to violently overthrow the balance of power carefully established nearly a century ago by the Congress of Vienna following the Napoleonic Wars.43 The Ottoman, Spanish, and Chinese Empires were weakening as a result of modernization and decay, thereby creating potential power vacuums that could lead to civil war, chaos, and the establishment of new state actors. While these old empires struggled to adapt to the changing technological world around them, the major industrial powers sought to either preserve or exploit their decline and fall, resulting in a series of diplomatic situations that potentially threatened a major war.
The international situation in the late nineteenth century was becoming one big global competition with the perception of it being a zero-sum game in which one major power’s gain was another’s loss. While for centuries imperial competition and global power dynamics were limited to an empire’s geographic or cultural location (with rare exceptions made by the Roman, Greek, and Mongol empires), modern industrial and scientific technology created the communication, transportation, and medical capabilities, and military power to quickly deploy military forces and dominate various parts of the globe. Max Boot argues that the Industrial Revolution was both a boon and a bane in that industrial technology allowed countries to produce more food, medicine, clothing, and countless products, resulting in a population explosion without triggering a Malthusian crisis. However, while industrialization made life better for millions, it also resulted in the death of millions since this technology now enabled the extinguishment of life in a similar industrialization process.44 In turn, this potential for violence created an atmosphere of power politics and realpolitik that caused an increasingly competitive, dangerous global environment that set the conditions for a global war. Through the Second Industrial Revolution, the use of hard and soft power could now be brought to bear globally at times and locations of an industrialized nation’s choosing. This ability became apparent in the ease in which the major powers quickly conquered and absorbed weaker, undeveloped countries throughout the world, as seen during the Scramble for Africa, the Great Game in Central Asia, and the ease in which China was brought to its knees during the Opium Wars.45
Competition for the lands, markets, resources, and national prestige led to constantly shifting alliances and rivalries within the international system. The Holy Alliance, created in the early half of the nineteenth century between Prussia, Austria, and Russia, was a coalition created by the monarchist great powers to restrain republicanism and secularism in Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.46 Meanwhile, Great Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia formed a coalition to stop Russian expansion into the Balkans and the Middle East.47 Another source of rivalry and friction developed after Japan’s smashing victory over China during the First Sino-Japanese War in 1895, leading to the triple intervention of France, Russia, and Germany in the Asia-Pacific Region. These three major powers stopped Japan from imposing additional monetary and territorial demands at the expense of China and possibly causing its collapse in the region.48 Finally, British and French competition continued on and off following the Napoleonic Wars during the nineteenth century and almost led to war in 1898 when the Scramble for Africa resulted in a showdown between British and French forces during the Fashoda Incident over imperial territorial disputes regarding control of the source of the Nile River.49 According to David Levering Lewis, the possibility of a global war was postponed and therefore allowed the various major powers to continue their military repression and administrative consolidation of their holdings both at home and abroad. However, the delayed world war allowed for continued tensions to build, and with them, an arms race began, and two powerful alliance systems arose that promised an even greater, more destructive world war.50
With the various major powers competing with each other for international supremacy and prestige, these nations also utilized their industrial and scientific bases to build and modernize their militaries as well as experiment and develop new military technologies. Industrialization not only allowed these powerful states to quickly support both the defense and economic opportunities of their people, but it also allowed the unprecedented national coordination and mobilization of their people and resources for total war. Hew Strachan points out, industrialization transformed war with the standardization of weapons and equipment with interchangeable parts. The introduction of precision machine tools and assembly processes combined with the refinement of better materials led to the unprecedented production of weapons of high quality and destruction. Therefore, many of the theoretical ideas and creations from the mind became a reality thanks in part to the rise of science and technology.51
In other words, the wars that were fought against an equally powerful nation were now more dangerous and destructive than ever, thus allowing the major powers, thanks to technology, to draw on every ounce of strength from the land and its people to win in a potential all-out war. Martin van Creveld observes in his study of industrialization and its impact on the growth of the military that as national economies expanded, so did armies; their growth more than kept pace with the rise in population. While machinery increased production, it also made its manpower pool available for other purposes, such as the military. Soon, armies were numbering in the millions in terms of both active and reserve troops ready for the possibility of combat.52 This reality became apparent in the Crimean War, the American Civil War, the Taiping Rebellion, and the German and Italian Wars of Unification. In each of these conflicts, the size and support of these armies dramatically increased because of science and technology, and so did the casualties and the level of destruction. This new reality resulted in nations requiring longer periods of time invested in reconstruction and recovery before being able to reengage in diplomatic affairs and pursue their national interests in the world.
The constantly shifting agreements and coalitions that maintained the balance of power within the international system were fading away. The world was changing because of the decline of certain states at the expense of new states that were rising to the fore. Henry Kissinger observes that several factors within the international system were transforming the balance of power, such as the decline of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, as well as the rise of Germany, Italy, and Japan. However, the balance of power within the Vienna system, Kissinger goes on to explain, was being radically altered with the rise of a unified Germany, and Great Britain continually distancing itself from maintaining the international system established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.53 The instability of the world due to intense state-on-state competition inevitably led to two slowly coalescing alliance systems by the early twentieth century: the Triple Entente composed of Great Britain, France, and Russia and the Triple Alliance made up of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy.54 While European rivalries threatened the peace and security of the international system, both the United States and Japan found themselves at cross-purposes in both Asia and the Pacific. Japan’s growing ambitions in the Pacific were intensified by the vulnerability of China and Europe’s colonial possessions in the region. While the United States and Japan were wary of each other and made long-term plans for an eventual war, Russian and British strength in the region also served to curb Japanese aggression during the nineteenth century.
Ironically, despite the friction and tension within the international system, a worldwide belief existed that the days of the Napoleonic Wars, where all the major powers were drawn into the conflict, were over and that national differences could be worked out and resolved peacefully. However, the fluctuation of power across the international system that was shaped by the unpredictability of interactions between the European powers still created moments of political crisis in which the threat of war was always a possibility because of the heightened pressure and threat of losing national prestige and power.55
Past experiences from wars during the nineteenth century also mistakenly led to the understanding that conflict between nations would be very short, as proven in the German and Italian Wars of Unification, the First Sino-Chinese War, and the various small colonial bush wars that took place in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Meanwhile, the Crimean War, the American Civil War, and the Boer War were argued to be the exception rather than the rule of future conflicts, despite the massive loss in human life and material destruction. Orlando Figes argued that these conflicts were the earliest examples of truly modern wars that were fought with new industrial
