Thank you, Gentlemen. You pointed out the “little open secret” of the origins of WW 1 correctly :-)
However; I beg to differ on the question of how old Germany is: the German people was first mentioned by Tacitus in “Germania” around 95 A.D.
The Germanic tribes becoming a united realm did however evolve in the late 10th, 11th and early 12th centuries under the Ottonian and Salic Emperors, after the old Frankish empire - which had encompassed present-day France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Western Germany and northern Italy (last but not least) - had fallen apart in the late 9th century.
BTW, the French kingdom evolved just at roughy the same time, between the late 9th century and the final French victory over the Angevin Empire in 1214.
Only the Kingdom of England was somewhat faster in seeing the light of day - but then no-one on the Continent had somebody like the Venerable Bede, who invented the term “England”, using it first in his “Ecclesiastical history of the English People”.
Although it took until 937 for England to become a single kingdom, the term “English” as an idea, then as an ethnolinguistic and cultural term, had been coined more than two centuries earlier - by the aforementioned sagacious monk of Jarrow :-)
“However; I beg to differ on the question of how old Germany is: the German people was first mentioned by Tacitus in “Germania” around 95 A.D.”
There was no argument that the “German people” (more directly the core of “Germanic” speaking people) is very old and older than most nation states of Europe today.
The point I made was there was no unified nation-state of Germany until shortly before WWI, as far as history goes. The strictly German people were disunited among German princely states, Austria, areas conquered by Napolean and other spaces occupied by Germans but under some non-German ruler. That disunited state of Germans was one France and Britain sorely wished the German people had remained.
Why should the Germans - pre-WWI - have felt ethical or moral qualms or guilt at behaving no differently than the British, French, Russians and others had done in Europe for centuries? Why should what Napoleon conquered have remained as some inviolate status quo that if broken meant a rupture in a “balance of power”? Did “balance” really mean equity or parity, or just that Britain and France held the upper hand and that upper hand should not be diminished? Things did honestly look different, more than “wrong”, from a German perspective.
“BTW, the French kingdom evolved just at roughy the same time, between the late 9th century and the final French victory over the Angevin Empire in 1214.”
That was some 600 years before any whole state for the core German speaking peoples.