ABSTRACT
Both the domestic politics of most European countries and their relations to each other during the quarter-century preceding the First World War can be grouped into two periods, with a dividing line running roughly from 1900 to 1906. The first period largely continued the trends of the 1880s. The combination of domestic political conflict and Great Power brinkmanship created the conditions in which the First World War began in the summer of 1914, bringing the entire period of post-1850 European history to its final, convulsive end. In some ways, both the European domestic political systems and the system of relationships between the Great Powers became overloaded with conflicts in the ten or so years before the First World War. The debate over the origins of the First World War began during the war itself, as governments of all the combatant nations published collections of diplomatic documents designed to prove that they had acted to preserve the peace.
