Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:

Albanians, aggressive, preventive, races, Turks, War, racial, nationalities, hard, France, boot, care, Bosnia, imperial, Serbian, Russians, Slav, match, sucked, toxically

•

Balkan whirlpool

•

Germany is getting             sucked into this area of the world and its issues

•

the Balkans are "                  toxically anti-imperialist"

•

against the Austrian-Hungarian Empire

•

against the Ottoman Empire

•

they've thrown off                 imperial rule, but now they are full of quarrels with each other, the Balkans has become a battle ground of warring new                           nationalities

•

1908:             Bosnia is annexed by the Austro-Hungarian empire

•

1912-1913: various Balkan wars

•

players: the old Ottoman Empire, the Young Turks, Bulgarians, Serbians, Romanians, Montenegrans, Macedonians, Greeks, Catholics, Greek Orthodox adherents, Muslims

•

the bordering empires         care what happens here

•

Austria-Hungary doesn't want their empire to get broken up by these                     aggressive, ambition anti-imperial nationalities

•

the Turks feel threatened

•

the Russian empire empathizes with their         Slav counterparts in Serbia

•

the result is proxy wars

•

Austria-Hungarian Empire is backing the                   Albanians against the Serbs

•

the Russians are on the Serbian side

•

Serbs have large ambitions to become a South-Slav Empire

•

for Austro-Hungarian empire and its German allies,               Serbian nationalists haven't been sufficiently dealt with

•

the Russians are frustrated and angry that the Austro-Hungarians were able to get their way with German backing

•

much resentment is focused on Britian

•

the 1912 Balkan war was settled by the treaty of London which attempted to "put a lid on the situation", Germany felt that through this treaty it and Austria-Hungaria had not been allowed to properly deal with the nationalists in the Balkan area

•

accelerants (1912-1913)

•

an example of an accelerant is gasoline

•

the agitated situation in the Balkans is like gasoline lying around waiting to be set alight

•

December 1912: German       War Council

•

British have just gotten involved to put a stop to the war of 1912 and keep the Austro-Hungarians from "putting a         boot into the Serbs"

•

the Germans are furious about this, and it's the form their fury takes that is so interesting

•

Wilhelm II's notes: "The final struggle between the Slavs and the Teutons will see the Anglo-Saxons on the side of the Slavs and the Gauls."

•

instead of talking about the states as states, he is talking about them as racial groups and for him it's a contest of           races coming to a final struggle, it's that kind of apocalyptic feeling that leaps from the page

•

the cold facts of what's going on in the Balkan crisis would not cause any dispassionate observer to come to these conclusions, Wilhelm II's conclusions are more a result of his             racial and imperialistic world view

•

German decisions

•

                    preventive war

•

the final struggle is coming, it will be better to have a preventive war before the                 Russians get too strong along with their French allies

•

Austria-Hungary

•

let's Austria-Hungary know that the next time they have a serious crisis in the Balkans, Germany will be behind then 100%, and Germany encourages them to "take a         hard line in the Balkans"

•

war plans

•

decided on a further build-up of the German army, and took actions to lock them into a plan that even if a war starts in the Balkans, the Germans will be prepared to wage that war in France and Belgium

•

Russia and             France are responding to this military build-up in Germany

•

Germany increasingly reaches out to make common cause with the           Turks

•

by 1913, there is a lot of gasoline lying around the Balkans, and in 1914, the           match will be struck there