System Alliance Europe

Transcription

My name is Indy Neidell And welcome to our channel THE GREAT WAR This show follows world war 1, from July 28th 1914 to November 11, 1918, week by week exactly 100 years later, but in order for the initial weeks of war to make more sense we’re doing these prelude to war episodes to give you a little background... All here on our channel THE GREAT WAR! Do you know what happened 100 years ago last month? On June 28th 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, this was the little match that ignited the bonfire of the First World War It took a full month after the assassination for war to be declared and on July 28, 2014 it was exactly 100 years since the beginning of World War I, or the Great War, as it was called, or even the war to end all wars. and unlike pretty much every other World War One show ever, we’re going to ignore Franz Ferdinand for the moment, and talk about some other stuff. The consequences of the Great War were massive, and affected pretty much every person in every country on earth. Four great empires ceased to exist, a bunch of new nations saw the light of day, and the explosive growth of an extraordinary number of social movements, such as internationalism or facism, changed the world’s political landscape forever. Just in terms of technology, the Great War moved the world ahead by leaps and bounds. Cars and planes had existed prior to the war, but by 1918 we had tanks and diesel fuel, bombers and fighters, and large planes ready to be converted into the first airliners. And the tragedies were enormous. Although completely accurate records are impossible, the war caused close to 40 million casualties- killed or wounded including nearly 10 million dead soldiers in a world whose population was only a quarter of what it is now. But why the Great War? Why start it? Why go through with it? There had certainly been enough talk about a European war during the early parts of the 20th century, sometimes romantically, such as when military leaders who had never actually seen combat thought about coming home covered glory but most often talked about as a necessity, and this was driven by waves of revolutionary sentiment, strikes and violent labor unrest, and above all feverish nationalism, which together came to steer the course of Europe in the early 20th century. Now we will go into that in detail week by week. Think about a German Europe. Not today, but 100 years ago. It’s a theme that was certainly tossed around back then, most spectacularly in the bestseller “Mitteleuropa”. Now I don't mean the Nazi kind of German Europe, but a true German influenced and culturally and politically dominated Europe. See, Prussia and then a unified Germany had emerged as the leading power of Europe after beating France under Bismarck in 1871, and things had just rolled on since then. By 1914, Berlin was the cultural capital of Europe- where you went to study anything “serious”. Words like Hertz, Roentgen, Mach, and Diesel all come from this period. And British cabinet ministers, Russian Bolsheviks- they’d all studied in Germany, which had even replaced England as the industrial giant of Europe. Many people, not just German, dreamed of a German Europe or at least a multi-national German commonwealth. Now this commonwealth could protect itself from England and the US, that could bring in raw materials from France or Scandinavia, would have its own coal and steel production, and hopefully even colonies in north Africa or the Middle East where there was oil. It was an impressive dream, and it wasn’t far-fetched, especially when you think about what was going on outside of Europe at the time. Africa and India were basically being run from Europe, China was ready to collapse, the Ottoman Empire looked ready to collapse, what Germany really needed to do to succeed was work with its German speaking neighbor to the south. Germany had been allied with Austria since 1879. There was, though, a big problem with the Austro-Hungarian Empire because it was really shaky. There are several reasons for this, but one big one I’m gonna mention here- Austria had a serious mismanagement problem. Actually, when you look at the world around it, Austria was an anachronism. The rest of Europe was going through a big age of nationalism, but in Austria there were 15 different versions of the national anthem. Franz Josef, the emperor, had been on the throne since 1848 and was 84 years old, and he too was very out of place in modern Europe. And he made very questionable decisions. In 1908, for example, he made the decision to annex Bosnia and Herzegovina, which were nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, which basically pissed everyone off Especially the Ottoman Empire, there were protests from all of the great empires but especially noisy protests from Bosnia’s neighbor Serbia, and I don’t know if it’s quite possible for me to express just how much anti-Austrian sentiment there was among the Slavic nations and peoples of the Balkans. Looking back, you might have thought that Vienna would have said, “okay, you guys can have