<P> Left - wing parties, especially the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), made large gains in the 1912 German election . German government at the time was still dominated by the Prussian Junkers who feared the rise of these left - wing parties . Fritz Fischer famously argued that they deliberately sought an external war to distract the population and whip up patriotic support for the government . Indeed, one German military leader Moritz von Lynker, the chief of the military cabinet, favored war in 1909 because it was "desirable in order to escape from difficulties at home and abroad ." Conservative Party leader Ernst von Heydebrand und der Lasa suggested that "a war would strengthen patriarchal order". </P> <P> Other authors argue that German conservatives were ambivalent about a war, worrying that losing a war would have disastrous consequences, and even a successful war might alienate the population if it were lengthy or difficult . </P> <P> The argument that Austro - Hungary was a moribund political entity, whose disappearance was only a matter of time, was deployed by hostile contemporaries to suggest that the empire's efforts to defend its integrity during the last years before the war were in some sense illegitimate . </P> <P> Clark states: "Evaluating the prospects of the Austo - Hungarian empire on the eve of the first world war confronts us in an acute way with the problem of temporal perspective...The collapse of the empire amid war and defeat in 1918 impressed itself upon the retrospective view of the Habsburg lands, overshadowing the scene with auguries of imminent and ineluctable decline ." </P>

How did the network of european agreements cause world war i to start