World War One

In early 1914 Bethmann Hollweg’s secretary, Kurt Riezler, published (pseudonymously) a book entitled Characteristics of Contemporary World Politics. In it he argued that the unprecedented levels of armament in Europe were ‘perhaps the most controversial, urgent and difficult problem of the present time.’ Sir Edward Grey, always fond of explanations of the war which minimized human agency, would later agree. ‘The enormous growth of armaments in Europe,’ he wrote in his post-war memoirs, ‘the sense of insecurity and fear caused by them—it was these that made war inevitable. This, it seems to me, is the truest reading of history . . . the real and final account of the origins of the Great War.’

Historians seeking great causes for great events are naturally drawn to the pre-war arms race as a possible explanation for the First World War. As David Stevenson has put it: ‘A self-reinforcing cycle of heightened military preparedness . . . was an essential element in the conjuncture that led to disaster . . . The armaments race . . . was a necessary precondition for the outbreak of hostilities.’ David Herrmann goes further: by creating a sense that ‘windows of opportunity for victorious wars’ were closing, ‘the arms race did precipitate the First World War.’ If the Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in 1904 or even in 1911, Herrmann speculates, there might have been no war; it was ‘the armaments race . . . and the speculation about imminent or preventive wars’ which made his death in 1914 the trigger for war. Yet, as both Stevenson and Herrmann acknowledge, there is no law of history stating that all arms races end in wars.

The experience of the Cold War shows that an arms race can deter two power blocs from going to war and can ultimately end in the collapse of one side without the need for a full-scale conflagration. Conversely, the 1930s illustrates the danger of not racing: if Britain and France had kept pace with German rearmament after 1933, Hitler would have had far greater difficulty persuading his generals to remilitarize the Rhineland or to risk war over Czechoslovakia. The key to the arms race before 1914 is that one side lost it, or believed that it was losing it. It was this belief which persuaded its leaders to gamble on war before they fell too far behind. Riezler erred when he argued that ‘the more the nations arm, the greater must be the superiority of one over the other if the calculation is to fall out in favour of war.’ On the contrary: the margin of disadvantage had to be exceedingly small—perhaps, indeed, only a projected margin of disadvantage—for the side losing the arms race to risk a war. The paradox is that the power which found itself in this position of incipient defeat in the arms race was the power with the greatest reputation for excessive militarism—Germany.

Sir Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (82-83). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.