What caused the Great War to start? This question has been a commonly discussed topic amongst many people as everyone has their own unique ideas on what caused the war. It’s interesting that there doesn’t seem to be one proper answer to help figure out the question.

From the good to the bad, there are hundreds of different theses that argue why the war started and what caused it. We had the chance to look at four very credible theses and pull our own thoughts and ideas from those theses to come up with our own so without further ado, this is my thesis on how the Great War, or better known as World War I, started.

What I’m mainly building on in my thesis is that peace was carefully balancing between the Central Powers and the Triple Entende. What I mean by that was that the war didn’t break loose for the sole reason of the assassination of Archduke, Ferdinand. I believe that the constant uncertainty/distrust between countries in Europe was causing high tensions which led to questionable choices. The idea of war was being tossed around in a non very negative way. The murder of Franz Ferdinand was what finally tipped this developing war into action.

The war seemed less about personal problems with the countries and a lot more to do with the connections from each side. For example, Austria-Hungary invades Serbia, Russia supports Serbia and goes to war which automatically puts the rest of the Entende at war as well. The same goes for the Central Powers when they went to war with Russia by invading Serbia.
The importance of this is that the murder of Ferdinand could have just been a situation between Serbia and Austria-Hungary, but with connections, this put a large majority of Europe and war.

To show what each side was doing which I believe caused the war, here’s an example of “visual notes” I made to make it easier to visualize my point about connections and the shaky balance in Europe at the time.

As shown in the picture, you can see that I focused a lot on connections between countries and the awkward relationship between the Triple Entente and Central Powers which I think really impacted how the war started. For a more in depth visual about my thesis, here’s a video I made with Aiden and Adam which emphasizes the importance of connections before the war, enjoy.

I really enjoyed this little segment about WWI as just through making the visuals (video and drawing) I had to pay attention to the details and facts—as you should— which forced me to learn and do more research about WWI and more specifically in this case, before the war. This has been my thesis on what caused the Great War.