on invading Belgium) might have kept the war local or prevented it.

The course of the war: strategies of the two sides, 1914–1918

Both sides expected a short war. By the end of 1914 the plans of every army had failed, and the war became a long struggle in which each side tried to wear down the other’s armies, economies and will to fight.

The timeline of the war shows how the fighting moved through four phases: the failure of the plans for a quick victory in 1914, attrition in 1915–1916, the gambles of 1917 and the decision in 1918.

1914: the failure of the short-war plans

German armies swept through Belgium and northern France in August 1914, while French offensives under Plan XVII were thrown back with heavy losses in Lorraine. But the German right wing was weaker than Schlieffen had intended, its soldiers were exhausted and supplies lagged behind. On the Marne (6–12 September) French and British counter-attacks into a gap between two German armies forced a retreat. Moltke was replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn. After a "race to the sea", by November a line of trenches ran from the Channel coast to Switzerland.

In the east, Russia invaded East Prussia faster than Germany expected and was crushed at Tannenberg (26–30 August) by Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff Erich Ludendorff, who became national heroes. Against Austria-Hungary, however, Russia won major victories in Galicia, and Austro-Hungarian attacks on Serbia failed. The Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers in November 1914, opening fronts in the Caucasus and the Middle East.

1915–1916: attrition

In 1915 the Central Powers concentrated on the east. The German–Austrian breakthrough at Gorlice–Tarnów in May drove the Russians out of Poland, and in October, with Bulgaria now an ally, the Central Powers overran Serbia. The Allies tried to open a new front by attacking the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli (April 1915–January 1916), hoping to reach Constantinople and supply Russia through the Straits, but failed. Italy, promised Austrian territory in the secret Treaty of London (April 1915), entered the war in May 1915, and fought eleven battles on the Isonzo river with little gain.

In 1916 both sides tried to win in the west by attrition. Falkenhayn attacked Verdun in February, aiming to inflict unbearable losses on the French army; by December both sides had suffered losses of about 300,000 dead or missing and the front had barely moved. The British and French attacked on the Somme from 1 July to November, partly to relieve Verdun. In the east the Russian Brusilov Offensive (June 1916) nearly destroyed the Austro-Hungarian army, which survived only with German help. At sea, the only great fleet battle of the war, Jutland (31 May–1 June 1916), left the German High Seas Fleet in port for the rest of the war and the British blockade intact.

1917: two German gambles and the collapse of Russia

In August 1916 Hindenburg and Ludendorff took over the Supreme Army Command (OHL). They demanded total mobilisation of the economy and, with the navy, persuaded the Kaiser to resume unrestricted submarine warfare on 1 February 1917, sinking without warning any ship in the waters around Britain. The admirals calculated that Britain would be starved into seeking peace within six months, before American help could matter. The United States broke off relations, and after the publication of the Zimmermann Telegram, in which Germany offered Mexico an alliance against the United States, declared war on 6 April 1917.

The second gamble was on Russia. The war had brought the tsarist regime down in the February Revolution of 1917, and the German government helped the Bolshevik leader Lenin to return from Switzerland, hoping he would take Russia out of the war. After the Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 they asked for an armistice. The Russian side of these events is the subject of the regional study of the Russian Revolution.

The Allies had a hard year. The French Nivelle Offensive (April 1917) failed and was followed by mutinies in much of the French army, which General Philippe Pétain ended by stopping major attacks and improving conditions. The British offensive at Passchendaele (July–November) cost about 250,000 or more British casualties for a few kilometres. At Caporetto (October 1917) German and Austro-Hungarian forces broke through on the Italian front and took more than 250,000 prisoners. At Cambrai (November 1917) the British showed how massed tanks and surprise artillery fire could break a trench line, although German counter-attacks recovered most of the ground.

1918: the last offensive and the Allied victory

By the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (3 March 1918), Soviet Russia gave up Poland, the Baltic provinces, Finland and Ukraine, territory with about a third of the old empire’s population and much of its coal, iron and industry. The treaty showed what a German victory would have meant, and it let Ludendorff move dozens of divisions to the west, although large forces stayed in the east to occupy the new territories.

Ludendorff’s Spring Offensives began on 21 March 1918 (Operation Michael). Using surprise bombardments and storm troops, the Germans advanced further than any army on the Western Front since 1914, and by June stood on the Marne less than 100 kilometres from Paris. But the offensives had no clear strategic goal, outran their supplies and cost the German army hundreds of thousands of its best soldiers. The crisis forced the Allies to unite their command: on 26 March Ferdinand Foch was given the coordination of the Allied armies, and in April he became their commander-in-chief.

The Allied counter-attack began on the Marne on 18 July. At Amiens on 8 August, British, Dominion and French troops with hundreds of tanks broke the German line, and in the "Hundred Days" that followed the Allies advanced on the whole front, with growing American forces in the Meuse-Argonne from 26 September. The Hindenburg Line was broken at the end of September. Germany’s allies collapsed one by one: Bulgaria signed an armistice on 29 September, the Ottoman Empire at Mudros on 30 October and Austria-Hungary at Villa Giusti on 3 November, after its army disintegrated at Vittorio Veneto and its nationalities declared independence.

