how the assassination of one person sparked the start of WW1
In: Other
Since the Napoleonic wars a hundred years earlier Europe had been operating on this balance of power system. The idea was to keep the countries and alliances in Europe relatively equal in power so that one of them doesn’t start conquering the others. Like Germany is stronger than Belgium but Belgium is allied to the United Kingdom and France. So they can’t conquer Belgium because they wouldn’t be able to defeat all of them. But Belgium and France can’t go conquer Germany because the UK is only defending Belgium, not supporting them to conquer anything. Also if they did then Germany’s allies Austria and Italy would defend them.
The simple thing is they had a large network of alliances meant to stop major wars. And it mostly worked for a decently long time, but it meant that when a war actually did start, the entire continent was in a series of complicated alliances, so instead of being a small war of Austrian retaliation against Serbia, Russia joined to defend Serbia, and Germany joined to support Austria, then France joined to fight Germany with Russia, the UK joins to prevent any one country on the continent from gaining too much power.
Latest Answers