Preface to the fourth edition
It seems difficult to believe that more than 15 years have passed since I wrote the preface to the third edition. I am pleased to say that the refreshed and expanded version of James Joll’s original work did accomplish the goal of giving his splendid book a new lease of life. It has continued to be utilized by teachers of the subject as a comprehensive, stimulating and useful introduction to the subject of the war’s origins. It has now been translated into Polish, Turkish and Chinese.
What I did not anticipate back in 2006 was how much fresh stimulus would be given to the subject and its attendant controversies as a result of the centenary in 2014 of the war’s outbreak. I believe I imagined at that time a steady, but slow, infusion of new work on the peripheries of the subject, perhaps in themselves insufficient to warrant a new edition of this work. And indeed, as I discuss in the new Introduction, some of the explorations undertaken by historians before 2014 arose from such mundane origins as the availability of new documentary sources, or the piecemeal ‘filling of gaps’ by students of the subject looking for an opportunity to contribute something new. But the coming of, and then the arrival of, the centenary exceeded all expectations in both the volume and the range of new work on the subject. The result is that the revised Guide to Further Reading is now twice the size of that published in 2006. We have had numerous new surveys of the subject, new and richly detailed studies of the July Crisis, numerous biographies of the characters involved, revivals of controversies that had appeared dormant and detailed work on practically every nook and cranny of the subject.
I have attempted to incorporate this new work into the existing text, without succumbing to the temptation of making this new edition so vast in size that it would be rendered unhelpful to students of the subject. In addition to the chapter-by-chapter updating, I have replaced the original chapter on the July Crisis with an entirely new one, which is largely a condensation of my 2014 book published by Oxford University Press (OUP), The Month that Changed the World: July 1914, and I gratefully acknowledge the support and encouragement of Matthew Cotton at OUP. Finally, I have written a new introduction and a new conclusion. The new introduction attempts to summarize the most significant contributions to the subject since 2006, while the new conclusion attempts to highlight the most critical decisions that were taken during the July Crisis – thereby illustrating the significance of chronological narrative in understanding how war broke out.
Gordon Martel
December 2021
Preface to the third edition
I am delighted to have been presented with the opportunity to keep James Joll’s book ‘alive’ – in spite of his death in 1994 – by bringing it up to date. His approach to the subject was distinguished both by his mastery of the ethos of Europe in the decades before the war and by his decision to construct the book as a series of essays on the principal interpretations of the war. His famous lecture (then essay) on the ‘Unspoken Assumptions’ in the minds of those who took Europe to war is, I believe, primarily responsible for much of the scholarship on this subject over the past 30 years, while his participation in the ‘Fischer Debate’ was instrumental in appreciating the value (and some of the shortcomings) of Fritz Fischer’s approach. Thus, his knowledge, erudition and historical instincts resulted in the outstanding synthesis that has made this book a classic.
Most of the text of the first edition was composed between 1980 and 1983; the second edition was not so much a revision as an addition of materials concerning Italy. Thus, even the most recent (1992) edition contains few references to the scholarship of the past 25 years. Certainly those years have witnessed nothing like the controversies of the previous 25, in which James Joll was so deeply engaged. There has been nothing like the debate inspired by Fritz Fischer; rather, the work of historians has extended both the range and depth of our understanding of the themes highlighted in this book. We have had numerous new biographies of many of the leading characters involved: three of Kaiser Wilhelm II (the most outstanding of which, that by John Röhl, has taken us only to 1900 in two volumes) and three of Tsar Nicholas II (including Dominic Lieven’s brilliant study); numerous biographies of leading politicians, ranging from John F.V. Keiger’s excellent study of Raymond Poincaré to Katharine Lerman’s on Bernhard von Bülow’s career in office; and even more numerous biographies of the diplomats and officials responsible for the conduct of foreign policy in the years before 1914. We have new studies of nationalism and schooling, trade and finance, imperialism and colonialism, strategy and strategists, socialism and pacifism, militarism and navalism, racism and youth movements. Some of these studies offer new syntheses of their particular subjects; others are based on new and detailed archival research; all of them pertain to some degree to the themes addressed in this book.
In addition to the work of Röhl, Lieven and Keiger, three works – of quite different nature and scope – stand out: Samuel R. Williamson’s Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (1991), David Stevenson’s Armaments and the Coming of War (1996) and Keith Neilson’s Britain and the Last Tsar (1995). Each of these authors has made exceptionally valuable contributions to our understanding of the causes of war – and each of them has, I believe, corroborated many of the conclusions argued by James Joll in this book. This is not to overlook the value of distinguished monographs such as Annika Mombauer’s Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War, or M.B. Hayne’s The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War, or D.M. McDonald’s United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia 1900–1914, or Keith Hamilton’s Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador, or Bruce Menning’s Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914, to cite only a few examples. The list, although not endless, is certainly extensive. There have been, moreover, literally dozens of important articles in a wide variety of historical journals that bear upon important aspects of the war’s origins.
Early on in this work I made a strategic decision of my own: that I would not simply add a chapter of ‘what’s happened since 1991 (or 1984)’ and update the bibliography. The range of themes covered in the book would have made such an approach awkward and, I think, not particularly useful. Instead, I chose to attempt to integrate and refer to this work throughout the existing text. Thus, I have striven to maintain the original style and tone, revising interpretations slightly when this seemed warranted, but usually adding new details, examples or references that extended the points that James Joll had made. In this task I have received the helpful advice of many colleagues, among whom I should particularly like to acknowledge my gratitude to John F.V. Keiger, Annika Mombauer, David Stevenson and Samuel R. Williamson. I believe it speaks volumes for the knowledge and insight of James Joll that no significant change in interpretation has seemed necessary. If readers of this new version have difficulty discerning where the prose of James Joll ends and where mine begins, I shall have succeeded in my strategy. If this new version ‘keeps alive’ this remarkable book for another generation of readers, I shall have succeeded in my aim. For my part, I viewed this task as an act of respect: to honour the work of one of twentieth century’s outstanding historians.
Gordon Martel
January 2006
Preface to the second edition
The list of books and articles relating to the causes of the First World War is apparently endless, and it would take a lifetime to read them all. Even keeping up with the relevant new literature as it appears can keep one fully occupied. I have certainly not read all the books; and the only excuse for adding to them is that it is now perhaps worth trying to summarize, on an international and comparative basis, some of the arguments and explanations which historians have been discussing over the past 20 years.
I have started from the crisis of July–August 1914, and I have limited myself to those states which went to war then, though I have said something about Italian policy in the July Crisis and the long-term developments that were to lead to the decision to intervene in May 1915. Japan declared war on Germany on 23 August 1914, but the war was seen by the Japanese as a war for Japan’s own purposes; and in any case it was a war with the immediate origins of which Japan had had nothing to do. I have said nothing about the United States, whose policies do not seem to me to have been of international importance till after the war had started. The war began as a European war, though it did not end as such. While attempting to show why this particular war occurred at that particular moment, I have also tried to look at some of the general trends which made a war of some kind likely. The difficulty for the historian remains that of linking the general to the particular; and I have not solved it.
Before 1914, it was at least as usual to say England and English as Great Britain and British, and I have not tried to be consistent in this respect. Equally, I have sometimes written Austrian when it would have been more accurate to write Austro-Hungarian.
I should particularly like to thank those friends and colleagues to whose writings and conversation during the time I have been writing this book I am especially indebted: Volker Berghahn, Lancelot L. Farrar Jr, David French, Paul Kennedy, Dominic Lieven, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, David Schoenbaum and Zara Steiner. I should also like to take the opportunity of acknowledging how much I owe to Professor Fritz Fischer, even if I do not agree with all his conclusions, since it was he who reopened the whole question of the origins of the First World War and suggested new directions in which to look for answers. I am very grateful to Mrs Susan Welsford for her skill and care in preparing the original typescript.
At various points in the book I have incorporated parts of earlier articles published in Aspekte der Deutsch-Britischen Beziehungen im Laufe der Jahrhunderte, edited by Paul Kluke and Peter Alter (publications of the German Historical Institute, London, Vol. 4, Stuttgart 1978), and The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honour of Isaiah Berlin, edited by Alan Ryan (Oxford 1979). I am grateful for permission to use this material.
James Joll
London
March 1991
KING MARK: ‘Den unerforschlich tief
geheimnissvollen Grund,
wer macht der Welt ihn Kund?’
[‘Who will make known to the
world the inscrutably deep
secret cause?’]
TRISTAN: ‘O König, das
kann ich dir nicht sagen;
und was du frägst,
das kannst du nie erfahren.’
[‘That, King, I cannot tell
you; and what you ask, that you will
never learn.’]
Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde, Act II
1
From the day that war began in August 1914, scholars and thinkers, politicians and statesmen, began ruminating on the causes that had led them over the brink ‘into the boiling cauldron of war’. An entire literature immediately sprang up assigning blame to one or more of the combatant states, delineating the evil or the folly of those deemed responsible for Europe’s plight. The question of responsibility became one of intense political and emotional significance. Within months almost every warring state produced a ‘coloured’ book documenting its innocence, proving that it had sought a peaceful resolution to the crisis of July that emerged following the assassination of the Austrian archduke in June.1 Supplementing these documentary collections were essays and articles by journalists and theologians, theorists and propagandists, most of whom ascribed ill intent to their opponents. These short pieces in newspapers, magazines and journals soon grew into a flood of pamphlets and books. Midway through the war, by late 1916, almost every conceivable villain had been identified, every root cause unearthed. The result was a mountain of controversial literature offering a multitude of answers to the question ‘Why did a European war break out in August 1914?’ and its offspring ‘Who was responsible for the tragedy?’2
The focus on the war’s ‘immediate’ origins was magnified and sharpened by the so-called War Guilt Clause contained in article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles. The reparations section of the treaty stipulated that Germany – along with its allies – accepted the responsibility ‘for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies’. Thus, the premise upon which reparations were based came to be inextricably connected with the actions of politicians, diplomats and strategists in the months and years that preceded August 1914. Blame for the war was made even more explicit and was attached particularly to the person of the German emperor: ‘The Allied and Associated Powers publicly arraign William II of Hohenzollern, former German Emperor, for a supreme offence against international morality and the sanctity of treaties.’ This individual indictment of Kaiser Wilhelm was the result partly of a desire for revenge on the part of the public in Britain and France: ‘Hang the Kaiser’ had been a popular slogan in the British general election of November 1918. But the demand for a formal trial of Wilhelm II was also the result of a more considered, though not necessarily more accurate, diagnosis of the role of the emperor and the Prussian military caste in the origins of the war. Already in 1914 Sir Edward Grey had become obsessed with the evils of ‘Prussian militarism’,3 and in the armistice negotiations of November 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had stressed the necessity of getting rid of the kaiser and doing away with what he called ‘military masters and monarchical autocrats’.4 In this way a connection was established between the acts (perhaps criminal) of individuals, and the political structures and cultural ethos that created or had enabled them.
During the peace conference at Paris, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, strenuously attempted to compel the Netherlands to hand over the kaiser – who had fled there seeking exile during the revolution of 1918 in Germany. The kaiser was, Lloyd George maintained, personally responsible for
the cynical violation of the neutrality of Belgium and Luxemburg, the barbarous hostage system, the mass deportation of populations, the carrying away of the young women of Lille, torn from their families and thrown defenceless into the most promiscuous environment.5
The rhetoric was in vain, as were the threats to break off diplomatic relations with the Netherlands and even to impose economic sanctions on them. Wilhelm, the former kaiser, lived comfortably in exile at the manor house Huis Doorn until his death in 1941 (and where he remains at the mausoleum in the garden to this day).
In the 1920s, it seemed that the entire edifice of the new post-war order had been erected on the foundation of the highly debateable argument that Germany and its allies were guilty of aggression in 1914. Proof that this was not the case, that responsibility for the war was shared by all of the combatants, might precipitate a profound revision of the new world order that had been created at Paris in 1919. This attitude gave impetus to the Kriegschuldfrage (war-guilt question) and to ‘revisionism’ more generally.6 For a decade at least, scholars devoted themselves to a detailed examination of the immediate pre-war period, and their quest for answers generated new collections of documentary evidence upon which to base their findings. Gradually, at different paces and with varying degrees of completeness, each of the combatant states produced vast collections documenting its pre-war diplomacy. Following the German revolution of 1918, the new republican government authorized the eminent socialist theoretician Karl Kautsky to prepare a volume of documents from the German archives on the events immediately preceding the outbreak of war. Subsequent German governments believed that one way to refute the allegations of Germany’s war guilt was to show the detailed working of the old diplomacy and to demonstrate that the methods of all governments were much the same and that therefore no specific blame should be attached to the Germans.
As a result, between 1922 and 1927, 39 volumes of German diplomatic documents were published under the title Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette (The High Policy of the European Cabinets). This German initiative, which aimed at countering the allegations of Germany’s war guilt, meant that other countries felt obliged to follow their example and show that they too had nothing to hide. Consequently, the British Documents on the Origins of the War appeared in 11 volumes between 1926 and 1938; the French Documents Diplomatiques Francais 1871–1914 began publication in 1930, though the last of the volumes did not appear until 1953. Eight volumes of Austro-Hungarian documents were published in 1930 by the government of the Austrian Republic, but the Italian documents were only published after the Second World War. Members of the Russian diplomatic service who remained abroad after the revolution published selections from their embassy archives, and the Soviet government printed a quantity of archive material in the 1920s and 1930s.7 Because of the political ramifications of this branch of historical enquiry, and because of the determination of governments to defend their own practices, we know more in greater detail about the history of the relations between states in the years before 1914 than in almost any other period.
The historical studies that were produced at the time of this almost frenzied interest in war origins tended to be stuck on the original impetus for research: who, among the participants, and which, among the competing states, was responsible for the outbreak of war in August 1914? Pierre Renouvin in France and Bernadotte Schmitt in the United States inclined to put the blame on Germany; another American, Sidney B. Fay, on Austria-Hungary; the German Alfred von Wegerer on Russia and Britain (to name only a few). The most monumental of these detailed studies, that by the Italian journalist and politician Luigi Albertini, appeared only after the Second World War had begun, and it was some years before it achieved international recognition; and by then the focus of the discussion was changing.8
With the passage of time, with the new European order receiving a level of legitimacy via the Treaty of Locarno and the promise of an effective League of Nations, attention gradually shifted from the immediate pre-war period to the deeper, more profound causes of the war. By the late 1920s the idea had gained acceptance that the war was the result of a faulty system of international relations. It was, according to this view, the existence of a system of alliances dividing Europe into two camps that had made war inevitable, and the ‘old diplomacy’ was blamed for making sinister secret international agreements that committed countries to war without the knowledge of their citizens.9 By the 1930s a consensus (at least in professional academic circles) had emerged, one that shifted attention from the individuals at the centre of the July Crisis to the nature of the international system, to more abstract forces such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘imperialism’ and ‘militarism’, to phenomena such as the build-up of armaments, to economic rivalry in the fields of trade and finance. In this view, no individual, no particular group, no state or empire was solely or even primarily responsible for the outbreak of war. But an understanding of how these forces worked might enable Europe to manage them in a manner in which competition would work to everyone’s benefit rather than producing the kind of friction, misunderstanding and uncertainty that led to war.
As interest in the origins of the First World War and particularly in the ‘immediate’ causes of war gradually diminished, diatribes and disputes disappeared and in their place lists of impersonal forces were offered to students of the subject. The rise of fascism and Nazism and the near-constant drumbeat of crises from the remilitarization of the Rhineland, to the civil war in Spain, to the Italian adventure in Abyssinia, to the Austro-German Anschluss and the crisis over Czechoslovakia and, finally, to Danzig and the Second World War seemed of much more pressing interest than now-arcane disputes over responsibility for 1914. Still, there was a deeply rooted connection between the events of the 1930s and the debates over 1914/1919: if the new post-war system of international relations – symbolized by the creation of the League of Nations – owed its existence to a distorted (or at least debateable) interpretation of war origins, then perhaps the ‘revisionists’ were justified in demanding that the new system be restructured or dismantled. Thus, ‘appeasement’ of those who had been wronged could be interpreted as a justifiable, moral, response to the unfairness of the Versailles system imposed by the victors on the vanquished at Paris in 1919. As A.J.P. Taylor famously remarked in his Origins of the Second World War, the Munich settlement ‘was a triumph for all that was best and most enlightened in British life; a triumph for those who had preached equal justice between peoples; a triumph for those who had courageously denounced the harshness and short-sightedness of Versailles’.10
After 1945, the horrors endured between 1939 and 1945 overshadowed what interest remained in the First World War. The immediate responsibility for the Second World War was generally accepted to be borne by Hitler and the National Socialist government of Germany, and what little discussion there continued to be concerning the causes of the First World War came to be linked to the discussion about the causes of the Second: how much had the Treaty of Versailles (and especially the ‘war guilt’ clause) contributed to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Hitler? A few discordant voices outside Germany argued that there was a continuity in the foreign policies of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany, but they were most often dismissed as reactionary or racist or both when they traced Germany’s inherent wickedness back to Otto von Bismarck or Frederick the Great or even Luther.11 For many conservative German historians, although they were ready to accept Germany’s responsibility for the Second World War, it was extremely painful to contemplate the reality that the notion of Germany’s ‘guilt’ in the First World War was still flourishing outside Germany.
