Who Was To Blame For The First World War

Although it is generally agreed upon that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was the event that sparked World War I, this singular act was really just the last straw. Such a bloody, widespread conflict, cannot be explained away or blamed on just one event, but as the war was so devastating, placing blame was something everyone seemed eager to do when it came time to create peace in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles. As such, the question became: is it possible to put the blame for a world war on just one country? At the time, all fingers pointed to Germany, but in much the same way that the assassination was not world changing enough to carry all of the blame, the nation of Germany was not either. Germany undoubtedly …show more content…
These secondary attempts to reckon with what caused World War I make up the revisionist movement of the historiography. The works from this period were generally characterized by the idea of shared blame, with all of the European powers jointly causing the war (Hale 259). Interestingly, many of these historians were not German, they had no special ties that made them partial to German innocence (259). For example, Sidney Bradshaw Fay, an American historian, developed a thesis in the late 1920s that primarily blamed the First World War on the issues of nationalism that had developed, leading to imperialism and separatism throughout Europe. Fay also took issue with the secret alliances that the European powers had gone into, which Fay felt served to further divide Europe since different nations became grouped with their allies, bound to them in peace or war (Fay 11). However, Fay also asserted that Germany was forced to attack, giving them a minimal hand in the war, which many disagree with, although the general revisionist ideas still