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  • i I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History, and things are indeed on

  • course to crash, because World War I is coming.

  • Decades ago, when I studied European history in high school, I learned there were precise

  • causes of the war: the alliance system, arms build-up, secret treaties, nationalism, and

  • imperialism.

  • That set of causes, launched from above by political leaders, eventually led to war.

  • But more recently, historians have started to lay out a more complex road to war: namely,

  • a road that passed through social and cultural change at the turn of the century.

  • And those changes, which were experienced by tens of thousands if not millions of people,

  • caused tensions across a broad swath of Europe.

  • People's lives were affected by changing family structures, by paradigm shifts in science,

  • disruption of traditional gender roles, achievement of the vote by working men, and ongoing economic

  • advances, and the result was disorientation, dislocation, deep resentments, and widespread

  • fear--which, of course, is not too dissimilar from how an array of changes are affecting

  • people today.

  • [Intro] Some might even say that pre-war Europe a

  • battlefield before World War I started.

  • Strikes, which at times grew violent, abounded across Europewhether at the oil fields

  • of Baku, the farms of Hungary, or the factories of Italy.

  • Assassinations were common--as was everyday violence against Jewish people and other oppressed

  • ethnic minorities.

  • In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was tried for espionage,

  • convicted and imprisoned on Devil's Island.

  • The evidence against Dreyfus turned out to be fabricated, complete with forged signatures.

  • Further evidence of his innocence was that the espionage continued, even after his exile.

  • Passions exploded over the case, and anti-Semitism flourished, families quarreled, and assaults

  • took place around questions of whether Dreyfus had committed these crimes.

  • Newspapers took both sides as violence grew.

  • Then in 1898 famed novelist Emile Zola's article “J'accuse,” exposed trumped

  • up evidence against Dreyfus and helped build support for him.

  • Dreyfus was eventually pardoned in 1899, but facts were not enough to stop the growing

  • hatred and antisemitism.

  • Intense divisions within and between communities were growing elsewhere, too.

  • Ireland, for one, was on the brink of civil war, with both those opposing British rule

  • and those favoring it establishing independent armies.

  • The distant colonial world was increasingly tense too.

  • Between 1904 and 1908 the German army massacred between 24,000 and 100,000 Herero people,

  • who refused to surrender their lands in southwest Africa.

  • Those who weren't massacred were driven into distant territory to starve.

  • Some say that slaughter was a training ground for European soldiers who would soon engage

  • in further war.

  • Around the same time, the French closed the University of Hanoi and arrested or killed

  • prominent teachers and intellectuals. and open rebellion escalated.

  • As one opponent said of the French: “Look at those men with blue eyes and yellow beards.

  • They are not our fathers, nor are they our brothers.

  • How can they squat here, defecating on our heads?”

  • and the Boers--that is, farmers with Dutch heritage-- of South Africa likewise rebelled

  • against the British as the 20th century opened.

  • They were only defeated after many civilians, confined to concentration camps, died of disease

  • or starvation.

  • South Asians demanded reform too.

  • They became more militantly anti-British and launched boycotts of British goods.

  • In 1900, a conglomerate of colonial nations massacred Chinese civilians involved in the

  • Boxer rebellion.

  • Boxer activists had themselves assassinated European and Chinese Christians in an attempt

  • to take back their empire from white invaders.

  • All these events suggest that the world was already at war before 1914, although if you've

  • been following this series, or our other series in history, you'll know that war was often

  • happening-- if anything, peace, to whatever extent humans have experienced it, is very

  • much a historical exception.

  • And that's important to remember when thinking about the ultimately disastrous system of

  • allegiances Europe had developed.

  • That system was created by politicians to try to prevent wars, or at least to manage

  • any on the continent.

  • Foremost among these politicians was our old friend Otto von Bismarck, who'd had no qualms

  • about starting wars to help Germany build its empire but then declared Germany a “satisfied

  • nation.

  • Oh, the adjectives that haunt us.

  • Bismarck wanted peace in Europe and so organized an alliance system to that end, binding Germany

  • and Austria in the Dual Alliance of 1879, then adding Italy to a Triple Alliance in

  • 1882.

  • He also allied Germany with Russia in the Reinsurance Treaty, another attempt to build

  • coalitions so formidable that large wars would become impossible.

  • But all of this was about to change when William II, aka Kaiser Wilhelm, came to power in Germany

  • in 1890.

  • He rattled the sword, and called Bismarck's alliances the work of an outmoded old man.

  • Under William II, the treaty with Russia was canceled, which drove Russia to sign an alliance

  • with France in 1894.

  • William also called for Germany to gain power around the world, expanding into tropical

  • colonies to create a Germanplace in the sun.”

  • Which if you wanna do, you could just try to take Southern France.

  • Oh, right, you will.

  • Try to take Southern France.

  • Meanwhile, the French and British secretly built another alliance--theentente cordiale

  • And I'll remind you, I've had three years of high school French.