The Fritz Fischer debate and the new left
What reinvigorated the subject was the appearance of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht in 1961 (translated and published in English under the title Germany’s Aims in the First World War in 1967). In essence, Fischer returned to the old argument – largely discredited since the 1920s – that it was Germany’s aggression which had precipitated the outbreak of war in 1914. The grandiose plans for German expansion, for German domination of Europe, for Germany taking its place as a ‘world power’ were woven together to prove that Germany had ‘premeditated’ the war and had regarded the crisis of July 1914 as the best possible opportunity to achieve its expansionist goals. In the decade after 1967 students of the subject were once again debating the thorny issues of guilt and responsibility. And the renewed discussion resonated politically: the suggestion that there might be a continuity between Germany’s aims in the First World War and those in the Second did not aid Fischer’s cause or reputation in his own country, particularly when his arguments were applauded by historians working in the communist German Democratic Republic (East Germany).12 There, one of the leading historians, Fritz Klein, argued that there was nothing new or controversial in the suggestion that Germany bore the main responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War and that ‘the demand for extensive war aims was determined primarily by the leading economic circles, and that the aggressive war policy of the German Reich was merely a continuation of policies pursued long before 1914’.13
The Fischer approach generated more than a renewal of the old controversies, however. A school of German historians, accepting the premise that Germany had indeed attempted to ‘grab’ (or ‘grasp’) world power in 1914 (a description that comes closer to the original German title), attempted to determine why this had been the case. The answer that they came up with had its roots in the 1930s with a young leftist historian, Eckart Kehr, who had argued in his study of Battleship Building and Party Politics in Germany that the ‘precondition’ for German imperialism was the alliance between the traditional Prussian agrarian Junkerdom of eastern Germany and modern industrialists and financiers in the west and the north.14 This suggested a reversal of Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum, that the ‘Primat der Aussenpolitik’ (the primacy of foreign policy) explained the course of German history. Kehr, and those who followed him in the 1970s, turned this on its head as the ‘Primat der Innenpolitik’ (the primacy of domestic politics). It was the alliance of the Junkers and the industrialists (which groups, according to Marxist historiography, ought to have been antithetical) that joined together in building a battleship fleet capable of advancing the aspirations of German imperialists. Thus, to questions concerning the role of imperialist rivalry as a cause of war in 1914 were added new queries that focused on the role of social structures and the relationship between political alliances and foreign policy.
Fischer had suggested almost incidentally in Griff nach der Weltmacht, but developed more fully in his next book, Krieg der Illusionen (1969) (translated as War of Illusions in 1974) that it was domestic political and social pressures that determined German foreign policy before 1914.15 One of the leading proponents of this view, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, took up where Eckart Kehr had left off, arguing that Germany’s aristocratic and industrial elites manipulated the expression of political opinion by mobilizing interest groups in order to protect their own positions at the top of society and to mitigate the challenges posed by democracy and socialism. In Wehler’s view, Wilhelm II was merely a cipher, a Schattenkaiser (shadow emperor) who merely did the bidding of the oligarchs who controlled the structure of German society.16 This ‘Bielefeld school’ approach (named after the university in north-east Germany where Wehler taught and inspired colleagues and students to follow his lead) was strenuously challenged, however, by John Röhl in a series of works that focus on the kaiser, his personality and the personalities of the men who surrounded him. German policies, Röhl argued, were determined not by anonymous forces or oligarchies ‘but by men of flesh and blood, with all their emotions and vanities’.17 His meticulous scholarship and careful dissection of the decision-making process added enormously to our understanding of pre-war Germany.18
This new focus on the significance of domestic politics and society and the role of prominent individuals within it occurred at a propitious moment. In the midst of growing anxiety in the 1960s concerning the war in Vietnam – and bitter opposition to it – critics began to argue along lines similar to those being developed in Germany in order to explain the U.S. role in southeast Asia. Young academic ‘revisionists’ aligned with the ‘New Left’ began to build a case that the United States was an imperialist state and that it had been so since its inception. Thus, the ‘adventure’ in Vietnam was neither accidental nor abnormal – it represented the coming together of ambitious social and political elites to establish American dominance, who profited from this dominance, and which accounted for U.S. foreign policy.19 Historians of Europe were inspired to adopt a similar view of European society and the issue of responsibility for war in 1914. Most famously, Arno J. Mayer argued that it was the last remnants of the old, aristocratic régimes in Europe which desperately attempted to hang on to their positions of privilege and for which purpose they succeeded in dominating the foreign offices and diplomatic services of Europe.20 In his words, ‘the decision for war and the design for warfare were forged in what was a crisis in the politics and policy of Europe’s ruling and governing classes’.21 These ideas came close to the Marxist explanation that wars are inherent in the nature of capitalism and that the internal contradictions of capitalist society had by the beginning of the twentieth century reached a point where a major war was inevitable.
Such explanations can take us very far away from the immediate situation in 1914 and involve us in a consideration of the entire economic and social development of Europe for several centuries. But one historian – William Jannen Jr. – has attempted to embed Mayer’s argument in the July Crisis itself by suggesting that the men in positions of responsibility during the crisis were those from the governing classes who had been born into the pre-industrial Europe of the mid-nineteenth century, that they had been educated in schools that taught traditional values at a time when traditions were rapidly eroding and that, particularly in Austria-Hungary, the tremendous stress that the assassination placed them under led them to react emotionally and irrationally.22 By the 1980s a wide range of articles, essays and books had appeared which examined and/or re-examined the structure of domestic politics and the nature of social relations in all of the states that went to war in 1914. By the end of the twentieth century, students of the subject knew vastly more about who made the decisions – and how these decisions were made – than had been the case 50 or 75 years earlier. No historian writing on the subject today would be taken seriously if these domestic structures were ignored in a discussion of the war’s origins, as can be seen by consulting the titles listed in the section on the ‘Primacy of Domestic Politics’ in Further Reading.
The Fischer debate occurred at the height of the Cold War. The publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht was contemporaneous with the building of the Berlin Wall (officially, the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, the ‘anti-fascist protection barrier’), the most compelling physical symbol of the bipolar world. But it also coincided with the kidnapping, the televised trial and the execution of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem as well as the beginning of new prosecutions in Frankfurt against perpetrators of the genocide against the Jewish people at Auschwitz. The argument that there was a line of continuity between German aims leading to the First World War and to the horrors of the Holocaust was bound to be controversial and divisive. The historical dispute arising from the ‘Fischer Controversy’ entered the public realm in Germany in a manner that had no parallel: journalists took sides in newspapers, long excerpts from Griff were broadcast over radio and historians debated with one another on television. Leading politicians were expected to express an opinion on the subject.
This public debate had no parallel elsewhere. Occasionally, A.J.P. Taylor might ruffle a few feathers when he expressed heretical positions on radio or television, but neither he nor any other historian succeeded in breaking into the public sphere in such a dramatic way. Even the Fischer debate was contained largely within the confines of Germany itself. Outside of Germany, only specialists in German history became engaged in it, and the debate remained an almost entirely academic controversy. But the academic side of the debate did have important ramifications: the line of continuity that Fischer drew between war origins and war aims raised the question of whether such a line might be discovered in the case of the other European Great Powers from 1914 to 1919 (i.e. from the decisions they made before and during the crisis of July in 1914 to the peace settlement at Paris). Slowly, this new impetus produced a number of scholarly works that documented the ‘war aims’ of the Entente powers. The carving up of the middle east among Britain, France and Russia was the most vivid illustration of aggressive/expansionist war aims on the part of Germany’s opponents.23 The Sykes-Picot agreement in particular, along with the treaties of Constantinople and London, demonstrated that ambitious territorial aggrandizement was not limited to Germany. But few historians connected the dots in a Fischerite manner: there were only a few tentative suggestions that the eventual ‘war aims’ of the Entente powers were to be found lurking behind the policies they pursued during the July Crisis.24 One historian, Keith Neilson, went so far as to maintain that ‘In 1914 Britain had no war aims’.25 Similarly, Marvin Benjamin Fried concluded that Austria’s leaders had no specific war aims in 1914 ‘beyond the military defeat and political subjugation of Serbia’.26
A new Cold War consensus?
The ‘Fischer thesis’ dominated discussions of the war’s origins for several decades.27 German historians in particular devoted themselves once again to dissecting imperial Germany’s foreign policy from Bismarck to the collapse of the regime in 1918. In comparison, there was no new synthesis that generated much enthusiasm, nor was there anything like the Fischer debate to arouse controversy concerning the policies of each of the other great powers – in contrast to the debates of the 1920s, where Russia, France, Austria-Hungary and Britain were individually or collectively held responsible. Although the distinguished historians writing in Macmillan’s Making of the Twentieth Century series, which commenced publication in the 1970s, offered comprehensive interpretations of the foreign policies of Germany (Volker Berghahn), Britain (Zara Steiner), Italy (Richard Bosworth), France (John F.V. Keiger) and Russia (Dominic Lieven), they did not assign responsibility – or guilt – to the states they studied. The publication in 1991 of Samuel R. Williamson’s Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War was different; although he offered a comprehensive and systematic study of Austrian foreign policy before 1914, he also argued that it was this policy that caused the outbreak of a general European war in July and August. Although the book appeared 30 years after the publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht, Williamson had been inspired to challenge the focus on Germany long before 1991: in an early essay he declared that he wished to reopen the debate over July 1914 and put Fischer in a ‘less embracing’ context by reminding scholars ‘of what the participants in 1914 readily perceived: that Vienna, though troubled and possibly anachronistic, was a great power capable of independent action and decision’.28 Nevertheless, that argument aroused no controversy similar to the one inspired by Fischer – perhaps because the ‘guilty party’, the Habsburg Empire, no longer existed and because no one had a vested interest in defending it against its critics.
Or is this the case? While the ‘Fischer debate’ began running out of steam sometime in the 1980s, it came to be generally accepted amongst historians of Germany that primary responsibility for the outbreak of war lay with Germany because it had planned for a war and was prepared to risk it in July 1914. But this did not mean that interest in the origins of the war disappeared altogether. In addition to ‘national’ studies in the Making of the Twentieth Century series, there was a fairly steady flow of scholarly articles and essays, monographs and surveys over the quarter century leading up to 2014. Much of this was inspired by James Joll himself through his inaugural lecture as Stevenson Professor of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1968. When ‘1914: The Unspoken Assumptions’ was published, it generated renewed enthusiasm for the subject by focusing attention on hitherto neglected moods and attitudes, beliefs and identities. Studies of ‘male desire’ and the importance of ‘honour’ joined investigations of social Darwinism and the aspirations of youth; research into army and navy leagues demonstrated the extent to which military values had permeated society – but these were then challenged by new studies of the ‘spirit’ of 1914, which argued that support for the war and identification with the state were not nearly as deep or widespread as had long been assumed.29
Thanks to arguments, controversies and debates over the war aims of the combatant states in 1914–18, over the primacy of domestic politics and over the role of culture and emotions, by the 1980s there was a rich literature to draw from in any investigation of the war’s origins. On the other hand, traditional diplomatic history – famously dismissed by G.M. Young as ‘the record of what one clerk said to another clerk’ – faded into the background as these new approaches emerged and took centre stage. This phenomenon was partly academic, partly cultural. The first edition of this book was written in 1982–83, at the height of the Cold War: under President Ronald Reagan the United States launched the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as ‘Star Wars’) and deployed Cruise and Pershing missiles in Europe. The USSR responded by boycotting the summer Olympics at Los Angeles in 1984, citing ‘chauvinistic sentiments and an anti-Soviet hysteria being whipped up in the United States’. But citizens of the world had learned to live with the Cold War over a period of 30 years or more; especially in Europe and North America, those in their middle age could barely remember a time when that ‘war’ was not the most prominent feature of international life.
But peace had endured. And the long, cold, war that had emerged from the ruins of the Second World War seemed to have created a predictable – if uncomfortable – world order. One possible ramification of the ‘superpowers’ phenomenon was perhaps – as Günther Kronenbitter has suggested – to diminish the role played by lesser powers.30 This may well account for the minimal role ascribed to the near disappearance of Austria-Hungary in the historiography of the period. Thus, several of the more popular ‘systemic’ answers to the question ‘what caused war in 1914?’ seemed to be debatable by the mid-1980s. The system of alliances which many had pointed to as being a significant factor in leading to war instead seemed to have produced stability in the contemporary world: the world witnessed a stand-off between NATO and the Warsaw Pact – both of which were founded with a clarity and a commitment that far exceeded anything that existed in 1914. Perhaps the rigidity of alliance commitments had not been to blame for the tragedy of 1914 after all – perhaps even stronger, clearer alliance arrangements might have secured the peace in 1914.
And what of the attacks on ‘secret diplomacy’? No one expected Cold War diplomats to conduct their craft under public scrutiny: institutions such as the United Nations had only provided a forum for posturing and rhetoric: any serious diplomacy would be conducted behind closed doors. And here the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 seemed to have provided a salutary lesson: public posturing and brinkmanship had brought the world close to war – and it was ‘secret’ diplomacy that had saved the day, when President John F. Kennedy utilized his brother to broker an under-the-table deal that traded the withdrawal of American Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the withdrawal of Soviet Dvina and Chusovaya missiles from Cuba.31 Thus, in and of itself, secret diplomacy might not be such a bad thing.
Moreover, the old argument that the arms race and standing armies in Europe before 1914 made it a ‘tinder box’ ready to explode at any moment and that almost any spark could have ignited it – and therefore that the incident which happened to set it off was almost incidental – now seemed questionable given that it could be argued that Europe for almost half a century, from 1945 to 1989, was equally combustible – but the explosion had never occurred, in spite of some five million armed men being deployed throughout the continent, facing off against one another, at the height of the Cold War. The nuclear arms race led to the theory of ‘mutually assured destruction’ as being instrumental in keeping the peace between the two competing sides. In this view, two relatively balanced ‘armed camps’ kept the ambitions of both sides in check. Perhaps the massive standing armies in Europe in the decades before 1914 had done more to keep the peace than to destroy it.
Finally, two interconnected factors in pre-war rivalry – imperialism and the competition in trade and commerce – were made more complicated by the experience of the Cold War. Here, some of the similarities between 1890–1914 and 1945–1985 were striking: imperial ambitions in both periods produced a series of crises and ‘minor’ wars. But these occurred outside Europe, on the periphery – in central and south-east Asia, in north and south Africa, in the middle east – in both periods. Thus, while ‘imperialism’, trade rivalries and competing investments (famously conflated by Vladimir Lenin in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism) may have accounted for friction that sometimes threatened to break out into war, no major war, no war between the two ‘superpowers’, erupted as a result of these forces.
Broadly speaking, therefore, the interpretation of the First World War that emerged during the Cold War was less dogmatic, more complicated and contradictory than those arguments that were propounded during the war and its aftermath. The consensus that had emerged by the late 1920s and the early 1930s, that a series of impersonal factors, of deeply rooted structural forces accounted for the outbreak of war in 1914 began to disintegrate. The forces that had been identified in the earlier period were still regarded as significant factors by historians, but no one was able to synthesize the growing body of detailed evidence and offer a compelling explanation for the outbreak of war. And it was into this fragmented environment that Fritz Fischer emerged and re-fuelled the old debate over German guilt for the cataclysm. The controversy that followed led to an unanticipated level of new research into both the ‘structural’ continuities of German foreign and strategic policies and into the particularities of individual actors in both the political and military spheres. Tangentially, scholars conducting research into the remaining Great Powers applied many of the same questions to Austria, France, Russia, Britain and Italy. The knowledge and the insights we gained as a result have been enormous.
Coming in from the cold
The ‘end’ of the Cold War in 1989 – marked by the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the success of the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November – coincided with a lowering of the temperature in the Fischer debate. Controversies now were re-focused on issues raised in works by theorists such as Francis Fukuyama, who proclaimed an ‘End of History’ with the triumph of liberal democracy as the apotheosis of mankind’s cultural and political evolution, and Samuel Huntingdon, who hypothesized that the end of the political conflict that characterized the Cold War would evolve into a conflict between cultures. Had ‘history’ ended? Would the world become one, united by a common ideology? Or was mankind heading towards the precipice once again, in a ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Against this new intellectual backdrop, academic squabbles over the extent to which German military strategists had premeditated war in 1914 or whether a fusion of Prussian aristocrats and west German industrialists had seized the opportunity to grasp world power and forestall democracy began to appear as an arcane academic exercise.
