The Illusion of Limited War: Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg's Calculated Risk, July 1914

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Abstract
The responsibility for the outbreak of World War I weighed heavily upon Imperial Germany's fifth Chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg. “This war torments me,” he confessed to the Liberal Conrad Haussmann during the struggle. “Again and again I ask if it could have been avoided and what I should have done differently.” This soul searching led Bethmann to believe that “all nations are guilty; Germany, too, bears a large part of the blame.” Arguing that “our fate is too colossal to have its origins in singular events,” the Chancellor stressed the larger causes of the conflict. Imperialist rivalry, the anti-German coalition, the growing isolation of Berlin, and Vienna's relative decline, “all that forced us to adopt a policy of utmost risk, a risk that increased with each repetition, in the Moroccan quarrel, in the Bosnian crisis, and then again in the Moroccan question.” But he also admitted candidly: “Lord yes, in a certain sense it was a preventive war,” motivated by “the constant threat of attack, the greater likelihood of its inevitability in the future, and by the military's claim: today war is still possible without defeat, but not in two years! Yes, the generals,” he repeated. “It could only have been avoided by a rapprochement with England, that is still my conviction. But after we had decided for a [common] policy with Austria, we could not desert her in such danger.”

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