On 29 September Ludendorff told the Kaiser that Germany must ask for an armistice at once. A new government under Prince Max of Baden approached President Wilson. In early November sailors at Kiel mutinied against orders for a last naval battle, and revolution spread to the cities. On 9 November the Kaiser’s abdication was announced and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin, and the next day Wilhelm II fled to the Netherlands. The armistice was signed in a railway carriage at Compiègne and took effect at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918.

Why Germany and the Central Powers were defeated

The Central Powers held out for more than four years against enemies with far greater resources, and in March 1918 Germany seemed closer to victory than at any time since 1914. Explaining their defeat means explaining both why they lasted so long and why they collapsed so quickly in the autumn of 1918.

Military strategy

The diagram of the reasons for defeat places military strategy first because the war Germany fought was the war it had planned to avoid. Its strategy depended on a quick victory over France; when that failed at the Marne, Germany faced a long war on two fronts, with allies that needed constant support. Austria-Hungary lost much of its pre-war army in 1914–1915, the Ottoman Empire was fighting on several fronts, and Bulgaria had limited strength.

German strategic choices then made matters worse. Verdun in 1916 bled the German army almost as much as the French. The decision for unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917 brought in the United States for a gain that the convoy system soon reduced. The Spring Offensives of 1918 spent Germany’s last reserves on attacks without a decisive objective. Each of these was a gamble on a quick decision, and each failed.

The Allies made serious mistakes too, at Gallipoli, on the Somme and in the Nivelle Offensive. But they learned. By 1918 the British, French and Dominion armies combined infantry, artillery, tanks and aircraft effectively, and the appointment of Foch gave them a unified command that the Central Powers never matched. German strategy in the last two years was also shaped by the dominance of Hindenburg and Ludendorff over the civilian government, which removed political restraint on military gambles.

Economic and technological factors

The Allies could draw on the resources of the British and French empires and, through trade and credit, of the United States, while the Central Powers were cut off by the British blockade. Germany organised its war economy with great skill, and the chemist Fritz Haber’s method of making nitrates allowed it to produce explosives and fertiliser without imports. But shortages of food, fats, rubber, copper and oil grew every year. Estimates of the German civilians who died of causes linked to hunger and disease during the war range from about 400,000 to about 760,000, and the figures are disputed. Austria-Hungary’s economy, less industrialised and divided between its Austrian and Hungarian halves, coped worse: by 1918 people in Vienna were going hungry while Hungary held back its grain.

Technology on its own decided little, because each side copied the other’s inventions. What mattered in 1918 was the quantity of weapons and the methods of using them. The Allies produced thousands of tanks; Germany built only about twenty of its own. Allied aircraft production far exceeded German output, and the Allies’ supplies of shells, lorries and fuel kept their advance moving in the Hundred Days while German units ran short.

The entry of the United States

American entry in April 1917 changed the balance in three ways. Economically, the United States had already sold huge quantities of munitions and food to the Allies, paid for partly by loans raised in America; after April 1917 the US government lent the Allies about 7 billion dollars more during the war, which kept Britain and France solvent. At sea, the US Navy helped to defeat the U-boats. Militarily, American soldiers arrived slowly but in large numbers: about 2 million had reached France by November 1918, and about 1 million fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

Historians disagree about how decisive the American army itself was. American divisions took part in heavy fighting only from mid-1918, and British, Dominion and French troops did most of the fighting in the Hundred Days. But the knowledge that millions more Americans were coming pushed Ludendorff to attack in the spring of 1918 and convinced German leaders in the autumn that the war could not be won. The American contribution was therefore greatest as a guarantee of future Allied superiority and as a source of money and supplies, more than as a fighting force in 1918.

Mobilisation of the home fronts

Total war depended on civilians as much as soldiers: they worked in the factories, grew the food, paid the taxes, bought war bonds and accepted the deaths of their sons. Every belligerent government took new powers over the economy and daily life.

The table of home fronts shows that the democracies held together better than the empires. Britain and France were fed through sea trade and their empires, and their parliaments gave governments legitimacy for their demands. In Germany hunger, the unequal burden of sacrifice and anger at war profiteers wore down the Burgfrieden; the Social Democrats split in 1917, and the Independent Social Democrats (USPD) opposed the war. In Austria-Hungary the war turned national grievances into movements for independence. Many historians therefore see the internal collapse of the Central Powers in 1918 as the result of the blockade and the long war, not as a separate cause of defeat.

The impact of the war on European countries

Every country that fought was changed by the war, but in different ways and to different degrees. Losses were heaviest, in proportion to population, in Serbia and France; political upheaval was greatest in the defeated empires. Germany and Britain, treated in depth, show the contrast between a defeated and a victorious great power; France, Austria, Hungary and Italy are summarised more briefly.

