Europe Was Sitting on a Powder Keg, Giving Off Sparks – German Fear of Russia
The war was sparked by Serbian terrorists’ assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. However, a general European war would probably have erupted sooner or later, as a result of numerous tensions and irreconcilable differences between Europe’s great powers. Even without the Archduke’s assassination, it is likely that another spark would have led to war.
The biggest source of tension was Germany’s fear of Russia, which launched a massive program of modernization and industrialization in the 1890s. Until then, German military planners were confident that backwards Russia was incapable of fighting a modern military like Germany’s. Russian modernization, coupled with Russia’s vast potential in manpower and resources, upset those calculations.
A powerful Russia was worrisome to Germany, which already had a formidable potential foe to her west: a revanchist France, eager to redress the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war, and regain the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. The Germans were confident that they could handle France, but a France allied with a modern Russia was another story.
Fear of Russian modernization came on the heels of decades of warnings from German nationalist intellectuals about an inevitable showdown between menacing “Slavs” and fair “Teutons” for the mastery of Europe. As they presented it, the issue was a racial conflict that had been fought between Germans and Eastern Europeans, in one form or another, for centuries.
Experts in the German general staff calculated that Russian modernization would enable Russia to catch up with Germany by 1916, and steadily pull ahead thereafter. Thus, by 1914, the German military was advising the Kaiser that since war with Russia was inevitable, it had best be fought sooner rather than later, before Russia had fully modernized and realized her potential.