It’s an interesting line of thought.
While it isn’t the only view, it’s a popular view that from at least the 1400s onwards a huge reason for most European wars was a desire to maintain a certain balance of power. While not always the explicit cause, if you look at most major European wars until German unification there is usually a great power wanting to expand at the expense of one of the minor powers and another great power not wishing to see a rival great power become too powerful.
The battlefields tended to be the lands of the minor powers, typically fragmentary parts of Europe that were mostly collections of small independent states. France and Austria frequently had wars involving Italy, because up until Italian unification Italy was a bunch of tiny little republics, principalities, kingdoms, and dukedoms and the two nearest great powers, Austria and France, were often involved in Italian politics trying to get land and influence on the peninsula. Likewise power and influence in Germany were constantly fought over.
Austria was always closely scrutinized by other great powers. It was bad enough that Austria had a major European empire that included all of Hungary, portions of Germany, Italy, and the Low Countries. On top of that from I believe the reign of Charles V and forward you had Hapsburgs on the throne of Spain as well, whose own empire included vast overseas holdings as well as southern Italy and land in the Low Countries (incidentally this is why some people will distinguish between the Austrian and Spanish Netherlands, because the Spanish Hapsburgs had some lands there and the Austrian Hapsburgs had some land there.) (This map shows what I mean.)
During the reign of Charles V all that land was actually ruled by one man (and that map doesn’t show the New World), it was mostly not ruled by one person after his death but it was ruled by Hapsburg monarchs and their interests often aligned and they often worked together (they warred against each other sometimes, too.)
Given the vast power of Austria already the other Great Powers were pretty much willing to go to war to keep Austria from getting more influence in Germany. While their title as Holy Roman Empire technically meant they were ultimate sovereigns over all of Germany, as most know the HRE did not actually function that way. It wasn’t a total paper tiger, though. The Emperor was an important figure across the entire HRE, he had great influence there and in pretty much every major war Austria ever fought (up until the HRE was disbanded) large portions of its constituent states would side with and fight for the Emperor.
France of course was also highly expansionist and powers like Russia and England/Great Britain/United Kingdom (depending on date) were always quick to check French power. In particular England’s policy from the early 1500s up until the Napoleonic wars was to essentially pick sides in European wars based on which Great Power was seen as likely to become too powerful if it won the war, England would pick the other side. This is why out of context the sides Great Britain would pick in various wars might seem a little odd. In the 1740s Great Britain sided with Austria when Frederick the Great decided to invade Silesia, mostly because so many of Austria’s neighbors were clamoring for territorial expansion at the expense of the new Empress Maria-Theresa that Great Britain feared Austria would become too weak and that other continental powers would thus benefit. Not even twenty years later however, Great Britain was fighting with Prussia against Austria, Russia, and France in the Seven Years War. Interestingly both the Silesian War (part of the War of the Austrian Succession) and the Seven Years War were global in nature and involved essentially all of Europe. Based on how you do the counting WWI was the 6th or 7th “global” war. Many all-European conflicts broke out from 1500-1850s and they tended to involve overseas colonies as well.
It wasn’t just coincidence, either. It was a “feature” of the Great Power system in Europe. France, Great Britain, Russia, Austria, Spain were major powers from 1500-1815 or so (arguably Spain’s fall from Great Power status was complete long before Napoleon, but that’s a debate in and of itself.) The great powers all had a vested interest in making sure none of the other great powers became significantly more powerful than they already were. For that very reason any war involving any of the Great Powers had a very, very high likelihood of involving them all. Since after the early 1700s most European wars were going to pull a Great Power into the war, essentially any major war had a huge chance of becoming a total European war.
Since an obvious place for a Great Power to expand is in places where there are weak, smaller states, Italy and Germany essentially became the pieces on the board that everyone kept fighting wars over, again and again and again.
Another feature of such a system is that since it was mostly Italy and Germany that were always being fought over a lot of the dying, pillaging and looting happened there. From the Thirty Years war up through the Napoleonic wars most of the fighting was going on in Germany. Even the wars of Napoleon can be ultimately linked to the other Great Powers not willing to accept France having so much land (especially in Germany which Napoleon had essentially entirely subjugated.) What this then meant was that being a minor power was bad because your shit got fucked up all the time when the Great Powers fought wars over your land that invariably took place on your land. This meant the minor powers would always be trying to become more and more powerful, because the weaker they were the less able they were to stop such things from happening.
