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The First World War as a Global War
From its beginning, the First World War was a global affair and had multiple layers: civil society organizations, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, the involvement of women, and new means of communication and transportation changed the nature of the war. Image Source: Library of Congress
On June 28, 2014, it has been exactly one century since Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated. On the occasion of this anniversary, the Institute aims to use the example of the First World War to demonstrate the potential of European Global Studies.
“A couple of revolver shots probably never before formed a connection between such a line of complicated causes and such an infinite variety of possibly still more complicated affects as those yesterday”, wrote the New York Times in one of the paper’s first reports on the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo. For the summer month that followed the event, a diplomatic silence prevailed – at least on the surface. During the so-called July Crisis, the diplomats’ back rooms witnessed hectic exchanges among the alliance partners, which culminated in Austria-Hungary, backed by Germany, declaring war on Serbia. The successive calls for alliance action that followed resulted in the outbreak of the First World War.
Already during the war, a discussion that was held through a large amount of documents dealt with the question about the war guilt; a question that was only recently revived by the British historian Christopher Clark and his theory about the diplomatic ‘sleepwalkers’. In these disputes, the First World War was regarded as a European war, which, according to the long prevailing perception of the events, has only developed into a world war during the fateful year of 1917, with the Russian Revolution and the United States’ entry into the war.
Such a reading, which regards the events as a gradually expanding conflict, is contradicted by our contemporary views on the world of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The political and economic dependency of the colonies, and thus of all regions of the world – with the exception of Latin America – on the colonial powers, the densification of global value chains, the moving together of the world through the means of communication, railway and steamship, as well as the mobility of people, goods and ideas resulted in a degree of integration and reciprocal dependencies that is ranked only slightly behind our contemporary understanding of globalization.
From its beginning, the First World War had a global dimension that has long been underestimated and is now increasingly recognized by historians. The historical actors were aware of the border-crossing entanglements of economy, society and law since the mid-19th century, and this interplay left its mark on the actions of governments, diplomats and states. Once we assume that the outbreak and the progression of the First World War was just as much shaped by this entanglement of Europe with other regions of the world as the first global economic crises at the end of the 19th century, the scale of the foreshadowed ‘great seminal catastrophe’ becomes apparent already a few days after the assassination in Sarajevo: the approach followed by European Global Studies allows us to reflect on the connection between globalization and conflicts and thus to rethink one of the core problems of our contemporary times from a historical perspective.
Through a gradually published series of contributions, the Institute for European Global Studies will report on the global global-historical dimension of the First World War and explore the analytical potential of European Global Studies. The first article is about the media coverage in Asia and the United States during the days that followed June 28, 1914, and thus points to the new possibilities of information gathering that are opened up be the use of the ‘Digital Humanities’. The quoted sources and images, for instance, can be viewed via NewspaperSG, a digitization project of the National Library of Singapore, or via the digitized image collection of the American Library of Congress.