Symbolic and cultural approaches to the origins of World War I: Introduction

World War I gave rise to the discipline of International Relations (IR). Rethinking the origins of that conflict accordingly encourages – perhaps requires us – to rethink the origins and development of our discipline. This War is considered overdetermined by many historians and IR scholars. Many historians took too seriously the memoranda and memoirs of leaders who had strong political and psychological interests in denying their agency, and thus their responsibility for it. Recent historical research has come to see the war as more contingent than inevitable. ¹ Such a rethinking creates a serious challenge for those many IR theories, which are either based on World War I or purport to explain it. Who would take seriously a theory based on a contingent case, and one, moreover, that is contingent for reasons having little to do with these theories?

We can also learn a lot about the discipline by looking at the kinds of questions it asks about World War I and the methods employed to find answers. These have evolved over time and reflect changing political projects and intellectual agendas. In the first decade after the War, historical scholarship debated which set of national leaders was most responsible for the conflict but also the ways in which alliances and arms races were fundamental underlying causes. Many IR scholars turned to international law and organization as more promising vehicles for conflict management and prevention. After World War II, in an era of Cold War and nuclear weapons, the discipline emphasized the importance of deterrence. Scholars looked at why it failed in 1914 and 1939, but also how it might have succeeded. Following the Berlin crises of 1958 and 1962 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 decision making became a prominent research concern, and here too, World War I was a fascinating case because of its multiple decision-making pathologies.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been a marked bifurcation in approaches to World War I. Rationalist approaches have grown in importance. ² They focus on decision making and assume that it can be modeled‚ including the case of the July 1914 crisis – and this despite the consensus among historians that it was highly irrational and contingent. ³ Cultural constructivist approaches attempt to bridge the divide that opened up between social science and what the Germans call Geisteswissenschaft. Our exploration in this Forum of the causes of World War I is very much in this tradition. Contributors explore an alternative approach to World War I that stresses the cultural and symbolic aspects of German leaders and how their self-descriptions were modified and challenged by interactions with others and events such as the twin murders at Sarajevo.

The current IR literature on the World War I privileges underlying over immediate causes and structural and rational explanations over cultural ones. ⁴ Agency is given short shrift, even by rationalist models that focus on the decisions of individual leaders. These actors are assigned preferences and perform in mechanical ways in response to the opportunities and constraints thrown up by the environment. In effect, they are interchangeable. Historians on the whole give equal emphasis to underlying and immediate causes. ⁵ Many analyze the War through the prism of policy makers, but treat these actors as individuals with diverse goals operating in a common European culture but in varied domestic political environments. ⁶ Those historians who describe the War as the inevitable product of material or social structures are in a declining minority. ⁷

Common to structural or material explanations is the belief that state behavior is governed by the quest for security, material benefits, or both. Scholars who adopt such an approach take for granted that definitions of security and wealth and their modalities are self-evident, which they certainly are not. They further assume that actors are instrumentally rational in pursuit of their interests. They do not recognize that rationality, goals, and what actors consider appropriate means of achieving then are culturally embedded and socially constructed. These approaches can reveal more about the values and worldviews of analysts than they do about the actors in question. They give the impression that the War was rational and inevitable and the logical consequence of internal or external pressures.

The failings of structural and rationalist approaches are multiple. They cannot explain why the same material structures lead to different outcomes. In the eighteenth century, war was widely understood by European policy makers as a principal means of acquiring wealth. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was generally recognized as inimical to material well-being. Today, economic interdependence is seen as a source of peace and stability – at least in Europe and the Pacific Rim. One hundred years ago, it was unable to prevent World War I. Up to World War I, war was widely regarded as a necessary evil or even beneficial in its consequences for leaders, regimes, and peoples. Following the devastation of that conflict, opposition to wars of conquest became a nearly universal sentiment. This shift in opinion did not prevent World War II, but it certainly changed the calculus of leaders and made many more cautious than they might otherwise have been. It can be argued that three waves of learning have increasingly undercut key motives for war initiation and encouraged leaders to seek security, wealth, and standing by other means. ⁸

The failure to establish law-like generalizations of any kind regarding war is due in the first instance to human reflexivity and agency and the complex and unpredictable aggregation effects of the behavior of multiple actors. It is also attributable to the symbolic multiplicity of one ‘material’ world. Classical Realists, unlike neo-realists, recognize that a balance of power of saturated states is not the same as a balance of power with revisionist state actors and that the determination of the balance and actor goals are highly subjective. Analyses of war and peace, and of any particular war, must engage the reasons that actors have for behaving as they do. This is the starting point of any sophisticated analysis of politics. However, outcomes cannot be attributed to reasons because they are so often at odds with what actors intended. Different tools are required to study aggregation, and the concept of emergent properties is valuable in this connection. Such processes are no more independent of context than behavior. Like natural selection, they also work best when actors are oblivious to them. Once they are described, people, institutions, and states take them into account. As Max Weber observed, the half-life of any regularity or process is relatively short due to reflexivity.

