How far is it correct to say that the First World War was fought essentially for the preservation of balance of power?

The First World War (1914–18) is often read as a war to preserve the European balance of power against a rising Germany. The claim is substantially correct as a framework, but incomplete as a cause.

The balance-of-power case

• Germany's unification (1871), industrial surge and Weltpolitik threatened the equilibrium constructed at Vienna in 1815.
• Britain abandoned 'splendid isolation' precisely to balance Germany — the Entente Cordiale (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention (1907) answered the Triple Alliance.
• The Anglo-German Dreadnought naval race was a contest over the maritime balance, and Britain's formal casus belli — Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of London (1839) — expressed its cardinal rule that no single power dominate the Low Countries and the Continent.
• France sought to check Germany after 1871 and recover Alsace-Lorraine; Russia backed Serbia to preserve the Balkan balance against Austria-Hungary.

Beyond balance of power

• Imperialism had its own dynamic: rivalries over Morocco (1905, 1911), colonial markets and the Berlin–Baghdad railway.
• Nationalism: pan-Slavism, pan-Germanism and Balkan aspirations — the Sarajevo assassination of 28 June 1914 was a nationalist act, not a balancing manoeuvre.
• Militarism and rigid war plans: the Schlieffen Plan and inflexible mobilisation timetables converted a Balkan quarrel into a general war.
• Domestic pressures and alliance rigidity turned instruments of balance into machinery of escalation.
• Historians reflect this duality: Fritz Fischer stressed deliberate German ambition for hegemony, while A.J.P. Taylor blamed 'war by timetable' — escalation through planning, not design.

Balance of power was thus the underlying grammar of 1914 — every power justified itself as restoring equilibrium — yet the war erupted because that mechanism broke down under imperialism, nationalism and militarism. It is more accurate to say the war was fought amid the collapse of the balance of power than essentially for its preservation.