Hi
If the world’s leading experts had to form a consensus on the causes of World War I, what would they be ?
I look forward to your feedback.
davidmich
http://www.royalmint.com/pre-register/edith-cavell
Professor Sir Hew Strachan, Trustee of the Imperial War Museums and one of the world’s leading experts on the First World War.
As Oxford University’s Professor of International History, Margaret MacMillan is one of the world’s leading experts on the First World War.
This wikipedia article is a good place to start:
An informed general consensus would lay primary blame on the Central Powers for invading their neighbors.
I didn’t know MacMillan was Lloyd George’s great-granddaughter.
Here’s another quick perspective: John Green’s Crash Course - How World War I Started and Who Started World War I.
I will go with the entangling alliances theory that everybody was allied to protect someone or other and the dominoes fell.
It had been a long time since there was a large war in Europe and prior to WWI war was glorified and sensible men who didn’t want to kill/die violently in conflict between nations were shamed as cowards. WWI and the trenches and machine guns and the gas and the stupid generals and photography and the millions of deaths made war look almost as miserable and futile as it really is to the average viewer. The American War of Northern Aggression Against Slaveholders didn’t have as much photography, machine guns or the misery of living in trenches. Even Theodore Roosevelt, who loved war and killing was disgusted with WWI, a war he wanted the United States to enter. How anyone can see modernized war as romantic and glorious is beyond me.
Excellent.
I wonder how many experts accept the reasoning put forth by some that it was the collusion between the German Foreign Ministry and Mexico that swayed the US to enter the war.
“After his reelection in 1916, Wilson offered to mediate a peace; but both sides refused. Berlin then decided on unrestricted submarine warfare, beginning 1 February 1917, to starve Britain into terms. Wilson severed diplomatic relations on 3 February. American public opinion was also inflamed by the Zimmermann note, in which Germany sought a military alliance with Mexico(under President Carranza) against the United States. When submarines sank three American merchant ships, Wilson abandoned temporary armed neutrality and decided to take the United States into the war, in part because his strict accountability policy had failed and in part because he wanted the United States to help shape a treaty for peace.”
Niall Ferguson in his “Colossus The Rise and Fall of the American Empire” states that :
"it was not the sinking of the Lusitania that brought the United States into the First World War…but the exposure of a spectacularly clumsy attempt by the German Foreign Ministry to enlist both Japan and Mexico on the side of the central Powers in the event of an American decision for war. The inducement the Germans offered President Carranza was “an understanding…that Mexico is to re-conquer the lost territories in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona” (p. 62)