The chart of military deaths gives only part of the human cost. Millions more were wounded, and civilians died from hunger, disease, occupation and massacre, above all in the Armenian genocide carried out by the Ottoman government in 1915–1916. The influenza pandemic of 1918–1919, spread by troop movements and hitting populations weakened by the war, killed about 228,000 people in Britain alone.

Germany: social impact

About 2 million German soldiers died, about 15 per cent of the men who served. Estimates of the number left permanently disabled range from about 1.5 million to 2.7 million, depending on what counted as disability. An official count of 1920 recorded about 525,000 war widows and about 1.1 million orphans who had lost their fathers. Pensions for these groups took a large share of the post-war budget, and their claims became a constant political issue.

Defeat and revolution overturned the political order. In November 1918 the Kaiser and all the German princes lost their thrones, and the Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert headed a revolutionary government that called elections to a National Assembly. That assembly, meeting at Weimar to escape the unrest in Berlin, adopted the constitution of the Weimar Republic in July–August 1919. The first years of the republic were violent:

• The Spartacist rising (January 1919): a revolt by the newly founded Communist Party in Berlin was crushed by army units and the Freikorps, volunteer paramilitary units of former soldiers; its leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered.

• The Kapp Putsch (March 1920): Freikorps units tried to overthrow the government; the army refused to act, and the putsch collapsed after a general strike.

• Political murders: Matthias Erzberger, who had signed the armistice, was killed in August 1921 and the foreign minister Walther Rathenau in June 1922, both by right-wing nationalists.

• The Munich Putsch (8–9 November 1923): Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists tried to seize power in Bavaria and failed.

The political history of the Weimar Republic and the reasons for its later failure are part of the regional study of European totalitarianism. These events were consequences of the war: millions of men had been trained to kill and some could not return to civilian life, and the bitterness of defeat produced a violent politics on both the left and the right.

Many Germans could not accept that their army had been beaten, because the war had ended with German troops on foreign soil. The former commander-in-chief gave this belief official weight.

The obedient troops who remained immune to revolutionary attrition suffered greatly from the behavior, in violation of duty, of their revolutionary comrades; they had to carry the battle the whole time. … An English general said with justice: "The German army was stabbed in the back." No guilt applies to the good core of the army.

Paul von Hindenburg, testimony before the parliamentary committee of inquiry into the causes of the defeat, 18 November 1919 (translation, German History in Documents and Images). Hindenburg read a statement prepared with Ludendorff and the nationalist politician Karl Helfferich, ignoring the chairman’s objections. The "English general" was the British general Frederick Maurice, whose newspaper articles had been misquoted in a Swiss newspaper in December 1918 as saying that the army had been stabbed in the back. As evidence of why Germany lost, the testimony has no value; as evidence of how defeat was explained to Germans, it is central, because it spread the stab-in-the-back myth with the authority of the most respected man in the country.

Germany: economic impact

Germany paid for the war mainly by borrowing and printing money, expecting to make the defeated pay. The national debt rose from about 5 billion marks in 1914 to about 156 billion in 1918, and the mark lost more than half its value against the dollar. After 1918 governments faced the cost of pensions, demobilisation and, from 1921, reparations, with an economy that had lost territory, ships and foreign investments. They continued to cover deficits by printing money, partly because tax increases were politically dangerous and partly because inflation kept unemployment low and made the reparations burden seem impossible to pay.

Data: Reichsbank exchange rates as reported in Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic (Wikipedia, 2026) and contemporary sources; rounded.

The table of exchange rates shows inflation turning into hyperinflation in 1923. When Germany fell behind with reparations deliveries, French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr in January 1923. The government called on workers to stop work in protest (passive resistance) and paid them with printed money. Prices began to rise by the hour; workers were paid twice a day and rushed to spend their wages. In November 1923 the government introduced a new currency, the Rentenmark, and ended the inflation.

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The effects were very unequal. People with savings, war bonds, pensions or fixed incomes, many of them in the middle classes, saw them wiped out. Debtors gained, including landowners with mortgages, the state itself and industrialists such as Hugo Stinnes, who borrowed to buy up businesses. Many middle-class Germans blamed the republic for their ruin, a resentment that later helped extremist parties.

Germany: experiences of women

Millions of German women ran households and farms while their husbands served, and many lost husbands, fathers, brothers and fiancés. Women replaced men in metalworking, chemicals and munitions, and on farms and the railways; at the giant Krupp works in Essen, women made up a large part of the workforce by 1918. The historian Ute Daniel, in The War from Within (German edition 1989, English 1997), argues that the increase in women’s paid work was smaller than it seemed: most wartime women workers had worked before, and moved from textiles, domestic service and family farms into better-paid war industry.

Women’s most important experience of the German home front was the struggle for food. Women queued for hours for rationed goods, and from 1915 hungry women led protests and riots over food in Berlin and other cities. Belinda Davis, in Home Fires Burning (2000), shows that these protests forced the authorities to take the needs of "women of lesser means" seriously and helped to destroy the legitimacy of the imperial state when it failed to feed them.

