1914: The German War?

It is one hundred years since the outbreak of the First World War. Given the nature of publishing and the fact that the conflict is widely seen as key to an understanding of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that there has been an outpouring of material dealing with what A. J. P. Taylor famously termed ‘the struggle for mastery in Europe’, the competition between the European powers for continental supremacy leading up to 1914. ¹ What follows is an attempt to assess some of the new work, to put it in context of the existing literature and to point out some of the problems that remain.

Echoing Taylor’s title, Brendan Simms has recently extended the temporal framework of analysis of the competition among the European states back five centuries, beginning with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and continuing to the present. ² Covering such a wide range of time requires a thread on which to hang the narrative. For Simms, this thread is a German one. He argues that the ‘Holy Roman Empire, and its successor states, lay at the heart of the European balance of power and the global system it spawned’, giving Germany a particular place of prominence in his study. ³ This last assertion gives Simms licence to argue that the attempt by European states to dominate the German-speaking areas determined (and continues to determine) the shape of global politics to the present day, despite the relative decline of Europe in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. This belief in the primacy of Germany is not a surprise given Simms’s previous work, and it gives a welcome coherence to a fine book based on a wide-ranging and thorough reading of secondary sources. Simms’s conclusion that the ‘fundamental issue has always been whether Europe would be united – or dominated – by a single force’ based upon control of Central Europe is not a contentious one. ⁴ However, the pride of place given to Germany is not without its issues, some of which will be discussed in this article.

Simms’s analysis provides a convenient framework for an examination of the new writing both on the origins of the First World War and on international relations generally in the decade before 1914. Within this structural design, the war was merely another attempt by one of the great powers, this time by the newly created Kaiserreich, to obtain control of Europe. This explanation has similarities with (but is much more sophisticated and based on sounder scholarship than) the attempt – now rather thoroughly debunked – by Niall Ferguson to contend that a victory by the Central Powers in the conflict of 1914 would have resulted in the creation of the ‘Kaiser’s European Union’. ⁵ However, the essential point of Simms’s book is that European politics have been characterized by prolonged struggle, a major part of which was the First World War.

Standard accounts attribute the outbreak of the war to a number of structural matters. The existence of submerged nationalities, secret diplomacy with its entangling and opposing alliances, arms races, and heightened and bellicose nationalism all worked together before 1914 to create a situation where the slightest incident – often termed a ‘spark’ – would trigger a general conflict. The perfect locale for this to occur was the Balkans – often, maintaining the metaphor, referred to as ‘the powder keg of Europe’ – where the quarrels and aspirations of conflicting nationalities were enmeshed in the conflicting goals of the great powers. This structural explanation was created early. After the war ended, governments were quick (the losing sides quicker than others) to publish documents designed to show that they were not to blame for the catastrophe of the Great War. ⁶ Historians immediately after the First World War, without access to the primary documents themselves, were forced to rely on this tendentious material published by the various belligerents and the equally tendentious interpretations put forward in the ‘war of the memoirs’. ⁷ Given this, it is not surprising that the standard model described above was established by the early 1930s and has persisted in many ways until the present, at least in popular work and the analyses of political scientists. The work of men like Harry Elmer Barnes and Bernadotte Schmidt concluded that the war had been a ghastly mistake, that blame could be apportioned to all the great powers (although Barnes allotted more responsibility to Britain and France) and to errors in judgement by the major political figures. ⁸

The occurrence of the Second World War set this interpretation in aspic. After 1945, all, including the Germans, were agreed that Hitler was to blame for the second global conflict. In the spirit of the political reconciliation needed to rebuild Europe, prominent French and German historians met in 1951 to discuss the entire issue. Their conclusions were that none of the belligerents in 1914 had desired war beforehand and that, while each side had made errors of judgement, it was impossible to assign moral guilt to any specific country. ⁹ In this context, the enormous compilation of sources by the Italian journalist, Luigi Albertini, published a year later, whose contents made such an anodyne conclusion unlikely, was largely ignored and derided as the work of a mere journalist. It remains so today, its sheer size making it often quoted but rarely read. ¹⁰

This comfortable interpretation of the origins of the war was rudely challenged in 1961 with the publication of Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht. ¹¹ Fischer’s basic argument, amplified in subsequent work, was that Germany premeditated war and that the Kaiserreich had extensive war aims even before the outbreak of war, ambitions that stemmed from a desire to dominate Europe. ¹² As might be expected, this interpretation was met with both political hostility and scholarly objection. ¹³ An industry was spawned, seeking either to support or destroy Fischer’s analysis, including his argument that internal political forces in Germany – the so-called ‘coalition of rye and iron’ – had driven the Imperial government into a preventive war for domestic as well as political reasons. ¹⁴

