how the assassination of one person sparked the start of WW1
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It didn’t. The assassination of Ferdinand was essentially the match that lit the whole shithouse on fire.
And burn, baby, did it burn.
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.
How did the assasination of an Austrian cause all of Europe to fight each other basically?
Because of treaties and because of fear is the basic answer.
Treaties in the sense that Russia and France had agreed to defend each other against the Germans if they attacked.
Fear is what made the Germans and Austrians attack.
Specifically the Germans were deadly afraid of the Russian Empire, this huge country with vast resources and endless manpower, which was industrializing at rapid speed. The were paranoid about being overtaken by the Russians, and in particular they were afraid about the massive expansion of the armed forces the Russians were undertaking at that moment, a program that would be complete in 1917.
German general staff believed that 1914 was the last year that Germany could beat the Russians.
As you can understand that really made them eager to fight now, in 1914. And that when the Austrians asked for their help in what would turn into a general european war, the Germans took that oppportunity.
But it was not the Germans that sparked WW1, but the Austrians.
And they were in even worse shape. Because the very concept of Austria-Hungary was outdated in 1914. A big multiethnic empire kept together only because the royal family held the various titles that composed the empire.
But this was the age of nationalism, and Austria was surrounded by national states who had many of their brethren still living inside the Austrian empire. Romanians, Serbs, and Italians.
For Austria the threat was clear and imminent. Either they manage to dominate Northern Italy and the Balkans, or their empire will collapse.
If you see your current predicament as doomed, then starting a war is no longer a terrible prospect to be avoided. It becomes an alluring easy fix for a big problem that seems unsolvable otherwise.
Germany wanted to go to war anyway and so did. If it hadn’t been that trigger it would have been another.
One of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite shows, “The West Wing,” occurs when acting president Glen Allen Walken explains how World War I starts.
“Franz Ferdinand, who was the nephew of the Austro-Hungarian emperor, was killed by a group called the Black Hand,” Walken, played by John Goodman, explains. “And because they were a Serbian nationalist society, the empire declared war on Serbia. Then Russia, which was bound by a treaty, was forced to mobilize, which meant that Germany had to declare war on Russia. Then France declared war on Germany, and that was World War I. Because the emperor’s nephew was killed.”
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