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[male narrator] Human history is equal parts
heroism, tragedy, and misunderstanding.
Very rarely have we displayed all three to such a degree
as in the First World War.
This war is called the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century
because without it, there is no Stalin and no Hitler;
no fascism or World War II.
Without it, we don't have a Cold War that leads us to the very brink of annihilation.
Nor do we see the Middle East carved up by old men still bitter from four years
of meaningless, self-inflicted catastrophe.
Without this war, we probably don't have 9/11
or the turmoil in the Middle East today.
This war ushered in the modern age.
Born in a crucible of gunpowder and toxic smoke
and the blood of ten million men.
Blood spilled in war from the fields of France to the waters off America.
From the Russian frontier to the sands of the Middle East.
From the Chinese mainland to the deepest parts of the sea.
This war broke empires.
It shattered the past and forced us to give up our last ties to our medieval understanding.
When the smoke cleared and a stunned world climbed out of its trenches,
we lived in a new age with new powers, new ideas, and new terrors.
It is the defining event of the 20th century.
It is the Great War.
But it's not the war itself that we’re here to talk about today.
Hopefully, over the course of this show,
a bit at a time, we’ll slowly, story by story,
cover the sprawling events of this turning point in history.
But today?
Today we are focused on the events that led to this war.
For if the war itself is the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century,
then the weeks before the war are its seminal tragedy.
In these next few episodes, we’ll focus on the very human, very personal stories
that led Europe to consume itself,
to ignite itself in one suicidal blaze from which it still hasn't recovered,
because it is a tragedy of the highest order.
It's like a play, a Greek epic,
a story so grand we would think it must be fiction
if the scars of the war couldn’t still be seen on the fields of France.
It’s Shakespeare living out before us.
It begins with the death of a prince and his lady
and ends in mass slaughter the likes of which the world has never seen.
So let's set the stage.
For a hundred years, Europe has been at peace.
There have been wars, sure, but they were minor wars, wars on the periphery,
wars without many of the Great Powers involved.
Not since Napoleon did the great states of Europe vie in bloody battle.
For after the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars,
the statesmen of Europe had come together
to try to stop such a catastrophe from ever happening again.
They created a system called the Concert of Europe
so that whenever war seemed perilously close,
the nations of Europe would come together in a congress, a conference,
and instead come to a settlement that all parties would abide by.
But Europe has changed since those weary of the Napoleonic conflicts
first came together to create the Great Concert.
The first and most major change was the formation of Germany.
At the time our story begins,
it's important to remember Germany as a nation was only forty years old.
It's a young nation, a strong one,
a nation looking to claim its own.
But to say that Germany was a strong nation is to undersell the magnitude of its creation.
I mean to say that the birth of Germany
was something perhaps unique in the history of the world.
For overnight, with the signing of a few papers,
the middle of Europe was transformed from a thousand tiny squabbling states
to the greatest land power the world had ever known.
In one night, suddenly the most powerful nations of Europe,
Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, and England
were not the most powerful nations in Europe any longer.
Overnight in the very heart of Europe had been created a nation
with more manpower, natural resources, and economic strength
than any other nation in the world, except perhaps for Great Britain.
Moreover, this creation was cemented in the defeat of France,
which at the time was considered the strongest land power in Europe,
and at the time of our story, that defeat and its memory still run deep.
And now look at the world from the perspective of that powerful new German nation.
Here they are, arguably the most powerful country in the world,
and yet they see themselves being denied all the rights of a great world power.
Britain and France held territories across the globe.
Even the Netherlands, a nation which the might of the new Germany
can wipe off the face of the earth in a week,
had colonies from Asia all the way to Africa.
But Germany, for all their strength,
had been denied those possessions simply because their nation was young.
Imagine what this does to the balance of power.
Imagine what this does to the geopolitical scene.
Think what would happen today if, say,
the entire EU declared themselves a single nation
with a single economy, a single military, and a single foreign policy.
Imagine if they said that they want greater access to Middle Eastern oil.
And Russia and the United States said,
“No, we were here first.”
Imagine now if representatives from Russia and the United States smiled
and told this young nation that they’d be happy
to continue to sell them oil at an inflated price, though.
This was the position Germany found itself in.
How was the Concert of Europe,
a system built around a balance of power and compromise,
to last in these circumstances?
And yet, for forty years, it did.
And this brings us to the second major change since the Napoleonic Wars:
The men.
The seventy years after those wars was a time of giants,
men who towered over the world stage.
Time and again here, Europe rolled well on the dice of history
and came up with leaders who were capable of navigating an increasingly complex
and increasingly modern geopolitical world.
