The image of Austria and Germany’s concerned generation go back far in the past. The First World War was not a single or special case in history according to their experience.
Repeatedly in the Past, the people and Nation States struggled to achieve similar places for themselves beside prevailing peoples and states who accordingly turned also to be competitors while they claimed a portion of the natural Resources, Commercial stream and other resources of prosperity available on this earth. The ascending and descending of nations is for the generation of the Europeans around 1900 was only a part of world history and no question of the moral. Thus, also the Germans cannot see anything despicable in the ascent of their own country at this time. The phenomenon of the up and descent in the modern times is for it like that something like an historical law of nature.

In England the view of the things was further more than that.

Portuguese world and colonial empire for example was connected with Spain in National union in the year 1580, and thus replaces itself as the first power of Europe. Already in 1577 England, began to attack the commercial Routes of Spain. In 1588 Spain lost its just gained Super power role through loosing its Fleet in the naval warfare under England’s attack.Now England ascends and takes over as Great Britain for three and a half centuries the supremacy on the globe.

When Holland gathered Power as Sea and trading Nation, England puts this competition into the barriers with three broken by fence naval Wars between 1652 and 1674.

Afterwards Great Britain was only once seriously provoked, when France under Napoleon I. dared into the attempt to replace England as the first sea power.

Great Britain was consistently alert over the fact that no power on the close continent and in the surrounding field of her own colonies could become so powerful that it could become the rival. The means to it was always intervening with arguments of others on the mainland in favour of the weaker states and to lead war against „the rising“. This dirty policy of the „balance of power“ secured the existence of the British Supremecy up to the beginning of the Second World War. Besides, her “balance of Power strategy”, Great Britain lead further number of wars in 18th and 19th Century either in order to take away colonies from other states, or to defeat in order to protect own colonies or the living persons there from the Freedom fighters or to prevent the increase of area around her competitors border.

Immediately after First World War much academic work that blamed Germany entirely for the war was produced in Allied countries. However, academic work in the later 1920s and 1930s blamed all participants more or less equally. Starting in the mid-1920s, a number of American historians opposed to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles such as Sidney Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes produced works that claimed that Germany was not responsible for war, and as such, Article 231 of the Versailles which had seemingly assigned all responsiblity for the war to Germany and thus justified the Allied claim to Reparations was invalid. The objective of Fay and Barnes was to put an end to reparations imposed on Germany by attempting to prove what they regarded as the moral invalidity of Article 231. Both Fay and Barnes were provided with generous use of the German archives by the German government.
In the inter-war period, various factors such as the network of secret alliances, emphasis on speed of offence, rigid military planning, Darwinian ideas, and the lack of resolution mechanisms were blamed by many historians. These ideas have maintained some currency in the decades since then. Famous proponents include Joachim Remak and Paul Kennedy. At the same time, many one sided works were produced by politicians and other participants often trying to clear their own names. In Germany these tended to deflect blame, while in Allied countries they tended to blame Germany or Austria-Hungary. The debate over "German war guilt" was quite emotional and topical in the interwar years, and some lingering resentment within Germany may well have contributed to the rise of the Nazi party, which denied German war guilt.
In 1961 Fritz Fischer wrote the enormously influential Griff nach der Weltmacht in which he blamed Germany for the war. Fischer believed that many members of the German government had overtly expansionist plans, formulated in the aftermath of Social Democratic gains in the election of 1912. He alleged that they hoped to use external expansion and aggression to check internal dissent and democratization. Some of his work is based on Bethmann-Hollweg's "September Programme" which laid out Germany's war aims. Fischer's work created a whole school of analysis in a similar vein, emphasising domestic German political factors. Some prominent scholars in this school include Imanuel Geiss, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen, and V.R. Berghahn.

Hillgruber argued that what the Imperial German government had attempted to do in 1914 was to break the informal Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain by encouraging Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia and thus provoke a crisis in an area that would concern only St. Petersburg. Hillgruber argued that the Germans hoped that both Paris and London would decide the crisis in Balkans did not concern them and that lack of Anglo-French support would lead the Russians to reach an understanding with Germany. In Hillgruber’s opinion, the German government had pursed a high-risk diplomatic strategy of provoking a war in the Balkans that had inadvertently caused a world war.
Another theory was A.J.P. Taylor's “Railroad Thesis”. In Taylor’s opinion, none of the great powers wanted a war, but all of the great powers wished to increase their power relative to the others. Taylor argued that by engaging in an arms race and having the general staffs develop elaborate railroad timetables for mobilization, the continental powers hoped to develop a deterrent that would lead the other powers to see the risk of war as being too dangerous. When the crisis began in the summer of 1914, Taylor argued, the need to mobilize faster than one's potential opponent made the leaders of 1914 prisoners of their own logistics – The railroad timetables forced invasion (of Belgium from Germany) as an unavoidable physical and logistical consequence of German mobilization. In this way, Taylor argued, the mobilization that was meant to serve as a threat and deterrent to war instead relentlessly caused a world war by forcing invasion. Many have argued that Taylor, who was one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, developed his Railroad Thesis to serve as a thinly veiled admonitory allegory for the nuclear arms race.

Other authors such as Arno Mayer, in 1967, agreed with some aspects of the "Berlin War Party" theory, but felt it isolated Germany from its historical context. Mayer believes that all states acted more or less as Germany did in the years before the war. Samuel R. Williamson lays most of the blame with the Austro-Hungarian elites rather than the German in his 1990 book, Austria-Hungary and the Coming of the First World War.

Recently, American historian David Fromkin has allocated blame for the outbreak of war entirely to Germany and Austria-Hungary in his 2004 book Europe's Last Summer. He theorized that the German military leadership, in the midst of a European arms race, believed that they would be unable to further expand the German army without extending the officer corps beyond the traditional Prussian aristocracy. Rather than allowing that to happen, they manipulated Austria-Hungary into starting a war with Serbia in the expectation that Russia would intervene, giving Germany a pretext to launch what was in essence a pre-emptive strike.

Another recent work is Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War which completely rejects the Fischer thesis, laying most of the blame on diplomatic bumbling from the British.