a sort of pan-Slavic nation under Vienna”, which might have cooled things off a bit, but they didn’t do that. What they did instead was nothing at all. You see, for years, Vienna had been trying to control its minority nations by basically paying them off, to the extent that they had no money left for things like the army- Austria spent less money on the army than England did, even though the Austrian army was ten times the size. So they couldn’t afford to keep trying to buy them off, which didn’t work anyhow. So Vienna basically did nothing and hoped there would be no catastrophic events. That didn’t work out so good. Does this sound really complicated? Well, it is. There hadn’t been a real European war in over 40 years, war being kept at bay by a complicated and constantly shifting system of alliances. You should look it up yourself because it’s really interesting, but here’s the basics: Germany and Austria-Hungary were 2/3 of the Triple Alliance, right? Italy being the third part at the time, but nobody really counted on them to help out in case of a war. Germany and France had historically been at odds with each other, but even more so after Prussia walked all over France in the Franco-Prussian War. France and England were allies, but it turned out that in the early 20th century there were French contingency plans afoot to invade England, and vice versa, so go figure. When Bismarck had run Germany, he had cultivated Russian friendship, but that was long gone. Much of the Germans elite now openly looked down on Russia, who allied herself with France when German industrial and military power really got going, and the triple entente between England, France, and Russia became official in 1907. The German Empire was friendly with the Ottoman Empire and a true Russian nightmare would be the Germans in charge of the Dardanelles. Through which Russia send up to 90 percent of their weed exports Russia supported Serbia and all of the slavic peoples which meant that they were banging heads with both Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and everybody; EVERYBODY was wooried about another Balkan explosion. Whew. That’s almost it, but not quite. Before I go, I’d like to mention the unique case of Germany and Britain. Now, the Germans and the English admired each other culturally, industrially, and militarily. Germany especially admired England’s vast overseas empire and her navy, the greatest the world had ever seen, and many Germans were convinced that the British navy was the key to her success, her power, and her empire. Now I’m going to quote historian Norman Stone “the last thing Germany needed was a problem with Great Britain, and the greatest mistake of the 20th century was made when Germany built a navy designed to attack her”. Pretty heavy words. But think about it; the Kaiser, who occasionally ruled Germany by decree, totally ignoring the fact that the German people did not want war with anybody and admired and respected the British, built a navy. A navy built for only one purpose- to challenge Britain. Winston Churchill, at the time Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, suggested a mutual pause in naval building, reasoning that for the British Empire a powerful navy was a necessity, But for the Germans a luxury. But Kaiser Wilhelm wouldn’t have it, and built up the German navy. That navy took a third of the German defense budget, which meant that Germany couldn’t afford a two front war against France and Russia if such a thing were to happen. It also meant that there were a bunch of giant battleships sitting in harbors thumbing their noses at England. Now there was substantial naval warfare, especially submarine warfare, between England and Germany during the war, but these battleships didn’t do anything- they sat there just taking up space the entire war until their crews finally mutinied. They had much more armor than British ships, and they were really impressive, but they just sat there mocking England, whose response was to out-build the Germany navy two to one and make further defensive arrangements with France and Russia. That was interesting right? I’m gonna wrap it up here, but come back next time to see what was going on then in Serbia, Italy, and other sunny places with long cultural histories. Don’t forget to subscribe to get each new episode and also, this show is available in German and Polish if you or your friends want to watch it but English isn’t your first language. Links to those channels are below. One important thing before I go You may have some Questions at this point you may be wondering for example: What about the economic situation in these countries or what about the possible threat of civil war in Ireland or even Can you tell us about Conrad von Hotzendorf Well there is one thing you need to keep in mind this show will run weekly for four and a half years and including special features will be around three hundred episodes so all of your questions, hopefully, will be answered and explained but it takes time with such a huge project. We do welcome your comments and your questions so bring em on