I think the War was bigger than Princeps and Franz Ferdinand, and I agree that it would have happened soon anyway. If not for the assassination, then for some other reason.
It's amazing, though, to read about the general attitudes before the war, when people didn't think of it as necessarily a bad thing.
My reading has given me the impression that most powers wanted to avoid it but Germany, feeling it was inevitable, would rather it happen sooner rather than later, when Russia's modernisation had been completed.
Yes, agreed again.
I wasn't aware of it until reading about it on Wikipedia, but in December 1912 Kaiser Wilhelm met with his senior politicians and generals to discuss Germany's strategic situation. (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Imperial_War_Council_of_8_December_1912)
Very simply, the generals wanted to attack Russia immediately, regardless of the lack of an excuse - that was how seriously they saw things. Supposedly Admiral Tirpitz wanted an 18 month delay to allow the completion of the widening of the Kiel Canal and the construction of a U-boat base on the island of Heligoland. Tirpitz got his way, and the government seems to have taken advantage of the extra year and a half to undertake a series of very deliberate steps to prepare for war.
But in the July crisis, Germany was totalling egging on Austria-Hungary but we're trying desperately to make the Ultimatum, and their reaction to the Serbian response, look reasonable. They wanted to look like they were forced into war by the actions of others, ie by Serbia's intransigence or Russia's sabre rattling.
Yes. If you read the July Crisis article you can see how the German deputy foreign minister, Zimmerman, instructed his ambassadors to tell their host governments that the German government had no idea what the Austrians were planning, even as they were helping the Austrians to make their Serbian ultimatum as outrageous as possible.
The key in this is that the Germans had definitely made up their minds to go to war with Russia, but were holding off their declaration of war as long as possible in the hope of hearing a clear signal from Russia. When they heard that Czar Nicholas had ordered mobilisation the German leadership were thrilled, as they were then able to present themselves to the Reichstag as the injured party, despite the fact that they'd been preparing to go to war with Russia almost from the start of the crisis.
The second thing worthy of note in this process is the way the business of "going to war with Russia" meant "occupy Luxembourg and Belgium in order to attack France". Even before the Serbian government had responded to the Austrian ultimatum the German government had sought permission from the Belgian government to march through their land in order to attack France.
I get the impression that a lot of people who don't really know much about World War One sort of assume that the countries went to war in some sort of orderly domino-like process. At the start it was - Austria threatened Serbia, so Russia threatened Austria, so Germany threatened Russia. You might think the next step was that France threatened Germany. In fact that wasn't the case: the French government (1) urged the Russians to act cautiously, (2) resisted early calls from the military to order mobilisation, and (3) ordered its troops on the German frontier to pull back ten kilometres to avoid the possibility of itchy trigger fingers bringing on a war by accident.
Instead, first the German ambassador to France threatened that Germany would attack France if Russia mobilised, and second the German Chancellor threatened that Germany would attack France if it didn't immediately renounce its alliance with Russia.
The Germans thus present themselves as being like a man in a bar who, on seeing someone spill a drink on his friend, immediately turns around and swings a punch at the drink spiller's colleague.
Regardless, I think it's important for people to understand these events in more detail, because I get the impression from the "domino theory on the outbreak of World War One" that the war broke out as a result of a lot of careless blundering by all parties. The more sinister reality is that there were diplomatic mechanisms in place to resolve crises such as the July Crisis which people like the British Foreign Minister Sir Edward Grey tried to use, but they were hamstrung by a German leadership group who very deliberately subverted the mechanisms in order to bring about a war.
In addition, this apparent confusion of the politicians leading to war is unfavourably compared with the vindictive attitude displayed by the Allied politicians after the war in assigning blame for the outbreak of war to Germany. This wasn't just victor's justice, it was in part based on a pamphlet written by the German Prince Lichnowsky, who'd been German ambassador in Britain during the July Crisis. He was at least partly aware of the duplicity of the German government and blamed the outbreak of the war on its actions.
Finally, there's the issue of Britain's involvement in the war, the suggestion being that Britain got dragged into a war which wasn't its business, using the excuse of the Belgian treaty. The reality is that Britain got involved in World War One because a German victory would have been dangerous for British strategic security even if it had stayed neutral. Britain's actions in 1914 were the same as they'd been for a couple of centuries, and would be for another couple of decades - join an alliance against any nation threatening to conquer Europe, as British strategic security lay in keeping Europe divided.
Maybe the German language Wikipedia has a different take on things.
Unlikely. The historian who brought this version of events to light was the West German Fritz Fischer. His findings basically confirmed Lichnowsky's assessment but also laid out the thinking behind the German government's actions.
