The ‘first world war’ is a misnomer. Its causes were no more world-wide than its battlefields. The national antagonisms which exploded in it were European, and the alignment of the belligerent powers inside and outside Europe did not correspond to the lines of real cleavage between either the imperial interests of European powers or extra-European national ambitions. As world-wide causes have been assigned to the war, so also have causes comparatively remote in time. In each case the enlargement in retrospect of its true limits above all reflects the magnitude of the experience for contemporaries. But it accords as well with the preoccupations of various doctrinaire schools of international and national politics and history which have helped form popular interpretations of the war. The dogma, for instance, that war at this stage of history must express ‘imperialist contradictions’—one not confined to Marxists—required that the war should be treated as global, while the doctrine current in post-war Europe that it was the necessary result of German authoritarian militarism required that the origins of the war should be traced back to the foundation of the second German empire.

Most schools of interpretation, however, accept a distinction between remote and immediate origins of the war of 1914 and to most a dividing line in 1912 makes sense, if not for all the same reasons. Then began the crucial developments in two of the three main causes of the crisis of July 1914, or at least of the final order of battle, the alliance system and Balkan nationalism—the third being Anglo-German naval rivalry.