By the later 1970s, much of the fire had gone out of this debate, and a number of scholarly works in a series entitled ‘The Making of the Twentieth Century’, were published by Macmillan to lay down the new synthesis. The first of these to emerge was V.R. Berghahn’s study of Germany’s approach to war. Cleaving closely to the Fischer line, Berghahn, found the motives for Germany’s actions in 1914 in the Primat der Innenpolitik, a position he largely maintained twenty years later in a second edition. ¹⁵ In 1977, Zara Steiner, the doyenne of British diplomatic historians, published her analysis of the British case. In contradistinction to the Fischerites, Steiner demonstrated that British policy in 1914 was not driven by domestic politics but by the diplomatic situation caused by the Continental crisis. ¹⁶ Her expert knowledge of the British Foreign Office and the British political scene in 1914 allowed Steiner to show that those who made policy both tried to avert war and then entered it reluctantly. ¹⁷ Not to do so seemed, in their eyes, as likely to affect Britain adversely as standing aloof. In this position, she has remained constant. However, the second edition of her book puts a greater emphasis on the way in which considerations of Russia played into Britain’s pre-1914 policy than did the first edition, possibly reflecting the contribution of her co-author in the revised version. ¹⁸

In 1983, three more books were published in the same series, Richard Bosworth’s on Italy, Dominic Lieven’s on Russia and John F. V. Keiger’s on France. ¹⁹ Given that Italy did not enter the war until 1915, Bosworth’s tome is more a study of Italy’s place among the Great Powers than an examination of how the war broke out in August 1914. Russia’s role, on the other hand, was central to the entire issue of the origins of the war. Lieven’s fine study put a great deal of emphasis on the people who made up the Russian decision-making elite. Far from wishing for or willing war, he demonstrated that St Petersburg attempted to rely upon both deterrence and the balance of power to manage the July crisis, but found that these two complementary approaches were insufficient to avert war. Russia decided to go to war, Lieven asserted, because not to do so would have relegated her to the rank of a second-class power and undermined the legitimacy of the ruling class. This latter point speaks to the issue of the primacy of domestic politics, but Lieven pointed out that, unlike the situation in Germany, those advocating war were not that influential. Many of them were well aware of the fragility of Russia’s domestic situation and understood that Russia, with her vast resources, was assured of her ‘place in the sun’ in the long run. While Lieven has not produced a second edition of his book, his subsequent work has amplified and reinforced the position that he adopted. ²⁰

Keiger’s analysis of France’s actions in 1914 was an equally important contribution, given Paris’s role both in its own right and as Russia’s ally. For Keiger, the key to understanding French policy was to appreciate the control over it held by Raymond Poincaré, both as prime minister and President of the republic. Keiger asserted that, for Poincaré, France’s international position and security were dependent on the continuance of a balance of power. As a result, France was unwilling to restrain Russia during the July crisis (although not encouraging her to take action), since to do so would result in the crumbling of the alliance structures which alone stood between Paris and domination by Germany. Equally, knowing that Britain was not firmly committed to supporting either Paris or St Petersburg, Poincaré needed to ensure that France was not perceived by London as a war-monger. Thus, in the July crisis, France’s role was reactive and largely passive, a position that Keiger has amplified in his biography of Poincaré. ²¹

The final contribution to this series was Samuel R. Williamson’s study of Austria-Hungary. ²² For him, Austria-Hungary, driven by concerns about the future of the dual monarchy and conscious of its own weakness, was willing to risk a general conflict in the hope that a successful war against Serbia would arrest the decline of the empire. Domestic politics and the concerns of the Habsburg dynasty were inextricably linked and produced a gambling policy.

Until recently the positions taken in the Macmillan series had not been seriously challenged, although some have been modified and refined. ²³ Two relatively recent collections make this clear. ²⁴ As might be expected, with the passage of time, the belief in the primacy of domestic politics as the major determinant of German policy has declined. Holger Herwig has demonstrated that the careful planning and coordinated effort that should have accompanied a German preventive war was lacking. Instead, he shows that German decision-makers were convinced that the Second Reich’s position internationally was declining and that a ‘now or never’ attitude suffused their thinking. ²⁵ Such a return to ‘agency’, the idea that the decisions of a few individuals made policy rather than the structures in which they operated, is also the view of John C. G. Röhl, the biographer of Wilhelm II. ²⁶ Eugenia Kiesling feels that ‘French diplomatic decisions mattered rather little in 1914’, implicitly sharing Keiger’s contentions. ²⁷

A greater challenge to Keiger comes in the work of Stefan Schmidt, who argues convincingly that Poincaré, during the French official visit to Russia in late July 1914, gave firm assurances to St Petersburg that France would support an active Russian response in the crisis. ²⁸ This interpretation (when seen in conjunction with French concern that Russia would not support the balance of power, a fear given some justification by Russia’s hesitating support for France during the Moroccan crisis of 1911) seems sound, but it does not vitiate Keiger’s wider argument that France attempted to avoid war. Instead, it merely underlines Poincaré’s belief in the balance of power to ensure France’s security. With regard to Austria-Hungary, both Fritz Fellner and Graydon A. Tunstall, Jr. believe with Williamson that Vienna’s policy was both provocative and dangerous, although the former loads most of the responsibility on Germany. ²⁹ A similar conformity of opinion exists with regard to Russia, where Lieven’s insistence on Russia’s determination to continue to be a great power has been supported. ³⁰ As to Britain, both collections supported Steiner’s analysis, with Keith Wilson placing the responsibility for the British decision squarely on a small contingent of ‘Liberal imperialists’, headed by the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, while J. Paul Harris reinforces Steiner’s assertion that entering the war was seen as the lesser of two evils. ³¹

