Russia’s allies France and Britain, which were allied with Japan, signed their own agreement in 1904 to avoid being pulled into the war. The resulting war, fought both at sea and on land in China, was won by the Japanese, and as Beiriger notes, it helped shift power the power balance in Europe. The Japanese saw Russia’s rising aggressiveness as a menace and launched a surprise attack on Nicholas’ fleet at Port Arthur in China. Russia’s Czar Nicholas II wanted to obtain a port that gave his navy and commercial ships access to the Pacific, and he set his sites on Korea. “They ended up alienating both the government and public of Britain prior to the war.” 3. “The German Naval Laws created unintended consequences,” Beiriger says in an email. Instead, the British responded by building even more ships, and by ending their late 1880s policy of “splendid isolation” to form alliances with Japan, France and Russia. “Tirpitz aimed at forcing Britain into an alliance with Germany on German terms,” explains Eugene Beiriger, an associate professor of history, peace, justice and conflict studies at DePaul University, and author of the 2018 book World War I: A Historical Exploration of Literature. It was the first of five laws dictating a buildup in which the Germans envisioned building a force that was superior to Britain’s Royal Navy. This legislation, advocated by Germany’s newly-appointed Secretary of the Imperial Navy, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, dramatically expanded the size of Germany’s battle fleet. “The alliance system was critical to shaping the war, and even in helping bring it on: it created a set of expectations about international rivalry and competition, determining what kind of war Europeans imagined and prepared for.” Fogarty, an associate professor of history at University at Albany, explains. “To my mind, it is the coming together of the Triple Entente in stages-the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894, the British-French Entente Cordiale of 1904, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907-that really solidified the system of diplomatic agreements that formed the main antagonistic blocs that went to war in 1914,” Richard S. It was the start of what would become the Allied side, the Triple Entente, in World War I. So the two nations decided to join forces for mutual protection as well. Franco-Russian Alliance (1894)īoth Russia and France, which had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, feared the rising power of Germany, which had already formed alliances with Austria-Hungary and Italy. Here are eight of the events that led to the war. “Which may be, in the end, the best explanation for why it did.” “No one can say precisely why it happened,” explains the narration to a film at the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City. The path to war included plenty of miscalculations and actions that turned out to have unforeseen consequences. But historians say that World War I actually was the culmination of a long series of events, stretching back to the late 1800s. The event that sparked the conflagration was the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in 1914. Long after the last shot had been fired, the political turmoil and social upheaval continued, and ultimately led to another, even bigger and bloodier global conflict two decades later. It also radically altered the map, leading to the collapse of the sprawling Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires that had existed for centuries, and the formation of new nations to take their place. The result was some of the most horrific carnage the world had ever seen, with more than 16 million military personnel and civilians losing their lives. World War I, which lasted from 1914 until 1918, introduced the world to the horrors of trench warfare and lethal new technologies such as poison gas and tanks.
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