The revolutionary government gave women the vote on 12 November 1918, and in January 1919 women voted for the first time; 37 women were elected to the National Assembly. The Weimar constitution declared that men and women had in principle the same civic rights and duties. But demobilisation orders of 1919 required employers to dismiss women to make room for returning soldiers, and most women left industrial jobs. Political equality advanced much more than economic equality.

Germany: experiences of marginalised groups

About 100,000 German Jews served in the army, and about 12,000 died. In October 1916, responding to antisemitic claims that Jews were avoiding front-line service, the War Ministry ordered a census of Jews in the army, the Jew count (Judenzählung). Its results were never published, which allowed the slander to continue, and German Jews saw the count as a betrayal of the Burgfrieden’s promise of unity. After the war antisemitic groups blamed Jews for defeat and revolution, and Rathenau, the most prominent Jewish politician, was murdered in 1922.

Disabled veterans were another group pushed to the edge. The Reich Pension Law of 1920 promised support, but inflation eroded pensions and many disabled men felt abandoned by the state and despised by a society that wanted to forget the war. Other minorities suffered from the new national tensions: Poles in the eastern provinces were caught up in the border fighting of 1919–1921, and from 1920 a nationalist campaign against the French colonial soldiers (many of them from Africa) stationed in the occupied Rhineland spread racist propaganda that also targeted the children of German women and these soldiers.

Britain: social and economic impact

About 750,000 men from the United Kingdom died, about one in eight of those who served, and more than 1.6 million were wounded. Losses fell heavily on young officers from the upper and middle classes, which gave rise to the idea of a "lost generation", although in absolute numbers most of the dead were working-class men. War memorials were built in almost every town and village in the early 1920s, and the Cenotaph in London and the burial of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey (November 1920) became national rituals of mourning.

Britain paid for the war partly by taxation, unlike Germany. The standard rate of income tax rose from about 6 per cent before the war to 30 per cent by 1918, and many more people paid it. The rest was borrowed, and the national debt rose roughly elevenfold, with interest payments taking a large share of the budget for decades. Britain also lost overseas markets: countries cut off from British exports during the war, such as India and those of Latin America, built their own industries or bought from the United States and Japan. Coal, cotton and shipbuilding, the old export industries, never recovered their pre-war position.

A short post-war boom in 1919–1920 was followed by a sharp slump. By mid-1921 more than 2 million people were unemployed. The government’s promise to build "homes fit for heroes" produced the Housing Act of 1919 (the Addison Act), the first large programme of council housing, but spending cuts from 1921 stopped it after about 213,000 homes had been built. Expectations raised by the war and disappointed afterwards fed industrial conflict: strikes by miners, railwaymen and others reached a peak in 1919–1921.

Britain: political change and the experiences of women

The Representation of the People Act of February 1918 gave the vote to all men over 21 and to women over 30 who met a property qualification, nearly tripling the electorate. The war also changed party politics. The Liberal Party split between the followers of H. H. Asquith and of Lloyd George, and the Labour Party, which had served in the wartime coalition, became the main opposition in 1922 and formed its first government in January 1924.

For women, the war brought both new opportunities and limits. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 opened the legal profession, juries and many public posts to women; the first women barristers and solicitors qualified in 1922. But most women who had taken industrial jobs left them by 1919, under agreements with trade unions or because employers dismissed them, and many returned to domestic service or unpaid work at home. Marriage bars, which forced women teachers and civil servants to resign when they married, spread in the early 1920s. Women did not win the vote on equal terms with men until 1928.

Britain: experiences of marginalised groups

Ireland was transformed. The Easter Rising of April 1916 in Dublin was defeated within a week, but the execution of its leaders and the threat of conscription in 1918 turned Irish opinion towards the republicans of Sinn Féin, which won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in December 1918. Its members set up their own parliament, the Dáil, in January 1919, and the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) followed. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 created the Irish Free State, a self-governing dominion, and confirmed the partition of Ireland.

Black and Asian workers and sailors, many recruited during the war, faced violence after it. In 1919, with unemployment rising among demobilised soldiers, white crowds attacked Black, Arab and Chinese residents in Liverpool, Cardiff, South Shields, Glasgow and other ports; in Liverpool a young Black sailor, Charles Wootton, was chased into the docks and drowned. Others on the margins included the roughly 16,000 conscientious objectors, who lost the vote for five years under the 1918 Act, and about 250,000 Belgian refugees, most of whom returned home in 1919.

Other countries: France, Austria, Hungary and Italy

The war had very different effects on the other European belligerents. The table of other countries summarises them; any of them can be studied as an alternative to Germany or Britain.

Data in the table of other countries are rounded; estimates of deaths and disabled vary between sources. The rise of Fascism in Italy out of these conditions is part of the regional study of European totalitarianism.

