Accounts of the route to World War I often say that particular powers wanted war, but that shorthand can hide disagreement inside each state. Some factions sought conflict while others strongly opposed it. A contributing factor may also affect different strategic relationships in different ways. Historians therefore need to separate a state's broad course from the competing intentions inside it. The Berlin-Baghdad railway example makes that causal complexity concrete.
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War aims and factions within states
Before World War I, factions within the same country could press for war while others resisted it, which makes a state difficult to treat as a single actor.