Unraveling the Causes of World War I: Assessing the Fischer Thesis and Long-Term Factors

World War I, which began in central Europe in July 1914, was a conflict which involved all of the world’s great powers and was the second deadliest conflict in Western history. However, its origins remain extremely controversial and have been debated ceaselessly. There have been numerous arguments for conflict, but this essay will only focus on the Fischer thesis in evaluating and assessing the long and short term causes.

However, we must first examine the background in which conflict arose between the two alliance blocs. In 1871, the Franco-Prussian War saw the well-equipped Prussian army not only defeating, but also humiliating France. The unification of Germany meant a shift in balance of power in Europe, and its victory over France showed its potential to be dominant. Following the war, Germany continued to grow in military and industrial strength, becoming the strongest industrial power in Europe by 1900. The sudden rise of Germany and the destabilizing of power caused much anxiety among other European countries.

To make matters worse, a young and ambitious Wilhelm II came to the German throne in 1888, drastically modifying German’s foreign policy such that France was free from isolation, and alliance between Russia lapsed, allowing France to ally with Russia. In addition, the new German government embarked on a new foreign policy, known as Weltpolitik, which aimed to secure colonies overseas and expand the empire. This brought it into conflict with more established colonial powers, namely Britain and France over the Jameson Raid as well as the subsequent Moroccan crisis.

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Furthermore, it was also the result of Weltpolitik that Germany decided to present a naval challenge to Britain, which prided in its naval supremacy. Hence, Britain was forced out of its position of ‘Spendid Isolation’ in order to respond to Germany’s challenge. To seek security against what seemed like Germany’s aggressive expansionism, Britain, France and Russia formed the Triple Entente. Feeling encircled, Germany also sought alliances with Austria Hungary and Italy.

To put these events in perspective, we shall use the Fischer thesis to see how these events paved the way to war. According to the book, Germany’s aims in the First World War, which Fritz Fischer published in 1967, Fischer claims that German decision-makers in 1914 had deliberately risked European war, in full realization that an Austrian-Serbian conflict might escalate. In fact, he argues that German leadership had pursued an aggressive foreign policy in the years before 1914, and they had regarded the July crisis as a golden opportunity to achieve some of their expansionist aims.

He also maintained that Germany’s leaders went to war in order to achieve annexation war aims (the so-called September-Programme), and that these aims had been similar to those pursued by Hitler in the Second World War, implying a continuity in expansionist policy from WWI to WW2. Furthermore, he suggested that the German foreign policy was viewed by the Kaiser and his government as a key means of diverting attention from domestic problems. Hence, according to Fischer’s views, the policy that led to the outbreak of war was not one of blunders, but of design.

Based on Fischer’s argument, Weltpolitik as an aggressive foreign policy would be considered a significant factor in the outbreak of war. Fischer support this argument with a document that he discovered in the files of Reich-Chancellery in Potsdam, which seemed to reveal that Germany’s war aims during the war matched the intention of the pre-war years to achieve a position of hegemony for Germany, first in Europe and ultimately world-wide. The document, dated 9 September 1914 and subsequently dubbed ‘September Programme’, was a memorandum written by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg’s private secretary Kurt Riezler, detailing the Chancellor’s view about the aims of German policy.

It included plans of annexations of territory belonging to Germany’s European neighbours, a customs union that would guarantee German economic hegemony and a German colonial empire in Africa. In Fischer’s words, ‘the realization of this programme would have brought about a complete revolution in the political and economic power-relationship in Europe’. To Fischer, the ‘September-Programme’ was a ‘blueprint’ for world power. ‘It was an expression of German striving for European hegemony, the first step toward ‘world domination’’, as he summed up in a later publication.

A great emphasis is also placed on the using of the July crisis by the German government to deliberately instigate war, as well as the fact that the German government already had a pre-existing war plan long before the July crisis. The recording of a meeting in December 1912 shows that the German government already had a war plan long before the July crisis. Against the background of war in the Balkans, and having been advised that Britain would not remain neutral in a future war between Germany and France, Wilhelm II had used this new uncertainty to argue for unleashing a war.

His advisors had agreed and the Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke even demanded a war ‘the sooner the better’. Evidence for this secret meeting emerged from the diary’s of Kaiser’s Chief of the Imperial Naval Cabinet, Admiral von Muller. According to Muller’s account, the Kaiser’s ‘envisaged the following’ at the meeting, ‘Austria must deal energetically with the foreign Slavs (the Serbs), otherwise she will lose control of the Slavs in the Austrian Hungary monarchy… The fleet must naturally prepare itself for the war against England.’ On the basis of such evidence, Fischer argued that war had been decided upon in Berlin as early as December 1912, and that the meeting was proof of the warlike spirit among German’s leading decision-makers.

Finally, the presence of domestic problem also encouraged the German government to go to war, such as to distract the public. Fischer maintained that an aggressive foreign policy had been employed by Imperial Germany’s ruling elite in order to placate public opinion and divert attention from domestic problems, an argument that had first been advanced by Eckhart Kehr in the early 1930s. To justify the lack of democracy, the Kaiser and the Junkers devised complex strategies to weaken the influence of organized labour, and used foreign policy and imperialism to rally the middle class to support the ruling elite, a strategy known as Sammlungspolitik. This view explains why Germany embarked on Weltpolitik in the first place and decided on war in 1914.

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