The Paris Peace Conference: aims and negotiations, 1919

The Paris Peace Conference opened on 18 January 1919, the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Empire. Delegations from about thirty states attended, but the defeated powers and Soviet Russia were excluded.

How the conference worked

At first the main decisions were taken by the Council of Ten (two delegates each from the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan). From late March 1919, to speed up work and keep discussions secret, the leaders met as the Council of Four: Woodrow Wilson, Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Vittorio Orlando. More than fifty commissions of experts drew borders and drafted clauses, often without knowing how their work fitted together. The treaties with Germany’s allies were left largely to the foreign ministers and to later conferences.

The Big Three agreed on some aims, such as a League of Nations, the disarmament of Germany and the payment of reparations, but disagreed sharply on how far to weaken Germany. Wilson spoke for a peace based on his Fourteen Points and on the principle of self-determination; Clemenceau for security for France against a neighbour with a larger population and economy; Lloyd George for a peace that would satisfy British voters, protect the empire and leave Germany able to trade.

The main disputes

• The Rhineland. Clemenceau and Marshal Foch wanted the left bank of the Rhine separated from Germany as a buffer state. Wilson and Lloyd George refused. In the compromise of April 1919 the Rhineland was demilitarised and occupied for fifteen years, and Britain and the United States promised to defend France if Germany attacked it.

• The Saar. France asked for the coal-rich Saar as compensation for its flooded mines; instead the Saar was placed under the League of Nations for fifteen years, with its mines owned by France and a plebiscite to follow.

• Poland. The new Polish state was promised access to the sea. The commission on Poland proposed giving it Danzig and Upper Silesia. Lloyd George argued that too many Germans would be placed under Polish rule; Danzig became a Free City under the League, and a plebiscite was held in Upper Silesia.

• Reparations. The Allies could not agree on a figure. Britain insisted that war pensions be included in the bill, which increased Britain’s share; the amount was left to a Reparation Commission to fix by May 1921.

• Italy’s claims. Orlando demanded the territory promised in the Treaty of London (1915) and also the port of Fiume (Rijeka), which had not been promised. When Wilson appealed directly to the Italian people against the claim, the Italian delegation left Paris in protest in April 1919.

Lloyd George set out the danger of a vindictive peace in the Fontainebleau Memorandum of 25 March 1919, written after a weekend of discussion with his advisers. He warned that Germany could be stripped of its colonies and reduced to a small army and navy, but that if it felt it had been unjustly treated it would "find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors". Clemenceau replied that Britain was asking France to make concessions in Europe while keeping the German colonies and fleet it had already won.

Germany and the treaty

The German delegation, led by the foreign minister Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, was given the draft treaty on 7 May 1919. In his reply he refused to accept that Germany alone was guilty of the war, telling the Allied leaders that such a confession on his lips would be a lie. Germany sent long written counter-proposals on 29 May. The Allies made a few changes, most importantly the plebiscite in Upper Silesia, and on 16 June gave Germany a final ultimatum: sign within days or face renewed war.

The Scheidemann government resigned rather than sign. On 21 June the crews of the German fleet interned at Scapa Flow scuttled their ships so that they could not be handed over. On 22 June the National Assembly voted by 237 to 138 to accept the treaty, and it was signed in the Hall of Mirrors on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination at Sarajevo.

The treaties with Germany and its allies

Peace was made through five treaties, each named after a place near Paris, plus the Treaty of Lausanne that replaced the treaty with the Ottoman Empire. The table of the treaties compares their terms.

Data: territorial and population figures are rounded and vary between sources, because the treaties used different census years.

The table of treaties shows a pattern. Every defeated state lost territory to its neighbours and was disarmed, and every treaty included the Covenant of the League of Nations. But the treaties with Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria were in many ways harsher than Versailles: Germany kept most of its industry and almost all its German-speaking population, while Hungary lost most of its territory and Austria was reduced to a small, poor state.

The ethnic map of Austria-Hungary shows why the principle of nationality could not be applied cleanly. In much of central Europe, especially Transylvania, southern Slovakia, the Banat and the Bohemian borderlands, peoples were mixed, and the peacemakers also gave weight to strategy, railways and the claims of allies. The new borders mostly favoured states that had fought on the Allied side or were created by Allied decision, such as Czechoslovakia and Romania.

From Sèvres to Lausanne

The Treaty of Sèvres was the only settlement overturned by force. In May 1919 Greek troops landed at Smyrna with Allied approval, and in the Greco-Turkish War that followed the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal drove them out in 1922. Allied unity collapsed: France and Italy made their own agreements with Kemal, and Britain was left almost alone at Chanak in September 1922. The new Treaty of Lausanne recognised a sovereign Turkey. Its convention on the exchange of populations (January 1923) forced about 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Turkey and about 400,000 Muslims from Greece to move, one of the first internationally agreed compulsory population exchanges. The Turkish side of these events belongs to the regional study of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of Türkiye.

