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WW1 Causes - Coggle Diagram
WW1 Causes
European Expansionism
In the 1900s, several European nations had empires across the globe, where they had control over vast swaths of lands.
Prior to World War I, the British and French Empires were the world’s most powerful, colonizing regions like India, modern-day Vietnam and West and North Africa.
The expansion of European nations as empires (also known as imperialism) can be seen as a key cause of World War I, because as countries like Britain and France expanded their empires, it resulted in increased tensions among European countries.
Conflicts over Alliances
In the age of imperialism prior to World War I, countries throughout Europe had created alliances.
The alliances promised that each country would support the other if war ever broke out between an ally and another Great Power. Prior to WWI, the alliances of Russia and Serbia; France and Russia; Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary; Britain, France and Belgium; France, Britain and Russia; and Japan and Britain were firmly in place.
The alliance, between France, Britain and Russia, formed in 1907 and called the Triple Entente, caused the most friction among nations.
Serbian Nationalism
Nationalism was one of many political forces at play in the time leading up to World War I, with Serbian nationalism in particular, playing a key role.
Serbian nationalism can be dated to the mid- and late-1800s, though two precipitating nationalism events are directly linked to the start of WWI.
In the Balkans, Slavic Serbs sought independence from Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and in 1878, they tried to gain control of Bosnia and Herzegovina to form a unified Serbian state.
The Balkan Wars
Balkan Wars, (1912–13), two successive military conflicts that deprived the Ottoman Empire of all its remaining territory in Europe except part of Thrace and the city of Adrianople (Edirne).
The second conflict erupted when the Balkan allies Serbia, Greece, and Bulgaria quarreled over the partitioning of their conquests.
The result was a resumption of hostilities in 1913 between Bulgaria on the one hand and Serbia and Greece, which were joined by Romania, on the other.
Versailles Treaty
The Treaty of Versailles, signed in June 1919 at the Palace of Versailles in Paris at the end of World War I, codified peace terms between the victorious Allies and Germany.
The Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for starting the war and imposed harsh penalties in terms of loss of territory, massive reparations payments and demilitarization. Far from the “peace without victory” that U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson had outlined in his famous Fourteen Points in early 1918, the Treaty of Versailles humiliated Germany while failing to resolve the underlying issues that had led to war in the first place.