By the early years of the 20th century the major imperialist gains had been completed, but some of the excitement that the process had generated remained, to spill back into European diplomacy. Germany had begun construction of a large navy, for example, in the late 1890s, in part to assure its place as an imperialist power; but this development, along with Germany’s rapid industrial surge, threatened Britain. France ran a massive empire, but its nationalistic yearnings were not fully satisfied and the humiliating loss of Alsace-Lorraine had not been avenged. Russia encountered a new opponent in the Far East in the rise of Japan. The Japanese, fearful of Russian expansion in northern China, defeated the tsarist forces in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–05, winning Korea in the process. The unstable Russian regime looked for compensatory gains in the hothouse of the Balkans rather than in the distant reaches of Asia. The stage was set for intensification of European conflicts.
Furthermore, the complex alliance system developed by Bismarck came unraveled following the statesman’s removal from power in 1890 at the hands of a new emperor, William II. Germany did not renew its alliance with Russia, and during the 1890s an alliance developed between Russia and France, both fearful of Germany’s might. Britain, also wary of German power, swallowed its traditional enmity and colonial rivalries with France, forming a loose Entente Cordiale in 1904; Russia joined this understanding in 1907. Europe stood divided between two alliance systems.
In 1908 Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was eager to strike a blow against South Slavic nationalism, which threatened the multinational Habsburg empire. This move antagonized Russia and Serbia, the latter claiming these territories as part of its own national domain. In 1912 Russia aided several of the Balkan states in a new attack on the Ottoman Empire, with the allies hoping to obtain Macedonia. The Balkan nations won, but they quarreled with each other in the Second Balkan War in 1913. Further bitterness resulted in the Balkan region, with Serbia, though a winner in both wars, eager to take on Austria-Hungary directly.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian nationalist, assassinated the Austrian archduke and apparent heir to the throne Franz Ferdinand. Austria-Hungary resolved to crush the Serbian threat in response. Germany supported its Austrian ally, partly because it feared that its most reliable partner needed a victory and partly because many leaders judged that war had become inevitable and was preferable sooner than later, given ongoing military modernizations in France and Russia. Russia refused to abandon Serbia, and France hewed to its alliance with Russia. Last-minute negotiations, led by Britain, failed. Russia began a general mobilization following Austria’s July 28 attack on Serbia. Germany, eager to take advantage of Russia’s slowness by striking a lightning blow in the west, then invaded neutral Belgium and pushed into northern France. Britain, briefly hesitant, was committed by treaty to defend Belgium and entered the fray on August 4, and World War I was under way.
The patterns of European diplomacy in the late 19th century are not an unrelieved story of nationalist rivalries. From the 1850s onward European nations signed a number of constructive international agreements designed to link postal systems, regularize principles of international commercial law, and even install some humanitarian agreements in the event of war. The International Red Cross was one fruit of these activities, as was the establishment of a World Court, in the Netherlands, to help settle international disputes. But efforts to negotiate a reduction of armaments, in a series of conferences beginning in 1899, failed completely amid growing national military buildups. Britain and Germany, in particular, refused to abandon their naval race, which took a new turn in 1906 with the development of the massive British battleship HMS Dreadnought.
World War I, a bloody struggle that served to reduce Europe’s world role, resulted not only from escalating international tensions but also from domestic strains. Russia and Austria-Hungary, internally pressed by social and nationalist strife, looked to diplomatic successes, even at the cost of war, as a means of diverting internal discontents, and the alliance system trapped more stable nations into following suit. Germany, Britain, and France, beleaguered by growing socialist gains that frightened a conservative leadership and urged on by intense popular nationalism, also accepted war not only as a diplomatic tool but also as a means of countering internal disarray. Cultural emphasis on irrationality, spontaneity, and despair contributed to the context as well. War thus resulted from a number of basic developments in 19th-century Europe, just as its catastrophic impact resulted from the military technologies that the 19th-century industrial revolution had created. Peter N. Stearns Modern culture
In the last quarter of the 19th century European thought and art became a prey to self-doubt and the fear, as well as the pleasures, of decadence. Writers as different as Baudelaire and Matthew Arnold, Henry Adams and Flaubert, Ruskin and Nietzsche had begun from the mid-century onward to express their revulsion from the banality and smugness of surrounding humanity, debased—they felt—by “progress.” It seemed as if with the onset of positivism and science, Realpolitik and Darwinism, realistic art and popular culture, all noble thought and true emotion had been suffocated. The only things that stood out from banality and smugness were their own appalling extremes—vulgarity and arrogance—against which all the weapons of the mind seemed powerless.
Such intellectuals and artists were hopelessly outnumbered not only in the literal sense but also in the means of influencing culture. A newspaper that reached half a million readers with its clichés, its serial story, and its garish illustrations “educated” the people in a fashion that actively prevented any understanding of high culture. The barrier was far more insurmountable than mere ignorance or illiteracy, and it was cutting off not just the populace but also—to use Arnold’s terms—the barbarian upper class and the Philistine middle class. Similarly, Nietzsche anatomized what he called the culture-Philistine; that is, the person whose mind fed on middling ideas and “genteel” tastes halfway between those of the populace and those of the genuinely cultivated. Numerous artists and writers, high in repute and believed then to be the leaders of modern civilization, provided the materials for these conscientious consumers of art, literature, and “sound opinion” in every field. In other words, the prudent, self-limiting impulse of Realism after 1848 had generated the middlebrow, while the evolution of industrial democracy had generated the mass man. By the late 1880s the gap between this compact army with its honoured officers and common soldiers and the hostile, half-visible avant-garde was a permanent feature of cultural evolution.
Out of the uneven conflict came increasingly violent expressions of hatred and disgust, and the age that had defined Realism as the commonplace and average gradually succumbed to a variety of proffered opposites. Their forms and tendencies can be grouped into half a dozen kinds, not all on the same intellectual or artistic plane, nor all distinctly named then or now. One discerns first a retreat from the ugly world into a species of Neoclassicism. Such were the French poets known as Parnassians. Strict form, antique subjects, and the pose of impassivity constitute their hallmark. In painting, the work of Puvis de Chavannes stands in parallel.
In music, the explicit revolt against Wagner and Liszt, of which Brahms was made the torchbearer, offers similarities, particularly in the desire to learn and employ the “purer” forms of an earlier time. Likewise, the shift in tone and temper of the later poems of Tennyson, Arnold, or Gautier; the resurgence of Thomist orthodoxy in Roman Catholic thought; the haughty detachment in the plays of Becque and those of Ibsen’s middle period, all suggest a search for stability, for a fixed point from which to judge and condemn contemporary “progress.” Symbolism and Impressionism