Although the consensus found in these two books remained firm, there have been advances and contending voices. With regard to the former, we now have additions to the cast of countries whose policies can be analysed with regard to the outbreak of the war. Not the least important of these is Serbia, whose veiled support for nationalist extremists contributed to the assassination at Sarajevo and whose refusal to buckle in the face of Austro-Hungary’s ultimatum in July led to Vienna’s initiation of hostilities and the First World War itself. Two studies have reached largely the same conclusion. Both Mark Cornwall and Richard C. Hall argue that Serbia, flush with confidence as a result of its victories in the Balkan wars, was determined to stand firm in the face of the ultimatum in order to underline its new-found status. The Serbs relied on the European balance to protect it: once it was clear that the Dual Monarchy’s threats were not going to result in Belgrade’s being left to its own resources, the Serbians became stubborn. While most of the Austro-Hungarian demands could be accepted without loss of face, not all of them could, and no amount of pressure could persuade the Serbs otherwise. Far from being guided by the Great Powers, Serbia pursued its own course. ³²

In addition to these analyses of the roles of the individual Great Powers, a particularly interesting approach to the origin of the war was constructed by James Joll in The Origins of the First World War, first published in 1984. ³³ While not rejecting the importance of the structural aspects of the international scene, Joll’s focus was more on the issues of mentalité, something to be expected from a scholar whose seminal work on ‘unspoken assumptions’ and the origins of the war was (and remains) essential for those who seek to understand motivation in international affairs. ³⁴ Another example of this approach is found in the work of Avner Offer, who has suggested that ‘honour’, in all its cultural variants, was an important determinant in the decision-making of 1914. ³⁵ Stemming from Joll, there have been a number of important works dealing with the issues of mentalité, particularly with respect to such things as popular opinion before the First World War, the impact of such intellectual trends as social Darwinism on pre-war thinking and attempts to shape national identities towards conflict. ³⁶ There has been at least one other attempt to ask a different question as to war origins. In an original work, William Mulligan has suggested that a better issue to examine is why the large and growing peace movements were unable to restrain the dogs of war in 1914. This is an innovative approach and one that suggests that more work could be done on this topic. ³⁷

By the turn of the last century, the basic arguments and interpretations seemed firmly in place. However, before we turn to the most recent attempts to deal with the origins of the war, it is necessary to examine the large amount of scholarship that deals with the context for the matter. This writing in many cases was based on and hence provided support for the interpretations outlined above. In other cases, it was subversive and provided the basis for alternative approaches to the outbreak of the war. Using the traditional framework, let us first turn our attention to the issue of arms races. Here we are particularly fortunate to have two very good recent books that cover the topic. The best of these is that by David Stevenson, which, based on a wide range of primary material, demonstrated the inter-connected nature of the arms races, showing how it was not just the great powers but also the smaller states who attempted to gain a military edge on potential opponents. This much was in line with the syntheses of the 1930s, but Stevenson’s conclusion was that armaments and technological advances themselves were subsidiary to the political decisions when it came to the origins of the war. ³⁸ This view was largely shared by David Herrmann, whose book on a similar topic explicitly concerned itself with whether increased spending on armaments led to the outbreak of war, although he put more emphasis on the de-stabilizing nature of, in particular, the post-1912 arms races, perhaps because he does not appreciate the importance accorded both fortifications and defensive armaments in military budgets. ³⁹ While both of these books concentrated on Europe, Herrmann’s had the additional value of considering the impact of the Russo-Japanese War on the military balance in Europe, contending that the weakening of Russia made the balance of power much less secure.

The case of the military readiness of the Tsarist state had long been ignored, until the mid-1970s, a victim of the simplistic explanation that the Russian army had been defeated in the First World War because its soldiers lacked munitions due to the incompetence of the Romanov regime. This facile approach was exploded when Norman Stone, then at Cambridge, later at Oxford, and at present at Bilkent University, published his study on the Eastern Front. ⁴⁰ Stone demonstrated that, while the Russian army experienced shortages of materiel, their shortfalls were similar to those experienced by other belligerents and that the purely military component of the Russian wartime economy functioned effectively. Nearly twenty years later, Peter Gatrell reinforced this approach. He demonstrated that the Russian government pursued a massive rearmament programme after the Russo-Japanese war in order to maintain the Tsarist state as a great power, something seemingly doubtful after the disasters of 1904–05. ⁴¹ This programme was a success, as Stone contended, but it distorted the Russian economy to such a state that, when exposed to the stresses of war, the general economy collapsed leading to eventual revolution.

