Causes of WWI??

When I think about the causes of World War I, my mind jumps back to 8th grade history class. I remember something about Serbia, Bosnia, some dude named Franz Ferdinand getting assassinated, and that after the assassination BAM- war started. This reading opened my mind to some more accurate details. Yes, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand (the archduke of Austria and the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire) was the spark for the war, but there were many other factors that contributed. Britain wanted to maintain the balance of power since no single nation should be allowed to dominate the whole Continent. Also, Britain was upset because of the German invasion of neutral Belgium. Germany thought that their super cool Schlieffen Plan to attack France first to "secure a quick victory that would neutralize the Western Front and free the German army to fight Russia in the east" was going to work (873). However, in fact, this plan miserably failed due to the ridiculous speed of the operation- it was too fast for the soldiers and supply lines to keep up with, the resistance of the poorly armed but determined Belgian army, the intervention of Britain's "small but highly professional field army," and the combined attack of Britain and France against Germany at the battle of the Marne (873). Austria declared war because they viewed this conflict as a "matter of prestige and power politics- a chance to reassert the fraying empire's authority in the face of the rising nationalism of its peoples"(869). Seeing as the Austria-Hungary empire was actually struggling to survive amidst all of the different nationalist groups living in the various sections of the empire. Russia declared war in order to "regain some of the tsar's authority by standing up for the rights of "brother slavs"' (869). 

However, I believe that a huge reason that this big war started was because of the lack of communication between countries. The book even mentions that there was not enough "reasoned debate about the problem" and the government officials had little contact with one another, in fact, several heads of states, the kaiser, the president of France, and a few ministers were actually on vacation during the month of July! ON VACATION while the military generals started mobilizing their armies in order to get ahead of the game. People felt a sense of urgency to jump on the band wagon and start mobilizing armies because they felt the lure of success of being the first to successfully strike against one's enemies, and the fear of loosing all that was at stake.