How the Research Is Empirically Examined 91
across the ocean, and in 1917, the United States joined the war, in response
to Germany’s submarine warfare. A global war was fought for the first
time.
That chain reaction and the speed of escalation that led to the First World
War are consistent with the argument that many researchers have raised in
the past that it was an unintentional war. The First World War might have
been unintentional, but it was inevitable and not unexpected because of
the multipolarity that prevailed at the time. In other words, the European
leaders did not have absolute control over their own fate, and the systemic
forces pushed them to act in manners that were in conflict with the nar-
row interests of their own countries. These phenomena, which stemmed
directly from the multipolarity that prevailed in those years in the global
system of countries, led the system to force the players to wage a central
war that none of them wanted or clearly aimed for.
The First World War led to enormous destruction and loss of life—8.5
million dead.^79 At its end, three empires collapsed—the Austro-Hungarian,
the Ottoman, and the Russian—and the independent countries of Poland,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary formed in their territories. In addition, the
countries of Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were established.^80
Despite its costs, the coalition that comprised Britain, France, Russia, and
later the United States and Italy, was able to defeat the central powers that
threatened the member states’ dominance—Germany, Austro-Hungary,
Turkey, and their allies. Moreover, the war prepared the ground for a
determined effort to build a new global system that could have prevented
another war. The war caused great revulsion to the war institutes and the
realistic theory that justified the competition among the great powers and
justified arms races, secret alliances, and balance of power politics. The
high costs of the First World War led the decision makers who convened
in Versailles Palace to reevaluate the realpolitik assumptions concerning
the laws of statesmanship. Instead of that, they tried to remove the threat
of another global war and of global dominance using a new plan that was
based on liberalism and sought to form political and economic coopera-
tion among the major powers.
Before the First World War, all the major European powers and Ser-
bia preferred a negotiated peace over a global war. However, they found
themselves involved in a global war that had enormous human and eco-
nomic costs, solved little, and formed the scene for another global war two
decades later.^81 This unintended consequence, another world war—the
Second World War—stemmed primarily from the multipolarity that pre-
vailed in the system in those years rather than the alternative explanations
presented above.
The two decades following the First World War were the peak of lib-
eral ideology. The liberal philosophy was reflected in a number of docu-
ments and arrangements. I shall mention the more prominent ones: the 14