In the immediate aftermath of the assassination on June 28 of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (the heir to the Habsburg throne) in the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, the British newspapers denounced the Serbian nationalist assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and were generally sympathetic to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Ĭhristopher Clark points out that the British cabinet decided on July 29, 1914, that being a signatory to the 1839 treaty guaranteeing Belgium's frontiers did not obligate it to oppose a German invasion of Belgium with military force. British policy-makers insisted that that would be a catastrophe for British security. Kennedy argues that by far the main reason was London's fear that a repeat of the war of 1870, when Prussia and the German states smashed France, would mean that a rapidly industrialising Germany, with a powerful army and navy, would control the English Channel and northwest France. The German invasion of Belgium was not the real cause of war with Britain, because the British decision had already been made as the British were more concerned with the fate of France (pp. 457–62). Germany's reliance time and again on military aggression, while Britain increasingly appealed to moral sensibilities, also played a role, especially in portraying the invasion of neutral Belgium as (in the German view) a necessary military tactic or (in the British view) a profound moral crime. It was in essence not a consequence of the disputes over economic trade imperialism, the Baghdad Railway, the confrontations in Eastern Europe, highly-charged political rhetoric, or domestic pressure groups. In explaining why Britain went to war with Germany, British historian Paul Kennedy (1980) argued that a critical factor was the British realisation that Germany was rapidly becoming economically more powerful than Britain. Britain was effectively bound to support France in a war against Germany regardless, but this was not widely understood outside government and the military. A British Expeditionary Force of 100,000 men would be landed in France within two weeks of war, while naval arrangements allocated responsibility for the Mediterranean Sea to the French Navy, with the Royal Navy looking after the North Sea and the English Channel, including Northern France. The 1911 Agadir Crisis encouraged secret military negotiations between France and Britain in the case of war with the German Empire. The 1902, 19 agreements with Japan, France and Russia allowed Britain to refocus resources during the Anglo-German naval arms race
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