Germany's Superpower Quest Caused World War I

Germany's Superpower Quest Caused World War I

06/30/14

Michael Lind

History, Europe

"The major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71." 

Editor's Note: Please also see Michael Peck's recent article How Germany Could Have Won World War I. 

The centenary of the beginning of World War I has revealed a deep divide between perceptions of the war held by the general public and historians, at least in the English-speaking world.  Pundits and commentators and politicians routinely opine that World War I was a needless and unavoidable catastrophe, variously attributed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, runaway arms races, imperialism in general, or “sleepwalking” politicians who stumbled blindly into catastrophe.  The general impression among the broader public is that nobody in particular was to blame for the greatest conflagration in world history before the Second World War.  Literary and cinematic masterpieces like Remargue’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory have reinforced the perception that the conflict proved the absurdity of war.  The lesson is that war is like catastrophic climate change—a destructive force that must be avoided and for which everyone is partly to blame.

In the Anglophone world, this popular interpretation of World War I has deep roots in strains of isolationism, the international peace campaigns of the early twentieth century, and, not least, Woodrow Wilson’s call for a “peace without victory.”  In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities. 

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