In the 1800s, Russians saw men like Alexander II,
who understood that Russia needed to modernize to survive.
He began dismantling serfdom, reformed the judicial practices,
encouraged universities and pursued peace,
understanding that Russia was in no position to fight the major European powers.
Like all the men here, this guy was not all chuckles and sunshine.
Alexander II brutally suppressed revolutionaries and separatists
in the territories Russia controlled.
Still, he was effective without question.
By 1900, we have in Russia Nicholas II,
a deeply reactionary, deeply conservative man,
who history records as being of middling intellect
with neither the training nor the inclination to properly rule.
His reign is a catalog of embarrassing mismanagement.
This is the man who fell under the sway of the mystic Rasputin.
This is a man who couldn't even coordinate his own coronation,
a man who let 1300 people die in a human stampede on the day he was crowned
because, I kid you not, there was not enough beer and pretzels.
And this is the man who held a ball that day anyway because,
hey, while let a few hundred deaths spoil your day.
And this is the man who will, in the end,
hold the fate of the world in his hands.
And by this point in Austria, we have as emperor an 84-year-old man,
two years away from his death and battered by the weight of the life he's led.
His foreign minister, Berthold, is neither a bad man nor a stupid man,
but he is a weak and vacillating man
at a time when European politics are all about strength.
And Germany?
Germany during the twenty years following its creation had unquestionably
one of the greatest diplomats the world has ever seen:
Otto von Bismarck.
This is a man of great ability and great appetite;
a man known to smoke three cigars at once
and down a bottle of champagne at breakfast;
a man who probably deserves an entire episode just to himself,
but for our purposes, he is the man who held the Concert of Europe together
under the incredible strain of the creation of the new German state.
His life's work was to ensure that France and Russia never allied
so that Germany would never be surrounded.
This was his nightmare, his greatest fear,
and in this, like in many things, he turned out to be right.
He famously said that the great European conflagration
would come from some damn fool thing in the Balkans,
and he warned Kaiser Wilhelm II that within 20 years
his bellicose policies would destroy the Kaiser Reich,
and he was correct, almost to the day.
But he was fired by Kaiser Wilhelm II,
who has too much historical baggage to get an accurate view of.
Suffice it to say that the Kaiser often ends up with a reputation for feeling inadequate,
having been born with a withered arm
and growing up hounded by his mother,
he came to believe that he had to prove he was masculine,
and so set out to break with Bismarck’s policies
and show that he was his own man
by abandoning the German alliance with Russia
and moving Germany toward a much more expansionist stance.
He was known for being brash and impulsive with little tact,
crumbling the carefully balanced alliances
that had for so long kept the Concert of Europe in place.
Now to all this we have to add one last piece to the stage:
Fear.
The fear of the dying empires;
the fear of those once great nations
that now so clearly saw the shadow of death approaching them from behind.
The Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
and the Russian Empire.
The Ottoman Empire was long known as the sick man of Europe.
Its decline had been long and slow
with the surrounding nations taking bites out of its carcass as it slowly died.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire looked at the fate of the Ottomans
and saw shadows of what was to come.
They feared they'd be like the Ottomans—
dismantled, taken apart piece by piece until they were too weak to fight back.
They had once been the most powerful state in Europe,
but they ruled over many nations and many peoples,
and over the 19th century, those people had asserted themselves,
crying out for their own nations, crying out to be free,
to as people decide their own fate.
And so through the 19th century,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire saw its territory chipped away
as the other great nations of the Concert of Europe ruled in their conferences
that those people had a right to be free.
And with each loss,
those peoples that the Austro-Hungarian Empire still maintained control of
agitated for their own freedom to a greater and greater extent,
causing unrest that rocked the empire to its very core.
And lastly, we have the Russians.
The Russian czars ruled the largest country in the world,
but like the Ottomans, their military, economy, and infrastructure
were woefully behind the times.
And in 1905 when the Russians lost the war with the Japanese--
the first time a European power had lost a war to an Asian one in modern history--
their weakness became eminently clear to the world.
This loss caused a revolution that forced the czar
to accept the parliament and a constitutional monarchy.
But it wasn't in the nature of Alexander II to accept the parliament,
and he rebelled against these constraints,
leaving his country precariously perched on the verge revolution.
So with a new superpower in the midst of Europe,
fear driving crumbling empires to irrational and desperate decisions,
and a group of leaders simply not equal to their forebears
at the task of guiding the ships of state,
the players are all in place.
The stage is set and the curtain begins to rise
on the war to end all wars.
Join us next time for an improbable assassination,
the death of a prince,
and a sandwich which changed history.
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