"World War I: The Blame Game " Topic

"Although in many cases it accomplishes little to nothing, people do seem to endlessly enjoy playing the ‘blame game'. For monarchists, who often enjoy it as much as anyone, there is probably no better occasion than World War One. This is understandable since, while there were republics in the Americas, China, Portugal and France, monarchy was still the rule rather than the exception before the First World War whereas after the conflict republicanism became dominant on the continent with the fall of the German, Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, the creation of new republics in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Finland and the Baltic States and which saw, eventually, the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. The world was a much more monarchist place before 1914 and a much more republican place after 1918 and so many monarchists go looking for a guilty party to blame. Some blame the Central Powers, some blame the Allies, some blame Austria, some blame Germany and some even blame the United States which seems rather odd considering that the United States did not join the war until the very last stages of the conflict. Some blame "Prussian militarism" and some blame British paranoia over the growing colonial and industrial competition Germany represented.

There seems to be no end to it. Personally, my position has always been that in the case of World War One, the blame game is useless. I say this for two primary reasons; because there was so much blame to go around in starting the conflict that no one side or even one country can be held to be more guilty than any other and secondly because, I believe, once started, there was no possible way in which it could have ended well. In the first half of the conflict, there was still too much fury and hope for victory for either side to stop and in the second half, both sides had lost too much to agree to make peace without having something to show for it. However, let us take each of these points in order. In looking at the major participants in the outbreak of war in August of 1914 there is scarcely a country involved that does not share some blame for causing the conflict to happen in the first place or to spread to catastrophic proportions. The only truly innocent country involved was the unfortunate Kingdom of Belgium which simply happened to be a victim of geography. The Belgians truly had no choice but to fight and the noble King Albert I could not have acted other than he did for his own honor and that of his country. However, aside from Belgium, there is plenty of guilt to go around.

Starting with the spark that set the whole thing off we have the Kingdom of Serbia. Truly, if there was one completely guilty party in this whole affair it was the murderer Gavrilo Princip who assassinated two innocent people. Putting aside their status, these were a loving husband and wife, parents of three children, murdered in cold blood. Moreover, the Archduke was a man who wanted to do better by the Slavic peoples of Austria-Hungary. He had clashed with those in the Austrian army who advocated war with Serbia and there was no love lost between him and the Hungarians because of his desire to include the Slavic peoples in the power-sharing of the Austrians and Hungarians. Serbian nationalists hated the Archduke not because they feared he would make things worse for the Serbs but specifically because they feared he would make things better. Serbia must bear some blame for this, for the government connections with the secret society that carried out the assassination (which has been proven) and for the hatred that was prompted against Austria-Hungary by the proponents of a "Greater Serbia" that paved the way for this kind of mentality and the act of terrorism it produced. Although the weakest of the guilty parties, Serbia nonetheless has blood on its hands…"
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Amicalement
Armand

Difficult to know where to start with all of that.

"The very one was to blame" school of thought was discredited when I was studying the period at senior school. The German Empire was an aggrssive, militaristic, dictatorship intent upon colonial expansion and European hegemony.

They were to blame for the war, and most modern studies on the subject will show you that.

> The German Empire was an aggrssive, militaristic, dictatorship intent upon colonial expansion and European hegemony.

You mean, just like almost every other country in Europe?

>> The German Empire was an aggrssive, militaristic, dictatorship intent upon colonial expansion and European hegemony.

>You mean, just like almost every other country in Europe?

No. The other nations lined up against them were not like Germany. This is a common misconception. No other Nation had the same territorial ambitions. Britain certainly didn't want to run Europe and the French just wanted Alsace/Lorraine back.

Howdy,

No, France and Russia were not just like Germany. But they certainly deserve their share of the blame for pushing the world to war. Irrespective of other's actions it was Russian mobilization that actually kicked over the beehive.

Ponder on,

JAS