How the Research Is Empirically Examined 89
European continent. They sought a local war in the Balkans in which Aus-
tro-Hungary would almost certainly defeat Serbia and would therefore
avenge the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and remove the constant
Slovak threat to the integrity of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The central
powers aimed at risking Russia’s involvement, believing that it would not
intervene, and the result was a war on the European continent in which
Germany and Austro-Hungary fought Russia, France, and Serbia. Austro-
Hungary, and particularly Germany, did not want a global war that would
be powered by British involvement in the war in the continent. Based on
these preferences and the assumption that Great Britain would remain
neutral in the first moves of war on the continent—which assumption was
not unreasonable given what was then known—Germany encouraged
Austro-Hungary to fight against Serbia.^71
The paradox of the First World War is that although each of the leading
players preferred a certain arrangement over war, the result was a world
war. The explanation is that at each of the important decision nodes, the
political leaders were facing elections that could lead either to deteriora-
tion or nondeterioration of the crisis, and that in the international political
constraints that they faced they preferred the alternative of determination.
Each decision reduced the range of possibilities that followed it, and once
Britain made its intentions clear and Germany understood that Britain
would probably intervene in the war on the continent, the central powers
could no longer turn the wheel back. The great powers ended up with an
outcome that none of them wanted, but it was more of a result of a series
of basic rational decisions under a complicated series of international and
domestic conditions, than of crisis mismanagement.^72
Systemic Causes of the Outbreak of the First World War. The sources of
the approach whereby systemic factors are what led to the outbreak of the
First World War are identifiable in a book from 1916, which stated that
the causes of the First World War did not lie in Germany or in any other
power. Rather, the main culprit lay in the European anarchy that formed a
strong ambition among countries to achieve superiority over other coun-
tries, based on both security and tyranny motives.^73
The common view concerning the First World War, that it is a result
of the German aspiration for power, is exaggerated. Germany wanted a
local war rather than a total war involving the British. The war broke out
because the international forces shaped the priorities of the great pow-
ers and the strategic and political choices of their actions. In contrast, the
mismanagement of the crisis by the political leaders was only a second
cause of the outbreak of the war.^74 According to the international relations
theory of war, structuralism shapes the outcomes of the behavior of coun-
tries (i.e., the stability of the system or the tendency of the system to war).
Thus, the multipolarity that prevailed in the system from 1910 led the