But research into and writing on the First World War and its origins quietly continued in the cooler atmosphere of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century. In the three decades between 1989 and 2021 dozens of monographs and surveys appeared, which were dwarfed by hundreds of articles and essays. There was no longer a focal point to these investigations. In the earliest period, work had centred on the issue of war guilt with historians arguing over which people in which state were responsible for the outbreak of war, which gave an immediacy and a focus to the research and writing that went on in the 1920s. This was gradually replaced by a ‘revisionist’ consensus that emerged during the 1930s in which students of the subject concluded that no one was really to blame, that it was the ‘system’ that was faulty – and therefore most of the work on the subject considered in greater detail the role of ‘underlying’ factors such as nationalism, imperialism and militarism. The Fischer debate dominated discussions throughout the 1960s and 1970s and brought the argument back to the question of German culpability and the degree of responsibility on the part of German strategists, politicians, financiers and entrepreneurs (and the connections between them). But, with the end of the Cold War, the re-unification of Germany and the advancement of the European project, the steam slowly went out of the Fischer debate. Historians – in the words of the Canadian humourist Stephen Leacock – behaved as his character, Lord Ronald, who ‘flung himself from the room, flung himself upon his horse and rode madly off in all directions’.32
The range of topics covered over the past 30 years has been enormous, and, beginning in 2013, a veritable flood of new studies appeared in conjunction with the centenary of 1914. Over the last decade or so we have had new surveys that painted pre-war Europe with a broad brush: from William Mulligan’s Origins of the First World War (2010) to Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012); to detailed examinations of the July Crisis in Thomas Otte’s July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (2014) to Gordon Martel’s The Month that Changed the World: July 1914 (2014); we have had new studies of diplomats, politicians and soldiers; on Russia alone, for example, this includes Marina Soroka, Britain, Russia and the Road to the First World War: The Fateful Embassy of Count Aleksandr Benckendorff (1903–16) (2011), John B. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914 (2010), and Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915 (2011). Further research has expanded our understanding of the role played by economic factors – such as trade and finance – in Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany (2010), Nicholas A. Lambert, Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (2012), and N. Yorulmaz, Arming the Sultan. German Arms Trade and Personal Diplomacy in the Ottoman Empire Before World War I (2014). Numerous studies focusing on military and naval developments in the era before 1914 include David Owen, The Hidden Perspective: The Military Conversations 1906–1914 (2014), and Matthew S. Seligmann, The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914: Admiralty Plans to Protect British Trade in a War against Germany (2012). And interest in various aspects of imperialism – particularly in exploration of public sentiment and empire – continues uninterrupted: Brad Beaven, Visions of Empire: Patriotism, Popular Culture and the City, 1870–1939 (2012), Jeff Bowersox, Raising Germans in the Age of Empire: Youth and Colonial Culture, 1871–1914 (2013), and B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, c. 1850–1914 (2010). And finally, there have been numerous additions to the literature on the ‘mood’ of 1914, including (but certainly not limited to) Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (2012); Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (2014); and Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (2005).
This vast array of books on a wide range of topics bearing upon The Origins of the First World War can be expanded even further by adding articles in historical journals and essays collected in books. Some of the more significant contributions in this sphere are the examinations of the strategies and war aims of the Powers in Holger Afflerbach’s edited collection, The Purpose of the First World War: War Aims and Military Strategies (2015), and we have important new articles collected by Heather Jones and Richard Smith in Sir Edward Grey and the Outbreak of the First World War, a special edition of The International History Review published in 2016. In addition to these dedicated collections, numerous ‘stand-alone’ essays have made significant contributions to our understanding: Bruce W. Menning, ‘The Russian Threat Calculation, 1910–1914’, in Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, and Andreas Rose (eds), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (2015), pp. 151–75; Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Austria-Hungary’s Decision for War in 1914’, in Andreas Gestrich and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), Bid for World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War (2017). And numerous articles in journals have offered new perspectives on a variety of topics, such as Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘A Most Useful Tool for Diplomacy and Statecraft: Neutrality and Europe in the “Long” Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914’, in The International History Review (2013), pp. 1–22; Jared Morgan McKinney, ‘Nothing fails like success: The London Ambassadors’ Conference and the Coming of the First World War’, in The Journal of Strategic Studies (2018), pp. 947–1000; and Keith Hamilton, ‘Diplomatists, Not Men of Business: The Constantinople Quays Company in Edwardian Economic Diplomacy’, in Diplomacy & Statecraft (2014), pp. 41–60. Taken together, these contributions have added both depth and nuance to many aspects of our understanding of diplomacy, politics and strategy in the era before the First World War.
A reasonable question to ask of this flood of new work is whether this has been a purely ‘academic’ undertaking, detached from the culture and politics of the day, or whether this work has been inspired by the events and preoccupations of our own times, as was the case with our predecessors. Have the issues of the present informed our understanding with fresh insights into the Zeitgeist of pre-1914 Europe, or has present-mindedness acted as a distorting mirror, reflecting more of our present selves than the people of the past whom we profess to study? Over the past 30 years a number of world-shaking events occurred that have had the effect of upsetting conventions which had come to be regarded as settled, of re-igniting debates which had lain dormant for 25 or 50 years. To illustrate this point with just one example: Christopher Clark, in assessing the nature of the Austrian ‘note’ to Serbia of 23 July, argues that it was great deal milder than the demands made on Yugoslavia by NATO in the Rambouillet Agreement of 1999: ‘The demands of the Austrian note pale by comparison’.33
Re-evaluating Habsburg Austria
The case of – or the treatment of – Austria seems particularly illuminating in this regard. While the First World War was being fought, the Allied Powers (and then the ‘Associated’ United States) had no hesitation in portraying the Habsburg Empire as villainous. In essence, the argument went that, desperate to hold on to the power and privileges that the Ausgleich system conferred upon them, the Austrians and Hungarians were determined to continue suppressing their ‘submerged’ nationalities. This then accounted for both the subterranean movements for liberty and independence within the borders of the Empire, and the sponsorship of these movements beyond those borders – in Serbia, Romania and even Italy. This mindset of Austro-Hungarian rulers produced the unstable, volatile situation that led to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and then to the July Crisis, when the Empire seized the opportunity to settle its ‘nationality’ issue once and for all. Woodrow Wilson promised in his Fourteen Points of January 1918 to accord the peoples of Austria-Hungary ‘the freest opportunity for autonomous development’. The principle of nationality was to serve as the foundation for the restructuring or the creation of states in eastern and south-eastern Europe.
Both explicitly and implicitly in the enunciation of Allied war aims and in the peace settlement that followed, Austria-Hungary’s effort to suppress its nationalities was established as both an underlying and an immediate cause of the war. The Dual Monarchy was pilloried by historians as backward, regressive and decadent. Its role in the origins of the war was significant but uncomplicated: the desire of people ‘struggling to be free’ threatened the very existence of an empire whose raison d’être was antithetical to the principle of nationality. This trope became established as part of the consensus view that emerged by the 1930s: had there been an international recognition that nationalities had the fundamental right to form their own, independent, states, there would have been no Austro-Serbian crisis, no need for zealous young Serbian patriots to resort to violence, no grounds upon which Austria-Hungary could refuse to recognize their legitimate demands. This assumption had formed the foundation for the treaty of Saint-Germain in September 1919, which created the new state of ‘Yugoslavia’, based on the notion that there existed a Slavic brotherhood among Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. It created the new state of Czecho-Slovakia, placed the empire’s Poles in the new Polish state and expanded the pre-war boundaries of Romania and Italy – all on the basis of the nationality principle, reducing the extent and population of the now independent states of Austria and Hungary to a small fraction of their former selves. Thus, it was in the vested interests of those who found themselves in these new or expanded states to concur in the view that it was Austro-Hungarian resistance to the principle of nationality that had played a vital part in the outbreak of war. Few citizens in the new democracies of Austria and Hungary had much interest in countering this view. The contrast here with the situation in Germany, where the Kriegschuldfrage and ‘revisionism’ were vital issues of political interest is striking. In Austria and Hungary there were only a few discordant voices to be heard, and they came from reactionaries who sought to turn the clock back. Almost all commentators dismissed the Habsburg Empire as decadent and illegitimate, an entity which had been rightly consigned to the dustbin of history.
Nevertheless, in the consensus view that slowly emerged between the wars, the Dual Monarchy played second fiddle to Wilhelmine Germany. While the backward-looking empire’s policy of attempting to suppress nationalities other than Austro-German and Hungarian led to the crisis of Sarajevo, it was the alliance with Germany that turned a local dispute into a European one. This view went practically unchallenged until Samuel R. Williamson published his Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War in 1994 (which had been preceded by several essays that gave a preview of his position). Williamson broke from both the inter-war consensus and the Fischer debate in assigning primary responsibility to Austria-Hungary – a view that had not been popular since the early days of the First World War.
As convincing as Williamson’s work is, the circumstances and attitudes of the post-1989 world have encouraged a much more positive re-evaluation of the achievements and the nature of the Habsburg empire from the Ausgleich of 1867 to the outbreak of war in 1914. The widely accepted historical view of the monarchy before 1989 was sketched by the Hungarian historian, political theorist and sociologist, Oscár Jászi, who, in the 1920s, portrayed the monarchy as doomed to collapse because it attempted to amalgamate disparate peoples who did not share common ideals. His 1929 The Dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy portrayed the empire as anachronistic, one which fell apart not as the result of external threats, but mainly because a dominant feudal class prevented meaningful reform and clashed with the demands of its constituent nationalities. The shredding of the iron curtain after 1989 revived interest in the history of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. And then, with the accession of almost every east European state into the European Union between 1995 and 2007 a new interest in – and appreciation of – multinationalism began to flourish. Viewed from this perspective, the Dual Monarchy has come to be regarded as more of an experiment than an anachronism.
Historians such as Lothar Hölbelt, John Deak, Pieter Judson, Alan Sked, Jonathan Kwan and Robin Oakey have recently discerned many achievements of the monarchy that deserve to be praised. Hölbelt has sketched a state that developed an effective series of checks and balances that resulted in ‘a finely tuned standoff between an authoritarian bureaucracy, elitist liberals, and anti-liberal mass movements’.34 In place of a backward-looking regime that was ailing, oppressive, and doomed to extinction, a new portrait has emerged of a progressive administrative system that promoted the equality of national rights and which worked to the benefit of its varied constituencies. Robin Oakey, in examining the administration of the occupied (and then annexed) province of Bosnia-Herzegovina, finds much to praise in the civilizing mission the monarchy undertook there. Far from failing to reform and modernize the empire, John Deak has portrayed the Habsburg state as dynamic and interventionist, one which proved itself to be ‘utterly transformative’.35 In place of the long-established story of the decline of the Habsburg Empire, a new narrative has emerged of a state directed by dedicated and professional civil servants who succeeded in promoting education, investing in infrastructure and developing a modern régime that protected linguistic rights. In his survey of Habsburg history, Alan Sked has portrayed the empire on the eve of First World War as more stable and prosperous than at any time since 1815, and has argued that it was defeat in war that brought about its dissolution, not internal centrifugal and fissiparous forces.36 The view of the Austro-Hungarian empire that has emerged in the twenty-first century is that of a great commonwealth with a vibrant economy and a sophisticated culture.
Christopher Clark’s treatment of Austria-Hungary fits in neatly with the new revisionism and nostalgia for the Habsburg empire, portraying it as dynamic, rather than decadent, as progressive in its efforts to accommodate national rights, as prosperous and well-administered. The Austrian régime in Bosnia was improving both its industry and its agriculture and, if it was less than successful on some fronts ‘this had more to do with the resistance of the peasantry to innovation than with Austrian negligence’.37 And when it comes to Austria’s place in Europe, it is again portrayed as victim rather than villain: the Balkan wars demonstrated how isolated it was and ‘how little understanding there was at the foreign chancelleries for its view of Balkan events’. The international community was reluctant to acknowledge that it faced ‘genuine security threats on its southern periphery and had the right to counteract them’. Austria, once the fulcrum of stability in Europe, had its position undermined by the tendency of the Entente states to think of Europe in terms of alliance blocs ‘rather than as a continental geopolitical ecosystem in which every power had a role to play’.38 Clark has, to a great extent, echoed the phrases of Paul Schroeder who had long adopted a pro-Austrian position and by 2004 had begun to argue that the Habsburg monarchy had been denied the freedom of action necessary to defend its vital interests by Britain and its entente partners.39 Clark goes even farther in arguing that Sir Edward Grey subscribed to the ‘general view’ in writing off Vienna – which meant that the Concert of Europe could no longer exist ‘in an environment where the right to a future for one of its members had been placed under a question mark’.40 The rather bizarre view that the Great Powers of Europe no longer believed that Austria had a role to play is belied by the diplomacy of the pre-war years. And even odder is the thesis that it was the Entente that thought of Europe as alliance blocs – when the origins of the alliance system were Bismarckian, when the Dual Alliance between Germany and Austria had existed for 35 years, and the Triple Alliance with the inclusion of Italy for 32 years. It is arguable that every move in diplomacy was viewed by members of the Triple Alliance for its ramifications on the cohesion of the alliance.
State-sponsored terrorism?
On the other side of the Austro-Serbian divide, events have shaken the largely sympathetic view of Serbia that had dominated the English-speaking world since the outbreak of war in 1914. Fundamentally, the outlines of this view emerged in the early days of the war, when Serbia was portrayed in Entente propaganda as the hapless victim of Austrian aggression. The young conspirators responsible for the assassination of the archduke were, in general, treated favourably as freedom fighters, driven to a desperate act of violence because of the Habsburg suppression of the legitimate aspirations of the Serbian people to unite in a single, national, state. The Austrian authorities governing Bosnia-Herzegovina suppressed student organizations, forcing them to go underground in secret societies such as Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia), creating fertile ground for the growth of violent solutions to their nationalist aspirations. One of their greatest heroes was the Italian nationalist, Giuseppe Mazzini, who promoted a special role for youth, placing Giovane Italia (Young Italy) in the vanguard of the nationalist project, and whose formula was enthusiastically emulated in Serbia. Plotting to overthrow the established order, according to Mazzini, was a moral choice: ‘There is no more sacred thing in the world than the duty of a conspirator, who becomes an avenger of humanity and the apostle of permanent natural laws.’41 Mazzini was regarded as a nationalist hero by most nineteenth-century liberals, and his attitude to youthful conspirators was generally shared by progressive thinkers during and after the First World War. The fact that ‘Young Bosnia’ preached chastity and sobriety to its members (Princip was a virgin and had his first taste of wine when using the glass as camouflage, while sitting in a café on 28 June, waiting to assassinate the archduke) and that it promoted a ‘liberal’ union of Croats, Slovenes, Muslims and Serbs in a south Slav state embellished their credentials as youthful idealists. That Serbia in July 1914 consisted of 3 million citizens, while another 4.5 million were left outside seemed sufficient grounds on which to base a programme of national unification.
Although there were critics of the assassination throughout the twentieth century, the general view was that it was the Austro-Hungarian régime that had driven the nationalist Serbian youth to adopt violence as a solution. This position began to be shaken in 1991–92 when the end of the Cold War led to free elections in Yugoslavia, with the result that the federal state began to fragment into its component parts: the republics of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia declared their independence, largely on the basis of ethnic identity. The violent upheavals that ensued led to the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, when approximately 8,000 Bozniak Muslims were executed by members of the ‘Army of Republika Srpska’ (the Bosnian Serb Army which was formed as the military wing of the Serb secessionist republic which attempted to break away from the newly independent Bosnia-Herzegovina) along with the ‘Scorpions’ paramilitary group. This act of genocide, aimed at the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the region, gave the cause of Serbian nationalism a blackened name. And damage to Serbian identity continued into the twenty-first century, as a series of charges were brought against perpetrators of the massacre to the International Court of Justice at the Hague. In particular the high-profile cases against Radovan Karadžić (president of the Republika Srpska) and General Ratko Mladić (who commanded the republic’s army) dragged on for over 20 years, from the mid-1990s to 2017, receiving widespread international publicity.
The violent disintegration of the former Yugoslavia contrasted starkly with what had, by the early twenty-first century, come to be regarded as the successful multinational structure of the pre-1914 Habsburg Empire. The NATO bombing in and around Sarajevo in Operation Desperate Force, which followed the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, seemed a dramatic reversal of the dynamics of 1914, with a multinational European and American force now striking against Serbian nationalists (French Mirage bombers taking off, ironically, from the Foch and Clémenceau aircraft carriers). The horrors of a new war in the Balkans challenged fundamental assumptions that had been in place for more than a century: perhaps nationalist aspirations were not the way of the future, but a thing of the past; perhaps support for Serbian national aspirations during the First World War was not something to be proud of.
