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Some of the distant origins of World War I can be seen in the results and consequences of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and 1871 and the concurrent unification of Germany. Germany had won decisively and established a powerful empire, but France fell into chaos and experienced a years-long decline in its military power.
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. In 1916, Germany's domestic situation was becoming increasingly worrying due to supply difficulties caused by labor shortages. [3]Faced with the indecision of the White House, Imperial German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg decided to make his own peace proposal, seeing it as the last chance for a just peace, as the outcome of the war was, in his view ...
Writing the Great War - The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present. Berghahn Books. ISBN 9781789204544. Horne, John (2012). A Companion to World War I. Kramer, Alan (February 2014). "Recent Historiography of the First World War (Part I)". Journal of Modern European History. 12 (1). Sage Publications: 5– 28.
Before World War II, the events of 1914–1918 were generally known as the Great War or simply the World War. [1] In August 1914, the magazine The Independent wrote "This is the Great War. It names itself". [2] In October 1914, the Canadian magazine Maclean's similarly wrote, "Some wars name themselves. This is the Great War."
Berlin did not go to war in 1914 in a bid for ‘world power’, as historian Fritz Fischer claimed, but rather first to secure and thereafter to enhance the borders of 1871. Secondly, the decision for war was made in July 1914 and not, as some scholars have claimed, at a nebulous ‘war council’ on 8 December 1912.
Together with other international agreements signed at the Paris Peace Conference, such as the Saint-Germain Peace Treaty of 1919 and the Teschen Settlement of July 1920, it provided the legal framework for overcoming the economic chaos in Central Europe caused by the First World War and exacerbated by the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian ...
In 1914 the war was so unexpected that no one had formulated long-term goals. An ad-hoc meeting of the French and British ambassadors with the Russian Foreign Minister in early September led to a statement of war aims that was not official, but did represent ideas circulating among diplomats in St. Petersburg, Paris, and London, as well as the secondary allies of Belgium, Serbia, and Montenegro.
In his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes referred to the Treaty of Versailles as a "Carthaginian peace", a misguided attempt to destroy Germany on behalf of French revanchism, rather than to follow the fairer principles for a lasting peace set out in Wilson's Fourteen Points, which Germany had accepted at the ...