<The First World War was caused by a series of treaties so convuluted that the death of one obscure Archduke caused country after country to go to war.

The First World War's flashpoint was an assassination. The fuse was the treaty alignment (not unlike the post-WWII defensive treaties that comprised NATO, SEATO, etc.). The actual underlying causes of WWI were the rise of nationalism, the reconstruction of the Italian and German nation-states, the slow, inexorable demise of the 19th century European and Ottoman empires, and the struggle for access to finite sources of raw materials and to strategic locations.

To say that the assassination of the heir to the Hapsburg throne was the cause of WWI is like saying that the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get even for Pearl Harbor. A simple reading of the events could make a credible argument for either, but the actual issues were much more complex. In fact, the death of another man, Kaiser Frederick III of Germany, the father of Wilhelm II, of cancer at the age of 56 after only 99 days on the throne, had a more profound influence on the political climate that allowed the First World War. Unlike his son, Frederick believed in the (excuse the word, but it is a usage contemporary to the time) liberal philosophy that favored parliamentary monarchy, and was more inclined to make common cause with his wife's uncle, the future Edward VII of Great Britain. Wilhelm II, on the other hand, was ever the insecure hothead, and grasped the tools of autocracy with both hands, rejecting the Western European movement toward democracy to such an extent that he exiled his own mother from his court because she maintained contact with her English family.

After the war, their policies also gave rise to totalitarian governments in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union that were responsible for tens of millions more deaths outside of war.

The Treaty of Versailles's political humiliation of the defeated and, more importantly, economically crippling requirement that the Germans pay reparations to the victors, did pave the way for the rise of Fascist states in the 1930s. (I must note that Italy was on the side of the Allies when the war ended, and that the rise of Fascism there resulted not from any overt punishment but from the collapse of the world economy during the Great Depression, compounded by an unrequited desire to recapture "the glory that was Rome" which was still a sore spot with the Italian nationalists of 1870 and their children.) America's reaction against Wilson and his Fourteen Points, and our return to isolationism, contributed to the problems in Europe as well.

The demise of Tsarist Russia occurred during the First World War, in 1917, and was the turning point for American interventionists, who could then argue that the United States would only be allied with the European democracies. The democratic government founded in Russia was overthrown months later by Communists led by a man who had been in exile and who travelled by train without impediment across Germany to the Russian border in wartime. Thus was the two-front war, Bismarck's great fear (Wilhelm II fired him too), finally concluded, but too late for Germany.

There was an opportunity to overthrow the Communist coup, and the Americans were involved, but anemically and ineffectually.

The European diplomatic and foreign policy tradition has been one of a large, unhappy family dwelling together in one house and fighting over the furniture. The American diplomatic and foreign policy tradition (with the brilliant exception of the Marshall Plan) has been one of walking into the yard to play, throwing a few punches, and then taking our ball and going home. Both approaches leave something to be desired.

Regards--
Mary Anne