CAUSES AND LESSONS: WW1
•Why is WW1 the most studied war by both historians and politics
scientists?
•We tend to favor what we can remember: The systematic study of
politics was born in the 1950s
•It is a war that can be well explained from any of the three major
lenses/images
•It appears to be a break point from the past because the degree of
industrialization, nationalism, and colonialism will make the scope,
cost, and speed of war qualitatively different going forward: At least
15 million people died (vs. approx 60K in both Vietnam & Korea).
•It is puzzling: Although the war wasn’t “accidental,” none of the key
decision-makers appears to have wanted or expected the scale of
damage
•It provoked serious soul searching after the fact and the first efforts
at truly global peacemaking strategies, including WMD limitations
and collective security institutions
WHAT SYSTEM-LEVEL
ISSUES CAUSED WW1?
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How did Britain’s relative decline and particularly its eclipse as the
global hegemon impact war? (1860: 25% GNP, 1913: 10% vs. Germany
15%)
How did the consolidation of Germany through conflict and US
expansion in the Pacific set the table for war?
How did status discrepancies & the emphasis on imperialism lead to
war?
Did the European arms (especially the fact that it was naval) race make
war inevitable? Why did Germany move so fast to translate its
economic power into military might?
Changing balances of power, security dilemmas, and preventative war:
– Triple Entente (Fr., Brit., Russia) vs. The Central Powers/The Triple
Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungry, not Italy)
– How did the rigidity of bi-polar alliances (vs. Bismark’s flexibility) in
the context of a changing global power create issues?
WHAT SOCIETAL ISSUES
CAUSED WW1?
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Could Lenin’s theory of imperialism explain the war?
Did regime type matter? Thinking about the US’s late entry vs. everyone
else… What would have happened if divided powers were the norm?
Did the fact that all of the major powers involved were except for the US
to some degree were experiencing domestic problems explain
anything?
– Would a democratic Germany have gone to war? Would a Germany
that hadn’t been recently formed?
– What would have happened if British and US politics had better
allowed both countries to better articulate the fact that they would
enter the war? (Was there a lack of a deterrent to the Central
Powers?)
Domestic populations and “war fatigue”? Had Europe forgotten the
costs of war? How do global attitudes about conflict impact its
outbreak?
What was the main military doctrine of the day in Europe (Cashman
describes it as “the cult of the offensive”); The sense was that fast, hard
aggression would shorten wars (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2?)
WHAT INDIVIDUAL ISSUES
CAUSED WW1?
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How important were poor choices, misperceptions, and appeals to nationalism
through propaganda?
How did stress, mental abilities, and personality disorders lead to both
misperceptions and miscalculations?
– Germany’s Kaiser (Wilhelm II): Did his insecurities lead to too much hard
power and a complete neglect of soft power; did it lead to a heightened
sense of discrepancy (compare to China today)
– Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian emperor was a “tired, old man who was
controlled by power hungry generals and foreign ministers
– Czar Nicholas II was an isolated autocrat who was mostly focused on home
issues.
– Compare this to Wilson in the US, who resisted war as long as he could
Why didn’t leaders see what would happen? Information screens and cognitive
dissonance are worse in a world that doesn’t have modern communications
Was there a failure to empathize the pressures at play in other states?
Did the political systems in place at the time play a role in making leaders
incorrectly gauge the conflict? Group think and insulation
WHAT LESSONS DID WE TAKE
AWAY FROM WW1?
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Comparing the end of WW1 vs. WW2
What happens when you punish enemy populations?
Does collective security work any better than relying on balances of
power and treaties? (Why did W Wilson think the League of Nations
would work?)
– They are forward thinking and flexible over time as balances and
the relative power of individual states change; they encourage
otherwise neutral parties to work towards peace; they balance the
“rights” of sovereignty with basic obligations
How did WW1cause us to rethink through the relationship between
economics and war?
How did WW1 impact the rules of war? Chemical weapons as a new
framework for thinking about indiscriminate weapons of mass
destruction (WMDs)