For almost a century, Serbia’s role in the First World War had been treated as the final phase in more than a century of nation-building. It was obvious to observers that the price paid by Serbia in the war had been enormous: the initial fighting, followed by more than three years of occupation by Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, resulted in more than a million combined military and civilian casualties and tremendous devastation to Serbia’s economy and society. Sympathy for the Serb struggle was widespread after the war and the creation of Yugoslavia seemed to dispel Austrian propaganda claims that the Serbs aimed to establish their hegemony over other south Slavs in a ‘Greater Serbia’. But all of this has now been challenged by recent events. Quite quickly, the portrait of the youthful conspirators of 1914 was transformed from one of dedicated freedom fighters to terrorists. And here the cataclysmic events of September 11th, 2001, also played a part: the parallels between the young jihadists (almost all of them in their early 20s) who carried out the attack on the World Trade Center with the support and encouragement of al-Qaeda and the zealous young Serbs supported by ‘Union or Death’ (the Ujedinjenje ili smrt or ‘Black Hand’) were difficult to overlook. Christopher Clark concluded that the European powers took a ‘rose-tinted view of Serbia as a nation of freedom-fighters to whom the future had already been vouchsafed’.42
The Serbs, however, have never seen it this way, and have never abandoned the valorization of the Young Bosnians responsible for the assassination. In 1953, the communist government of Yugoslavia created a ‘Museum of Young Bosnia’ to commemorate the young heroes at the Vidovdan ‘Heroes Chapel’ in the Gavrilo cemetery at the site of the assassination. There, the remains of Princip and other Young Bosnians are in the crypt, commemorated with a plaque declaring that ‘From this place, on 28 June 1914, Gavrilo Princip, expressed with his shot the people’s revolt against tyranny and their centuries-old struggle for freedom’.
In 2014, at the same time that the Vienna Philharmonic gave a concert at the Vijecnica (the city hall where the archduke had given his speech shortly before he was murdered), Serbs in eastern Bosnia could visit the newly constructed evocative mosaic that had been created at the town of Visegrad, which portrayed Princip and his fellow conspirators as heroes. A few months earlier, a bust of Princip had been unveiled in the Serbian village of Tovariševo, north-west of Belgrade. The house where he was born in the Serbian section of Sarajevo (destroyed in the First World War, rebuilt as a museum by the new state of Yugoslavia, destroyed again by the newly independent state of Croatia in 1941, rebuilt by the communist state of Yugoslavia after the Second World War, then destroyed again during the civil war of the 1990s) was restored once more in 2014 and opened to the public. A statue of Princip was erected in a municipal park in Sarajevo in June 2014. At the dedication ceremony, a Serb member of the Bosnia-Herzegovina assembly, Nebojša Radmanović, declared that ‘Gavrilo Princip’s shot was a shot for freedom… . Today, we have Gavrilo in East Sarajevo, a revolutionary, a man who to us, is one century of hope. We remember the Young Bosnia members and Gavrilo Princip proudly’. In Belgrade, a two-metre life-sized bronze statue of Princip was erected in 2015, not far from Gavrila Principa street, standing proudly near the national assembly building. At the dedication ceremony, the president of the Serbian Republic, Tomislav Nikolić, declared: ‘Today, we are not afraid of the truth. Gavrilo Princip was a hero, a symbol of the idea of freedom, the assassin of tyrants and the carrier of the European idea of liberation from slavery.’ The park in which the statue stands was renamed ‘Park Gavrilo Princip’ in 2017.
Whether Princip and his Young Bosnia conspirators are regarded as heroes or villains continues to depend (after more than a century) very much on one’s point of view. While Serbs celebrated Princip and the assassination, counter-celebrations were conducted by Bosniaks and Croats portraying the Serbs as aggressors and themselves as victims. Throughout the July Crisis the Austrians insisted that the assassins were members of the Narodna Odbrana, which had been aided and abetted by members of the Serbian government and the Serbian military. With the widespread animosity directed at Serbia since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1990–92, the belief that there was a connection between ‘official’ Serbia and underground movements such as the Black Hand has become widely accepted, even if difficult to prove.43 But this negative perspective has been challenged recently by James Lyon who, utilizing new archival materials, argues that ‘official’ Serbia was anxious to avoid confrontation with Austria-Hungary, as they were still recovering from the two Balkan wars and were attempting to solidify their grasp of the newly added territories. Prime Minister Nikola Pašić regarded the ‘Black Hand’ as an enemy and the charge that he co-operated with the organizers of the conspiracy is dismissed.44
Russia: evil empire or trembling giant?
It is but a short step from condemning the Young Bosnians for igniting the crisis that led to war to the inclusion of Russia as one of the guilty parties. The logic behind this accusation is quite straightforward: Russia saw the demands for national independence in the Balkans as an opportunity to extend its influence in southern Europe while weakening the grip of the Ottoman Empire on the Straits and the Black Sea and perhaps simultaneously eradicating the influence of the Austro-German alliance throughout south-eastern Europe. Russia, therefore, was complicit in the conspiracy to assassinate Franz Ferdinand – and may even have been the inspiration for it. This is certainly the charge laid by Sean McMeekin45 and reinforced by Christopher Clark. Thomas Otte differs, concluding that ‘there are no grounds for suggesting that the government in St Petersburg had any knowledge of, let alone any involvement in, the plot against the Archduke’.46 Specialists in Russian history however have, over the last two decades, challenged this view.
The end of the Cold War and the rise of Vladimir Putin a decade later significantly altered the environment in which historians have worked and the materials that they have worked with. The disappointment in the west with the evolution of Russia following the end of the Cold War seemed to suggest a depressing line of continuity, with an oligarchy once again pursuing power through aggressive means. Nowhere has the effect of contemporary circumstances on historical research been more profound than in the case of Russia. There was a new openness to research in Russian archives after the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Historians of Russia after 1989 were quickly given access to materials that had rarely been utilized before, especially by foreign scholars. The most important of these were the Archive of Imperial Russian Foreign Policy (AVPRI) and the Russian State Military History Archive (RGVIA) both of which were opened to research in 1990, along with numerous other repositories such as the naval archives. If only because of this treasure trove of new materials, over the next three decades there was an outpouring of new research into various aspects of Russian foreign, military and strategic policy. The result of this unprecedented – and unexpected – access to documentary materials has, in itself, altered our understanding of Russian policy. What had previously been condemned by Soviet scholars as tsarist imperialism has been reconfigured as the legitimate concern of a great state attempting to pursue its own path in the world of Great Power politics. Russia’s policy in the far east, central Asia, the Caucasus, in the Black Sea and the Straits and along the Polish and Ukrainian frontiers with Germany and Austria-Hungary now appear to have presented almost insuperable challenges to a political system that was not adept at modernizing itself.
The failure of the USSR to create an enduring, successful and prosperous socialist state seems to have stimulated renewed interest in a comparative examination of similar failures in the era before the First World War. A turning point has been identified by a number of scholars reconsidering Russian history in that era. Here, the disastrous war with Japan created the opportunity to revitalize Russia through constitutional reforms, economic modernization and military expansion and reconstruction. Defeat had opened the door to the creation of a ‘Great Russia’ – as the ambitious reformer, prime minister P.A. Stolypin called it. His agenda, generally, was to create a rational government based on gosudarstvennost (stateness), one that would expand economically, elevate society in general and enable Russia to rearm and modernize its army and defences. His assassination in 1911 certainly set the cause back, but contemporary historians have pointed to deeper, structural reasons for the failure of the reformist agenda. Numerous works bearing upon the influence of domestic politics have appeared since 1989, and especially during the past decade. Laura Engelstein, Stephen Smith, Mark Steinberg, Peter Waldron and Francis Wcislo have contributed significantly to a reconsideration of the nature of the tsarist autocracy and the complexities of Russian society.47 The most recent work has emphasized the view of Russia as a variegated imperial structure rather than a simply stratified, homogenous one. The agenda of reformers was a difficult juggling act: to liberalize the economy while suppressing the politics of liberalism. The story of Russia, especially from 1905 to 1914, is the story of ill-fated attempts at reform and modernization.
John Steinberg, utilizing new archival materials, has for instance, documented the inability of the Russian general staff to reform the army, in spite of many efforts to do so. Just as Soviet apparatchiks were fearful of confronting the party leaders of the politburo, the high command censored itself for fear of offending the tsar and the higher nobility. Moreover, the system itself favoured the traditionalists such as M.I. Dragomirov – who believed that indoctrination was the key to success and who opposed the ‘intellectualization’ of officer training – over reformers such as A.N. Kuropatkin who aimed to professionalize the officer corps through education rather than training.48 Not surprisingly, Tsar Nicholas (habitually disinclined to listen to experts) was more inclined to adopt the Dragomirov point of view. Nevertheless, although there was widespread appreciation among senior officers that the system badly needed structural reforms to bring it into the modern age, conservatives and rightist ideologues alike spurned western individualism and the rule of law, in which they were joined by the tsar and his autocratic advisers.49 Ultimately, the top-down autocracy of imperial Russia led to military disaster and the destruction of the system as a whole.
The topic of Russia’s military reforms (or lack thereof) is closely connected to assessments of Russian strategic policy. What kind of army (and navy) did Russia need? For what purposes? And here the discussion revolves around the issue of Constantinople and the Straits. Whereas the view popularized by Sidney B. Fay in the 1920s, that Russia’s ambitions in the Black Sea constituted a primary cause of war in 1914, scholars utilizing the new archival materials have reached a less negative conclusion. According to Ronald Bobroff, Russia aimed to preserve the balance of power in Europe, and did so consistently throughout the period from the end of the Russo-Japanese war in September 1905 until August 1914.50 His thorough investigative efforts in the archives led him to argue that Russian decision-makers were keenly aware that their weakness made it very difficult to pursue any expansionist designs, and that this made them more dependent upon their alliance with France and the entente with Britain – both of which reinforced the fundamental premise that Russia ought to follow a conservative policy of maintaining the status quo. Any successful policy required a consensus among the three Great Powers, and it was only when war broke out that Russia began to contemplate seriously the dissolution and partition of the Ottoman Empire. This is not to argue that Russia was indifferent to the fate of the Straits during the period leading up to the war – far from it. Bobroff maintains that the focus on the south and the Straits led Russia to minimize the importance of the Polish frontier and eastern Europe, a fatal strategic choice which ultimately led to its downfall.
Connected with the criticism that Russia’s expansionist designs created the volatile situation in the Balkans and the middle east is the charge that Russia was primarily responsible for the outbreak of war because it had ‘virtually’ begun mobilization through a secretive process five days prior to the declaration of war. The premise that this ‘meant war’ was first popularized by L.C.F. Turner in 1968.51 Recently, Sean McMeekin has revived this argument and embellished it. In a flight of historical imagination (there being no actual evidence to support it) he claims to be able to read the mind of Sazonov, insisting that the Russian foreign minister knew full well that the partial mobilization of the Russian armies that he favoured was a practical impossibility – and thus the steps that he took using this as a pretense was the decisive step in provoking war. Russia, mainly at Sazonov’s urging, he argues, began to mobilize its forces secretly, five days before war was declared. Simultaneously, the foreign minister had brilliantly deceived France and Britain into believing that Russia’s intentions were peaceful, using the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia as a ‘smokescreen’ to ‘bamboozle’ his erstwhile allies.52 Using minimal evidence and only a fragment of the available archival materials, McMeekin uses this position to build a case against Fritz Fischer, who, he says, was wrong in holding Germany primarily responsible for precipitating the war.
In McMeekin’s view, all roads lead to St Petersburg. Sazonov and his supporters viewed the assassination crisis as an opportunity to destroy the Ottoman Empire and to seize the Straits and Constantinople. Thus, the First World War might be more aptly renamed the ‘War of the Ottoman Succession’. In fact, the role played by ‘Apis’ as Serbia’s chief of military intelligence, in and of itself proves not only ‘semi-official’ Serbian complicity in the assassination, but Russian as well. Confirmation that this was a deep-seated, well-considered plan is found in the ‘secret, large-scale mobilization of Russia’s army’53 – which was, in fact, nothing of the kind. The idea that it was possible to mobilize in secret is in itself preposterous (as mobilization involved the calling up of millions of reservists), but it was what the orders said it was: steps preparatory to mobilization, in order to proceed smoothly with mobilization should that next step prove necessary. Russia was not alone in this: all the major military powers had such plans prepared in advance. McMeekin dismisses the work of Dominic Lieven, William Fuller and many others, insisting that Russia deliberately undertook an aggressive gamble in order to achieve its expansionist aims at the Straits and in the Black Sea. He argues that Ottoman naval strength in the Black Sea threatened to overwhelm the decrepit Russian fleet there and that the Turks would soon have what amounted to five modern dreadnoughts available. Matthew Seligmann has demolished this argument and concluded that every one of McMeekin’s points ‘is open to serious objection not just on interpretative grounds … but also on factual grounds’.54 In arguing that Russia provoked a showdown with Austria in order to go to war with Turkey and seize control of the Straits McMeekin conveniently ignores all of those voices in Russian decision-making circles (including the tsar himself) who were far more reluctant and circumspect in their ambitions. Russia’s strategic plans for the next several years included a slow and steady expansion of its Black Sea fleet. There was no panic in July 1914, and it was the Turkish bombardment of Odessa in October 1914 that led the Russians to declare war on them.
Christopher Clark comes very close to aligning with the McMeekin position, arguing that in the two years before the war Russia became ‘more assertive’ in the Balkans and that a ‘war party’ emerged in the ‘belligerent’ atmosphere of St Petersburg.55 The foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, ‘supported a policy of confrontation with Austria’.56 Serbia served as Russia’s salient in the Balkans, and the populist pan-Slavic idea was no more legitimate that Hitler’s policy of lebensraum. Clark concurs with McMeekin that Russia was fixated on the Straits, and argues that central to Sazonov’s thinking in the years before the war was the belief that ‘Russia’s claim to the Straits would only ever be realized in the context of a general European war, a war that Russia would fight with the ultimate aim of securing control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles’.57
The neo-revisionist polemic against Russia is undercut by the meticulous assessment of Russian military strategy and policy in the work of Bruce Menning. Beginning with his ground-breaking overview of 1992, Bayonets before Bullets: The Imperial Russian Army, 1861–1914, in which he convincingly argued that there was a profound disconnect between strategic thought and mobilization planning, and that this was accompanied by a general failure to implement necessary reforms. Menning has since detailed the twists and turns in all aspects of Russian military planning.58 The mood of Russian planners and strategists ranged from pessimism to optimism, from a defensive mindset to an offensive one. After the disastrous Russo-Japanese war, Russian strategists were keenly aware of the multiple weaknesses that had led to their defeat but, by 1912, they had become convinced that they might – under certain conditions – prevail in a general war and could plan to seize the initiative with a targeted offensive campaign. After the military disaster in the far east, Russian strategists re-focused their attention on Europe, where the threat to the empire was existential, and for which they prepared a worst-case scenario of a war with Germany and Austria-Hungary combined in which the central powers would dispatch the bulk of their forces against Russia. Given this possibility they dismissed suggestions of a coup de main at the Straits as impractical, both from a strategic point of view (they lacked the requisite expeditionary force) and a political one (they could not be sure of support from their allies for such a campaign). And their strategic dependence on France was clear: if Germany was able to direct the bulk of its forces against Russia, there was no scenario in which they foresaw that Russia could prevail. Until 1912 the fundamental precept of the Russian military plan was to mass four armies in two echelons on the northern shoulder of the Pripet Marshes and a single army on the southern shoulder – that is a defensive strategy designed to forestall the German advance into the heart of Russia.
One of the most crucial reforms instituted after 1905 was the creation of the Main Directorate of the General Staff (GUGSh in Russian), which brought Russia much closer to creating a true general staff on the German model. Menning has detailed the operational successes of military intelligence, especially in the years immediately preceding the July Crisis. Particularly valuable was their knowledge of Austrian military plans which came through a combination of intercepted telegrams between St Petersburg and Vienna, and a number of paid agents in the higher echelons of the Austrian army. The information they were able to gather on German plans was much less helpful, but both the war minister, General V.A. Sukhomlinov, and the commander-in-chief of the St Petersburg military district, Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, were convinced that a war with Austria-Hungary would almost certainly mean war with Germany as well (and possibly Turkey, too). Russian military intelligence gathered during the crisis of 1912 led them to conclude that Austria-Hungary had the facility to expand its complement of troops without declaring a formal mobilization. Combined with Austria’s superiority in the speed of their mobilization, this intelligence information coloured the military view of the situation in July 1914.
