The Lamps Go Out

Here is the paradox that still haunts international relations: every alliance formed to prevent war made war more likely. By 1907, Europe had organized itself into two armed camps so rigid that any bilateral dispute would automatically become a continental one. The architecture of "peace through strength" became the architecture of collective suicide.

On one side, the Triple Alliance — born from the Dual Alliance of 1879 between Germany and Austria-Hungary, expanded in 1882 to include Italy. On the other, the Triple Entente — stitched together from the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Entente Cordiale of 1904, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. Each agreement was rational in isolation. Together, they formed a doomsday machine.

The Franco-Russian pact alone committed Russia to deploy 700,000–800,000 troops against Germany if France were attacked. That single clause meant a Balkan crisis involving Austria-Hungary would drag in Russia (Slavic solidarity), which would activate Germany (Dual Alliance), which would trigger France (Franco-Russian Alliance), which would pull in Britain (Entente Cordiale's informal military cooperation). No one designed this cascade. Everyone contributed to it.

By 1913, Germany had surpassed Britain in manufacturing output — 14.8% of global production versus Britain's 13.6%. Read that again. The country that invented the Industrial Revolution had been overtaken by a nation that didn't even exist as a unified state until 1871. That statistic alone explains much of what followed.

Kaiser Wilhelm II's Weltpolitik — his demand for Germany's "place in the sun" — wasn't irrational. Germany was the continent's largest economy and yet possessed a colonial empire laughably small compared to Britain's or France's. The problem was method. The First Moroccan Crisis of 1905, in which Wilhelm personally visited Tangier to challenge French influence, backfired spectacularly: the Algeciras Conference of 1906 left Germany more isolated, not less. The Agadir Crisis of 1911 — when Germany dispatched the gunboat Panther to Morocco — pushed Britain and France into a naval cooperation agreement that effectively made the Entente a military reality.

Economic anxiety ran both ways. German exports to Britain totaled 1.4 billion Marks by 1913, while British exports to Germany reached £40.6 million. Interdependence was supposed to make war unthinkable. Instead, it made each side terrified of the other's growth. The logic of empire — that national greatness required territorial expansion — was the shared delusion. The competition over who got to exploit which part of Africa or Asia poisoned relations between nations that had far more to gain from cooperation than conflict.

When HMS Dreadnought launched in 1906, it rendered every battleship afloat instantly obsolete — including Britain's own massive fleet. The ship's all-big-gun design, turbine propulsion, and unprecedented speed meant the naval balance reset to zero overnight. By 1914, Britain had built 29 dreadnoughts to Germany's 17. The gap never closed, but Germany's attempt to close it consumed both nations.

On land, the numbers were even more staggering. Russia's peacetime army stood at 1.4 million — the largest on earth — with the capacity to mobilize 5 million. France, with a smaller population than Germany, extended conscription from two years to three in 1913, maintaining 820,000 active troops. Germany's 1913 Army Bill pushed its peacetime strength to 800,000, expandable to 4 million on mobilization. Britain's army was a comparative runt at 250,000, but its navy was the world's largest by a wide margin.

Behind these numbers sat a more insidious force: war planning as destiny. The Schlieffen Plan, devised by Count Alfred von Schlieffen and modified by Moltke the Younger, required Germany to knock out France in 42 days before pivoting east to face Russia's slow mobilization. This plan had a terrifying implication: once Russia began mobilizing, Germany had to attack immediately or lose its only strategic advantage. Military timetables replaced political judgment. The generals didn't just prepare for war — they made it structurally impossible to stop.

If the alliance system was the explosive and the arms race was the detonator, the Balkans were the fuse. The Ottoman Empire's slow-motion collapse created a vacuum that every neighboring power rushed to fill — and the competing claims of Austrian imperialism and Serbian nationalism made violence virtually certain.

The Bosnian Crisis of 1908 was the dress rehearsal. When Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Russia were outraged but lacked the military strength to respond. Germany's unambiguous diplomatic support for Austria forced Russia to back down — a humiliation Tsar Nicholas II vowed would never be repeated. That vow, made in private fury, would prove decisive six years later.

