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The root causes of World War I have been a source of endless debate and led to the founding of different schools of interpretation by historians. This tendency has been reinforced by the conventional view that the conflict that erupted in 1914 appeared like violent thunderstorm on a cloudless summer day. This interpretation is false because beneath the surface of the European security situation was a seething cauldron of racial and class tensions and hatreds, outmoded governmental structures and collapsing empires which exploded at the flash point of the "guns of August" (Tuchman). The question should not be why things came to a head in 1914 but why it did not happen sooner.

Flash Point: Collapsing Empires

For centuries the Ottoman Empire kept a kind of peace, albeit with a good bit of bloodshed, in the volatile Balkans region of Europe. As the twentieth century dawned, however, the Ottomans, "the sick man of Europe", could not even manage their own internal crises let alone their own former imperial possessions. Various nationalist movements began to percolate in the Balkans which successfully overthrew Ottoman rule but were unable to establish completely stable governments. Into the to the power void in the Balkans stepped the rival Russian and German/Austrian-Hungarian political blocs. Tensions over Balkan politics was one key drivers on the road global conflict.

The relative decline of Austrian-Hungarian power also played a key role in the emerging conflict. The Austrian-Hungarian empire suffered from a classical case of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance or what the rest of us call delusions of grandeur. Austrian-Hungary had been uniquely unsuccessful on the battlefield over the previous thirty years and yet they still fancied themselves as a great power. This sense of reactionary nostalgia was cleverly manipulated by Germany who used Austrian-Hungary's sense of last historical greatness for its own purposes. In the event, Austrian-Hungary was never able to police the Balkans effectively and their fears of losing their own empire eventually led them, goaded on by the Germans, into taking rash, ill-advised actions against Serbia.

Flash Point: The Arms Race

The frenetic arms race that preceded the Great War cannot be understood without examining Germany's primary role in promoting it and exacerbating it. Germany pursued a fevered naval and later general military buildup that compelled the other Great Powers to compete with in order to maintain military

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