Could world war 1 been avoided or prevented?

Answer 1

Absolutely. At any one of dozens of junctures the historical stream could have been diverted. If Germany had not been created as a nation in the 1860s, through the efforts of the Prussian minister Bismarck, out of the many Germanic States which occupied the map where Germany is now. If France had not reacted to this appearance on her eastern border of a powerful, united country by picking a fight with Germany, starting a war, and promptly losing. If France had managed to accept in good grace that defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the loss of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine as a result, instead of nursing a burning desire for revenge for the next forty years. As part of that desire for revenge the French, Europe's largest democracy, sought an alliance with Russia, Europe's most repressive monarchy, to "surround" Germany, and this event would later be important when the last real chance to avert WWI came along. If Germany had been able to adjust to feeling "surrounded" instead of making her own alliances, principally with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as a counter to the Franco-Russian Alliance. Events such as these helped to set the stage.

If the old Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph, had not been such a rigid stickler for maintaining his Hapsburg family Royal haughtiness, for instance, things might have gone differently. The Emperor had one son, who fell in love with a girl who wasn't good enough for Franz Joseph to accept. So the son and his beloved killed themselves when denied permission to marry. The Empress was never the same after that, and fled from European town to spa to fashionable resort, trying desperately to escape her sadness, a tragic figure, until stabbed to death by an anarchist while waiting for a ferryboat in Switzerland. Without an Heir Franz Joseph tried to make his younger brother the next in line, but the brother was not interested, so the job fell to his son, the Emperor's nephew, Franz Ferdinand. But Franz Ferdinand was already married to another girl who wasn't good enough, the daughter of minor, impoverished Czech nobles, Sophie, whom he loved dearly. At State dinners and formal occasions, the old Emperor decreed that Sophie was not fit to walk beside the heir to the throne, and she had to come in at the tail end of processions, as when they went in to dinner, while her husband escorted some more august royal lady. So when the chance came in June 1914 to visit a newly annexed part of the Empire, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and its capital of Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand also saw it as a chance to take his sweet wife and to have her walk by his side, and be accorded honors she rarely received. So he took the trip and took along his wife, and their murders there lit the fuse. (Of course, had the Empire not annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, this probably would not have happened). The Emperor was furious; heirs were hard to come by and getting scarcer. So the Austrians made demands of neighboring Serbia, whose intelligence service had backed the nationalists who committed the murders, which no nation pretending to be sovereign could accept. (Of course, if the nationalists had managed not to murder these two people, or if the Serbs had managed to not encourage them and fund the operation, the fuse would have remained unlit). The German Kaiser was not paying attention, eager to get about his summer vacation, cruising the Baltic Sea with his family on his yacht, and told the Austrians to do what they must, and went sailing, thus handing the "blank check" to the scheming Austrian Foreign Minister, who misled Austria's main ally, Germany, about what steps were being taken, until war broke out between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. If everyone had just minded their own business at this point, it would have remained just another little dreary Balkan War, little remembered today. After all, the Austrian Heir and his wife were foully murdered, and the nation that encouraged and abetted that act had only themselves to blame for picking a fight with a next door neighbor fifty times their size. But, everyone didn't mind their business. Though there was no treaty, no alliance requiring action, Russia decided to mix into the situation. This was the fatal decision that turned a small Balkan War into a World War. Germany was obligated to take Austria-Hungary's part, if war with Russia came to Austria-Hungary, because of their Treaty of Alliance. Similarly, France was obligated by these events far off in eastern Europe, if the ally they had courted went to war. This situation triggered Germany's cynical plan for such an occasion, to defeat France in a few weeks, just as they had in 1870, before turning all their attention to Russia, which massive nation without many railroads would take a month or more to get ready for war. So Germany invaded France, going through Belgium in accordance with their plan they had worked on for a generation, this violation of Belgium bringing in England, and the general war was on, all thanks to the Russian decision to intervene in the dispute between Serbia and Austria-Hungary on the side of Serbia, who had started the trouble to begin with.