Some work has been done on the pre-war economic preparations of the other great powers. For the most part they can be followed in the works of Stevenson and Herrmann, and there is an excellent survey in the first volume of Hew Strachan’s The First World War. ⁴² Only France has had an examination comparable to Gatrell’s study of Russia. ⁴³ On the other hand, there has been considerable work done on the war-time economies of all of the belligerents and much can be gleaned about the pre-1914 situation by an examination of the starting points found in these studies. ⁴⁴ Far more study has been made of the cost of economic preparedness. This is a topic of substantial interest to political scientists, since evaluations of the comparative strengths of the belligerents play a central role in their theories of why wars occur (and whether the participants should rationally have become involved). Such analysis often strays into the realm of subordinating political reality to theory, to the detriment of understanding the dynamics that drove spending. ⁴⁵ Much more interesting is the contention that the cost of arms races put such a strain on domestic taxes that, in particular, Germany found itself unable to spend as much on military matters as its strategic position suggested was necessary, something that provides a variant on the issue of the Primat der Innenpolitik. ⁴⁶

Few topics have experienced as much recent examination as war plans. Since the existence of war plans, with their timetables and implicit impact on decisions for war, are central to an understanding of decision-making, an examination of them is crucial to any discussion of the origins of the war. ⁴⁷ An early attempt to deal comparatively with the subject was a collection published in 1979. ⁴⁸ While useful, this study was patchy and failed to deal with a number of issues. However, two important contributions in this book were made by L. C. F. Turner, one on the Schlieffen Plan; the other on Russia’s mobilization in 1914. It is these two topics which have been, in the first case, the subject of much debate and, in the second case, the subject of substantial amplification and clarification. Turner’s Schlieffen Plan was the traditional one, wherein the plan devised by the German General Staff, under the leadership of Alfred von Schlieffen, concentrated its efforts on the right wing of the German Army and forced its way through Belgium and Luxemburg in an attempt to outflank the French forces. Once this had been done, and the French had been defeated, the German army would then turn its attention to defending its eastern flank against the slowly mobilizing Russians. ⁴⁹ This interpretation was challenged by Terence Zuber, who asserted that there was no ‘Schlieffen Plan’, and that the myth of one had been used by German generals to account for their failure in 1914. ⁵⁰ This radical assertion was opposed by a number of critics, who showed that Zuber’s interpretation was based on a narrow base of documentation and that, whatever the German operations in 1914 should be called, the traditional view held true. ⁵¹

As to Russia, we owe a good deal to the work of Bruce Menning. His work has shown that the complexity of modern war before 1914 and the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War shaped Russia’s war plans. ⁵² A great deal of work done on the Russian army underlines that its problems were the sort that affected the Tsarist state generally: the early modern style of government which was reflected in the promotion system, the awarding of position and the command structure of the armed forces was not adequate to the needs of modern warfare. ⁵³ Officers who did not attain the requisite standards of professionalism still reached positions of high command. The result was war planning that was both incomplete and uncertain as to its goals. When war broke out, Russia’s early actions condemned her to an inferior position and a general lack of success. ⁵⁴

Less new work has emerged with regard to the French war plans. The basic outline – that the French planned on taking the offensive along the German frontier upon the declaration of war and that the means of doing so had been developed in a number of iterations – has remained constant. The key work done more recently is that of Robert Doughty, who has shown that Poincaré overruled attempts by his military men to take any action that might destroy the Anglo-French entente and might undermine his attempts to convert the Anglo-French diplomatic entente into a full-blown military alliance. Further, the French commander-in-chief designate, General Joseph Joffre, constructed French war plans with an eye to fulfilling the terms of France’s alliance with Russia and under the assumption of a short war. ⁵⁵ The issue of the significance of the Anglo-French relationship has been at the centre of some recent looks at French planning for war, again with the conclusion that politics triumphed over military desires and that traditional animosity between the two countries was an important impediment in pre-war planning. ⁵⁶

As for the British, in what might be called the received version of British defence policy before 1914, the British army, upon recovering from the debacle of the Boer War, transformed itself. Driven by a desire to emulate the best European models, a General Staff was created to give the army intellectual rigour. ⁵⁷ The leading figures within the military establishment pushed for Britain to create a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) designed to fight on the Continent. On the other hand, the Royal Navy (RN), already the world’s dominant navy, underwent no such transformation. Instead, driven by technological imperatives and unwilling to create the equivalent of the army’s general staff, the RN concentrated on creating a battle fleet that could defeat the increasing naval threat posed by Imperial Germany and had secondary plans to land troops on the Continent for amphibious raids. ⁵⁸ There was continual tension between the army’s plans and those of the RN, something which the politicians were loath to tackle. However, in 1911, the Moroccan crisis between France and Germany forced a decision. At a meeting of the Cabinet’s Committee on Imperial Defence (CID), the army won a decisive policy victory. It was decided that, in case of war, a BEF would be dispatched to the Continent. The RN’s presentation at the meeting was incoherent, and, as a result, major changes to it were instituted, including installing a new political head (Winston Churchill), the creation of a naval planning body and major personnel shuffles. The RN’s war plans concentrated on defeating the German fleet in a pitched battle in the North Sea. When the First World War broke out, the received version continued, after some hesitation the BEF went to the Continent. The RN waited for the German High Seas fleet to emerge from harbour. When it did not, the RN swept up the elements of the German fleet that were at sea, instituted a blockade of Germany and waited for the battle of Jutland.

