The main reason for this is of course that Germany had no colonial empire, a fact that was the source of some very powerful political and military tensions: think, for example, of the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, when the Kaiser sought to challenge French supremacy in Morocco. The heightened competition among European powers for colonial assets obviously contributed to the climate that ultimately led to the declaration of war in the summer of 1914: one need not subscribe to all of Lenin’s theses in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) to share this conclusion.
