World War I broke out on the 28th June 1914 when a Serbian terrorist group, who called themselves the Black Hand, assassinated Franz Ferdinand the heir to the Austrian-Hungarian throne. By the time the war had ended in 1918, it had taken the lives of more than nine million soldiers. Ever since, historians from all over the world have debated and discussed the reason for not only why and how the war came to pass, but the reason for the grand geographic scale of it. One way to categorise the causes is into three sectors: nationalism, imperialism and militarism. Nationalism is the belief that a nation will benefit further by acting individually, or the lusting for national independence in a country under rule from another. Imperialism is a policy by which a nation extends authority through territorial gain, and/or political establishment of superiority over another nation. Militarism is when the military is placed predominantly regarding administration of a particular state, or whereby military preparedness, and strength during a time of peace is of extreme importance to a state. World War I broke out in July 1914 primarily due to nationalism, followed by tensions exacerbated by imperialism, and lastly due to militarism.
Topic Sentence: Nationalism is the most important cause of World War I, because it was the main trigger of all major problems in the Balkans, which created huge tension in Europe from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th. An area where nationalism was creating huge tension at the time was Serbia. Serbians are part of an ethnic group called Slavs. Austria-Hungary, Serbia’s neighbour had a population that consisted of a high percentage of Slavs. The Serbians saw the Slavs in Austria as being oppressed and dreamed to unite them under one large Slavic state; the creation of this country would mean that Austria Hungary’s empire would split in two. This desire to unite all the Serbs lead to the