This interpretation has been challenged on a number of fronts. The ‘victory’ of the Continentalists at the August meeting has been shown to be illusory. Instead, it fomented a revolt in the ruling Liberal party against the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey. The despatch of the BEF to the Continent did not constitute an automatic response to war but remained very much a political decision to be taken in a crisis itself, as the events of August 1914 showed. ⁵⁹ On the naval side, the past generation has seen Marder’s synthesis collapse. On the one hand, it has been shown that the technological impulse of the RN was towards battle cruisers, rather than battleships, as the former were seen as the key element for a policy of global defence. Rather than the RN being concentrated in European waters to meet a German threat, the redistribution of the fleet was based on the new technologies that permitted the fleet to be concentrated at key points to be despatched against threats from anywhere (including Britain’s putative friends, Russia and France). ⁶⁰

The remainder of Marder’s edifice (and a great deal more of the existing studies of pre-war British planning) have been toppled by Nicholas Lambert’s recent Planning Armageddon. ⁶¹ Lambert shows that the RN had developed a highly sophisticated war plan based on exerting pressure on the globalized economy that had been created in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Admiralty’s war plans, far from existing only in the head of Admiral Sir John (‘Jacky’) Fisher, the eccentric genius who was the RN’s First Sea Lord for much of this time, were carefully worked out by a wide range of experts drawn from within the RN itself and co-opted from the City of London. Utilizing British sea power, along with control of the global communications network (cable and radio), merchant shipping and the international banking system, the RN planned on shattering the global economy. By such means, Germany would be rapidly brought to its knees by means of systematic economic pressure made possible by naval power. ⁶² This, rather than the received version outlined above, was the RN’s – and Great Britain’s – true intention should a war with Germany occur.

Lambert makes it clear that this version of economic warfare was both actually known to and approved by most of the senior politicians within the Cabinet before 1914 (contrary to their post-war memories), but they did not wish to make such a policy public because it was fraught with political difficulties best avoided until they had to be faced in time of war. When war broke out, the Admiralty immediately instituted its policy of economic warfare, and immediately the difficulties became apparent. British financiers and traders were the collateral damage of the Admiralty’s economic warfare Armageddon, and they put pressure on the government (mediated through the Board of Trade) to abort the policy, and were supported in this desire by the British Treasury, which feared a collapse of the pound sterling along with the global economy. ⁶³ Neutral governments, particularly that of the United States, joined in the clamour, leading the British Foreign Office (concerned with international law and looking for the support of neutrals in the war itself) to join in the lobbying. The result was that economic warfare was abandoned, and instead an ad hoc policy of blockade came into existence in the autumn of 1914.

The challenge to Marder’s orthodoxy has not gone uncontested. Matthew Seligmann has contended that the German threat, in the form of armed merchantmen, was the basis for the development of the battle cruiser. ⁶⁴ This interpretation seems doubtful even without regard to the narrow band of archival material that underpins Seligmann’s work. Given both that Germany had so few armed merchantmen and that any of them at sea during hostilities would be unable to return to any German port for re-provisioning (due to the superiority of the RN in the North Sea) and would be interned in any neutral port, it seems unlikely that the British would have spent substantial sums in a time of fiscal restraint to deal with such a minuscule threat (or taken the difficult political steps that increasing tax revenue would have required). ⁶⁵ Another recent work has returned us to much of the Marderite interpretation with regard to its emphasis on the German threat and the planning for combined operations, but adding substantial nuance with regard to strategic thinking within the Admiralty itself. ⁶⁶ Both of these books analyse the operational level and, particularly the latter, show that there were many different strands of thought within the RN. However, in my view, neither sees the larger political, economic and financial picture so perfectly limned in Planning Armageddon and are unlikely to upset the revisionist view established by Sumida and Lambert.

More interesting (and likely of wider interest and greater influence) is the consideration of the Anglo-German naval race from the perspective of the ‘cultural turn’ as advanced by Jan Rüger. ⁶⁷ His study looks at what might be thought of as the ‘theatre’ of the naval race, showing how this played into the public perception of events. It is thus not only part of the tendency towards a study of mentalité discussed above but also a rare example of the examination of aspects such as memory and mourning that have been used with such great effect when discussing the war itself. ⁶⁸ The only difficulty with such an approach is that it can cause readers to forget that such things as navies were built with a concrete purpose; and that ‘theatre’ was deemed necessary only to maintain public support for the expenditure incurred.

