World War I was a terrible breakout in which all countries were involved. It began in 1914 and lasted for four years. There were many different reasons for this worldwide conflict but I believe that the main one was imperialism which began a long time before a world war was ever imagined to happen. Imperialism is the policy of forcefully extending a nation’s authority by territorial gain or by the establishment of economic and political dominance over other nations. This began many conflicts that started in Europe and spread to various countries which created industrialization, militarism, alliances, and nationalism.
Imperialism first formed in Europe’s major empires, Great Britain, Germany, and France. They wanted to spread their nations and create overseas empires and open up markets for the goods they produced. So they started conquering weaker nations in Europe like Africa because they thought that they were better than them and believed that there nations were more important than Africa was since it was a ‘backward’ country. Africa was not technologically advanced and did not have a good military so wasn’t able to fight back the imperialists. The European missionaries also started to support these ideas because they thought that it would make it easier for them to convert the native people and would end slave trade. This started spreading throughout Europe and countries started competing with each other; it was often thought that gaining colonies was a measure of the nation’s greatness.
During this time, industrialization was also introduced. Industrial and scientific achievements began and countries in Europe started becoming more advanced in technology and in trade with foreign nations. They began looking for rare things that they could trade with foreign countries like gold and diamonds from Africa. There were many consequences of imperialism and industrialization though because countries started fighting over nations they wanted to conquer and it drove them to creating more military advancements to help them take over the countries they wanted. They also started creating alliances with each other to help them when a war broke out with an enemy that tried to conquer the same land of a nation.
Militarism was an important factor which contributed to WWI because it helped make the nations stronger to conquer other nations. Machine guns and great gunships like the Dreadnaught were created which caused a lot of military competition. Many battles were also the result of militarism as they fought for lands, like the Boers war, the British and Germans who were fighting over who had a stronger naval army and the British with France over Africa. This created a lot of enemies and alliances which brought more and more battles and formed a lot of tension in Europe.
When alliances were created, the reason for them was when an agreement was made between two or more countries to give each other help if needed during a time of war but also to prevent any one European country achieving a position of overwhelming strength. Some examples of alliances that were created are the Three Emperors league (Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary), the Dual Alliance (Germany and Austria-Hungary), the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy), the Franco-Russian Alliance, and the Anglo-Russian Entente. The alliance system was started by Bismarck after the Franco-Prussian war when he wanted to isolate France so created the Three Emperors League in 1872. After France occupied Tunisia, Bismarck took advantage of Italian resentment towards France and created the Triple Alliance. The negative side of alliances was that some countries had no option but to declare war if one of their allies declared war first.
There were many nationalists forming in Europe during the constant battles between various nations. They believed that they should do everything for their country like join the army and fight in the wars, even if it meant getting killed, and support all of their nation’s plans to conquer. After the Austrian-Hungarian heir, Franz Ferdinand was assassinated along with his wife in Sarajevo, Serbia to break off Austria-Hungary’s south-Slav provinces so that they could be combined into a greater Serbia, the people became furious and did everything to get their country back. After this, nationalism started spreading throughout Europe which created stronger armies, more people wanted to expand their nations and it started more wars.
Therefore, we can see that the major cause of WWI was imperialism because that is what began all the other factors like militarism, alliances, and nationalism. Even though each factor caused many problems between different nations, especially in Europe, the main problems came from imperialism. I believe that it opened up many issues and made countries much greedier for power and money. It brought a lot of competition in trade and military equipment and started the use of alliances which created many more enemies. Through little wars about unimportant issues, big wars started happening with more and more countries involved which created a big mess and brought out World War I.