  • It was based on military cooperation and even shared military plans.

  • The entente became a triple entente when Russia and Britain settled their colonial differences

  • in 1907, uniting three very different powers.

  • But as they were entente-ing, Europe's powers were also growing their militaries.

  • Standing armies grew to hundreds of thousands of troops.

  • General staffs demanded larger stockpiles of weapons and got what they wanted.

  • Most costly were theDreadnoughtsor massive battleships with unprecedented firepower.

  • Britain launched the first of these in 1905; others followed.

  • The construction of battleships in these years employed tens of thousands of workers.

  • So through their staffs of public relations experts, military hawks threatened that cutting

  • the production of Dreadnoughts would lead to mass unemployment and revolution.

  • We want eight and we won't waitwas a popular British chant for more ships.

  • So, yeah, America didn't invent the military-industrial complex.

  • But we did perfect it.

  • So, William II also wanted Dreadnoughts, because he hoped to win the British over to an alliance

  • of Teutonic peoples, including especially Germans, that could defeat theLatins

  • orGaulsof southern Europe whom he considered inferior.

  • William was the grandson of Queen Victoria and a staunch anglophile, much to the dismay

  • of his generals.

  • But rather than taking advice from experts in his government, William used another strategy.

  • He avidly followed press coverage of himself and his regime, using that as a monitor of

  • successful policy.

  • He had tantrums and even months of nervous collapse when he was criticized in the press

  • and elsewhere, creating an atmosphere of turmoil in German policy through erratic militarism.

  • So, despite all these attempts to control war through alliances, the early decades of

  • the century were also deadly because of revolution and local wars in Europe itself.

  • In 1905, the people of Russia rose up against the tsarist regime.

  • They were hard pressed in their daily lives due to a conflict between Russia and Japan

  • over competing claims in East Asia.

  • And the Japanese, who'd been developing a modern army and an industrial economy, attacked

  • and crushed the Russian fleet in 1905.

  • Ordinary people paid the price for these losses and rebelled, but then Tsarist promises of

  • reform, combined with armed force, eventually restored calm and preserved the Romanov grip

  • on power--for another decade or so.

  • The Balkans also heated up, due to secret societies of Balkan peoples that collected

  • arms and organized themselves against the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, and also had

  • amazing facial hair.

  • Everything about that photograph is phenomenal, but the best part is that it vaguely resembles

  • a cheerleading pyramid...

  • Within these secret societies, people moved from safe house to safe house as they built

  • networks of militiamen ready to sabotage, assassinate, and fight the imperial powers

  • in order to gain independence.

  • In the face of such resistance, Turkish nationalists demanded a strengthening of military and administrative

  • institutions in the Ottoman Empire.

  • Finally, in 1908 a group of officers called the Young Turks rebelled in the name of promoting

  • Turkish ethnicity.

  • They ultimately pushed aside the sultan and replaced him with a pliable brother who was

  • more submissive to the Young Turks, albeit guided by a constitution and parliament.

  • The Young Turks responded to other people's nationalist dreams by squashing demands for

  • self-rule from Balkan ethnic groups.

  • Even as the Young Turks inspired many groups both in Europe and around the world, Austria-Hungary

  • used their revolt as distraction during which it scooped up Bosnia.

  • That caused outrage among Serbs as they had wanted to add Bosnia to a “greater Serbia

  • while all Balkan people's anger against the Young Turks boiled over.

  • Building on this anger, the Balkan governments of Montenegro, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Greece

  • unleashed the First Balkan War in 1912 against the Ottoman Empire.

  • They quickly won, only blocked when they tried to march on Constantinople.

  • But there was jealousy among the victors over the splitting up the territorial gains, as

  • there so often is, so in spring 1913 the Second Balkan War erupted.

  • The main issue this time was the territory awarded to Bulgaria in the settlement.

  • Serbia, which was backed by Russia, gained territory from this second war, making Austria-Hungary

  • and Germany anxious, not least because the Habsburgs were nervous that Austria-Hungary's

  • Slavic population might want to be part of this exciting new Greater Serbia.

  • German public relations people swung into action, planting hysterical stories on the

  • growing and lethal threat from Slavs.

  • So if you're wondering if misinformation can contribute to a global sense of dis-ease,

  • confusion, and polarization: Yes.

  • Yes, it can.

  • The heir to the Habsburg imperial throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, had a solution

  • for all these problems: restore absolutism as it had existed before the revolutions of

  • 1848 and the general liberalization of politics.

  • The parliamentary form of government has outlived its usefulness,” an advisor to

  • Franz Ferdinand had written as early as 1898.

  • The so-called individual freedoms must be curtailed.”

  • Let's Go to the Thought Bubble 1.

  • In June 1914, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian bookworm named Gavrilo Princip

  • 2. became one of history's more famous teenagers.

  • 3.

  • Princip thrived on reading Sherlock Holmes mysteries

  • 4. and Sir Walter Scott's heart-pounding stories of heroic medieval knights.