Before returning to the newest general studies on the outbreak of the war, it is necessary to consider the recent work on the relations between what were going to become the belligerents. Perhaps more than any other country, it is Turkey’s decision to join the conflict and its role in pre-war diplomacy that has seen the most advances. Long dismissed as the ‘sick man of Europe’, recent studies have shown that the Ottoman Empire was not the plaything of the Great Powers. Several new books are of particular interest. Mustafa Aksakal has shown that the Ottoman Empire’s foreign policy before the First World War was driven by a desire to create stability while the process of regeneration and reform of that tottering empire was undertaken. ⁶⁹ There were contending elements in the Empire as to how this should be achieved. Some believed that Constantinople should remain neutral in the war, while others believed that a German alliance would ensure stability and, perhaps, allow the Empire to get some measure of revenge for the humiliations imposed upon them by both the Balkan Wars and the cavalier treatment generally accorded to the Ottoman Empire by the great powers. In all instances, however, Aksakal makes clear that the decision for war was driven by purely Ottoman interests and that Constantinople drove a hard bargain for its participation.

Two complementary books highlight the relationship between the Ottoman and Russian Empires. Michael Reynolds outlines the ‘clash’ of these two bodies in the period from 1908 to 1918. ⁷⁰ By choosing a time period that both pre-dates the First World War and brings us to the collapse of both empires, he makes evident how the relationship between Constantinople and St Petersburg was separate from and yet linked to those between the great powers generally. By so doing (ignoring his valuable account of the Russo-Turkish front in the First World War, which is of considerable interest), Reynolds throws substantial light both on Turkish and Russian policy before the war. He agrees with Aksakal as to the independence of Ottoman actions, but contends that the Russian factor was more important that purely Balkan matters. His work also provides a different context for Russian policy. Reynolds sees that the quarrels between the Ottoman Empire and Russia over the former’s eastern borders and the fate of the Caucasian region generally led to a division of Russia’s efforts and a form of what has famously been called ‘imperial overstretch’, to Russia’s detriment.

The theme of Russo-Turkish antagonism forms the stuff of Sean McMeekin’s controversial examination of Russia’s entry into the conflict of 1914. ⁷¹ Somewhat misleadingly named the ‘Russian origins of the First World War’ (the war begins on p. 75 and the rest of the book deals with the wartime), McMeekin deals primarily with what he sees as Russia’s efforts to dismember the Ottoman Empire. With respect to this topic, he largely draws a similar picture, although in a belligerent and contentious style, to that of Reynolds. With respect to the origins of the war, however, McMeekin blames Russia. He contends that Russia’s long-standing foreign policy goals were to destroy the Ottoman Empire and to take Constantinople and the Straits. Beginning with these assumptions (views, incidentally, held by the bulk of foreign observers long before 1914), he argues that the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazonov, deliberately transformed a third Balkan war into a wider conflict by misleading his allies (Grey is portrayed as naïve, verging on incompetent) during the July crisis (while hiding Russia’s intentions from the Germans) and subsequently extorting the acceptance of wide-ranging war aims from Britain and France. This is an arresting thesis, but McMeekin’s discussion of the July crisis, in which he portrays the British as being gulled by Sazonov, is not convincing. First, the British were quite aware of what Russia was doing, but unable to convince St Petersburg not to mobilize. Second, Sazonov (and the French) were aware that Britain’s commitment to the war was contingent on politics and that striking the first blow (or appearing to have done so) would alienate Liberal opinion in Britain and likely keep London out of the war.

This renewed interest in Russia reflects a number of things, including the increased access to archives long-denied to foreigners under the Soviet regime. A better understanding of Tsarist foreign policy has been made possible, although the basic position laid down by Lieven has not been altered significantly. Particularly important are two works, one by David McDonald and the other by Marina Soroka. ⁷² In the former, McDonald outlines the problems inherent in the Tsarist governmental system when it came to foreign policy. With the Tsar’s ministers responsible only to the sovereign, each pursued his own policies and goals, often at odds with the aims of their fellow ministers. This lack of coordination within the government itself was evident during the Bosnian crisis of 1908–09, when the Russian foreign minister, Alexander Izvolskii, attempted a diplomatic coup without consulting the other ministers, leading to Russia’s humiliating backdown. This resulted in what McDonald refers to as ‘united government’, in which, under the leadership of Peter Stolypin, Nicholas II was forced to work in a more-or-less systematic fashion with his ministers. This lasted until Stolypin’s assassination in 1911, after which Nicholas attempted to subvert the idea of collective responsibility by means of appointments of nonentities and reactionaries to key ministerial posts.