Reactions to the peace settlement

Germany

Almost all Germans, from nationalists to Social Democrats, rejected the treaty. They called it a Diktat, a dictated peace, because Germany had not been allowed to negotiate; they argued that it broke the promise of a peace based on the Fourteen Points, on which they had asked for an armistice; and they rejected Article 231, which they called the war guilt clause, because it seemed to make Germany alone responsible for the war. The head of the government made the case in the National Assembly in May 1919.

Allow me to speak quite without tactical considerations: the basis for our deliberations, this thick book (referring to the conditions of peace), in which one hundred paragraphs begin with "Germany renounces—renounces—renounces," this dreadful and murderous hammer of witches, intended to pressure and extort a great people into professing its own unworthiness and agreeing to relentless dismemberment, enslavement and helotism— (Very true!) this book must not become the legal code of the future!

Philipp Scheidemann, minister president (head of government), speech to the National Assembly, 12 May 1919 (translation, German History in Documents and Images). Scheidemann was a Social Democrat who had proclaimed the republic in November 1918, so his anger shows that rejection of the treaty was not confined to the nationalist right. He spoke to a national audience before the Allies had answered Germany’s counter-proposals, so the speech was also a bargaining move. When the Allies refused to change the terms, his government resigned rather than sign, and the politicians who did sign were later denounced by the right as the "November criminals".

Germany’s allies

In Hungary the Treaty of Trianon was experienced as a national catastrophe. Flags were flown at half-mast, and every Hungarian government between the wars demanded revision of the treaty; the slogan "Nem, nem, soha!" ("No, no, never!") became a national motto. Bulgaria resented the loss of its Aegean coast, and in Austria many people wanted the union with Germany that the treaty forbade.

The victors

Victory did not mean satisfaction. In Italy, nationalists complained of a "mutilated victory", a phrase used by the poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio, because Italy received less than it had been promised. In September 1919 D’Annunzio led a force of volunteers that seized Fiume and held it until December 1920; Italian disillusion with the settlement helped Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922.

In France many believed the treaty was too lenient. Foch argued that without the Rhine frontier France was not secure, and the security guarantee lapsed when the US Senate rejected the treaty in November 1919 and March 1920 and Britain declined to act alone. In Britain and the United States, by contrast, opinion moved towards the view that the treaty was too harsh, influenced above all by the economist John Maynard Keynes, who had resigned from the British delegation.

The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable,—abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe.

John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, December 1919, chapter V. Keynes had been the Treasury’s chief representative at Paris and wrote the book in anger after resigning in June 1919. It was a best-seller in Britain and the United States. As a source it shows how an influential British expert turned the debate about reparations into a moral question; its economic predictions were disputed by later historians, and its portraits of Wilson and Clemenceau were written to persuade, not to be fair.

Economic and political impact of the settlement, to 1923

The diagram of the settlement’s impact groups its effects to 1923. In western Europe the treaties ended the war; in the east, where empires had collapsed, borders were decided as much by fighting as by the decisions of Paris.

New states and national minorities

The settlement confirmed the independence of Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia), Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and greatly enlarged Romania. For tens of millions of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, South Slavs and Romanians, 1918–1919 meant national independence or unification, the realisation of the goals of national movements going back to the nineteenth century.

But the new states contained large minorities. About a third of the people of Poland were not Poles (Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians and Germans), and Czechoslovakia had about 3 million Germans and nearly 750,000 Hungarians. The peacemakers had moved borders more than people, and the minority treaties were difficult to enforce. Minorities that had belonged to the ruling nationality before 1918, such as Germans and Hungarians, found it hardest to accept their new status, and their governments in Berlin and Budapest supported their grievances.

Wars after the war

Fighting continued in eastern Europe for years. The Polish–Soviet War (1919–1921) began over the undefined border between the new Poland and Soviet Russia. After the Red Army was defeated near Warsaw in August 1920, the Treaty of Riga (March 1921) gave Poland a border far to the east of the line proposed by the Allies, leaving millions of Ukrainians and Belarusians in Poland. In Ukraine, fought over by Reds, Whites, Ukrainian nationalists and Poles, pogroms in 1918–1921 killed tens of thousands of Jews. Poland also seized Vilnius from Lithuania in 1920, and Polish and German irregulars fought in Upper Silesia in 1919–1921 before the League divided it. Robert Gerwarth, in The Vanquished (2016), puts the number who died in the civil wars, revolutions and conflicts that followed the armistice in central, eastern and south-eastern Europe at about four million, most of them in the Russian Civil War.

The defence and the revision of the settlement

States that gained from the treaties combined to defend them. In 1920–1921 Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia formed the Little Entente, a set of alliances aimed mainly at preventing Hungarian attempts to recover lost territory or restore the Habsburgs, and France supported them and signed an alliance with Poland in 1921. The excluded powers moved closer to each other: at Rapallo in April 1922, during an international economic conference at Genoa, Germany and Soviet Russia restored diplomatic relations and renounced claims against each other in the Treaty of Rapallo, and later developed secret military cooperation.