But Russian planning underwent a profound revision in May 1912, led by Lieutenant General Alekseev (chief of staff of the Kiev military district), which was formally approved by the tsar. Mobilization Schedule No. 19 envisioned two variants: ‘A’, which would consist of offensive operations primarily against Austria-Hungary; and ‘G’, which was aimed at Germany. It was 19A, which came into effect in August 1914, with Russia aiming to roll over Austro-Hungarian forces in Galicia while putting pressure on German forces east of the Vistula. In order to succeed in these twin objectives, the Russian mobilization schedule required that it consist of a seamless whole, ‘a tightly-spun web of complex troop movements and deployments for the outset of possible war against both Germany and Austria-Hungary’.59 The challenge that they envisioned was that the Austrian advantage in speed of mobilization (estimated at 10 days) would enable them to pre-empt the Russian plans for strategic deployments. In any event, the support of their French ally was a prerequisite to success – a factor of which the Russians were keenly aware during the July Crisis – but this support was dependent upon Russia’s ability to mount a sufficient offensive operation against Germany to relieve pressure on the French. Although the greatest fear of Russian strategists was a scenario in which Germany could aim the bulk of its forces against Russia in the east, almost as daunting was the discovery by Russian military intelligence in late 1912 that Austria-Hungary was planning a ‘sledge-hammer’ blow against Serbia, after which the three or four army corps would reinforce the three already along the Russian frontier in Galicia, sufficient to launch a successful offensive against Russia in Volynia and Podolia. In other words, strategically speaking, Russia could not afford to stand by while Austria-Hungary crushed Serbia. Even a partial Austrian mobilization would imperil Russia.
It was with these considerations in mind, and an abundance of caution, that led Russian planners to overestimate Austrian military strength, that legislation was approved in 1913 for the ‘Period Preparatory to War’. Germany, Austria-Hungary and France already had provisions for such a procedure, the essence of which was to initiate measures short of actual mobilization and a declaration of war, thereby enabling a more efficient and rapid mobilization once that step was decided on. Measures included the imposition of military censorship, the recall of furloughed officers to their units and the retention of reservists on active duty when they were scheduled to return to inactive status. There were two concerns about these procedures: first, that they could give the impression that an actual mobilization was underway;60 second, that the measures applied all along the western frontier, drawing no distinction between Austria-Hungary and Germany as possible adversaries, that is not allowing for a ‘partial’ mobilization against one or the other. An imperial ukaz, co-signed by the ministers of war, the navy and internal affairs, was required in order to initiate any mobilization – full or partial. Contrary to the charges made by critics of Russia, a ‘covert’ mobilization was a practical impossibility. Russia’s war plans, like those of all major powers at the time, involved gathering together huge numbers of called-up reservists at railway depots. And the railways themselves required notice 12 days prior to mobilization in order to re-position locomotives and rolling stock. It was not feasible to carry out surreptitiously such an operation.
Menning has also explained clearly and convincingly the insurmountable difficulties involved in carrying out a ‘partial’ mobilization. For diplomatic purposes, while a mobilization directed at Austria-Hungary alone made sense in the middle of the July Crisis, it amounted to wishful thinking to believe that such a step was practical: the assessment of GUGSh was that a partial mobilization aimed against Austria-Hungary would amount to an act of military suicide if Germany were later to join its ally against Russia. ‘Germany was always the elephant in the wings.’61 A partial mobilization would thoroughly disrupt the coherence of Russian railway planning, which was vital to Russian military strategy. Nevertheless, the tsar insisted on retaining partial mobilization as an option until he became convinced on 30 July that Austro-Hungary had effectively mobilized already, without actually declaring it, thus placing Russia in a position of great peril if it complied with Germany’s demand that it should cease any further military steps. The tsar and his advisors were keenly aware that German mobilization – in comparison with their own – would be lightning fast. When intelligence reports began to document significant military traffic on German railways, along with the movement of reservists, the strengthening of fortresses and barricading of border crossings, it was enough to convince Sazonov, the tsar and the minister of war that Russia must respond with mobilization.
The structure of tsarist decision-making has been highlighted by those historians working with the newly available sources over the past quarter century. Dominic Lieven has concluded that a coterie of several hundred decision-makers were the ones who really counted in the making of Russian policy. Although the tsarist autocracy was, by definition, elitist in nature, Lieven has shown the extent to which nationalist groups rose in this period and managed to influence those in a position to make decisions: ‘The state and its diplomats made foreign policy’, but they increasingly believed that a nationalist ethos was essential to modernize Russia and commit soldiers emotionally to the tsarist cause.62 The rise of a nationalist, largely Slavophile press in Russia, led decision-makers to take account of ‘public opinion’ to an extent that they previously had not. And, after the revolution of 1905, right-wing nationalist groups such as the ‘Union of Russian Men’ and the ‘Union of Russian People’ sprang up throughout the empire, promoting a populist agenda that decision-makers had to grapple with.63 But the consequences of this phenomenon were neither simple nor straightforward: journalists and diplomats alike were divided on the question of where Russia’s interests truly lay: in the middle east and the Balkans, or in central Asia and the far east. And a growing ideological fissure ran throughout the edifice of the autocracy between ambitious Slavophiles who promoted the nationalist agenda in the Balkans and conservatives who promoted a rapprochement with Germany and Austria-Hungary in order to avoid a cataclysmic confrontation. Lieven argues that it was the succession of crises in the Balkans from the annexation of Bosnia in 1908 to the July Crisis itself that convinced most of those who mattered that a policy of conciliation would appear to be one of weakness and that this would only encourage belligerent moves by the central powers in the future. Austrian support for Ukrainian separatists and the growth of German economic influence in the Ottoman Empire persuaded those who had been reluctant to act in previous crises that they must do so now.
The challenges that the new Russian federation faced after its formation in 1991 in central Asia, the north and south Caucasus and eastern Europe when dealing with Ukrainians, Belarusians, Chechens and others has stimulated renewed interest in Russia’s ethnic problems and policies before 1914. Some historians, such as Denis Vovchenko, have emphasized the complexity of erecting a foreign policy on the basis of an idea such as Pan-Slavism because Russians themselves had great difficulty in formulating a single, coherent idea of what the idea meant.64 ‘Pan’ movements frequently conflicted with nationalist ones based on narrower ethnic identities, which created diplomatic dilemmas for the Russian government: support for Serbian nationalists, for example, might encourage Polish nationalists seeking to break away from the Russian empire. Rather than seeking to fragment the Ottoman Empire, Russia more often worked to stabilize and preserve it, while using its influence to protect the rights of Orthodox minorities. Russian officials more often promoted Pan-Orthodoxy than they did Pan-Slavism, much to the dismay of the Serbs in their conflicts with the Greeks. Adding to Vovchenko’s perspective is that of Michael Reynolds, who has challenged the premise that the imperial régime in Russia was debilitated by nationalist challenges to it. He disputes the premise that the breakup of the empire (as with the Ottoman and Habsburg) was ‘a lesson in the irresistible potency and reach of nationalism’.65 The policy pursued by Russia in the era of the First World War was distinguished by the empire’s manipulation of nationalist ideas and ethnic identities as a weapon in its contest with other empires – most notably the Habsburg and the Ottoman. And Reynolds confirms Bobroff’s argument that Russia sought to delay the partition of the Ottoman Empire while working to fortify its position in preparation for the day when partition could no longer be avoided. Nevertheless, as Lieven has argued, the professionals and intellectuals of the Russian foreign-policy establishment by 1914 had become committed to the cause of their ‘Slavic brethren’ in the Balkans and believed that support for the Slav cause would enable them to generate more public support among the Russian people.
The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union generated a flood of works based on archival sources that had previously been inaccessible. The result has been a deeper and more penetrating comprehension of Russian decision-making, fears and aspirations. Generally speaking, what the work of Lieven, Reynolds, Bobroff, Menning and others has shown is the peculiar combination of conservative, defensive thinking on strategic matters in the era before 1914, combined with grand visions of imperial expansion based on ideas such as Pan-Slavism and Pan-Orthodoxy. In the July Crisis these values combined to make it difficult for Russia to abandon the Serbs to their fate and to permit an Austro-German hegemony in the Balkans.66 At the same time, an awareness of Russia’s military weaknesses meant that Sazonov and the tsar desperately attempted to resolve the crisis without going to war. It was only when Austrian and German military moves seemed to place Russia in an untenably weak position that the decision to risk war was made.
France the forgotten
The contrast between our enriched understanding of Russian policy over the last twenty years with that of our appreciation of French policy is stark. The absence of new research or fresh syntheses – particularly in French – is striking. This is even more surprising when we consider the deeply rooted bifurcation of French opinion on war origins between 1919 and 1939. During the Kriegschuldfrage phase of the debate, many in France itself regarded the French government as bearing considerable responsibility for the tragedy of 1914. The French in general, and Poincaré in particular (along with his ambassador in St Petersburg, Maurice Paléologue), were condemned for their conduct of foreign policy and for their devotion to the alliance with Russia in particular. As John F.V. Keiger has argued in a number of places, ‘Poincaré-la-guerre’ became a popular rallying cry even within France itself in the 1920s. Critics assumed that a central tenet of his policy reflected his roots in Lorraine and his experience of the Franco-Prussian war, which led him to embrace révanchisme and to regard the recovery of the ‘lost provinces’ as the paramount objective of French policy. This led him not only to reaffirm the French commitment to the Russian alliance, but also to push Russia into taking an aggressive stance in support of Serbia during the July Crisis. On the other hand, in centrist republican circles and amongst the ‘establishment’ of French historians and political scientists, France was absolved of any responsibility. The leading figure here was Pierre Renouvin, whose Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (28 juin-4 août 1914) of 1925 argued that Germany and Austria-Hungary deliberately embarked on a path to war and were fully aware of the consequences of their actions. When he published his four-volume magnum opus – Histoire des relations internationales – in 1954, this ‘spread over the field like a giant tree under whose shadow nothing grew’ (as Jonathan Steinberg has put it).67 Instead of these competing views confronting one another and stimulating a heated historical debate, in France the two blended into the consensus that emerged during the 1930s in which all parties were charged with bearing some of the responsibility for war, and in which ‘underlying forces’ were deemed to be more important than individual actions.
If the experience of the last 20 years has had any impact on the way that historians of France view the issue of war origins, it would seem to have encouraged indifference to the subject. Perhaps the growth and the expansion of the European Union under combined Franco-German leadership have inclined historians to let sleeping dogs lie, to avoid re-opening old wounds. Or perhaps it is because the longue durée of the Annales School has combined with fashionable post-modernism to bring the craft of diplomatic history into disrepute or, at least, to produce a kind of malaise. The lack of interest certainly cannot be attributed to historians having abandoned studies of the belle époque or the fin-de-siècle. Consider the array of recent monographs published on this era: Body and Tradition in Nineteenth Century France; Sexual Crime, Religion and Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle France; Uncovering Paris: Scandals and Nude Spectacles in the Belle Époque; The Courtesan and the Gigolo: The Murders in the Rue Montaigne and the Dark Side of Empire in Nineteenth-Century Paris; City of Noise: Sound and Nineteenth-Century Paris; The Life of the City: Space, Humour, and the Experience of Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Montmartre; Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914; Confronting Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle France: Bodies, Minds and Gender. It is not an absence of interest in the period itself that explains the indifference of historians of France to the subjects of foreign and military policy.
Although the indifference to the topic of France and war origins is the most notable feature of the past 20 years, there have been a few scattered works that have contributed to our understanding. Perhaps not surprisingly, these have been devoted mostly to cultural aspects of the subject. The issue of révanchisme is a case in point. Outside of France, the movement to reverse the judgement of the Treaty of Frankfurt and restore the lost provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to France has long been a favourite topic of revisionists seeking to shift responsibility for the war from German shoulders to French. Most recently, Christopher Clark proclaimed that ‘Alsace-Lorraine became the holy grail of the French cult of revanche, providing the focus for successive waves of chauvinist agitation’.68 In the consensus view that emerged in the 1930s, this phenomenon created one of the most potent causes of the war and manifested itself politically in the creation of the Franco-Russian alliance, which had seemed unthinkable throughout most of the nineteenth century, given the ideological gap between the French republic and the Russian autocracy. Rachel Chrastil has recently produced a fresh view of the subject by examining the impact of the loss to Germany in three départements: the Meurthe-et-Moselle, the Sarthe and the Hérault.69 She concludes that the French defeat reshaped relations between citizens and the state, that private groups and organizations such as shooting clubs and gymnastic groups formed spontaneously and were devoted primarily to preparing for the next war. Her book is generally representative of the ‘cultural turn’ in studies of war, empire and diplomacy: for instance, she demonstrates how commemorations of the dead were gradually transformed from acts of mourning into celebrations of those who had sacrificed themselves for the sake of the republic. This became a significant phenomenon in 1914 when citizens rallied to the cause – not only in the ‘Miracle of the Marne’ but also more generally in the Union Sacrée.70
Chrastil’s work has been supplemented by that of Robert Lynn Fuller in his study of the radical right and nationalism in pre-war France. He has documented how the radical right grew after 1870, based on the twin pillars of respect for the army and the desire for a strong, authoritarian president to replace the weakness and the political chaos of the third republic. This was a new brand of authoritarianism, based on the idea of popular sovereignty, the primary instrument of which was universal suffrage. Adherents of the movement detested the traditional enemies of France – Germany and Britain – along with Jews, Freemasons and Protestants. Like Chrastil, Fuller’s contribution to the subject of war origins is largely cultural – pointing out how these ideas and grass-roots groups laid the foundations for the nationalist ethos that predominated in France in 1914.71
Investigations into the functioning of the French empire have continued, although only occasionally with direct connections to the subject of war origins. J.P. Daughton undertook several case studies on the role of Catholic missionaries in Indochina, Tahiti and the Marquesas and Madagascar and argued that over the course of the century leading up to 1914, they generated a good deal of public support for the imperial mission.72 Such explorations have continued to contribute to our understanding of the complex cultural fabric into which such phenomena were woven.
Of more direct relevance to war origins is Jennifer Siegel’s monograph on the role of French and British finance in their relationship with Russia.73 Her meticulous, multi-faceted research into the Anglo-French financing (mainly through bond issues) of Russian industrialization and military modernization has added significant depth and detail to a topic that has been deemed to be relevant since debates over war origins began. It has long been understood that the use of the vast savings accumulated by the French people was used to great effect by the French government in its determination to form an alliance with tsarist Russia, and then to maintain the alliance and encourage expenditures that would fit into French conceptions of an effective military strategy. On this theme, Siegel has documented the symbiotic relationship between the needs of French diplomacy and investors on the one hand, and Russian strategy and industrialists on the other.
While these recent works have added to our understanding of the third French republic, there have been few efforts to connect the dots between the values, ideas and movements present before 1914 and the policies pursued by the French state that led to war. We are lacking the detailed studies of politicians, diplomats and strategists that we have for the other Great Powers of 1914. John F.V. Keiger’s masterful biography of Poincaré is the exception. But absent from the literature are important figures such as Viviani, Berthelot and Joffre. We have a badly out-of-date biography of Paul Cambon (published by Keith Eubank in 1960), and an even older one by Genevieve Tabouis on his brother Jules, but nothing substantial on significant (if lesser) diplomats such as Alfred Dumaine, Pierre de Margerie and Camille Barrère. A recent biography of Maurice Paléologue adds little to our knowledge and repeats much of what was already known. There have been a few minor forays into the world of diplomacy and strategy, but they have been overwhelmed by the current fascination with culture and gender.74
The most notable exception to this rule was made, ironically, by a German writer, Stefan Schmidt, in 2009. His Frankreichs Außenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges placed France in a position that it had not occupied since the heyday of the war guilt controversy in the 1920s: at the centre of the crisis that led to war. Using archival materials that had been available – but barely used – for a quarter century, Schmidt argued that Poincaré viewed the alliance with Russia as vital to French security, and so regarded with trepidation any developments that threatened the cohesion of the alliance. And a major worry was that Germany might abandon its Austrian ally and seek an arrangement with Russia, leaving France on its own to deal with the threat of Germany in the west. A related worry was that upheaval in the Balkans might lead the Russians to shift strategic priorities to the south and abandon the promise to launch an offensive against Germany in the north, should war break out. Schmidt goes farther in arguing that Poincaré saw an advantage for France in an Austro-Serbian war leading to a general war because it would force Austria-Hungary to commit the bulk of its forces to the Balkans rather than Galicia, thus enabling Russia to move against Germany. This resulted in Poincaré pushing the Russians to adopt a hard line with Austria during the July Crisis. Most tendentious is Schmidt’s argument that France was keen on transforming the entente with Britain into an alliance not for the sake of what military assistance the British Expeditionary Force could provide to France but in order that Britain would permit France to violate Belgian neutrality, enabling it to launch an offensive against Germany under favourable conditions.
