Precipitating events and attitudes

You may have learned in school that WWI started when a Serbian terrorist shot an

Austro-Hungarian archduke in Sarajevo, Bosnia, in 1914. That’s true, but the origins of

the war are much more complicated than that.

For one thing, the Serbians were angry with the Austro-Hungarian Empire (a

combination Austria and Hungary) for annexing Bosnia (even though Bosnia still

technically belonged to the Ottoman Empire, which was weakened by its own internal

revolt). The Austro-Hungarians worried about the Serbs potentially uniting all the Slavs

in southeastern Europe, in a mountainous region called the Balkans. Such unification

would have threatened the Hungarian part of their empire. Russian leaders,

meanwhile, believed that the Balkans, with its largely Slavic population, rightfully

belonged in the sphere of influence of the Russian Empire, also largely Slavic. Although

they had no legal claim over it, the Russians felt especially protective about Slavic

Serbia.

Russia didn’t declare war on anyone, but it mobilized troops. That was enough

provocation, though, to prompt the Germans — who were allies of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire — to declare war on both Russia and its ally France. The Germans

cut through neutral Belgium on the way to attack the French.

Britain had no formal quarrel with Germany, but relations between the two countries

were strained by an undeclared race for naval superiority. Starting in the 1890s,

Wilhelm II, the German kaiser (meaning “emperor”), aggressively built more and

bigger ships. Britain responded by stepping up its own shipbuilding. German troops

crossing into Belgium in 1914 solidified anti-German feeling in Britain because the

incursion violated international law, giving the British an excuse to mobilize troops