What political and social factors led up to World War I?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: The famines and colonial wars of the 1890s exposed as false the benign image of Western imperialism as a "civilizing mission" to the world. Early in the new century, the colonial wars of the United States and the Russo-Japanese War confirmed the supremacy of empires. Those conflicts also showed that the old order was crumbling, as new imperialists from outside Europe entered the arena. The Mexican and Chinese revolutions demonstrated the vulnerability of old regimeslong before the World War shook the political kaleidoscope into new patterns. The first decade or so of the twentieth century registered unprecedented changes in two world-reshaping areas: intellectual subversion and scientific innovation. The theories of Poincaré, Saussure, Einstein, Bergson, William James, and Freud overthrew prevailing orthodoxies about the physical world and the nature of language and mind. The anthropology associated with Franz Boas held up to society a myriad of possible models, all equally suitable to commend or condemn. The re-crafting of the world seemed limitlessly possible. Artists´ imaginations displayed the liberating effects. Inventions seemed to embody the possibilities in flight, speed, machine-power, instant long-range communications, perfectible health, infinitely extensible food production. Before war unmade the nineteenth-century world, philosophy, science, and art had begun to dismantle and rebuild it.