The circumstances of World War I paint a truly sad picture. Wars almost always could be avoided if people just knew at the outset what the outcome would be. They can almost always make a deal before fighting starts that leaves both sides better off than is true during and after the war. This is so for the simple reason that whatever costs the combatants bear in fighting, they could avoid bearing while agreeing to the same conclusion as arises at war’s end. The problem is, of course, that each side is unsure at the outset how things will turn out. They bluff about their own strength and resolve in the hope of extracting a really good deal. Much of the time that may work. Wars, especially big wars, are rare events. Sometimes, however, bluffing is tremendously costly. Rather than reveal the truth, governments sometimes fight wars they would have liked to avoid, or at least know too late that they should have avoided. One way contenders in a fight could use predictioneering is to simulate what is likely to happen before the events actually unfold so that they can avoid this very problem, maybe even saving millions of innocent lives as a result.
My new game-theory model (being applied here for the first time) shows a number of ways the First World War could have been avoided. Tens of millions lost their lives because a handful of diplomats played their cards poorly. That is the essence of Greek tragedy in modern times. Before I address how the war might have been avoided, let me provide a brief background on the circumstances that led to it.
Taking a very broad and long view, it is evident that the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were a time in which those who adopted more democratic forms of government and more capitalist economic modes, such as the Netherlands and England early on and France later, enjoyed burgeoning wealth and influence in the world. Monarchy seemed to be in decline.
Zooming in on the latter half of the nineteenth century, we see the unfolding struggle to control Europe’s destiny. Germany as we know it did not exist for most of the nineteenth century. Instead, modern-day Germany was divided into many princely states—Prussia, Saxony, Baden, Wurttemberg, and many others. Austria dominated German affairs.
All of this was to change with the rise of Otto von Bismarck as Prussia’s minister-president (they certainly went in for awkward titles). Bismarck built Germany into a European power. First he united Prussia with several smaller German princely states to fight the Seven Weeks’ War (1866), in which, to the surprise of most European leaders, he quickly and easily defeated Austria. This war marked the end of the post-Napoleonic Concert of Europe system of checks and balances that had been forged half a century earlier to ensure stability among the great powers of Europe (then consisting of Austria, England, France, Prussia, and Russia) and to prevent the rise of another Napoleon.
The Seven Weeks’ War revealed that Austria was much weaker than its status as a European great power implied. Desperate to maintain itself among the ranks of important states, the Austrian government agreed to a merger with Hungary that resulted in the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This was the same merger deal that the Austrians had rejected just before their 1866 defeat. The creation of Austria-Hungary helped keep Austria in the running as a great power, slowing but not reversing its declining political position. Just four years later, Bismarck went to war against France, defeating Napoleon III in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870—71. With France’s defeat, Bismarck succeeded in unifying the remaining German princely states, creating modern-day Germany. Whereas Austria had dominated the pre-1866 concept of Germany, it was now excluded, not to be reunited with the rest of Germany until Adolf Hitler—an Austrian by birth—rose to power about sixty years later. By 1871, Bismarck had established Germany as the rising power of Europe and helped France to join Austria (now Austria-Hungary) as a state in decline. This set the stage for the First World War.
Revolutions against monarchy and oligarchy were bubbling up everywhere. There was revolt in Russia in 1905, in Mexico in 1910, and in China in 1911. From the Austro-Hungarian point of view, the most threatening emerging nationalist challenge to monarchy came from the Balkans. There the Austro-Hungarians saw in the experience of the Ottoman Empire the foreshadowing of their own demise. The kingdom of Serbia tripled its territory as a result of the Balkan Wars (1912-13), becoming a magnet for Serbian nationalists. They wanted all of Serbia out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Those tensions burst to the surface on June 28, 1914, with the assassination in Sarajevo, today the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of the prospective heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand.
The assassination prompted Austria-Hungary’s government to issue an ultimatum to the Serbian government: give up your sovereignty, or it’s war. The Serbs were not without friends, and of course they were reluctant to give up their hard-earned independence. It seems that the Austrians were counting on this. The diplomatic records of the day, now open to us, reveal that they chose to make demands that they were confident could not be accepted. Apparently, the Austro-Hungarian leaders wanted a little reputation-building war with Serbia.
Europe’s great powers chose sides in the dispute. Russia sided with the Serbs. Under the terms of the Triple Entente—an alliance between Russia, France, and England—France and England also chose to side with the Serbs. The Russian decision triggered a response from Germany, by then Austria-Hungary’s ally. Under the terms of their alliance with Austria, Germany backed Austria-Hungary. Their broader alliance ties meant a high likelihood of additional support from Romania, Turkey, and especially Italy. The Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany had been expanded in 1882 to include the new European power of Italy, with the expanded alliance referred to as the Triple Alliance.
Fearing an aggressive move by Germany in defense of Austria-Hungary, the Russians mobilized. They intended, in game-theory terms, to send a signal that they were committed to Serbia’s defense. This prompted a similar mobilization by Germany. Much as in the prisoner’s dilemma game we discussed earlier, each side could see that conciliation was better than war, but they also could see that trusting their adversary to pursue a settlement was risky. And so they found the result that follows from the logic of the prisoner’s dilemma: they fought instead of settling. In a few short weeks, the conflict over Serbia escalated to involve all of the great powers on the Continent. World War I had begun. The little reputation-building war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia was not to be.
Shortly, I will apply my model to inquire what might have happened if the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia had been more able in 1914, or, for that matter, if the Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany had been more skillful. First, however, let’s pretend that there was a little army for hire of people with good math skills pounding out my calculations in 1914. What would they have predicted with no advantages of hindsight?
To address the 1914 crisis—not the fighting of the war, mind you, but the diplomatic run-up to war—I constructed inputs for the computer program that measure the degree to which each of the European countries, plus important non-Europeans including the United States and Japan, favored Serbia’s or Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy in 1914. I estimate salience based on a mix of expert judgments and geographic proximity to the Austro- Serbian crisis. Potential influence is based on a standard measure of “national power” collected for every country in the world for every year from 1816 to roughly the present by the academic enterprise, introduced earlier, called the Correlates of War Project. Of course, I use the estimates for 1914. Since I am examining this case using my latest model, I include the additional variable it requires. This variable measures the extent to which each player is resolute in the position it has taken even if that means a breakdown in negotiations or, conversely, is sufficiently eager for an agreement that it will show considerable flexibility in its approach to negotiations. Put in terms of our earlier discussion of health care, this new model includes an input that calibrates how much a player’s bargaining style looks like Bill Clinton’s (100 on this variable’s scale) or like Hillary Clinton’s (0 on this variable’s scale) back in the early 1990s. This “commitment” variable’s values are based on my reading of the historical record in the run-up to World War I. Any interested decision maker in 1914 would have had access to the information used here. And if they had my equations, they could have done the exact analysis I report.
