Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2010 erstellt
Description:
The prevailing consensus in the historical community is that Germany provoked both of the twentieth century world wars. However, the question of why Germany did so is subject to far more scholarly controversy. Broadly, the explanations fall into two groupings: those that focus on international - i.e. third image - imperatives, and those that focus on individual and domestic factors - i.e. the first and second images. In this paper, using detailed case study analysis, I investigate two candidate explanations for German behavior before the world wars: the preventive war hypothesis and the Innenpolitik hypothesis. I find that the logic of prevention does not motivate either war in the long term; security concerns were at most an intervening phenomenon in the process leading to war. On the other hand, there is strong evidence to suggest that domestic resource conflict plays a major role in the decision processes leading to each war. In both cases, decision makers were worried about future economic stagnation, and saw economic and social imperialist policies as the best way to promote the economic interests of favored groups in the German population (agrarians and industrialists), while maintaining the consent of the working class. These economic and social imperialist policies, in turn, eventually led Germany to initiate war in both cases. This reevaluation of German motives prior to the world wars casts doubt on the broader preventive war literature insofar as it brings to light new mechanisms to explain why declining powers initiate war