Causes of World War I: MAIN Factors, Sarajevo and the Indian Contribution

The Causes of World War I are the most frequently asked single topic in UPSC General Studies Paper I on world history. The First World War ran from 28 July 1914, when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, to 11 November 1918, when Germany signed the armistice in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage at Compiegne. In fifty-one months it killed about ten million combatants and seven million civilians, destroyed four empires (German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman) and reshaped the political map from Versailles to Vladivostok. The Causes of World War I are conventionally analysed through the MAIN factors of Militarism, Alliance system, Imperialism and Nationalism, with the immediate trigger being the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

This article reads the Causes of World War I in the way the mains examiner expects: long-term structural causes, medium-term diplomatic crises in Morocco and the Balkans, the chain of mobilisations in July and August 1914, the German operational plan known as the Schlieffen Plan, and the role of India in the British war effort, including the 1.3 million Indians who served the King-Emperor and the political consequences of their service in the post-war Gandhi era.

Quick Facts

• Dates: 28 July 1914 to 11 November 1918.
• Trigger: Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 by Gavrilo Princip of the Serbian nationalist group Mlada Bosna.
• Two alliance blocs: Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire from November 1914, Bulgaria from October 1915) and Allies (France, Russia, Britain and the British Empire, Italy from May 1915, Japan from August 1914, United States from April 1917).
• Casualties: Around 10 million military and 7 million civilian deaths.
• End: Armistice 11 November 1918; Treaty of Versailles 28 June 1919.
• Indian contribution: Approximately 1.3 million Indians enlisted; about 74,000 killed and 67,000 wounded; eleven Victoria Crosses.

The Long Causes: MAIN Factors

Militarism

By 1914 the European great powers had been preparing for war for two decades. Militarism meant rising defence budgets, conscript armies, mass mobilisation plans and a culture in which generals enjoyed direct access to monarchs above civilian ministers. Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II grew its army from about 600,000 in 1880 to 4.5 million on full mobilisation in 1914. Russia maintained a peacetime force of 1.4 million. Britain, an exception with a small volunteer army, had a massive Royal Navy.

The Anglo-German naval race was the most visible expression. Germany’s 1898 and 1900 Naval Laws under Admiral Tirpitz aimed at a fleet two-thirds the size of Britain’s. Britain answered with HMS Dreadnought in 1906, a turbine-powered, big-gun battleship that made every earlier capital ship obsolete. Both sides then competed to launch Dreadnoughts. The 1909 naval scare in Britain produced the slogan We want eight and we won’t wait. By 1914 Britain had twenty-nine dreadnoughts to Germany’s seventeen.

Militarism also meant general staffs that drafted rigid mobilisation timetables. Once a Russian, German or French army began to mobilise, the railway schedules dictated that it had to keep moving. Diplomats had perhaps forty-eight hours to defuse a crisis before the trains made war inevitable.

Alliance System

The second of the MAIN factors, the alliance system, was Bismarck’s creation that survived Bismarck. After German unification in 1871 Bismarck built a web of treaties (Dreikaiserbund of 1873, Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882, Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1887) to isolate France. Wilhelm II dismissed Bismarck in 1890 and let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse. France seized the opening with the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. Britain ended its splendid isolation with the Entente Cordiale of 1904 with France and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

By 1914 Europe was divided into two opposed camps. The Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. The Triple Entente of France, Russia and Britain. Italy switched to the Allied side in May 1915 under the secret Treaty of London. The Ottomans joined the Central Powers in November 1914. A local Balkan crisis could now drag in every great power because each had treaty or moral commitments to the others.

Imperialism

The third of the MAIN factors, imperialism, was the worldwide scramble for colonies and spheres of influence in Africa and Asia. The Scramble for Africa from the Berlin Conference of 1884-85 to the Fashoda crisis of 1898 brought European powers into repeated friction. Tensions in Morocco (1905-06 and 1911), Persia (1907), Manchuria, the Yangtze valley and the Ottoman territories of Mesopotamia and the Hejaz produced ongoing diplomatic confrontations. Germany felt locked out of the imperial cake; the slogan was a place in the sun. Kaiser Wilhelm’s gunboat Panther at Agadir in July 1911 was meant to extract a colonial concession and almost produced war with France and Britain.

