I'm writing a dissertation on whether or not the first world war was inevitable or not and would love to hear some people's opinions on whether WW1 was going to happen, or if it could have been avoided. I apologize if this breaks any rules, I don't post often here so I'm not quite familiar with the etiquette of this subreddit.
Edit* Just to clarify I'm looking for Historian's opinions on the subject. I would appreciate any recommendations for sources I could use for my dissertation. Thanks!
Could you clarify what you're hoping to achieve with this post? We're an "Ask An Expert" subreddit so if you are looking for a historians' answer then that's fine (though surely if you're writing a dissertation on this question you're well placed to answer it yourself!) However if you're looking to do a survey of sorts – canvassing people who aren't necessarily experts' personal opinions – I'm afraid this isn't the appropriate venue.
If it is latter you could ask in our upcoming Friday Free-For-All feature, though.
hi! you may be interested in some previous discussions (no doubt this isn't an exhaustive list; I just looked for variations of "WWI" + inevitable/unavoidable):
In my opinion a big war between European Powers was unavoidable. During the time period you have an extreme extension of European state power into the whole world. Everybody who could, expanded.
This also changed the connection between the Major Powers. As soon as the world was completly split up between them, they had to expand into "owned" regions, imperialism wasn't going away just because there were no more "uncivilized" people to conquer. The whole world became conquerable, all limits to what is acceptable became void.
The war also began more or less over a colony. The balkan was seen by Austria and Russia as somewhat of a colony, and they competed between each other who controlled them. And if it wasn't the Balkan, it could have been any other colony.
Also the question over Elsass-Lothringen wasn't solved, and France had a revanchist feeling and didn't give the region up. Nationalism was the icing on the cake.
The war was the explosion of decades of build-up tension by constant warring around the world.