Further underlining the intensely personal (and chaotic) nature of the Russian government is Soroka’s biography of the last Tsarist ambassador to Britain, Count Alexander Benckendorff. She makes clear that Benckendorff, whose position in society (he was related to a large number of people within both the Russian and foreign governments) ensured that his voice would always be heard in determining Russian foreign policy, far from being a subordinate of either Izvolskii or his successor, Sergei Sazonov, was at least their equal and never hesitated to lecture them both (Izvolskii more successfully than Sazonov) on the proper course for St Petersburg to follow. That course was an English one, and Soroka is clear that Benckendorff wished Russia to follow the developmental (both economic and constitutional) path laid down by the British. His goal was for the Tsarist state to transform itself into a powerful, modern liberal state: for this to happen, Benckendorff insisted in the primacy of maintaining a strong Anglo-Russian relationship above all other foreign policy considerations. Again, in both books, the importance of the individual is paramount as Lieven had argued before.

This emphasis on Russia has found its counterpart in studies of British foreign policy. The basic analysis of British policy under the last Liberal government was set down in 1977. A comprehensive edited book on Grey’s foreign policy created a framework in which it was argued that Britain moved gradually out of a non-aligned position (isolation, splendid or otherwise, was never a British policy), driven by the need to counter the threat posed by Germany. ⁷³ This emphasis on Anglo-German relations and Britain’s relations with the Continent likely was influenced by the experiences of two world wars and the contemporary debate in the 1960s and 1970s about whether Britain’s future lay with what was to become the European Union, although the contributions were of consistently high quality. The emphasis was also determined by the fact that by the late 1970s, the British Empire was nearly at an end, and that pre-1914 staple, the defence of a global empire, had been replaced by the Eurocentrism of NATO.

However important such concerns were to the zeitgeist of the 1970s, they were not so before 1914. At that time, concerns about empire and imperial defence were the staples of British strategic foreign policy, and in them, Russia loomed large. ⁷⁴ Keith Wilson was the first to insist on what might be called the Primat Russlands. He argued, in various venues and with differing emphases, that Britain had gone to war in 1914 in order to maintain the Anglo-Russian Convention and thus to ensure the safety of the British Empire. ⁷⁵ Coupled with this was his assertion that an image of a hostile and menacing Germany was ‘invented’ in order to enable British policy-makers to feel relevant in a period of national decline. Neither of these ideas became widely accepted, but the view that Russia was at least as great a threat globally to Britain before 1914 as was Germany was effectively argued subsequently. ⁷⁶ The emphasis on the importance of Britain’s global position and how it affected London’s European policy was reinforced by Thomas Otte’s deeply impressive analysis of British policy in China. ⁷⁷

Subsequent work has acted as a further corrosive to the established idea that Europe was divided into two hostile camps prior to 1914, in one in which Britain was firmly on the side of Russia and France, and completely hostile to Germany. ⁷⁸ What has emerged instead is that the pre-1914 alignments were fluid. The Anglo-Russian Convention was made possible only because of the Russian willingness to compromise with Britain in the aftermath of the disasters of the Russo-Japanese War. By 1914, Russia had recovered generally: her economy was flourishing and the Great Programme of rearmament was in place. As a consequence, Russian foreign policy was growing more assertive. The Anglo-Russian Convention was increasingly unpopular politically for Grey and indications were that its renegotiation in 1914 would be difficult if not impossible. With the Anglo-German naval race and its attendant tensions effectively resolved in 1912 when Berlin decided that its limited defence budget was best spent augmenting the army to deal with Russia’s Great Programme and France’s institution of a three-year conscription law rather than on pursuing the chimera of naval supremacy (or even equality) with Britain, the stage was set for a possible Anglo-German rapprochement. ⁷⁹ Indeed, in the summer of 1914, Grey had authorized his private secretary at the Foreign Office, Sir William Tyrrell to explore unofficially the possibility of an Anglo-German rapprochement, an initiative which was scuppered by the outbreak of war. ⁸⁰ What this abortive mission underlines is that analyses based on the assumed permanence (and even existence) of two opposing power blocs in Europe rest on shifting sand.

With such matters in mind, let us turn to several new books dealing with the outbreak of war. The first is Sean McMeekin’s examination of the July crisis. ⁸¹ This is a much more careful and less contentious book than his earlier examination of Russian policy before the war. After a quick look at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the book is divided into two principal sections: the first outlines the ‘reactions’ in the major capitals to the events at Sarajevo; the second is the ‘countdown’ (from 5 July to 17 July in three chapters; day-by-day in subsequent ones) to the outbreak of war. His analysis is based mostly on published sources (with the exception of the Russian archival material that was used in his earlier work) and condemnatory of all of the Great Powers. McMeekin has taken on Schmidt’s contention that the French gave strong support to the Russians during the July crisis (although without offering any new evidence) and shares the views of those like Williamson that Austria-Hungary was determined on war, but underlines the important role played by the Hungarian prime minister, Istvan Tisza, in shaping how this end was to be achieved. The German Chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg is seen as a diplomatic blunderer, who foolishly agreed to the famous ‘blank cheque’ and subsequently failed to appreciate the responsibility this involved.

