ABSTRACT
This essay1 attempts to address the question of whether World War I was inevitable or not primarily through counterfactual argument rather than by directly asking whether necessary and sufficient conditions were present and whether these account for its outbreak. Its thesis and methodology, however, do bear on the issue of the necessary conditions for the outbreak of World War I for the following reasons. First, the beginning of any war obviously always means the termination of a state of peace. The two actions or events are coterminous and equivalent, two sides of the same coin. This is more than a truism; it applies particularly to World War I and contributes powerfully to its enormous significance. As everyone knows, the war terminated both the longest period of greatpower peace in European history (no wars among European great power from 1871 to 1914) and, equally remarkable, a whole century of general peace, i.e., no general or systemic war among the powers since 1815. A fundamental assumption of this essay is that peace in history generally, but above all this remarkable long peace, did not just happen but was caused. The problematics of necessary and sufficient conditions apply as much to the active maintenance of peace as to its termination by acts or declarations of war. Without attempting systematically to pursue the question of what the necessary conditions were for the maintenance of general peace throughout most of the 19th century, my aim here will be to show that war at this juncture became unavoidable, not (or
at least not necessarily) because necessary, sufficient, and compelling conditions at this moment in 1914 produced the particular acts and declarations of war, but rather because certain conditions and actions necessary to the further maintenance of peace were not taken; that these actions were not taken, moreover, not because they were objectively infeasible but because they had become subjectively unthinkable; and finally that the nonperformance of these actions constituted the absence of conditions necessary for the further maintenance of peace and thus rendered war unavoidable.
