Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I A HISTORY OF INTERNATIONALIST THEORIES
- PART II A HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATES' SYSTEM TO 1900
- PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- 12 International Relations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 The First World War
- 14 The Failure of the League of Nations
- 15 The Causes of the Second World War
- 16 The Nature and Development of the United Nations
- 17 International Relations since the Second World War
- References
- Index
13 - The First World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I A HISTORY OF INTERNATIONALIST THEORIES
- PART II A HISTORY OF THE MODERN STATES' SYSTEM TO 1900
- PART III INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
- 12 International Relations in the First Half of the Twentieth Century
- 13 The First World War
- 14 The Failure of the League of Nations
- 15 The Causes of the Second World War
- 16 The Nature and Development of the United Nations
- 17 International Relations since the Second World War
- References
- Index
Summary
If we make a distinction, as we must, between what caused the first World War and what occasioned it we shall find that most people are content to agree that the immediate occasion was the Sarajevo assassination. Although there can be disagreement even on this issue―perhaps the immediate occasion was the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the German rejection of negotiations or the Russian mobilisation?―most people are content not to argue about it. They recognise that the immediate occasion of the war can tell us little of value about the causes of it.
The same is true of the Balkan entanglement which underlay the assassination. Most people accept that this in its turn was only the occasion, though a less immediate occasion, of the general war that followed between the Great Powers―that some crisis, and perhaps some war, was so likely to be generated by the Balkan problem that if the Sarajevo assassination had not sparked off a crisis in July 1914 then some other disturbance in the Balkans would have done so at no distant date. There is general agreement that there was a general war in 1914 because the local strains and pressures set up by a problem with which Europe had lived for nearly a century at last interlocked with a wider condition of tension between the Great Powers of which the origin was much more recent; and that if we are to understand the outbreak of that war, if we seek to know what caused it as opposed to what occasioned it, we must explain this interlocking and the growth of that wider tension.
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- Power and the Pursuit of Peace: Theory and Practice in the History of Relations Between States , pp. 289 - 308Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1962