A 1917 cartoon shows the German leader William II considering the U.S. flag looming on the horizon. ►
When war broke out in Europe in 1914, the United States decided to stay neutral. However, incidents like the senseless destruction of Louvain, a medieval university town in Belgium, by German troops turned American opinion against Germany.
“For two hours on Thursday night I was in what for six hundred years had been the city of Louvain. The Germans were burning it … the story … was told to us by German soldiers incoherent with excesses; and we could read it in the faces of the women and children being led to concentration camps and of the citizens on their way to be shot.”
—American journalist Richard Harding Davis, August 1914
Reading Skill: Identify Causes As you read, identify the causes of World War I, the conditions facing soldiers, and the reasons for U.S. involvement.
Why It Matters In 1914, nationalism, militarism, imperialism, and entangling alliances combined with other factors to lead the nations of Europe into a brutal war. The war quickly stretched around the globe. The United States remained neutral at first but ended up abandoning its long tradition of staying out of European conflicts. Section Focus Question: What caused World War I, and why did the United States enter the war?
Until 1914, there had not been a large-scale European conflict for nearly one hundred years. However, bitter, deep-rooted problems simmered beneath the surface of polite diplomacy. Europe was sitting on a powder keg of nationalism, regional tensions, economic rivalries, imperial ambitions, and militarism.
Nationalism, or devotion to one’s nation, kick-started international and domestic tension. In the late 1800s, many Europeans began to reject the earlier idea of a nation as a collection of different ethnic groups. Instead, they believed that a nation should express the nationalism of a single ethnic group. This belief evolved into an intense form of nationalism that heightened international rivalries. For example, France longed to avenge its humiliating defeat by a collection of German states in 1871 and regain Alsace-Lorraine, the territory it lost during that conflict. Nationalism also threatened minority groups within nation-states. If a country existed as the expression of “its people,” the majority ethnic group, where did ethnic minorities fit in?