Imperialism also fed economic rivalry. The proposed Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, financed by Deutsche Bank from 1903, threatened British access to the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. German trade penetration of the Ottoman lands worried both Britain (for India) and Russia (for the Straits).

Nationalism

The fourth and most explosive of the MAIN factors was nationalism. Three flavours mattered. Great-power chauvinism, expressed in German Weltpolitik, British jingoism after the Boer War and French revanche over Alsace-Lorraine, which Germany had annexed in 1871. Pan-Slavism, the Russian-led idea of a community of Slavic peoples, which made Russia the patron of Serbia and a counterweight to Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. And ethnic separatist nationalism inside the Habsburg empire and the Ottoman empire, where Serbs, Romanians, Czechs, Croats, Italians, Armenians and Arabs wanted out.

Serbia was the wild card. After the 1903 coup that brought the Karadjordjevic dynasty back to Belgrade, Serbia pursued a Greater Serbia programme. The Bosnian Crisis of 1908, when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina (which Vienna had administered since 1878 but which had a large Serb population), inflamed Belgrade and Russia. The two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 doubled Serbia’s territory and population. Vienna saw Belgrade as a mortal threat to the multinational Habsburg state.

The Medium Term: Crises and Wars Before 1914

Three crises rehearsed the final breakdown. The First Moroccan Crisis of 1905 saw Wilhelm II land at Tangier to support Moroccan independence against France. The Algeciras Conference of 1906 settled it in France’s favour with Britain backing Paris. The Second Moroccan Crisis of 1911 with the Panther at Agadir again ended with Germany humiliated.

The Bosnian Crisis of 1908 saw Austria-Hungary annex Bosnia-Herzegovina without consulting Russia, who was distracted after the 1905 revolution. Russia backed down, but vowed not to be caught short again. The two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 emptied the Ottoman Empire of most of its European territory and left Serbia armed, confident and ringed by enemies. The conditions for Sarajevo were now set.

The Spark: Sarajevo, June to August 1914

On 28 June 1914, the feast day of Saint Vitus and the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, visited Sarajevo on inspection. The Bosnian Serb teenager Gavrilo Princip, a member of Mlada Bosna and linked to the Serbian military intelligence officer Dragutin Dimitrijevic’s Black Hand network, shot the Archduke and his pregnant wife Sophie at point-blank range on the Latin Bridge.

July Crisis

Austria-Hungary, with German backing, sent Serbia an ultimatum on 23 July 1914 with ten demands, several of which intruded directly on Serbian sovereignty by allowing Austrian officials onto Serbian soil to investigate the assassination. Serbia accepted nine of the ten. Austria-Hungary declared the response insufficient and declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914.

Russia, the patron of Serbia and the leader of pan-Slav opinion, ordered partial mobilisation on 29 July and full mobilisation on 30 July. Germany sent ultimatums to Russia (12-hour) and France (18-hour) demanding demobilisation. Both expired. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August. On 4 August German troops crossed the Belgian frontier in execution of the Schlieffen Plan. Britain, guarantor of Belgian neutrality under the 1839 Treaty of London and bound by Entente understandings with France, declared war on Germany at 11 p.m. London time on 4 August 1914.

The Schlieffen Plan

The Schlieffen Plan, drafted in 1905 by Chief of the German General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen and modified by Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, was Germany’s operational answer to the two-front war it expected. The plan called for a holding action against Russia in the east while seven-eighths of the German army wheeled through neutral Belgium and northern France in a vast right-hook to envelop Paris within six weeks. Moltke weakened the right wing and the plan came up short at the First Battle of the Marne, 5 to 12 September 1914. The race to the sea, trench warfare and four years of Western Front stalemate followed.

