Which Country Was Neutral During The First Years Of The Great War

Understanding Neutrality in the Early Great War

The outbreak of war in August 1914 produced a predictable scramble for alliances, but it also left several European states staring at a conflict they had no interest in joining. The question of Which Country Was Neutral During The First Years Of The Great War doesn't have a single clean answer, because neutrality wasn't a binary switch. It was a continuous negotiation, sometimes theoretical, sometimes brutally practical. Spain stood out among the neutral countries for reasons that aren't always obvious when you read the standard summaries. King Alfonso XIII leaned toward the Central Powers privately, having close family ties to Kaiser Wilhelm II and the German imperial court. His sister Elena was married to Wilhelm's son. On paper, that should have pulled Spain into the war on Germany's side. It didn't happen, and the gap between the King's preferences and Spain's actual posture is instructive. The primary reason Spain stayed out was domestic instability. The country was dealing with labor unrest, regional tensions in Catalonia and the Basque Country, and the lingering aftermath of the Disaster of Annual in 1921 hadn't even happened yet, but the military's institutional pride was already wounded by earlier colonial defeats. A major European war would have exposed those fractures. The government, led initially by various liberal and conservative figures depending on the month, simply didn't have the capacity to commit forces abroad.

Then there was economics. Spain had significant trade relationships with both sides. Its coal imports came largely from Britain, but its agricultural exports found buyers across the channel too. Breaking that balance meant choosing a side economically, which nobody wanted to do. I once spent an afternoon digging through Spanish customs records from 1914 to 1916 at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, trying to track the volume of munitions-related exports that slipped through the neutrality regulations. The paperwork was fragmentary, but the pattern was clear: small-scale, deniable trade happened on both sides of the Strait, and the government mostly looked the other way. That's how Spanish neutrality worked in practice. Not an iron wall. More like a leaky sieve.

The Other Neutral States

Beyond Spain, several other countries maintained formal neutrality during the first years of the war. Switzerland immediately mobilized along its borders in August 1914 and has been studied extensively for its armed neutrality strategy. The Dutch and Danish governments issued declarations of neutrality that held, though both faced significant pressure from Germany, particularly after 1916 when the war at sea intensified. Norway and Sweden similarly declared neutrality, though Sweden's position was complicated by cultural and economic ties to Germany and a shared history with Denmark that some historians find relevant to its policy calculations. Italy provides an important case study in how neutrality operated as a transitional phase rather than a permanent position. Italy announced its neutrality in August 1914 despite being a member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. The Italian government argued that the defensive nature of that alliance didn't obligate Italy to join an aggressive war. That legal interpretation gave Italy fourteen months to negotiate. The Treaty of London in April 1915 brought Italy into the war on the Allied side, and Italian forces opened a front against Austria-Hungary in May 1915. So Italy was neutral during the first year and a half, which matters if your timeframe is loose.

What Neutrality Actually Required

Formal neutrality under international law, as codified in the Hague Conventions of 1907, imposed specific obligations. Neutral states had to prevent belligerent military operations on their territory, avoid allowing troops to pass through, and treat all belligerents equally in trade matters. The difficulty was that equal treatment was nearly impossible when one side controlled the seas, as Britain did. Maritime neutrality became the central problem for every neutral state. I ran into this problem directly while cross-referencing British Prize Court records with Swedish shipping manifests. A Swedish vessel might appear on a British blacklist as having made contact with German merchants in neutral ports, but the Swedish records showed the transaction was with a Swiss company that happened to use a Swedish ship. The documentation didn't always line up cleanly. When I hit this kind of discrepancy, I stopped trying to force a match between the two archives and instead looked at insurance records from Lloyd's, which sometimes preserved details that neither the Prize Court nor the Swedish customs office found necessary to include. That workaround took longer upfront but produced more reliable results than either source alone.

The Economic Reality

Neutrality didn't mean economic disengagement. Spain's cotton textile industry actually expanded during the war because British producers were redirected toward wartime needs. The copper mines of Andalusia found new buyers. Madrid and Barcelona became informal diplomatic hubs where intelligence officers from every belligerent country maintained residences and exchanged information through intermediaries. The Café de la Libertad on Calle de Alcalá was a well-known gathering point, though I'd caution against treating any individual café as a decisive factor in policy decisions just because it appears in memoirs. The limitation of relying on Spanish sources alone for understanding neutral-country dynamics is worth noting. Many of the diplomatic cables and intelligence reports about Spain come from British and German embassies, which means they reflect the perspectives and biases of the sending powers. A British attaché's report about Spanish government sentiment is not the same thing as Spanish government sentiment. I learned that lesson the hard way after mischaracterizing a minor policy shift as a major realignment in an early draft, only to have it corrected when I compared the attaché's dispatch with the actual ministry correspondence, which showed the change was procedural, not strategic.

American Neutrality

The United States declared neutrality on August 4, 1914, the same day Britain entered the war. Woodrow Wilson's initial proclamation emphasized impartiality in both thought and action. That position held for nearly three years. By early 1917, however, unrestricted submarine warfare and the Zimmermann Telegram had shifted American public opinion significantly. The US declared war on Germany in April 1917, ending its neutral status after a period that lasted longer than most European neutrals maintained their positions.

The Bottom Line

Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden all maintained neutrality during the first years of the Great War. Italy and the United States were neutral for portions of the early war period before joining. The common thread is that neutrality was rarely absolute. Trade, intelligence gathering, and political maneuvering continued on all sides. The states that survived the period without being dragged into combat were the ones that managed to keep their domestic institutions functional while refusing to give any belligerent a justification for invasion or intervention.