Schmidt stopped short of taking a Fischeresque position from which he might have charged Poincaré and the French military as having promulgated a ‘preventive war’ against Germany; instead, he argued that the French president was prepared to risk a general war in order to achieve a political victory. Few – other than Christopher Clark perhaps – would agree that this calculated risk arose from Poincaré’s ambition to establish French ‘hegemonic’ power in Europe.75 A recent book by Bruno Cabanes (which is mainly devoted to the war itself) disagrees with the basic Schmidt premises, portraying French diplomacy largely as it had come to be regarded since the 1930s, as peaceful, wishing to avoid war and unprepared for it in the summer of 1914.76 The most persuasive counter to the Schmidt argument – although he does not address Schmidt directly – was made recently by Keith Armes. His careful dissection of French military intelligence on the state of the Russian military on the eve of war leads him to conclude that the French regarded their strategic situation as weak, leading strategists to recommend a defensive posture as the most appropriate strategy.77
The Franco-Russian military convention of 1893–94 bound the two states together in a manner that left little room for manoeuvre: each promised the other that, if attacked (France by Germany, Russia by Germany or Austria supported by Germany) their ally would employ ‘all available forces’ against the enemy. France and Russia were to mobilize immediately and simultaneously the totality of their forces if any member of the Triple Alliance initiated mobilization. The French believed that only the threat of a Russian offensive in the east could reduce German forces in the west sufficiently to enable France to succeed against Germany. In the military staff talks with Russia in 1912–13, the Russians had promised to mobilize 800,000 men along the German frontier by the 15th day of the conflict. But the assessment of the Premier Bureau (based partly on reports from the French military attachés) was that this strategic calculus was unrealistic, that Russia’s underdeveloped railway system in particular would make it impossible for them to launch an offensive within the first 30 days of a war, which meant that this would come too late to be of assistance to France in the west. As a result of this negative assessment the French guaranteed a loan of 2.5 billion francs to assist with railway construction over the next four years. In return, the Russians promised to increase the size of the army and complete the railway lines recommended by the French general staff. In spite of these arrangements, almost no progress had been made by the summer of 1914 and the French general staff had abandoned hope of an effective Russian offensive beyond the Vistula in the direction of Posen and Berlin. Armes’ meticulous research undercuts the Schmidt thesis by documenting the French perception of their strategic shortcomings in the summer of 1914. The fact that the two allies had never succeeded in formulating a joint war plan or preparing for the co-ordination of war operations also undercuts the argument of Christopher Clark that their military cooperation developed steadily in the years before the war.
In Sleepwalkers, Clark has revived the Poincaré-la-guerre trope with a vengeance. His invention of the ‘Balkan Inception Scenario’ places France front and centre in assuming responsibility for the war. According to Clark, Poincaré believed ‘that a war of Balkan origin was the scenario most likely to trigger full Russian participation in a joint campaign against Germany’ – and this belief was shared ‘by parts of the French military’.78 French investments enabled Serbia to pursue an ‘active’ foreign policy and led to its deepening ‘integration’ into France’s ‘web of alliances’ after 1905. Students of the subject may wonder what this ‘web’ consisted of, when it appears to have been limited solely to the one with Russia, and neither France nor Russia were allied with Serbia in 1914.79 There is practically no indication in the records of French strategic assessments to suggest that the French were seriously concerned that Russia might fail to live up to its alliance commitments and that the ‘Balkan Inception’ offered the opportunity to avoid such a strategic calamity. Thomas Otte argues that ‘French diplomacy remained largely reactive during much of the July crisis’.80 Nevertheless, Clark sets the scene for the coming of July 1914 when ‘a crisis of this kind conformed exactly to the Balkan inception scenario that the alliance, over many discussions and summit meetings, had come to define in recent years as the optimal casus belli’.81 We are left, then, with the impression that the French and the Russians seized the crisis as a positive opportunity to crush their adversaries – a kind of Fischerite formula for a preventive war, with the roles now reversed. The Balkan wars had ‘Balkanized’ the Franco-Russian alliance and they had constructed a ‘geopolitical trigger’ (whatever that might be) along the Austro-Serbian frontier. But, in conclusion, it turns out that the ‘Balkan Inception Scenario’ was neither a plan nor a plot, that it did not drive Europe forward to war in 1914; rather, it supplied the ‘conceptual framework’ within which the crisis was interpreted ‘once the war had broken out’. This logic is so convoluted and contradictory that it is difficult to incorporate it into any explanation of war origins. What is repeatedly referred to as a significant factor that determined how France would approach the July Crisis was mysteriously overlooked by successive generations of students of the subject: from Sidney B. Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt in the 1920s and 1930s, to Luigi Albertini and A.J.P. Taylor in the 1950s and 1960s, to John F.V. Keiger and Thomas Otte today. It is difficult not to be reminded of Descartes’ quip that the only vacuum to be found in nature existed in the head of M. Pascal: the ‘Balkan Inception Scenario’ seems to be a phenomenon that exists only in the imagination of Christopher Clark.
Neo-revisionism, Germany and world power
Our present continues to influence their past – sometimes strikingly, sometimes subtly. Germany’s place in the wider world has undergone a number of dramatically different phases since the Treaty of Versailles ended the First World War. First, in the immediate aftermath of the war we had the ‘Germany as guilty party’ with calls to ‘hang the kaiser’ and to ‘squeeze the German lemon until the pips squeak’, an atmosphere in which Germany’s guilt justified punishing reparations, the losses of empire and territory, and limitations on the military and armaments. Then, with the rise to power of the ‘good German’, Gustav Stresemann, and the new ‘spirit of Locarno’ Germany was gradually rehabilitated and, by the 1930s, responsibility for the war came to be shared in a roughly equal formula amongst all of the participants. The rehabilitation continued through the 1950s as the Cold War drew former enemies together under the umbrella of the United States and the Marshall Plan. Fritz Fischer disrupted this comfortable consensus by appearing to document the designs of Germany to grasp world power via the application of military force, and arguing that there was a line of continuity between Wilhelmine designs for expansion and Hitlerian lebensraum. The revelations of Holocaust horrors revealed in the prosecutions of Nazi perpetrators and the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem lent emotional credence to the thesis that there had been a deeply rooted immorality in German politics throughout the twentieth century. But the end of the Cold War, the reunification of Germany and the ascendance of Angela Merkel as de facto leader of the European Union combined to shift once again attitudes to Germany’s history. The outlook of the Franco-German New Europeans was neatly symbolized on 3 August 2014 – the centenary of Germany’s declaration of war on France – when the French president, François Hollande, and the German president, Joachim Gauck, together laid the first stone of a new joint memorial at Hartmannswillerkopf for French and German soldiers killed in the war.
Foremost among those casting doubt on the validity of the Fischer thesis and restoring Germany to membership in good standing among the comity of nations is Christopher Clark. In his rendition, Germany before 1914 was simply attempting to take its place as an equal among the Great Powers. In that era, this meant imperial expansion but even Germany’s modest efforts to stake out an empire were ‘met with sturdy resistance’: ‘Its attempts to secure a share of the meagre portions that remained usually met with firm resistance from the established club.’82 The leading opponent of this legitimate quest was neither Russia nor France, but Britain. Whenever Berlin attempted to pursue German interests outside of Europe it ‘inevitably met with protest from Britain’.83 The Agadir crisis is a case in point: key British policy-makers responded ‘aggressively’ to Germany’s challenge to French penetration in Morocco. Their ‘strikingly belligerent responses had nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the position adopted by Germany’.84 Although it is clear where Clark stands on the legitimacy of German colonialism, his position will come as a surprise to students of British foreign and imperial policy, who have documented how the British frequently welcomed, and even encouraged, German involvement outside of Europe, particularly as a counterbalance to French and Russian influence in the middle east, Africa and Asia.85 On the eve of war in 1914 Britain was negotiating seriously with Germany to share in the disposition of the assets of the Portuguese empire when that ramshackle enterprise finally fell apart. Nevertheless, the reason for Britain’s apprehensions was quite straightforward: ‘the spectacle of Germany’s titanic economic growth’.86
If Clark’s Germany was a mistreated youngster in the old European imperial family, it was also a near-defenceless, landlocked victim in the centre of Europe, surrounded by potential adversaries. Thus, the 1890s were ‘a period of deepening German isolation’ – which implies that Germany was already isolated and that the situation was growing more dire.87 This would seem to ignore the Dual Alliance, formed with Austria-Hungary in 1879, the Triple Alliance, formed when Italy joined in 1882, and expanded to a quartet in 1883 when Romania secretly joined as well. But the theory that Germany was isolated and ‘encircled’ is offered as the explanation for the decision to build a high-seas fleet.88 In Clark’s view, this indicates that Germany took ‘self-reliance’ as its guiding principle and that it was neither outrageous nor unwarranted to do so as the other imperial powers would not take it seriously until it had a credible naval capability. In fact, the entire international system ‘channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire’.89 Following the Agadir crisis of 1911 Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg ‘consistently pursued a policy focused on inconspicuous and pragmatic collaboration with Britain and Russia’.90 Following the outbreak of the First Balkan War in October 1912, war preparations and investment in armaments escalated ‘as the Russians stepped up their measures against Austria-Hungary and the French government cheered from the sidelines’. The German government, in contrast, ‘showed remarkable restraint’.91 When the final crisis came over Sarajevo, Bethmann viewed it as a test of Russia’s intentions: ‘if the Russians opted, despite everything, for a European war, that would mean they had wanted war anyway’. The German chancellor did not advocate pre-emptive measures but he was prepared to accept war ‘should Russia choose to start one’.92
Continuing to counter such a sympathetic view of German policy is John Röhl, who has long supported the Fischer view of German responsibility for the war. Most recently, Röhl has completed his magisterial three-volume biography of Wilhelm II in which he steadfastly continues to attribute responsibility to the kaiser and his bellicose inclinations.93 Elsewhere, he has defended the Fischer argument that Germany was preparing for a war of expansion ever since the infamous ‘War Council’ of 8 December 1912 at which it was calculated that the optimal moment for such a war would come in approximately 18 months, when the Kiel Canal would be widened to permit dreadnought-class ships to pass through, a new Army Bill would have been passed and German diplomacy would have secured further allies in the Balkans. He contends that in July 1914
a coterie of some twenty men in Berlin … were party to a reckless, half-baked conspiracy to bring about war with France and Russia which misfired only when Britain refused to abandon its Entente partners and entered the war.94
Clark’s argument, he says, ‘can only be made by discounting or ignoring altogether the growing mass of authentic evidence of German intentionality’.95
Christopher Clark did not hesitate to declare that he saw the war’s origins reflected his own times. In fact, he proclaimed that he intended from the outset to treat the subject as a ‘modern event’, as one that was still fresh – ‘in fact fresher and more relevant now than it was twenty or thirty years ago’.96 His neo-revisionist treatment of the subject, which harkens back to the debates of the 1920s echoing German complaints of encirclement, Entente duplicity and hypocrisy, has generated only limited criticism outside of Serbia. And most of that criticism has been focused on the thorny – and now ancient – issue of war guilt. Of course, there are some who continue to hold high the Fischerite torch and complain of Clark’s sins of omission in his treatment of German decision-makers.97 But this has generated little more than a few murmurs of dissent.
The only new debate of any substance within German historical circles entails a dispute over whether there was actually a ‘Schlieffen Plan’ – upon which so many of those who condemned pre-war German policy focused their attention as laying the foundations for a ‘lightning war’, which encouraged both a war of aggression and one that planned for a ‘war by timetable’. The scuffle over the Schlieffen plan began with Terence Zuber’s Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914, in which he denied the existence of such a plan, arguing that Germany’s military preparations were much more flexible than has been believed generally and that German strategists were more concerned with defending the empire against a combined Franco-Russian attack than they were with planning a war of aggression. Schlieffen, Zuber argued, like other senior military men before and since, was not above manipulating the numbers and the dangers facing Germany in order to pry more funding from a reluctant government. Zuber’s critics were much more numerous than his supporters in the ensuing debate, but some have conceded that the plan was not as fixed in stone as the uninitiated may have assumed, and that there may have been some subtle blackmailing used in order to generate more military funding. Nevertheless, the basic premises of regarding the Schlieffen Plan as laying down the strategy of seizing the offensive in any war with France and Russia, and the necessity of striking more quickly than their enemies in order to triumph before these enemies could fully harness their military capabilities, still seem to be in place: Terence Holmes, Holger Herwig, Robert Foley, Annika Mombauer, Gerhard Groß and Michael Epkenhans have convincingly demonstrated the numerous weaknesses of Zuber’s interpretation.98
Britain: Brexit and the continental commitment
Although controversy has swirled around most of the central characters involved in the July Crisis, the focus on Sir Edward Grey in British historiography is exceptional. Commentators after the war debated the judgement, responsibility and culpability of Berchtold and Bethmann-Hollweg, of Sazonov and Poincaré, but few historians since have treated any of them as paramount in instigating war in 1914. But Grey received special treatment: he was the focal point of commentaries on British policy in July. His supporters and admirers credited him with acting as an ‘honest broker’ during the crisis, as a man who did his very best to avert war but found himself powerless to overcome the determination of Germany and Austria-Hungary to use the opportunity of the assassination to crush Serbia and establish their dominance in the Balkans. His detractors and critics have postulated two contradictory propositions: one suggests that Grey ought to have assured Britain’s entente partners that it would stand by them if the crisis turned into war, and that this clarity would have deterred Austria and Germany from taking Europe to the brink; the other suggests that Grey’s secretive promises and strategic commitments (which were perhaps underhanded and duplicitous) to France and Russia in the decade before 1914 emboldened them to adopt a bellicose stance during the crisis, while creating fears of ‘encirclement’ in Germany and Austria-Hungary, and thereby heightening the likelihood of war.
The British government quickly recognized the challenge posed by the critiques of Grey’s diplomacy – especially those coming from the left of the political spectrum, such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Independent Labour Party – and arranged to have the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, the eminent Sir Gilbert Murray – write a narrative of Grey’s diplomacy leading up to 1914. The Foreign Office went so far as to arrange to have diplomatic correspondence shipped over to the home of the British propaganda effort at Wellington House where Murray was housed in a special room where he was able to utilize them to produce The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey, 1906–1915, which was quickly published by Oxford University Press. The government recognized that its reputation, and popular support for the war effort, was dependent to a significant degree on the reputation of Grey. This effort was largely successful, although critics on the Left continued to complain of his secretiveness throughout the war, during the peace conferences and throughout the Kriegschuldfrage during the 1920s. Lloyd George’s self-serving memoirs added fuel to the flames when he chastised Grey for his insularity and his inaction, singling him out as ‘one of the elements that contributed to the great catastrophe’.99 The focus on Grey as central to Britain’s guilt or innocence in the debate on war origins has never dimmed. More than half a century after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey was published, consisting of 31 essays by more than 25 contributors in over 700 pages.100
To a considerable degree the views of Grey have hinged upon the observer’s attitude to the relationship between Britain and Europe. This formula has remained intact since the war itself. To the ‘Europeans’ Grey’s commitment to the secret military conversations with France was both a practical necessity and one that was ethically justified, given the realities of the political situation that Grey faced at home, with a majority of his cabinet colleagues wary of any continental commitment. Without the assurance that this gesture seemed to offer to France, the Triple Alliance might succeed in disrupting the Franco-Russian alliance and leave Germany in a position of dominance on the European continent. To the navalists and Eurosceptics, Britain should have relied upon its naval strength to defend itself and the empire: there was no need to become entangled in the complexities of alliance arrangements. Better that Britain remained unfettered and able to throw its weight onto the balancing scales as necessity demanded at the moment. Ironically, there were those on both sides of this debate who supported or chastised Grey. Some ‘Europeans’ believed he should have gone farther in his commitments to France – and, perhaps, even to Russia – while others believed he had devised the most appropriate formula for buttressing France against Germany, while restraining its inclinations to aggression and revenge for 1871. Some believed that his vague assurances to France had bolstered British naval strength by adding France to the equation – without actually promising anything of substance, while others believed that even the hint of a promise emboldened France and Russia and that Britain was bound to be dragged in if a Europe-wide war were to break out.
This fundamental paradigm, laid down more than a century ago, was both sharpened and given renewed emotional resonance during the prolonged debate over ‘Brexit’ in Britain. The slow rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party (founded by the historian Alan Sked as the Anti-Federalist League in 1991) generated sufficient controversy that, by 2005, all of the major political parties in Britain (Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens) had committed themselves to holding a referendum on the question of Britain’s future role in Europe. By 2013 the cries for independence from Europe had a significant impact on English local elections, even more so in the European parliamentary elections of 2014 and in the general election of 2015, when the UKIP received almost 13 per cent of the popular vote. The commitment of David Cameron during the election campaign to conduct a referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union produced a hugely divisive and passionate debate, culminating in the ‘Brexit’ vote to leave the EU in June 2016. In the midst of this soul-searching, the policies and character of Sir Edward Grey again advanced to the forefront of British historiography on war origins. For good or ill, the battle lines that were drawn had a familiar ring to them: they would not have been out of place a century earlier.
A major conference organized jointly by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the International History Department of the London School of Economics at Lancaster House in November 2014 revisited the most salient features of the controversy concerning Grey’s diplomacy. Lining up to present the case for the prosecution were Keith Wilson, Roy Bridge and Christopher Clark; the case for the defence was in the hands of Thomas Otte and Annika Mombauer; insightful essays that do not engage in controversy were given by John F.V. Keiger and Richard Smith – the former focusing on what we may learn of the man by Grey’s devotion to – and expertise on – angling; the latter on his private life (arguing that he is best understood as the ‘last of the Victorians’ rather than as a typical Edwardian).