Then came the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, which redrew the map catastrophically. The Ottoman Empire lost 83% of its European territory. Serbia doubled in size, absorbing Kosovo and Northern Macedonia. Pan-Slavic confidence soared. But a swollen, emboldened Serbia was exactly what Austria-Hungary feared most — a magnet for the empire's own restive South Slavic populations. The Black Hand (Ujedinjenje ili Smrt), led by Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević ("Apis"), head of Serbian military intelligence, represented the most extreme expression of this nationalist energy. Their weapon of choice would be a 19-year-old student with a pistol.

The date itself was a provocation. June 28 — St. Vitus Day, Vidovdan — is the most sacred date in Serbian national mythology, commemorating the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. For the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, to tour Sarajevo on this day was either an act of breathtaking ignorance or deliberate defiance. The Black Hand saw it as both.

The first assassination attempt that morning failed — a bomb bounced off the Archduke's car and detonated under the vehicle behind. Franz Ferdinand, shaken but determined, continued to City Hall. It was the return journey that proved fatal. The motorcade took a wrong turn onto Franz Josef Street. The driver stopped. And there, standing on the corner by sheer coincidence after the earlier plan had collapsed, was Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student, armed with a Browning pistol. Two shots. The Archduke and his wife Sophie were dead within the hour.

The assassination was a local act with global consequences — but only because every major power chose to use it as an opportunity rather than contain it. Austria-Hungary wanted to crush Serbia. Germany wanted to back its ally. Russia refused another Bosnian humiliation. France honored its alliance. Britain had commitments it couldn't abandon. Every capital made a rational decision in isolation. Together, they were catastrophic.

The five weeks between assassination and general war are the most studied diplomatic failure in history. Every step toward the abyss was a choice — and every choice narrowed the next one.

On July 5, Kaiser Wilhelm II issued the infamous "blank cheque" — Germany's unconditional pledge of support for whatever action Austria-Hungary chose to take against Serbia. This wasn't just diplomatic backing; it was an explicit encouragement to be aggressive. Vienna took nearly three weeks to act on it, delivering a deliberately unacceptable ultimatum on July 23 — 10 demands designed to be refused. Serbia's reply, submitted on July 25, accepted nine of the ten points but balked at Point 6: allowing Austro-Hungarian officials to conduct investigations on Serbian soil. It was a minor objection to a major intrusion. Austria declared war on July 28 anyway.

The dominos fell fast. Tsar Nicholas II ordered general mobilization on July 30 — the point of no return for Germany, whose Schlieffen Plan required striking west before Russia was ready. Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, on France on August 3, and invaded Belgium the same day. Britain's entry on August 4 came via the Treaty of London of 1839, guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg dismissed this treaty as "a scrap of paper." Britain disagreed.

The ink on the armistice was barely dry before the argument began, and it hasn't stopped since. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles — the "War Guilt Clause" — formally assigned blame to Germany and its allies. This was politics masquerading as history, and the resentment it generated helped fuel the rise of National Socialism. But was it wrong?

Fritz Fischer thought so — or rather, he thought it didn't go far enough. His 1961 blockbuster Germany's Aims in the First World War argued that Germany's political and military leadership had actively planned a war of aggression from 1912 onward, seeking Weltmacht (world power) status and using war to resolve domestic social tensions. The Fischer thesis caused a firestorm in Germany — partly because it implicitly connected Wilhelmine aggression to the Nazi catastrophe that followed.

A.J.P. Taylor offered a different villain: the railway timetable. His "war by timetable" thesis argued that rigid mobilization plans — particularly the Schlieffen Plan's 42-day clock — stripped decision-making from politicians and handed it to logistics officers. Once the first mobilization order went out, the machinery couldn't be stopped. War became not a political choice but a scheduling inevitability.

The most influential recent intervention is Christopher Clark's 2012 masterwork The Sleepwalkers, which rejects the search for a single villain entirely. Clark portrays all the European powers as "sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world." His argument — that mutual distrust, strategic paranoia, and institutional incompetence shared across every capital produced the catastrophe — is both more generous and more damning than any single-culprit theory. If everyone is guilty, then the system itself was the problem. And that system, in various forms, still exists.