I feel that the leading cause of world war one was the defense alliances. The war did start as an isolated event, and I’m not saying the only reason the world war started was due to the alliances. There was a large part of nationalism on the side of the Russians but I’ll get to that later. The initial conflict was not between the 9 countries that were the major contributors in the war but between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, even though Germany was hit with the blame of starting the war. Before the Great War began, there were countries that would go to another country and sign a treaty stating that if one country went to war or was attacked, the other would step in to defend them. This happened many times with several countries, which in …show more content…
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Russia got involved to defend Serbia. Germany seeing Russia mobilizing, declared war on Russia. France was then drawn in against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Germany attacked France through Belgium pulling Britain into war. (americanhistory.about.com) In the beginning, the war was between only Austria-Hungary and Serbia. The war did not have to spread. If there were no defense alliances, and all the countries stood by themselves, there would have not been a world war. The war would have been small and isolated, therefore it would have not been called a world war. It would have been called the war of Austria-Hungary and Serbia or something related to that. Although the Austrians were really looking for any excuse to go to war with the Hungarians, the "reason" that the war started between those two countries being the assassination of the arch duke wasn't really the reason. The arch duke was hated by the emperor and it was just a huge excuse to go attack Serbia which obviously worked seeing as how that ended up causing the biggest war to