Unless Britain was willing to allow Germany to expand economically, the logic of capitalist competition meant that Germany was bound to challenge British naval supremacy. Britain’s naval power was the vital element in its ability to restrict German access to markets and resources across the world. Imperialist competition between the two states over markets and resources preceded the arms race in the fifteen years before the war. The enthusiasm of the British ruling class for war undermines any justification for it based on German aggression.Ĥ Germany had started a naval arms race with Britain. The declaration letter had to be retrieved from the German ambassador and rewritten when it was discovered that the stories were false. At one point the Foreign Office even seized on imaginary German incursions into France to justify a British declaration of war on Germany. However aggressive the German leadership may have been in 1914, the British establishment was at least as determined to take the opportunity to go to war with its imperial rival. The Germans even offered guarantees over Belgian integrity, which the British government refused to consider at all.ģ German aggression was the driving force for war. These obligations had been developed in secret arrangements between the military of both countries, and were never subject to any kind of democratic accountability. There was no clear and accepted obligation on Britain to do this, and, in fact, before the Belgian issue appeared, the war party in the cabinet was already pushing for British intervention on the entirely different ground that there were naval obligations to France. In Germany also, there were attempts to justify the war on the grounds that it was being fought to defend civilised values against a repressive, militaristic state, in the form of Russian autocracy.Ģ Britain went to war due to a treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium. Germany had universal manhood suffrage while in Britain, including Ireland, some 40% of men still did not qualify for the vote. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.ġ The war was fought in defence of democracy. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Dominic Alexander debunks ten myths used to justify the slaughter of the First World War
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