The League of Nations, set up by the Covenant in all the treaties, met for the first time in January 1920. Without the United States, Germany or Soviet Russia, it was dominated by Britain and France. It settled some disputes, such as the Åland Islands (1921) and the partition of Upper Silesia, and organised a rescue loan for Austria in 1922, but it could not stop the Polish seizure of Vilnius, and in 1923 Mussolini’s occupation of Corfu showed that a great power could defy it. The League’s later record belongs to the regional study of Europe and the Second World War.

Reparations and the crisis of 1923

The economic clauses produced the sharpest conflict. In May 1921, under the reparations clauses of the treaty, the London Schedule of Payments set Germany’s reparations at 132 billion gold marks, of which only the first 50 billion were expected to be paid in practice. Germany paid the first instalment but then asked for postponements, and in late 1922 the Reparation Commission declared it in default on deliveries of timber and coal. On 11 January 1923 French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, the centre of German heavy industry, to take the deliveries by force.

The occupation was a political and economic disaster for both sides. German passive resistance and the money printed to finance it destroyed the currency; French costs were high and Britain disapproved. In September 1923 the new German chancellor, Gustav Stresemann, ended passive resistance and accepted the need to negotiate. The crisis showed that the settlement could not be enforced against German resistance without damaging the victors too, and it led to the international rescheduling of reparations in 1924, which lies beyond 1923.

Perspectives and debates

Almost every question about this period is contested: by contemporaries, who blamed their enemies, and by historians, whose views have changed with new archives and with the experience of later events, above all the Second World War.

Bismarck’s system: masterpiece or juggling act?

Older accounts, such as William L. Langer’s European Alliances and Alignments, 1871–1890 (1931), present Bismarck’s alliances as a masterpiece that kept the peace for twenty years. Later historians are more critical. They point out that the system depended on Bismarck’s personal skill, that its secret and contradictory promises could not have lasted, and that his own policies, such as the Lombardverbot, pushed Russia towards France. A middle view holds that the system did its job, keeping France isolated and the eastern empires in check, while leaving the underlying problems of the Balkans unsolved for his successors.

Weltpolitik: domestic pressures or world power?

In Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik (1930), Eckart Kehr argued that the fleet was built for domestic reasons: to give industry contracts and to unite the propertied classes against the socialists, a "primacy of domestic politics". From the 1960s Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in Das Deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (1973), developed this into a theory of social imperialism: the old elites used nationalism and expansion to distract the masses and defend their power. Geoff Eley, in Reshaping the German Right (1980), replied that the pressure for expansion came as much from below, from nationalist associations such as the Navy League, as from manipulation by the elites.

Other historians stress foreign policy and personalities. Klaus Hildebrand emphasised Germany’s exposed position in the centre of Europe and the logic of great-power rivalry. John Röhl, in his three-volume biography Wilhelm II (1993–2008), argues that the Kaiser’s personal rule was real and that his views shaped policy, while Christopher Clark, in Kaiser Wilhelm II (2000), sees a more erratic and less powerful figure whose interventions disrupted policy more than they directed it. Paul Kennedy, in The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (1980), traces the conflict with Britain to the economic and strategic rise of Germany as much as to any one decision.

Who was responsible for the war in 1914?

In Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961), Fritz Fischer used German archives to start what became known as the Fischer thesis, arguing that Germany’s leaders had aims of expansion, set out most clearly in Bethmann Hollweg’s September Memorandum of 1914, and used the July Crisis to fight a war they were prepared to risk. In War of Illusions (1969) he went further, presenting the meeting of December 1912 as the moment when war was planned. Gerhard Ritter, in The Sword and the Sceptre (Staatskunst und Kriegshandwerk, 1954–1968), led the opposition: he accepted that German militarism was dangerous but argued that Bethmann Hollweg sought to limit the war and that Germany had acted defensively.

1. France. The military authorities are to judge whether the annexation of Belfort, the western slopes of the Vosges, the demolition of the fortresses, and the annexation of the coastline from Dunkirk to Boulogne is to be demanded. In all events, because it is necessary for our industry’s iron-ore production, the basin of Briey is to be annexed. Furthermore, a war indemnity, to be paid in installments. It is to be so high that France will be unable in the next 18 to 20 years to expend major sums on armaments.

Memorandum from the office of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, drafted by his secretary Kurt Riezler (the "September Programme"), 9 September 1914 (translation by Jeffrey Verhey and Roger Chickering, German History in Documents and Images). The memorandum was written when German armies seemed about to win in the west, during the Battle of the Marne. For Fischer it showed long-held ambitions to dominate Europe; his critics reply that it was drawn up after the war had begun, as a plan for victory, and so cannot prove why Germany went to war; it was also never adopted as a formal programme.