The contribution of this Forum is twofold. In contrast to structuralist accounts, we focus on what actors ‘do’ and ‘feel’ during a crisis. In Germany and Austria, we stress symbolic interactions during the July crisis and how they were strongly marked by perceived challenges by leaders to their honor and that of their countries. As the German Kaiser, Austrian Emperor, and their politicians and generals adhered to an idealized image of their states as a virile ‘Weltmacht’ or dominant regional power, they were especially vulnerable to provocations. Conventional accounts of the July crisis ignore or underestimate the effects of these emotions. One example is the Kaiser’s blank check to Austria, made by an emotionally aroused leader and unattributable to utilitarian motives. Some major actors violated the instinct of survival. German general Erich von Falkenhayn, who pushed for war throughout the crisis, proclaimed ‘Even if we go under as a result of this, still it was beautiful’. ⁹ Austrian Emperor Franz Josef stoically accepted the need to war to preserve the honor of the Empire although he was pessimistic about the chances of victory. ‘If we must go under’, he told his chief-of-staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, ‘we better go under decently’. ¹⁰ Conrad wanted war because he hated Serbia and thought it would provide an opportunity for his mistress to divorce her husband and marry him. The Kaiser and other key German leaders had come to view European politics as a clash of civilizations, notably between Germans and Slavs. In this connection, it is not far-fetched to analogize the Sarajevo atrocity of 1914 to 9/11.

The second theme of the Forum is to go beyond the characterization of so-called structures as material. Structures are also symbolic. Consider the balance of power. Many realists describe it as a material structure because it is based on the distribution of power, which in turn is based on material capabilities. Material capabilities are only one source of power, which can also have symbolic roots, and power is not the same thing as influence. Influence is highly dependent on argumentation and persuasion, and both are more effective when the goal sought can be shown to be consistent with shared values and interests. Questions of legitimacy, appropriate fora for debate and decision, and symbolic framings (e.g. status, responsibility, aggression) are absolutely critical to how leaders think, act, and respond to the suggestions or demands of others.

The opening essay, by Richard Ned Lebow, examines the interplay of history, theory, and contemporary events. He describes the progression of contemporary concerns that have led IR scholars to study the origins of World War I and the different ways they have approached it. This historical and comparative perspective allows highlighting a number of tensions, if not contradictions, within and across these research efforts. He contends that World War I offers important insights into the causes and conduct of war, but they are not easily accessible to IR theory, as currently constructed and pursued.

Franca Loewener reevaluates the causes of World War I via an analysis of the causes of the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911. She demonstrates, with the concept of reputational filters, that state relations are essentially determined by what is perceived as respectable. She argues that the decisive difference between the 1905/1911 crises and the 1914 crisis was that in the former, war was not perceived as a legitimate and respectable means, while in the latter, self–other images had sufficiently degraded in order to see war as acceptable.

Reinhard Wolf explores the role of status motivations in the decisions of Austrian, German, and Russian policy makers. As he shows, in each of the three empires, leaders saw their country’s great power status severely threatened. In their view, it was about time to stand firm to spare their country yet another diplomatic defeat. Such symbolic considerations eclipsed strategic efforts to determine the best way to maximize national security in a multipolar setting. Due to the great complexity of the July crisis, weighing options in terms of their ‘expected utility’ clearly overburdened the leaders’ mental abilities. They simply had to cope with too many variables and had to extrapolate too many unknowns. Quite naturally, they fell back on intuitions and social scripts which defined acceptable crisis conduct in line with their nation’s great power identity.

According to Charles Doran in the following contribution, historians have long puzzled over the emotive words – Annerkennung, Gleichberechtigung, Gefahr – that Willhelmine Germany applied to its strategic situation along with the claim of ‘encirclement’ by its ‘enemies’. Why was Germany, the most powerful state on the continent, so anxious and unsettled about its future security and role? World War I was the product of actions by all the great powers. But the trigger was Germany’s sudden realization that its long accelerating rise in relative power had ended, a rise accompanied by expectations of enhanced foreign policy role and recognition. Germany discovered that notwithstanding its greatest absolute gains in power, its share of relative power suddenly entered incontrovertible decline, unleashing all of these subjective anxieties in an interval of maximum strategic uncertainty for all of the actors. The German leadership abruptly confronted the ‘trauma of expectations foregone’ in an interval when other states were experiencing ‘hopes and delusions of the second wind’ as their relative power decline suddenly decelerated. The system was in transformation, a system severely disequilibrated. World War I was not inevitable, but so much critical change in so short a period, so widespread the existential stakes – all this made war much more likely and devastating.

Thomas Lindemann examines the narrative logics of World War I considered as a self-fulfilling catastrophe. He contends that the quest for virile self-esteem can lead to war when compromise or concession is perceived to result in loss of ‘face’. Furthermore, he argues that ‘scientific’ fatalist narratives such as Ratzel’s Lebensraum theory considerably augmented the perception of threat emanating from Russia and from the encirclement of Germany. What made war inevitable was precisely the belief in the inevitability of war. He documents this dynamic in German decision making in the July Crisis of 1914. The assassinations at Sarajevo challenged Austria and Germany’s self-conceptions as great and ‘virile’ powers. Aggressive policies in 1914 were also a product of Social Darwinist misperceptions, the belief in the necessity for a great power to ‘grow’, and in the inevitability of war in the form of a final showdown between Germans and Slavs. These perceptions were made more acute by other actors’ perception of Germany as a parvenu power.