How did the alliance system contribute to the outbreak of WWI?
Answers
The alliance system caused the World War I to escalate from a regional conflict into a global war. Two major alliances existed in Europe prior to World War I. The Triple Alliance included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, while the Triple Entente included the Soviet Union, Britain, and France. After the assassination of the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria and Serbia came into conflict. Austria and Serbia were allied with Germany and Russia respectively, leading Germany and Russia to declare war on each other. The conflict then spread across the globe as a complex web of alliances forced more countries into the conflict.
Answer:
The internment of enemy aliens in the First World War was a global phenomenon. Camps holding civilian as well as military prisoners could be found on every continent, including in nation-states and empires that had relatively liberal immigration policies before the war. This article focuses on three of the best-known examples: Britain, Germany and the United States. Each had its own internment system and its own internal threshold of tolerance for violence. Nonetheless, they were interconnected through wartime propaganda and diplomacy, and through constant appeals to the rules of war, the rights of "civilised" nations and the requirements of self-defence.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Internment in Imperial Britain
3 Internment in Imperial Germany
4 Internment in the United States
5 Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Citation
Introduction↑
In addition to 9 million military prisoners of war (POWs), the warring European states interned more than 400,000 enemy aliens – civilians of enemy nationality – between 1914 and 1920.[1] Other "suspect" groups and individuals were held captive by their own governments on grounds of national security, reflecting increasingly sophisticated, albeit still relatively crude forms of domestic political surveillance.[2] Even non-belligerent countries like the Netherlands interned would-be deserters, civilian refugees, escaped POWs and other unwanted "war guests" who had deliberately or accidently crossed their borders and thereby "violated" their neutrality.[3] Taking enemy aliens and other outsiders together, as many as 800,000 civilians in Europe experienced some form of internment during the Great War and its aftermath. The same applies to a further 50,000 to 100,000 non-combatants in the rest of the world.[4] In terms of scale and global reach, this was of an altogether different order than the one-sided use of internment by European colonial powers in conflicts in Cuba and South Africa at the turn of the 20th century.[5]
Until the 1990s, much of the historiography assumed, somewhat misleadingly, that during the First World War (WWI) civilian captivity was confined to men of military age caught on enemy territory at the outbreak of hostilities and held as potential combatants. Only in the last two decades has attention shifted to other, forgotten victims of internment, including enemy civilians deported from occupied territories,[6] minority ethnic groups targeted as "disloyal",[7] and refugees forced to live in enclosed barrack camps in the unoccupied parts of their own countries.[8] Although men made up the bulk of internees, it is now recognised that women and children were also affected