Whenever you hear the term something was "really" like this, especially on a blog or internet page, run away. It's likely horrible. The best view is a balanced view and while there were economic reasons for going to war they were not the only reasons and also not necessarily the primary reasons. We can be frank here though; countries would not go to war if they did not feel they had something gain. All the countries who went into that war went into it because they wanted to, dead ass, the end. Italy is just the shining example of a reality that the alliances were a convenience and justification when helpful but absolutely useless when it matters; no one would have gone to war on the side they went to war on if they felt doing so would be the inferior option. They all had something gain or something very major to lose.

Why did Austria-Hungary go to war? Because she was a multi-ethnic, multi-national, multi-linguistic Empire which had just about everyone who was not Austrian or Hungarian hating the empire. Particularly you can look at the Southern part of it all and you see just what the Austro-Hungarians feared: Pan-Slavism. The Slovenes, Croatians, and Bosnians were all massive ethnic majorities in those regions denoted and they all hated the Empire. They wanted their own nation-state, in other words, free from bondage and together with their national brethren. This, however, also included a foreign power's people, you guessed it, Serbia. Yugoslavia was, ultimately after the war, the state of the Slavs; Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia; I mean it literally fit the borders to a T. You can imagine the Austro-Hungarian fear.

This puts things into context then. When the Archduke was assassinated and the Austrians had a veeerrrryyyy tenuous link between the Serbian government and said assassination they would not let a crisis go to waste. As long as Serbia was a free state, was the general feeling, pan-Slavism would continue to thrive. They had to be subjugated, in other words and the Austro-Hungarian government sent an ultimatum which was meant to be refused. Even despite all this the Serbians accepted it all even though it, in all essence, called for the cessation of Serbian sovereignty to A-H. The only caveat was that the Serbs wanted the Hague to conduct the investigation of the murder and not Vienna; Austria-Hungary denied and went to war. They literally got everything they wanted, Serbia would allow A-H to control their press, government appointments, military appointments, so on and so forth and even allowed the investigation in their borders (despite no evidence at the time) and the slightest disagreement gave them their justification for war. This isn't an economic battle this is, in many ways, and I'm going to use this very tenuously, an ethnic or even racial one. Slavism, as a whole, had to be put down and they were just looking for a reason.

We can do the same song and dance for everyone else. Britain went to war because she did not want a single power dominating the continent, especially one as aggressive as Germany. Germany, very loosely, "went to war over economics" but it was far greater than that. Yes they needed colonies to fill their factories with product but, even without them, Germany was the #2 industrial power in the world. They were not starving or anything. The concept of Weltpolitik, of Weltmacht oder Niedergang, "world power or downfall", and the 'prestige' of empire and the German people seizing their 'place in the sun' and their place among the community of Great Powers, was the major driving factor.

It was an ideological war in that sense but also a war of preemptive strikes and security. The Germans perceived the Russians and French as a threat, particularly the latter. Much like the Second World War the Russians were, at the wars beginning, only getting stronger every day. By the late 1910's and early 1920's Russia would have been, without a war interfering, the most dominant land military power on the planet without a doubt and Germany knew this; for pete's sake Russia near-single handedly held off the combined Austro-Hungarian-German-Ottoman invasion for three years and, at Brusilov, single handedly sent one of them (A-H) into a downward spiral of irrelevancy and nearly won the war altogether. The German strike against France had little justification in any legal or 'real' sense but was, again, a strike out of fear: If Russia was going to war they feared the French coming in and struck hard and fast to knock them out and then deal with the Russian threat to the East. Ultimately Russia went to war because she didnt want A-H meddling in the Balkans like that.

So really the concept of "security", internal and external, is a far more concise way to describe the reasons for going to war than "economics". At least in the former economics can be included in some fashion but not make it exclusively about it.