It has been said by some historians Prussia was an army that happened to have a state. In some ways that is true, but Prussian militarism and everything that came from it (arguably WWI and II) was essentially forged in fires lit by France, Russia, Great Britain, Austria, Sweden (especially during the Thirty Years War), when their armies raped, pillaged, and destroyed again and again the lives of Germans. In some provinces of Prussia the Thirty Years War killed 2/3rd of the civilian population.
It was not by accident that Prussia developed a canton military system that resulted in a high degree of military participation and a professional military force that on average had 3 years of training compared to the few months for most other Great Powers. The Hohenzollerns tried their best to survive the Thirty Years War by continually shifting allegiances to the most powerful participants, but unfortunately that spared them little, many of the worst deprivations of Prussian lands were carried out by Prussia’s nominal allies marching through the countryside. In most battles Prussia’s forces were easily swept aside by more powerful Swedish armies or armies of other states. After the Thirty Years War is when the Prussian military as the world came to know it really was born, and Frederick the Great mentioned during his life that he was putting to use the tool forged by his immediate predecessors.
I’ll leave it to the sociologist to speculate on what kind of a society you have when, through essentially necessity, a huge portion of the country is part of the professional military. Additionally when Frederick the Great took over he ramped things up even more and made sure that the training of his army focused specifically on maximum aggression, as Frederick felt that because in many situations Prussia would be outnumbered it would need overwhelming amounts of aggression to overwhelm numerically superior enemies. (This was cited as being decisive in many battles too, the Bayreuth Dragoons became famous when they essentially broke the back of the Austrian infantry at Hohenfriedberg through extremely aggressive action. Some have even pointed to such tactics as the philosophical predecessor of blitzkrieg.)
So in a sense the divided nature of Germany (and Italy while we’re at it) lead to great suffering for the people who lived there and was a direct cause of much of the desire for those countries to unify. So in a sense because of the situations and wars fought because of Germany’s divided nature it made it possible for Germany to actually become unified, so in a sense WWI and WWII are direct results of the historical division of Germany.
However, let us go back to the thought experiment of a Germany not united by Bismarck. In reality that isn’t as far fetched as it seems, if Otto von Bismarck had died a young man there’s a good chance Germany would not have unified as it did. Italian unification and German unification were very, very different things.
Italian unification was a combination of opportunistic expansionism by the King of Sardinia with a grassroots military/political uprising to unify Italy. In a sense it was a more organic unification than that of Germany.
German nationalism while very much a real thing wasn’t the same creature as nationalism in Italy or the Balkans. Germans were becoming more nationalist but at the same time non-Prussian Germans had no desire to be unified under the Prussian King. When the German Empire was formed it still retained all of its constituent states as sovereign entities. So in a since Wilhelm I was in a very true sense an Emperor because within the German Empire you had the Kingdoms of Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg–all retaining their crowned monarchs.In the lead up to German unification, many of the German states actually were more closely allied with Austria than with Prussia, because they felt that with Austria they could retain more independence whereas going under Prussian hegemony they would be subjected to Prussian whims.
For this reason the German Empire was a legal beast, with very different legal and political systems within each of its constituent parts. It bears some resemblance to early America in that Americans were generally agreed they didn’t want to be a colony of Great Britain, and they wanted to be united with one another in some form or another. However they didn’t want that union to come at the cost of their own individual freedoms as distinct colonies. A lot of political and legal wrangling and horse trading had to happen to make uniting the colonies work. With the German states, where many of these kingdoms, grand duchies and etc had warred with one another for centuries, had distinct political opinions, distinct heads of state, distinct legal systems, the issues in the way of unification were far greater than those that nascent America faced. In truth Bismarck’s singular political ability is probably the only reason it worked.
Now, back to the original question (finally) as to whether a disunited Germany could have essentially launched WWI. My answer to that is twofold. First, obviously a German Empire that did not exist could not do anything. Secondly though, Prussia before the German Unification was still a mighty power in Europe, easily the equal of Austria-Hungary (as it had proven in several wars during the 19th century.) Prussia still would have had Wilhelm II as its King at some point, and all the troubles that came from having Wilhelm II as ruler would still exist even if Germany wasn’t unified.
