Historica Olomucensia

The Europe Before the Great War 1914-1918 and On Its Way to It

The text of this article was presented as a lecture to the students of history at the Philosophical Faculty of the Palacký University, Olomouc in 2010. The author analyses factors and processes leading to the break-out of the Great War 1914-1918 and doing so, he examines three main areas: international relations, economy, and the cultural situation in Europe in general. He argues that the in historiography usual reduction of the "causes" of war to one or two historical facts is further impossible to maintain. In the multi-causal model, it is on the other hand difficult to find an unifying structure among all the historical facts and to appraise their real importance. The world was not heading toward the war with the inevitability of a machine and also the one-sided demonization of Germany is not the correct description of the reality. The Europe's way toward the war is full of paradoxes and irrationality and only a multi-sided synthesising approach can provide an answer to the question how is it possible, that after a few decades of peace, there could have been such a terrible war conflagration.