4 August 1914-2017
British Declaration of War

Today, 4 August 2017, marks the 103rd Anniversary of the British Declaration of War on the German Empire in 1914. The declaration came over a month after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in June 1914. Four years later, countries, empires, and arguably the entire world, had been irrevocably altered.  

One of the popular explanations for Britain’s declaration of war maintains that the English were provoked by Germany’s invasion of Belgium, thus automatically compelling them to honour their alliance to protect Belgian neutrality. While it is beyond the scope of our social media posts to tackle such a complex topic, we would like to share the following podcast, produced by BBC Radio 4 for the 1914-2014 centennial. It provides an interesting primer to the discussion on British reasons for the declaration of war. The entire Month of Madness program is an intriguing, accessible study of the five nations at the centre of that tumultuous summer of 1914. 

Listen to it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03th83q