Since the 1990s historians have looked beyond Berlin. Samuel R. Williamson Jr., in Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (1991), stresses that Vienna chose war first and for its own reasons. Sean McMeekin, in The Russian Origins of the First World War (2011), argues that Russian ambitions at the Straits and early secret mobilisation measures made Russia a major cause of the war. Niall Ferguson, in The Pity of War (1998), argues that Britain’s decision to intervene turned a continental war into a world war, and that Britain could have stayed out. Christopher Clark, in The Sleepwalkers (2012), spreads responsibility across all the capitals, Belgrade included.

Others defend a modified Fischer view. Annika Mombauer, in Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (2001), shows how strongly the German general staff pressed for war in 1914 while it believed Germany could still win. James Joll, in The Origins of the First World War (1984), pointed to the "unspoken assumptions" shared by the leaders of every country, such as the acceptance of war as a normal tool of policy and the belief that it would be short.

Weighing these views depends on the question. If responsibility means the decision to start a war, the evidence points first to Vienna, with Berlin’s encouragement. If it means turning a Balkan war into a European one, Russian mobilisation, the German war plan and the British decision all mattered. The two questions have different answers, and a single guilty power does not answer both.

Why did Germany lose?

Interpretations of German defeat differ in what they place at the centre. Avner Offer, in The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation (1989), argues that food decided the war: the blockade starved Germany while the Allies were fed from across the oceans. Wilhelm Deist argued in 1986 that the German army collapsed from within in 1918, as hundreds of thousands of soldiers avoided the front in a "covert military strike"; Alexander Watson, in Enduring the Great War (2008), shows how German troops began to surrender in large numbers once they lost confidence in their officers and in victory. Holger Herwig, in The First World War: Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1918 (1997), stresses the poor strategic judgement of the German leadership and the weakness of its alliance. David Stevenson, in With Our Backs to the Wall (2011), combines Allied material superiority, improved Allied tactics and German errors in 1918.

Did the war change the lives of women?

Arthur Marwick, in The Deluge (1965), presented total war as a powerful cause of social change in Britain, and the vote for women in 1918 and the new jobs open to them as part of it. Later historians questioned how much changed. Gail Braybon, in Women Workers in the First World War (1981), argued that most of the gains in employment were temporary: women were pushed out of men’s trades after the war, and employers, unions and the government all expected them to go back to the home. Ute Daniel’s study of Germany reaches a similar conclusion about the pattern of work, and Belinda Davis shows that the war’s largest effect on German women was political, through the protests over food. The perspectives differ partly because they measure different things: the vote and legal rights changed more than pay, jobs and the division of labour in the family.

The peace settlement: too harsh, too weak or impossible?

Keynes’s attack on the treaty in 1919 shaped opinion in Britain and the United States for a generation. More recent historians ask different questions. Alan Sharp, in The Versailles Settlement (1991; third edition 2018), argues that the peacemakers faced an almost impossible task: they had to satisfy their own voters, build new states out of collapsed empires and restrain a Germany that remained potentially the strongest power in Europe, with no agreement among themselves on how to enforce the result. Sally Marks, in "Mistakes and Myths" (2013), argues that German governments exaggerated the burden of the treaty and of reparations, and that the Allies lost the argument by failing to explain or enforce it.

Robert Gerwarth, in The Vanquished (2016), moves the focus east and to the defeated. He argues that the collapse of the empires and the violence of 1917–1923 (revolutions, civil wars, border wars and population transfers) mattered as much as the terms of the treaties in shaping the instability of the inter-war years. Adam Tooze, in The Deluge (2014), argues that the settlement depended on American power, which the United States was unwilling to commit. From these perspectives, the weakness of the settlement lay less in the harshness of its terms than in the lack of any power willing and able to uphold it.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

Paper 3: Bismarck’s alliance system

Paper 3: Weltpolitik

Paper 3: the outbreak of war

Paper 3: the impact of the war on women

Paper 3: the peace treaties

Self-check

• To do:

  I can explain how the unification of Germany changed the balance of power in Europe after 1871.

• To do:

  I can describe Bismarck’s aims and the alliances he made between 1873 and 1887, and explain their contradictions.

• To do:

  I can explain the Eastern Question and the outcomes of the Congress of Berlin for Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Balkan states.

• To do:

  I can explain how imperial expansion both eased and created tensions between the European powers.

• To do:

  I can describe the decline of the Ottoman Empire from 1878 to 1913 and explain why it endangered European peace.

• To do:

  I can explain how domestic conditions and the role of Wilhelm II shaped German foreign policy after 1890.

• To do:

  I can explain the aims of Weltpolitik and the Tirpitz Plan, and how Britain, France, Russia and Austria-Hungary responded.

• To do:

  I can explain the significance of the Moroccan crises, the Bosnian crisis and the Balkan Wars.

• To do:

  I can explain the roles of Balkan nationalism, the arms race, the war plans and the alliance system in causing the war.

• To do:

  I can narrate the July Crisis and explain the key decisions taken in each capital.

• To do:

  I can outline the main phases of the war and the strategies of the two sides.

• To do:

  I can weigh military strategy, economic and technological factors, the entry of the USA and the home fronts as reasons for the defeat of the Central Powers.