Stephen Van Evera's Offensive Argument For The First World War

There are many events that led to the outbreak of the First World War, but only few are important. I am trying to answer if problems of private information or commitment were primarily the cause. Van Evera argues that the belief in offensive military doctrines created private information that destabilized the international order. Rowe argues that the the ability to credibly threaten violence stabilized the system prior to the First World War, but globalization undermined states’ abilities to credibly commit the threat of violence. In this paper I will argue that the decisions by Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Russia to go to war in 1914 were primarily shaped by commitment problems because globalism increased the power of the political left in

He extends Robert Jervis’s argument that offense-defense balance and distinguishably causes war. Jervis argues that technology and geography alter the balance between a military’s offensive and defensive capabilities. If a state has a more offensive than defensive posture, then it can be a sign that it is an aggressor. If there is no geography that aids a state in defense, then it is likely to take land as a buffer to protect itself. Offense-defense balance is a cause of the security dilemma because it is difficult for a state to determine the intentions and balance of another state. For example, a state has an incentive to keep military technologies a secret. Any state analyzing another state’s capabilities will then misinterpret its offense-defense balance. It is also hard for states to distinguish between a technology’s offensive or defensive use. A fort is easy to interpret as defensive, but a machine gun can be either used as an offensive or defensive weapon (Jervis 1978). Van Evera argues that military beliefs lead to heavy offensive weighted balances which cause the security dilemma. Great Powers believed in the superiority of offensive military strategies. This belief stemmed from past wars according to Van Evera. These doctrines held that offensive swift blows were the key to military victories. Van Evera concludes that if a state’s

In the case of Germany globalization reoriented its economy around labor, its abundant factor of production, and decreased the income generated from land because of the depressed prices coming from other areas of the world. The increased the demand in Europe for industrial goods increased the wages of labor in Germany. People moved from rural parts of the country to the urban parts. The military usually drafted members of labor class to maintain its armed force parity with Russia. As the liberals gained in power, they pressured the German government to stop conscripting men to maintain such a large military force. This pressure convinced the military that it needed strike first against Russia while it had military parity with Russia. The declining domestically support of a large military force set preferences such that the military preferred to fight a war at that time when they had a credible threat for violence than let Russia take what it wanted in the future because it was stronger (Rowe