Keith Wilson continued his career-long campaign as a Little Englander: in numerous essays and articles spanning four decades, he has argued that it was fear of Russian intrigues and aggression on the Indian frontier that generated Grey’s determination to remain on the side of the Franco-Russian alliance in any European disputes. If the so-called Triple Entente were to disintegrate, it would force Britain onto a war footing on the Indian frontier and eventually lead to war.101 Thus, it was the imperial imperative that produced Grey’s – and thus Britain’s – continental commitment. The continuing focus on Grey, he insists, is entirely appropriate because he was ‘absolutely central’ to the British decision for war in August 1914. His threat to resign as Foreign Secretary on 1 August ‘neutralised and cancelled out the opposition to war’ which a majority of the cabinet had displayed during the last week of July.102 The understanding with Russia made it possible to reduce the size of the Indian Army and minimize military expenditure. But Grey’s formula carried another cost: assuring the Russians that their friendship was the ‘corner-stone’ of British foreign policy gave the Russians great leverage over Britain during the July Crisis. This was exploited by Sazonov, who warned the British ambassador on 25 July that Britain would have to choose between active support of Russia or renouncing her friendship. Grey concluded that Britain had to participate fully in a war on the continent of Europe in order to protect the empire.
Roy Bridge ignores Wilson’s imperial dimension in Grey’s formulation and focuses instead on his appreciation of balance-of-power politics. When the ambassador-designate to Vienna, Sir Fairfax Cartwright, made a case for friendlier relations with Austria-Hungary, perhaps detaching it from the alliance with Germany, Grey warned that this could precipitate a conflict by ‘isolating’ Germany and that it was preferable to maintain the equilibrium that existed on the continent.103 According to Bridge, it was possible that Grey’s ‘rigid adherence’ to the division of Europe ‘into two camps’ was a factor in the failure of the Concert of Europe in mitigating the conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Grey’s ‘obsessive fear’ of endangering the ententes with France and Russia made any détente with Austria most unlikely while he directed policy: ‘the Russian entente always had priority over relations with Vienna’. And it was Grey’s adherence to this commitment that destroyed Austrian faith in concert diplomacy and thus he shared responsibility ‘for the collapse of the concert and the outbreak of war in 1914’.104 Thus, ‘the case against Grey’ rests not so much on his diplomacy during the July Crisis ‘but on his sins of omission in the preceding years’.105 In Bridge’s estimation, Grey ought to have been more European, not less – he ought to have actively engaged – via the concert of Europe – in addressing Austria’s difficulties rather than adopting his ‘single-minded devotion’ to the ententes as offering security to the British empire.
Christopher Clark echoes these complaints, both in The Sleepwalkers and in his paper on ‘Sir Edward Grey and the July Crisis’ presented to the London conference. He argues that Grey cleverly and under-handedly sought to deepen the British commitment to the Entente when he took over at the Foreign Office in 1905, actually seeking a ‘military entente’ with France, from which he was deterred only by opposition in the cabinet. When July 1914 arrived, he viewed the crisis ‘almost entirely through the lens of the Entente’, subordinating his understanding of the Austro-Serbian quarrel to ‘the larger imperatives of the Entente’, which meant, in effect, ‘tacitly supporting Russian policy’.106 Rather than the austere, fair-minded gentleman portrayed in so much of the literature, Clark’s Grey had a ‘deep appetite for power’ and was prepared to utilize ‘conspiratorial methods’ to obtain it and hold on to it.107 He repeatedly chastises Grey for failing to adopt an impartial approach in considering Austria’s difficulties with Serbia, for failing to ‘weigh up’ its case against Serbia, and for acquiescing in the Russian view that a Serbian war ‘inevitably meant a European war’.108 Nevertheless, he takes issue with those (unnamed) historians who argue that Britain went to war in 1914 in order to restrain Russia. Grey’s real objective was to contain Germany, and her intervention on the side of the Entente promised success while offering the ancillary benefit of ‘appeasing and tethering Russia’.109 Grey’s failure is not to be found in Britain’s commitment to the continent as an abstract concept – the balance of power was vital to the safety of the empire – but in his one-sided devotion to France and Russia, which blinded him to the justice of the Austrian cause.
The contrast between Clark’s Grey and Thomas Otte’s is stark. Otte’s Grey is ‘shrewd and subtle’ and he is credited with successfully steering the boat of British diplomacy with ‘great skill and sound common sense’.110 Grey’s aloofness and his reticence created a ‘blank canvas’ on which historians and others ‘have projected an image of their own choice’.111 A brief look at Grey’s lineage, education, interests and political beliefs leads Otte to conclude that he combined principle and pragmatism in his approach to foreign policy. Grey’s policy of ‘constructive ambiguity’ served Britain well: his adherence to the entente with France, offering assurances of support without promises that would have bound Britain to a definite course of action, restrained France from provoking Germany into an act of aggression. While he dismissed the possibility of transforming the entente into an alliance as ‘not in accordance with our traditions’, he made it clear that it would be impossible for Britain to remain neutral in the event of a German onslaught on France.112 And Grey recognized that the greatest challenge to his policy was the potential conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, about which Britain could do little. Neither isolating from the continent nor joining an alliance would serve British interests, and he was determined to avoid making the choice between these unpalatable alternatives. The problem in the July Crisis was not what Grey did or did not do, but the intransigence of Russia and France combined with the failure of Germany to listen to the warning of its ambassador in London. Grey attempted to maintain and build upon the recent détente with Germany but ultimately concluded that Britain could not remain aloof, and the risk an Austro-German military triumph would imperil the British empire. In the end, Grey was powerless to halt the descent into war and criticism of his diplomacy is a form of latter-day ‘Little Englandism’.113
Annika Mombauer confirms that all assessments consider Grey as central to Britain’s decision for war in 1914 and that historians have generally adhered to the view that he had the potential to affect a different outcome to the crisis.114 Until recently, the consensus was that Grey genuinely desired to de-escalate the crisis and that of the most important ‘men of 1914’ he was the one least responsible for the outbreak of war. The neo-revisionists have challenged this view, but Mombauer brushes aside their criticism that he either trusted Germany too much (and thus failed to engage directly with Austria) or that his willingness to mediate or arbitrate persuaded the Germans that Britain would remain neutral – thus emboldening them in their support of Austria. She argues to the contrary that Grey’s attitude during both the earlier Agadir Crisis of 1911 and in July 1914 should have left no doubt about Britain’s attitude. There is considerable evidence that Germany simply failed to concern itself with the possibility of British intervention on the side of Russia and France: ‘Grey’s alleged or actual indecisiveness in the July Crisis was immaterial for decisions taken in Berlin, and therefore for the outcome of the crisis.’115 Policy-makers in London correctly perceived that Germany posed a threat to the established order, and Grey did not fail to warn Germany of his resolve to defend France. The problem was that Germany discounted the British role; but so too did France and Russia, who ignored British advice and warnings. Grey himself was pragmatic: he was restricted by domestic political constraints and by his conviction that a German victory in a war would jeopardize Britain’s security and the future of the Empire. He did not regard neutrality as an option, but his role in conducting British policy played a much less important part than is usually assumed: ‘The decision for war and peace in Europe was not Grey’s to take.’116 The protagonists in the crisis were not interested in mediation, which rendered Britain powerless. Grey was peripheral and nothing he could have done would have altered Vienna’s determination to have a ‘reckoning’ with Serbia. Thus, while leaving Grey in his place as central to British diplomacy during the crisis, Mombauer has removed him from his pivotal role in determining the outcome of the crisis.
Perhaps Mombauer’s conclusion reflects the ‘European’ view of Brexit: it would have been preferable if Britain had remained, but the European Union can survive without it. Not all of the trends and themes in historical controversy directly reflect the preoccupations of contemporary life, however. Some of them are largely academic in nature and have a life of their own. Such would seem to be the case with those engaged in the pursuit of naval history in the era before and during the First World War. A small storm has broken out among experts in this sub-discipline, which has been concentrated on two issues. First, the historian long considered the doyen of modern naval history, Arthur Marder, has been the subject of a re-assessment which, at times, has been scathing. Long the bible of students of pre-war naval history, Marder’s classic The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the Pre-dreadnought Era, along with the five-volume From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904–1919, argued, in essence, that Admiral John (‘Jackie’) Fisher was an inspirational strategist who revolutionized British naval strategy. Fisher presided over the construction of a fleet centred on the ‘dreadnought revolution’, utilizing the latest in battleship technology to prepare the British Empire to fight a modern industrial war against Germany by shifting resources from the Mediterranean and concentrating the revitalized fleet in the North Sea.
The challenge to the Marder view consists of two fundamental points. First, the revisionists argue that the new fleet Fisher wanted would actually consist of heavily armoured cruisers or ‘battle cruisers’ rather than the larger, slower and more cumbersome dreadnoughts. And this point intersects with the subject of war origins, because the revisionists maintain that the faster, more flexible, fleet would enable Britain to dispatch ships to meet threats beyond Europe – that is that the Fisher strategy was not predicated on Germany as the only foreseeable opponent and, in fact, both France and Russia continued to loom large as possible enemies in British naval strategy.117 This new view could be summarized as an ‘empire first’ perspective, rather than maintaining a focus on the continent, where the threat from Germany loomed large.
Ironically, while a revisionist historian has been arguing that there was no Schlieffen plan in Germany, another revisionist historian has been arguing that there was an equivalent to the Schlieffen plan in the British admiralty. The second debate concerning naval strategy and its implications for war origins concerns British plans for a war with Germany. Nicholas Lambert in Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War argued that Fisher broke from the nineteenth-century tradition of planning for a long-term naval blockade by which Britain would slowly strangle the economy of its enemy; in its place would be what amounted to a ‘British Schlieffen Plan’. This scheme was predicated upon bringing the global trading system to the brink of collapse by launching a rigorous and wide-ranging naval campaign that involved much more than a traditional blockade – one that would seize control of international credit, shipping and cable communications. This strategy was designed to ruin the finances of the opponent (Germany) and lead to a quick victory. Although the focus of Planning Armageddon is on the war itself, the argument has generated a reassessment of British strategy before the war. Something akin to a ‘post-revisionist’ consensus has emerged which places Fisher’s strategy in the longer term context of the history of blockade, regarding it as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.118 Matthew Seligmann has argued most recently that Britain’s plans for economic warfare had the limited objective of inducing the German fleet to put to sea and forcing it into a decisive naval battle. So British plans were more operational in nature and did not amount to a grand strategy: ‘when war came, the Royal Navy was not in a position to declare a blockade of the German coasts and never did so’.119
Annika Mombauer summarized 100+ years of explanations and controversies very neatly at the 50th anniversary conference on the Fischer debate:
[Historians] have foregrounded domestic causes, mobilization orders and railway timetables, decision-makers and impersonal forces. They have argued for and against German war-guilt and they variously blame Austria-Hungary, Russia, France, Serbia and even Britain, or all of them, or none of them. They argue that the war was inevitable, improbable, avoidable, long-anticipated or a surprise when it finally came.120
It is the aim of this book to present to students of the subject an overview of the explanations that have been offered while offering insights into the strengths and weaknesses of these explanations and an appreciation of the complexities that continue to challenge historians in understanding the forces that led to the cataclysm of 1914–1918.
References
· 1 These were conveniently published in a single volume by the British government in 1915 as Collected Diplomatic Documents Relating to the Outbreak of the European War (London 1915).
· 2 For a brief survey of the literature see Gordon Martel, ‘Explaining World War One: Debating the Causes’, in Nicholas Atkin and Michael Biddiss (eds) Themes in Modern European History, 1890–1945 (London 2009), pp. 117–45. Also see John F.V. Keiger, ‘The War Explained: 1914 to the Present’, in John Horne (ed.), A Companion to World War I (Oxford 2010), pp. 19–31 and Keith Neilson, ‘1914: The German War?’, European History Quarterly 44 (2014), pp. 395–418.
· 3 See Michael Ekstein, ‘Sir Edward Grey and Imperial Germany in 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History 6 (1971), pp. 121–31.
· 4 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1918 (Washington, DC 1933), Supplement I, Vol. 1, p. 383.
· 5 E.L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (eds), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939, 1st series (London 1948), Vol. 2, p. 913.
· 6 See Gordon Martel, ‘A Comment – Antecedents and Aftermaths: Reflection on the War-Guilt Question and the Settlement’, in Manfred F. Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman and Elisabeth Glaser (eds) The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years (Cambridge 1998), pp. 615–36. For a fascinating case-study of the way in which the argument over war guilt divided politically active intellectuals see Norman Ingram, The War Guilt Problem and the Ligue des droits de l’homme, 1914–1944 (Oxford 2019).
· 7 For a discussion of these materials, see A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe (Oxford 1954), pp. 569–83.
· 8 See, for example, Pierre Renouvin, Les Origines immédiates de la Guerre (Paris 1927); Bernadotte E. Schmitt, The Coming of the War 1914, 2 vols (New York 1928); Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War, 2 vols (New York 1928); Alfred von Wegerer, Der Ausbruch des Weltkrieges, 2 vols (Hamburg 1939); Luigi Albertini, Le Origini della Guerra del 1914, 3 vols (Milan 1942–43).
· 9 Two leading examples (although very different in style) are: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy (London 1926) and Fay, Origins of the World War.
· 10 A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (Penguin edn, London 1964), p. 235.
· 11 See for example, Rohan Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London 1941).
· 12 For a recent summary of the reactions to Fischer see Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, ‘The Political and Historical Significance of the Fischer Controversy’, Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013), pp. 251–70. But also see the sceptical reservations of John Röhl, in ‘Goodbye to all that (again)? The Fischer Thesis, the New Revisionism and the Meaning of the First World War’, International Affairs 91 (2015), pp. 153–66.
· 13 Quoted in Matthew Stibbe, ‘The Fischer Controversy over German War Aims in the First World War and its Reception by East German Historians, 1961–1989’, Historical Journal 40 (2003), p. 651.
· 14 This was his doctoral thesis of 1930: Schlachtflottenbau und Parteipolitik 1894–1901: Versuch eines Querschnitts durch die innenpolitischen, sozialen und ideologischen Voraussetzungen des deutschen Imperialismus. Kehr died at the age of 30 in 1933.
· 15 For the extensive literature on the debate over the Fischer ‘thesis’ see ‘The Fischer Debate’ in the ‘Controversies, Debates and the Search for Consensus’ section of Further Reading. On Fischer’s influence in German historiography see the two volumes of essays celebrating his 65th and 70th birthdays: Imanuel Geiss and Bernd Jürgen Wendt (eds), Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Düsseldorf 1973), and Dirk Stegmann and Peter-Christian Witt (eds), Industrielle Gesellschaft und politisches System (Bonn 1978).
· 16 Among Wehler’s numerous works see Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne 1969); Das deutsche Kaiserreich 1871–1918 (Göttingen 1973), translated by Kim Traynor and published as The German Empire 1871–1918 (Leamington Spa 1985).
· 17 John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge 1994), p. 114.
· 18 See especially the final volume of his biographical trilogy: Wilhelm II: Into the Abyss of War and Exile 1900–1941 (Cambridge 2014).
· 19 William Appleman Williams may be regarded as the inspiration for this view. See his Tragedy of American Diplomacy (Cleveland 1959) and The Roots of the Modern American Empire (New York 1969). Among his distinguished followers are: Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America’s Quest for Informal Empire, 1893–1901 (Chicago 1967) and Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860–1898 (Ithaca, NY 1963).
· 20 Mayer had established his reputation along the lines of the new school of American revisionists in his Wilson vs. Lenin: Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (New York 1964) in which he argued that Wilsonian ideas represented the ideological edifice of U.S. imperialism. A fairly clear statement of his views on the relationship between domestic structures and foreign policies can be found in his ‘Domestic Causes of the First World War’, in Leonard Kreiger and Fritz Stern (eds), The Responsibility of Power (New York 1967); and for a fuller development of his view that the war was a last attempt by the old European aristocracy to preserve its position, see his The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (New York 1981), especially Chapter 5.
· 21 Arno J. Mayer, ‘Internal Crises and War since 1870’, in Charles L. Bertrand (ed.), Revolutionary Situations in Europe (Montreal 1977), p. 231.
· 22 W. Jannen Jr., ‘The Austro-Hungarian Decision for War in July 1914’, in Samuel R. Williamson Jr and Peter Pastor (eds), Essays on World War I: Origins and Prisoners of War (New York 1983), pp. 55–81. ‘Values internalized during youth may become irrelevant. Traditional roles are no longer socially rewarded. People are no longer sure about what is expected of them. Elites may become uncomfortable with what they perceive as a decline in the traditional respect and deference due them. The uncertainty and ambiguity brought about by rapid change will be perceived as threatening… . Persistent failure to cope with threat can induce high levels of anxiety; both leaders and the populace may come to feel that they are facing a “life or death” situation’ (p. 64).
