The Road to the Great War

Austria-Hungary is slow as hell to get anything done
- Send the ultimatum way after the shock of the assassination has faded → if they had acted earlier they probably could have prevented WW1
German leadership aren’t bloodthirsty monsters itching for war
- They’re actually quite slow and casual. German leadership goes on vacation after giving Austria-Hungary the infamous blank check
There’s a looming sense of fatalism in both Austria-Hungary and Germany
- Germany
  - Feel encircled
    - Russia on the east is quickly becoming more industrialized
    - France to the west
- Austria-Hungary
  - Patchwork of different ethnicities/nationalities/etc → slow + bureaucratic + divided
  - Weak army
Neither Austria-Hungary nor Germany thinks that Russia will intervene because they wouldn’t stand for regicide
- Russia has stood down 2 times already in the past few years, and they reason that she’ll do so again.
  - What they don’t get is that Russia intervenes because she has already stood down twice before

Russia and France have a summit where they basically set the tone for a hard-line stance
Austria-Hungary delivers the ultimatum. It’s very extreme (so that if Serbia declines they can have a war and if Serbia accepts it’ll be an intrusion on their sovereignty)
From the Russian perspective, they’ve already backed down from Austria-Hungary twice in the last 5 years, and asking them to do so again would be too much. They also have a looming worry about the Ottoman Empire making a resurgence and closing off access to straits that are economically vital to Russia
Russia gives their own blank check to Serbia
If Germany wants to attack France, they must do so through Belgium because the part of France directly bordering Germany is heavily fortified
- Britain is essentially the guarantor of Belgium and is obliged to help if its sovereignty is threatened (although they aren’t obliged to provide military aid)

British are sympathetic to Austria at first
Edward Grey (head of British foreign policy) decided to have Britain play the role of chief mediator without realizing that it would’ve never worked because:
- They had a tacit alliance with the French and the Russians
- Neither Germany nor Russia would agree to convince Austria-Hungary and Serbia respectively to back down

the Kaiser and the Tsar exchange letters that convince the Tsar to avoid Russia’s mobilization
- his ministers, and especially his foreign minister Sazonov wear him down until he agrees to a general mobilization 2 days later
  - This is when things really get hairy. There’s no real way to calm everything down after this. The Austrians were still ~10 days away from a full mobilization against Serbia, so there was still time to calm things down and figure out a solution if the Russians hadn’t taken this step.
Kaiser feels betrayed and they end up sending off a declaration of war
Britain is still deciding what they will do
- Tories are pro-war
- Many people in the foreign office believe Britain needs to go to war because it has promises to both France and Belgium

Germany delivers an ultimatum to Belgium to let them pass (rejected)
Britain delivers an ultimatum to Germany to respect Belgian sovereignty (rejected)
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time”
Vibes:
- Very few people seem to actually want the war
  - The Kaiser, Tsar, British officials, French Prime Minister Viviani (although notably not French President Poincaré) have been actively anti-war the entire time
  - Diplomats and senior officials are constantly breaking down into tears
- Germany, who’s often blamed for being militaristic and the cause of the war in the popular imagination, seems to come out quite well. The Kaiser seems to have been actively against war, and most of the German leadership also seem to have been anti or neutral to a war. In fact, a lot of blame could be put on Sazonov and the Russian ministers for convincing Tsar Nicholas to go ahead with a general mobilization

Vihaan