One underlying cause of World War I was militarism. Militarism is when nations invested heavily in their armed forces in order to remain stronger than one's enemies. Well first Great Britain spent the most money on its navy so it could have a very strong military. Also Germany spent the most money on its army, to also have a very strong military. This evidence supports the claim that militarism was an underlying cause of the war because Germany had the strongest power on the continent. But the British navy was the strongest in the world. So obviously both countries, Germany and Great Britain, began to battle to see who had the strongest and most powerful military in the world.

The period between 1880-1914 is called "armed peace", and this was due to the great military expenditure, and continous shift of alliances.

Explanation:

As evidenced in the essay, the precedents of World War I was the militaristic nature of the regimes in Europe, and the arms race between Germany and Britain, and of the continous balance of power between alliances, that dated back to the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

British international stance was always to have no absolute Continental power, and that is why Great Britain started to draw closer with France to counterweight the German Empire. That is why, after the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, Britain and France would firm the Entente. And after that, Germany allied itself with the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, in a turn of the enmity between the Central European powers.

In all of this shift, a continous arms race was created, that contributed to the ascendant tensions in Europe, and finally the network of alliances would engulf the continent and its colonies in an all out war in 1914.