Why Each Power Went to War

Austria-Hungary went to war to crush Serbia before its multinational empire was pulled apart. Germany went to war because it had encouraged Vienna, because the Schlieffen Plan demanded acting before Russia finished its army reforms (scheduled for 1917), and because Wilhelm II’s clique believed Britain would stay neutral. Russia went to war to defend pan-Slav prestige and the Black Sea Straits after the humiliations of 1905, 1908 and the Russo-Japanese war. France went to war to recover Alsace-Lorraine and to honour the Russian alliance. Britain went to war to preserve the European balance, to honour Belgian neutrality and to prevent German naval dominance.

A. J. P. Taylor in War by Time-Table (1969) argued that the railway mobilisation schedules drove the politicians. Fritz Fischer in Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961) argued that Germany had a deliberate bid for world power. Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers (2012) restored the multi-causal complexity of July 1914, particularly the Serbian role. UPSC answers should acknowledge that no single power bore exclusive guilt, though Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles assigned war guilt to Germany.

India in the First World War

Indian contribution to the British war effort was massive and is examinable in its own right. Approximately 1.3 million Indians enlisted in the British Indian Army during the war. Around 74,000 were killed in action or died of wounds and disease, and another 67,000 were wounded. Indian troops fought on every major front: France and Flanders (the Indian Corps at Neuve Chapelle and Loos in 1914 and 1915), East Africa, Mesopotamia (the Indian-led campaign that captured Baghdad in March 1917 after the disaster at Kut), Egypt, Palestine, Gallipoli and the North-West Frontier. The Indian Army won eleven Victoria Crosses. The India Gate at New Delhi, designed by Edwin Lutyens and inaugurated in 1931, bears the names of 13,300 Indian war dead.

India also sent over 170,000 animals (horses, mules and camels), three and a half million tons of supplies and a war loan of one hundred million pounds sterling to His Majesty’s Government. The Indian taxpayer financed a substantial portion of the British war effort.

Political Consequences in India

Indian leaders, from Gandhi to Bal Gangadhar Tilak to the Aga Khan, supported the war effort in 1914 in the expectation of post-war constitutional reform. The Montagu Declaration of 20 August 1917 promised the gradual development of self-governing institutions and was followed by the Government of India Act 1919 (Montagu-Chelmsford reforms), which introduced dyarchy in the provinces.

The reforms fell far short of Indian hopes. The wartime Rowlatt Acts of March 1919, which extended emergency detention powers in peacetime, provoked Gandhi’s first all-India satyagraha. The Jallianwala Bagh massacre on 13 April 1919 in Amritsar, where General Reginald Dyer’s troops fired on an unarmed Baisakhi crowd, killing at least 379 by official count and many more by Indian estimates, broke the trust between Indian moderates and the Raj. The First World War thus delivered the Gandhi era as its own most lasting Indian political consequence: the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920-22, the Khilafat movement and the political ascendancy of Gandhian satyagraha.

The war also brought new political ideas. Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his speech on national self-determination, the Bolshevik Decree on Peace, and the formation of the League of Nations all gave Indian nationalists fresh vocabulary. The Indian National Congress’s Lucknow Pact of 1916 with the Muslim League, brokered by Tilak and Jinnah, was itself partly a wartime political consolidation.

Why It Matters for UPSC

For GS Paper I the Causes of World War I are asked in three frames. First, list and analyse the MAIN factors, with at least one example of each. Second, distinguish long-term causes (Bismarck’s diplomatic system, the naval race, Balkan nationalism) from the immediate trigger (Sarajevo) and the operational logic (Schlieffen Plan, railway mobilisation). Third, the Indian dimension: scale of contribution, expectation of reform, post-war disillusionment with Rowlatt and Jallianwala Bagh, and the rise of Gandhian politics. A complete mains answer cites Franz Ferdinand and Princip by name, the dates 28 June and 28 July 1914, the Schlieffen Plan, the 1.3 million Indian soldiers, the India Gate, and the line from the First World War through the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms to the Non-Cooperation Movement.

Frequently Asked Questions