An unified Germany we can speculate that all the issues Austria-Hungary had with Serbia would still exist, the desire of Russia to support Serbia would probably still exist. Thus, an AH-Russian war would have still happened. We know that any such war is going to involve other Great Powers. The question is, does a disunited Germany still have the close alliance with AH that Germany from history did?
That question can only be answered if the question of Alsace-Lorraine is answered. Namely, in a speculative history in which Germany is not unified under Prussian leadership, does Prussia still annex Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war? In reality that annexation more than anything else is what made WWI inevitable. If Prussia still annexes Alsace-Lorraine, Prussia still ends up an international pariah, and is pushed closer to a dual alliance with Austria. If Prussia and Austria are still closely allied then the other German states would also be in the same alliance (as allies of Prussia or of Austria–throughout the 19th century in any major war the small German states were always sided with one of the other major German powers AH or Prussia so it is unlikely they would change that for WWI and end up allied with the Triple Entente.
Throughout his long career Bismarck never sought the sort of delusional goals of a Napoleon or a Wihelm II (or a Hitler if you want to go there), those men all dreamed of domination of Europe. Bismarck was a true creature of the multi-polar European system and probably understood its workings better than anyone else on the continent. Bismarck wanted to shore up Prussia’s position while not upsetting the balance of power in such a way that it would lead to a major war. Bismarck was both a long time player in the game and a student of history, he knew what happened when the system got out of balance: massive wars with massive losers, Bismarck abhorred such things. Bismarck’s approach was essentially to keep the system in constant flux and avoid any possibility that large blocs of power would end up in situations where large scale general wars would be required (note that the wars of Bismarck were all fairly quick and limited in scope.) It is a testament to Bismarck’s ability he was able to wage wars with Denmark, Austria, and France in succession in such a way that other Great Powers were not pulled into the conflict, and he used each war to strengthen Prussia’s position in Germany while not upsetting the overall balance of power. But then he annexed Alsace-Lorraine, it was a fumble the equivalent of a star quarterback preparing to kneel the ball with his team up by 2 with ten seconds left on the clock in the fourth quarter of the Super Bowl and then fumbling it directly into the defensive line, it was so out of character and essentially stupid I’ve always wondered why Bismarck did it. Unlike Hitler or Wilhelm II Bismarck did not believe in “destroying” other Great Powers, Bismarck understood the balance of power system and understood it was a constantly shifting game and knocking one player out or trying to without in some other way balancing the system was disastrous.
If you look at all the reasons for taking Alsace-Lorraine, none of them make any sense. Firstly, it radicalized the French, Bismarck knew it would radicalize the French. It would guarantee a future war with France, Bismarck abhorred things that would guarantee a future war on ideological grounds. The military very much wanted Alsace-Lorraine because the generals claimed that it provided crucial control of strategic routes and would be key in a future war with France. The military truth of that does not seem to be true because Prussia had just completely destroyed the French military without having controlled Alsace-Lorraine, and its being controlled by France didn’t appear key to the outcome of the conflict. That Bismarck would be bullied into doing something he did not want to do by the generals also doesn’t make sense. Throughout his 40 year career Bismarck didn’t get the name “Iron Chancellor” by getting bullied by anyone, the only person who ever really pushed Bismarck around was the King (later Kaiser) and even then until the Kaiser was Wilhelm II Bismarck had usually prevailed in any disputes with the monarch.
But either way, with Alsace-Lorraine annexed I think it inevitable at that point Prussia’s options diplomatically become limited. However even without the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine I think it very unlikely a disunited Germany would not be involved in a World War around 1914. Namely because Prussia would still be a major power and Wilhelm II would still be the King. Wilhelm II would want to be involved in any war in which AH fought Russia, and with Prussia, AH, and the rest of the German states at war with Russia you know that France is going to be at war with them and Great Britain is going to side with France. Wilhelm would still of course push for war so he could justify invading France, and Wilhelm is still going to want war with France because he will view the destruction of France as a Great Power as somehow being essential Prussia. So really united or disunited I don’t see how you can avoid the breakout of war aside from killing Wilhelm II as a baby.
