The Causes of WWI

Triple Alliance = Germany, Austria-Hungary & Italy {1882}

Franco-Russian Alliance = France & Russia {1891}

Triple Entente = Russia, France & the UK {1907}

The Schlieffen Plan:

Germany had been preparing for war long before 1914. In fact, Germany had started drawing up a plan for war - the Schlieffen Plan - in 1897. It took nine years to finalise, but it was based on the theory that Germany would be at war with France and Russia at the same time. It did not prepare for many of the events that occured in July and August 1914. It was based on the belief that, if the country went to war, Germany would be faced with a war on two fronts with France and Russia.

The plan assumed that France was weak and could be beaten quickly, and that Russia was much stronger, but would take longer to mobilise its army.

The plan began to go wrong on 30 July 1914, when Russia mobilised its army, but France did not. Germany was forced to invent a pretext to declare war on France (3 August 1914).

Things got worse when Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914 because, in a Treaty of 1839, Britain had promised to defend Belgium.

The Entente Cordial:

Entente Cordiale, (April 8, 1904), Anglo-French agreement that, by settling a number of controversial matters, ended antagonisms between Great Britain and France and paved the way for their diplomatic cooperation against German pressures in the decade preceding World War I (1914–18). The agreement in no sense created an alliance and did not entangle Great Britain with a French commitment to Russia (1894). The most important feature of the agreement was that it granted freedom of action to Great Britain in Egypt and to France in Morocco.A German attempt to check the French in Morocco in 1905 (the Tangier Incident, or First Moroccan Crisis), and thus upset the Entente, served only to strengthen it. Military discussions between the French and the British general staffs were soon initiated. Franco-British solidarity was confirmed at the Algeciras Conference (1906) and reconfirmed in the Second Moroccan Crisis (1911).

The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand:

• On the way to the town hall of Sarajevo in Bosnia, the duke & his wife survived an assassination attempt by Cabrinovic, who threw a bomb at their car. It was a near miss.
• After taking a wrong turn and the driver being misinformed, the Archduke & Sophie were shot in the stomach & jugular vein by Gavrilo Princip.
• Both Cabrinovic & Princip were members of the Black Hand Gang.
• Serbia was known to support the BHG and so they were blamed for the Archduke's death.
• Germany swore to back-up A-H & Serbia was supported by Russia. This began WWI.

The Naval & Arms Race:

• Kaiser Wilhelm II was eager to build Germany's navy to rival that of Britain.
• The Royal Navy was by far the most powerful of the world’s fleets. It kept the British Isles immune from invasion and was also primed to blockade enemy ports in time of war. Fundamentally, however, its purpose was the protection of trade. Britain relied upon imports, and its economic prosperity rested on seaborne trade, financed by the City of London. Any threat to Britain’s naval supremacy was a threat to the nation itself.
• From 1898 onwards, Germany began to create a battle fleet. A shipbuilding arms race with Britain soon began. From 1906, this naval race became focused on the construction of a new class of battleship developed in Britain – the dreadnought.In fact, Germany could not hope to match the Royal Navy in the short term and, in 1910, began to redirect much of its defence spending to the Army. However, the damage to Germany’s relationship with Britain proved irreversible