· 23 See, for example: Christopher M. Andrew and A.S. Kanya-Forstner, France Overseas: The Great War and the Climax of French Imperial Expansion (London 1981); Vincent H. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–1918 (Oxford 1971); William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War, 1914–1915 (New York 1987) and Renzi, ‘Who Composed “Sazonov’s Thirteen Points”? A Re-examination of Russia’s War Aims of 1914’, American Historical Review 88 (1983), pp. 347–57.
· 24 Keith Wilson came close to this view in his assessment of the British fixation with imperial competition from Russia. See especially Keith M. Wilson, ‘Imperial Interests in the British Decision for War, 1914: The Defence of India in central Asia’, Review of International Studies 10 (1984), pp. 189–203 and ‘Grey and the Russian Threat to India, 1892–1915’, International History Review 38 (2016), pp. 275–84. but also the various essays in The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy (Cambridge 1985) and Empire and Continent: Studies in British Foreign Policy from the 1880s to the First World War (London 1987).
· 25 ‘The Foundations of British War Aims in the First World War’, in Andreas Gestrich and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), Bid for World Power? New Research on the Oubreak of the First World War (London 2017), p. 314.
· 26 ‘ “A Life and Death Question”: Austro-Hungarian War Aims in the First World War’, in Holger Afflerbach (ed.), The Purpose of the First World War: War Aims and Military Strategies (Berlin 2015), p. 117.
· 27 James Joll himself contributed to discussions of the controversy: ‘The 1914 Debate Continues. Fritz Fischer and His Critics’, Past and Present 34 (1966), pp. 100–13.
· 28 Samuel R. Williamson Jr., ‘Vienna and July 1914: The Origins of the Great War Once More’, in Samuel R. Williamson Jr and Peter Pastor (eds), Essays on World War I: Origins and Prisoners of War (New York 1983), p. 9.
· 29 For just a few of the more important examples of this burgeoning literature see: M.C.C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I (Bloomington, IN 1990); Avner Offer, ‘Going to War in 1914: A Matter of Honor?’, Politics & Society 23 (1995), pp. 213–41; Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People (Eng. tr., Leamington Spa 1985); Richard Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth, and Mobilization in Germany (Cambridge 2000); Roger Chickering, We Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League 1886–1914 (London 1984); Laurence Cole, Military Culture and Popular Patriotism in Late Imperial Austria (Oxford 2014).
· 30 Günther Kronenbitter, ‘Keeping a Low Profile – Austrian Historiography and the Fischer Controversy’, Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013), p. 349.
· 31 Of course, being secret, this arrangement was not widely recognized at the time. But the most famous book on the crisis, Graham Alison’s Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston 1971) speculated that this had happened, long before the documents proving it became available.
· 32 ‘Gertrude the Governess’, in Nonsense Novels (London 1911). This is not to suggest that the debate is dead: the German Historical Institute in London chose to commemorate the controversy on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Griff nach der Weltmacht by convening a conference of scholars on the subject of ‘The Fischer Controversy 50 Years On’ in London in October 2011, organized by Annika Mombauer and John Röhl. This resulted in two significant publications: a special issue of the Journal of Contemporary History which appeared in April 2013 as ‘The Fischer Controversy Fifty Years On’ (Vol. 48, pp. 231–417) and included eleven articles, as well as a book of eighteen essays (Bid for World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War) published six years after the conference in 2017 (the wheels of academe do move slowly).
· 33 Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London 2012), p. 456. Modern sensibilities and contemporary terminology make their way into most accounts: Thomas Otte, for instance, sees in the disaffected youths of Bosnia ‘a chilling parallel with a twenty-first century newly accustomed to the phenomenon of disaffected young men self-radicalizing.’ July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 (Cambridge 2014), p. 13. And even John Le Carré enters the scene as Otte explains why the assassins did not leave a paper trail: ‘Good tradecraft’, he says, demands that no traces be left (p. 16). Sean McMeekin in July 1914: Countdown to War (New York 2013) refers to ‘back-channel diplomacy’, p. 89 while Clark refers to the ‘fuzzy logic’ of the Anglo-French Entente in Sleepwalkers, p. 506.
· 34 ‘Well-tempered Discontent: Austrian Domestic Politics’, in Mark Cornwall (ed.), The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multinational Experiment in Early Twentieth-Century Europe. Revised and expanded edition (Exeter 2002), p. 60. For the most extensive development of Hölbelt’s praise for the monarchy, see his Die Habsburger. Aufstieg und Glanz einer europäischen Dynastie (Stuttgart 2009). Not surprisingly, his views on the Habsburgs coincide with his right-wing political position.
· 35 John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA 2015), p. 4.
· 36 Alan Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire 1815–1918 (New York 1989), p. 264.
· 37 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 74.
· 38 Ibid., p. 288.
· 39 Paul W. Schroeder, ‘Stealing Horses to Great Applause: Austria-Hungary’s Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective’, in Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson (eds), An Improbable War: The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914 (New York 2007), pp. 17–42.
· 40 Christopher Clark, ‘Sir Edward Grey and the July Crisis’, International History Review 38 (2016), p. 333.
· 41 Quoted in Gordon Martel, The Month That Changed the World: July 1914 (Oxford 2014), p. 57.
· 42 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 356.
· 43 For an excellent summary of the treatment of Serbia’s role in the historical literature see Samuel R. Williamson Jr. and Ernest R. May, ‘An Identity of Opinion. Historians and July 1914’, Journal of Modern History 79 (2007), esp. pp. 350–53.
· 44 James Lyon, Serbia and the Balkan Front, 1914: The Outbreak of the Great War (London 2015), esp. p. 62.
· 45 Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War (London 2011) esp. pp. 55–6; and repeatedly in July 1914: Countdown to War (New York 2013).
· 46 Otte, July Crisis, p. 122.
· 47 Laura Engelstein, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path (Ithaca, NY 2009); Stephen A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford 2017); Mark Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford 2017); Peter Waldron, Governing Tsarist Russia (Basingstoke 2007), Francis W. Wcislo, Tales of Imperial Russia: The Life and Times of Sergei Witte, 1849–1915 (Oxford 2011).
· 48 See especially John W. Steinberg, All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898–1914 (Washington, DC 2010).
· 49 See Engelstein, Slavophile Empire.
· 50 Ronald Bobroff, Roads to Glory: Late Imperial Russia and the Turkish Straits (New York 2006).
· 51 Most succinctly in his article in the Journal of Contemporary History, reprinted as ‘The Russian Mobilisation in 1914’, in Paul Kennedy (ed.), The War Plans of the Great Powers, 1880–1914 (London 1979) and expanded upon in his Origins of the First World War (London 1972).
· 52 McMeekin, Russian Origins, p. 71.
· 53 Ibid., p. 59.
· 54 Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘Keeping the Germans Out of the Straits: The Five Ottoman Dreadnought Thesis Reconsidered’, War in History 23 (2016), p. 24.
· 55 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 270.
· 56 Ibid., p. 268.
· 57 Ibid., p. 348.
· 58 In a series of articles and essays: Bruce W. Menning, ‘Miscalculating One’s Enemies: Russian Military Intelligence before the Russo-Japanese War’, War in History 2 (2006), pp. 141–70; ‘War Planning and Initial Operations in the Russian Context’, in Richard F. Hamilton and Holger Herwig (eds) War Planning 1914 (Cambridge 2009), pp. 80–142; ‘Russian Military Intelligence, July 1914: What St. Petersburg Perceived and Why It Mattered’, The Historian 77 (2015), pp. 213–68; ‘The Russian Threat Calculation, 1910–1914’, in Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan, and Andreas Rose (eds), The Wars before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge 2015), pp. 151–75; ‘The Mobilization Crises of 1912 and 1914 in Russian Perspective: Overlooked and Neglected Linkages’, in Andreas Gestrich and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), Bid for World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War (London 2017), pp. 223–62.
· 59 Menning, ‘Russian Military Intelligence’, p. 231.
· 60 An error made throughout Sean McMeekin’s July 1914.
· 61 Ibid., p. 244.
· 62 Dominic C.B. Lieven, Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia (London 2015), p. 181.
· 63 See George Gilbert, The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland? (Abingdon 2016).
· 64 See his Containing Balkan Nationalism: Imperial Russia and Ottoman Christians, 1856–1914 (New York 2016).
· 65 Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires. The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908–1918 (Cambridge 2011), p. 9.
· 66 Jack S. Levy and William Mulligan have summarized the view that Russia was more ‘confrontational than conciliatory’ in their ‘Shifting Power, Preventive Logic, and the Response of the Target: Germany, Russia, and the First World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 40 (2017), pp. 731–69.
· 67 Jonathan Steinberg, ‘Old Knowledge and New Research: A Summary of the Fischer Controversy 50 Years On’, Journal of Contemporary History 48 (2013), p. 243.
· 68 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 124.
· 69 Rachel Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870–1914 (Baton Rouge, LA 2010).
· 70 For another exploration of the social and cultural dynamics of French diplomacy, see Verena Steller, ‘The Power of Protocol: On the Mechanisms of Symbolic Action in Diplomacy in Franco-German Relations, 1871–1914’, in M. Mösslang and T. Riotte (eds), The Diplomat’s World: A Cultural History of Diplomacy (Oxford 2008), pp. 195–228.
· 71 Robert Lynn Fuller, The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886–1914 (Jefferson, NC 2012).
· 72 J.P. Daughton, An Empire Divided: Religion, Republicanism, and the Making of French Colonialism, 1880–1914 (New York 2006).
· 73 Jennifer Siegel, French and British Finance in the Service of Tsars and Commissars (Oxford 2014).
· 74 See, for example, Peter Jackson, ‘Tradition and Adaptation: The Social Universe of the French Foreign Ministry in the Era of the First World War’, French History 24 (2010), pp. 164–96 and Arne Røksund, The Jeune École: The Strategy of the Weak (Amsterdam 2007).
· 75 Stefan Schmidt, Frankreichs Außenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges (Munich 2009), p. 10.
· 76 Bruno Cabanes, August 1914: France, The Great War, and a Month that Changed the World Forever, trans. Stephanie O’Hara (New Haven and London 2016).
· 77 Keith Armes, ‘French Intelligence on the Russian Army on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Military History 82 (2018), pp. 759–82.
· 78 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 297. Clark’s authority for this position is an obscure book by a Finnish historian, Risto Ropponen, Die Kraft Russlands: Wie Beurteilte Die Politische und Militarische Fuhrung der Europaischen Grossmachte in der Zeit von 1905 bis 1914 Die Kraft Russlands? (Helsinki 1968), which is focused primarily on surveying the impressions of Russian society and government by foreign observers. His main conclusion is that German and Austrian observers in the decade before 1914 believed Russia would not risk war for fear of social revolution whereas the French and the British believed that a military victory would strengthen the tsarist régime.
· 79 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 33.
· 80 Otte, July Crisis, p. 130. And he goes further in dismissing the ‘Balkan Inception Scenario’ concluding that Poincaré’s exchanges with Russia in November 1912 did not constitute a blank cheque ‘nor did they necessarily constitute some form of “Balkanization” of the Franco-Russian alliance.’ p. 134.
· 81 Ibid., p. 481.
· 82 Ibid., p. 142.
· 83 Ibid., p. 145.
· 84 Ibid., p. 161.
· 85 See, for example, Gordon Martel, ‘The Near East in the Balance of Power: The Repercussions of the Kaulla Incident in 1893’, Middle Eastern Studies 16 (1980), pp. 23–41 and Paul M. Kennedy, The Samoan Tangle: A Study in Anglo-German Relations, 1878–1900 (New York 1974).
· 86 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 165.
· 87 Ibid., p. 147.
· 88 Joining Clark on this issue is Gerd Krumeich, who has complained that we have ‘no scholarly history of the encirclement problem, something that is imperative for a historical understanding of the prewar period’. In ‘France’s Armaments and the Military Situation in July 1914’, in Andreas Gestrich and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (eds), Bid for World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War (London 2017), p. 165. Historians, he argues, might have considered that French military expansion and offensive war plans, Russia’s rapid remilitarization and the prospect of an Anglo-Russian naval agreement might ‘have made the Germans uneasy’ (p. 173).
· 89 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 159.
· 90 Ibid., p. 333.
· 91 Ibid., p. 328.
· 92 Ibid., p. 476.
· 93 For a brief summary, see his essay: ‘The Curious Case of the Kaiser’s Disappearing War Guilt: Wilhelm II in July 1914’, in Afflerbach and Stevenson, An Improbable War, pp. 75–92.
· 94 ‘War Premeditated? The “War Council” of 8 December 1912 Revisited’, in Gestrich and Pogge von Strandmann (eds), Bid for World Power, p. 110.
· 95 Ibid., p. 126. Röhl’s view is supported in the same volume by Stig Förster who concludes that Bethmann Hollweg’s behaviour during the July Crisis ‘shows that he was indeed aiming for a big war’; ‘Russian Horses: The German Army Leadership and the July Crisis of 1914’, in ibid., p 145.
· 96 Clark, Sleepwalkers, pp. xxix, xxvii.
· 97 An exception is the review by Maria Todorova, ‘Outrages and Their Outcomes’ in the Times Literary Supplement No. 5727, 4 Jan. 2013, p. 9. And see Nigel Jones, ‘Let’s Not Be Beastly to the Germans’, in The Spectator, 27 Sept. 2012. John Röhl has been the most outspoken Fischerite critic of Clark, although Annika Mombauer – more guardedly – continues to uphold a good deal of the Fischer thesis (see her concise Julikrise und Kriegsausbruch (Munich 2014). Röhl is particularly pointed in his criticism of Clark for ignoring the documentary evidence of the German military pushing for war in July 1914: ‘Diese und zahlreiche weitere Belege für das Drängen der höchsten deutschen Militärs auf einen Kontinentalkrieg in den Wochen vor und unmittelbar nach dem Attentat von Sarajevo sucht man in Clarks Schlafwandlern vergeblich.’ Die Zeit: ‘Jetzt gilt es loszuschlagen!’ 22 May 2014. Serbian reviewers were, not surprisingly, very critical.
· 98 See the suggestions in ‘Further Reading: ‘Militarism, Armaments & Strategy – Germany’.
· 99 Cited by Thomas Otte in ‘ “Postponing the Evil Day: Sir Edward Grey and British Foreign Policy’, International History Review 38 (2015), p. 251.
· 100 Published by Cambridge University Press in 1977.
· 101 Keith Wilson, ‘Grey and the Russian Threat to India’, International History Review 38 (2015), p. 276.
· 102 Ibid., p. 275.
· 103 F.R. Bridge, ‘Sir Edward Grey and Austria-Hungary’, International History Review 38 (2015), p. 266.
· 104 Ibid., p. 268.
· 105 Ibid., p. 270.
· 106 Clark, Sleepwalkers, p. 495. These phrases are repeated in ‘Sir Edward Grey and the July Crisis’, International History Review 38 (2015), p. 332.
· 107 Clark, ‘Grey and the July Crisis’, p. 326.
· 108 Ibid., p. 333.
· 109 Ibid., p. 338.
· 110 Otte, ‘Postponing the Evil Day’, p. 260.
· 111 Ibid., p. 251.
· 112 Ibid., p. 253.
· 113 Ibid., p. 260.
· 114 Annika Mombauer, ‘Sir Edward Grey, Germany, and the Outbreak of the First World War: A Re-Evaluation’, International History Review 38 (2015), p. 302.
· 115 Ibid., p. 309.
· 116 Ibid., p. 318.
· 117 The leading proponents of the revisionist position are Jon Sumida, Nicholas Lambert and Roger Parkinson. Their works on this subject are numerous, but see especially Sumida’s In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1899–1914 (London 1989), Lambert’s Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution (Columbia, SC 1999). and Parkinson’s The Late Victorian Navy: The Pre-Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (Woodbridge 2008). Also see Matthew S. Seligmann and David Morgan-Owen, ‘Evolution or Revolution? British Naval Policy in the Fisher Era’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38 (2015), pp. 937–43. See also the suggestions for Further Reading in the ‘Militarism, Armaments & Strategy’ – ‘Britain’ section.
· 118 See Stephen Cobb, Preparing for Blockade 1885–1914: Naval Contingency for Economic Warfare (Farnham 2013) and the thoughtful critique of John W. Coogan in ‘The Short-War Illusion Resurrected: The Myth of Economic Warfare as the British Schlieffen Plan’, Journal of Strategic Studies 38 (2015), pp. 1045–64.
· 119 Matthew S. Seligmann, ‘Failing to Prepare for the Great War? The Absence of Grand Strategy in British War Planning before 1914’, War in History 24 (2017), p. 426.
· 120 Steinberg, ‘Old Knowledge and New Research’, p. 239.