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The proximate cause was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian separatist. The deeper historical cause was the continued dispute between Germany and France about which country owned the province of Alsace-Lorraine. Other contributing causes included the formation of vast military alliances in Europe, and increasing attitudes of nationalism and militarism. At the time, nobody really knew how destructive such a war would be, and the people who went to war had a foolish over-confidence in the ability of their own alliance to win the war easily. The thinking was that our own big alliance would make for easy victory, rather than that big alliances on both sides would make for a very big, very destructive conflict. But the world found out the hard way.

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15y ago

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