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CAUSES AND LESSONS: WW1

CAUSES AND LESSONS: WW1. Why is WW1 the most studied war by both historians and politics scientists? We tend to favor what we can remember: The systematic study of politics was born in the 1950s It is a war that can be well explained from any of the three major lenses/images

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CAUSES AND LESSONS: WW1

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  1. CAUSES AND LESSONS: WW1 Why is WW1 the most studied war by both historians and politics scientists? We tend to favor what we can remember: The systematic study of politics was born in the 1950s It is a war that can be well explained from any of the three major lenses/images It appears to be a break point from the past because the degree of industrialization, nationalism, and colonialism will make the scope, cost, and speed of war qualitatively different going forward: At least 15 million people died (vs. approx 60K in both Vietnam & Korea). It is puzzling: Although the war wasn’t “accidental,” none of the key decision-makers appears to have wanted or expected the scale of damage It provoked serious soul searching after the fact and the first efforts at truly global peacemaking strategies, including WMD limitations and collective security institutions

  2. WHAT SYSTEM-LEVEL ISSUES CAUSED WW1? • How did Britain’s relative decline and particularly its eclipse as the global hegemon impact war? (1860: 25% GNP, 1913: 10% vs. Germany 15%) • How did the consolidation of Germany through conflict and US expansion in the Pacific set the table for war? • How did status discrepancies & the emphasis on imperialism lead to war? • Did the European arms (especially the fact that it was naval) race make war inevitable? Why did Germany move so fast to translate its economic power into military might? • Changing balances of power, security dilemmas, and preventative war: • Triple Entente (Fr., Brit., Russia) vs. The Central Powers/The Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungry, not Italy) • How did the rigidity of bi-polar alliances (vs. Bismark’s flexibility) in the context of a changing global power create issues?

  3. WHAT SOCIETAL ISSUES CAUSED WW1? • Could Lenin’s theory of imperialism explain the war? • Did regime type matter? Thinking about the US’s late entry vs. everyone else… What would have happened if divided powers were the norm? • Did the fact that all of the major powers involved were except for the US to some degree were experiencing domestic problems explain anything? • Would a democratic Germany have gone to war? Would a Germany that hadn’t been recently formed? • What would have happened if British and US politics had better allowed both countries to better articulate the fact that they would enter the war? (Was there a lack of a deterrent to the Central Powers?) • Domestic populations and “war fatigue”? Had Europe forgotten the costs of war? How do global attitudes about conflict impact its outbreak? • What was the main military doctrine of the day in Europe (Cashman describes it as “the cult of the offensive”); The sense was that fast, hard aggression would shorten wars (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2?)

  4. WHAT INDIVIDUAL ISSUES CAUSED WW1? • How important were poor choices, misperceptions, and appeals to nationalism through propaganda? • How did stress, mental abilities, and personality disorders lead to both misperceptions and miscalculations? • Germany’s Kaiser (Wilhelm II): Did his insecurities lead to too much hard power and a complete neglect of soft power; did it lead to a heightened sense of discrepancy (compare to China today) • Franz Josef, the Austro-Hungarian emperor was a “tired, old man who was controlled by power hungry generals and foreign ministers • Czar Nicholas II was an isolated autocrat who was mostly focused on home issues. • Compare this to Wilson in the US, who resisted war as long as he could • Why didn’t leaders see what would happen? Information screens and cognitive dissonance are worse in a world that doesn’t have modern communications • Was there a failure to empathize the pressures at play in other states? • Did the political systems in place at the time play a role in making leaders incorrectly gauge the conflict? Group think and insulation

  5. WHAT LESSONS DID WE TAKE AWAY FROM WW1? • Comparing the end of WW1 vs. WW2 • What happens when you punish enemy populations? • Does collective security work any better than relying on balances of power and treaties? (Why did W Wilson think the League of Nations would work?) • They are forward thinking and flexible over time as balances and the relative power of individual states change; they encourage otherwise neutral parties to work towards peace; they balance the “rights” of sovereignty with basic obligations • How did WW1cause us to rethink through the relationship between economics and war? • How did WW1 impact the rules of war? Chemical weapons as a new framework for thinking about indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)

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