As might be expected, McMeekin saves the largest dose of vitriol for the two villains of his earlier book, Sazonov and Grey. He repeats, although less vehemently, his contention that Sazonov was duplicitous in his policy and primed Serbia to go to war while hiding Russia’s preparations from both friends and foes. McMeekin still sees Grey as bumblingly ineffectual, an argument that would be untenable if he had any awareness both of Grey’s political position and how the British foreign secretary’s policy in 1914 derived from the actions that he had taken in the two previous Balkan wars. McMeekin is unstinting in allotting responsibility for the war. The assassins were responsible for providing the events; the Serbian government was responsible for not making any attempt to check (indeed some elements directly supported) such terrorist activities. The Austro-Hungarian government was determined to wage war against Serbia – the assassination provided only the required pretext. The German issuance of the ‘blank cheque’ was foolish, and this fundamental error was compounded by diplomatic blundering during the July crisis itself. This aside, Berchtold is not made responsible for what McMeekin sees as the fundamental action – Russia’s decision to mobilize on 29 July – that converted a potential Balkan war into a general war. This action McMeekin attributes to Sazonov: and this, he contends marked the ‘decision for a European war’. ⁸² This argument, to contend that preparing to defend oneself (or one’s interests) in the face of a crisis is equivalent to throwing the first punch, is not one that I find convincing.

A very different book is Margaret MacMillan’s The War that Ended Peace. ⁸³ This is not a detailed account of the July crisis, but an examination of the ‘road to 1914’. MacMillan, whose earlier study of the Paris Peace Conference was widely acclaimed, has attempted to place the events of 1914 in the wider context of European society, culture and international relations from 1900 to 1914. ⁸⁴ This is a beautifully written book that covers many bases. The foreign policies of Britain and Germany take centre stage, with chapters that outline the received version of both states’ own policies and the points of friction – the Anglo-German naval race is prominent – between them. There are chapters on Joll’s unspoken assumptions, peace movements, conceptions of future wars and war plans. The usual diplomatic suspects in the run up to war, the two Moroccan crises and the two Balkan wars, are dissected nicely. In a book of nearly 650 pages of text, the examination of the assassination at Sarajevo begins on p. 544, something that underlines MacMillan’s goal of taking a longer temporal look at the outbreak of the conflict. She equivocates on the issue of responsibility: ‘Perhaps the most we can hope for is to understand as best we can those individuals, who had to make the choices between war and peace, and their strengths and weaknesses, their loves, hatreds and biases’ she concludes, but then contends that these same figures can be condemned for their ‘lack of imagination in not seeing how destructive’ any war could be and ‘lack of courage’ for not opposing those who argued that war was the only alternative. ⁸⁵ MacMillan’s book is not one that professional historians will find advances their understanding of the subject – nor is it intended to do so. It is based on a wide range of published sources, informed by a good historical sense and certain to find a wide audience among the educated public. This is the book for anyone who wants an informed and readable introduction to the subject.

A similarly wide-ranging work, but aimed at a more scholarly audience and based on a much wider range of documentation, is Christopher Clark’s widely praised The Sleepwalkers. ⁸⁶ In many ways this is a model of historical enquiry. It is divided into three parts: ‘Roads to Sarajevo’, ‘One Continent Divided’ and ‘Crisis’. Unlike MacMillan’s, Clark’s book is essentially about power politics. The first section outlines the Balkan scene in the years before 1914, making clear the interests and main players involved and how these circumstances affected the reactions of, in particular, the Austro-Hungarian elites. The second part steps back in time and is, in effect, a history of the international scene – alliances, elites, crises, public opinion and the like – from 1887 to the First World War. This is a well-informed, highly-nuanced section, especially good on the German-speaking countries, as one might expect from Clark whose particular expertise is Prussia and Wilhelm II. ⁸⁷ While he rejects the idea that formation of the ‘Triple Entente’ in 1907 necessarily led to war, Clark does not reject (indeed accepts) the idea that after that date Europe was divided into two power blocs and also largely parrots Wilson’s concept of the ‘invention’ of the German threat.

The final portion of his book begins with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and ends with the outbreak of war. It is very well done. He outlines the Sarajevo event itself, proceeds to discuss the reception of the event, the Austrian ultimatum, the French mission to Russia and the diplomatic twists and turns before the first shots were fired. Clark sees the French support for Russia in its proper context, that is, not as something urging St Petersburg to go to war, but as an attempt to ensure the solidarity of the Franco-Russian alliance while assuring the British that, if a conflict broke out, it was not Russia or France that caused it (thus straddling successfully the positions of Keiger and Schmidt). On the British decision to go to war, Clark accepts the view put forward in the second edition of Steiner’s book and in the works by Neilson and Otte, namely that Britain’s policy was both a global and a European one: ‘British intervention on the side of the Entente offered a means both of appeasing and tethering Russia and of opposing and containing Germany’. ⁸⁸

It is on the matter of responsibility that Clark’s book disappoints. In his conclusion, he contends that to search for blame comes ‘with built-in assumptions’, including making a judgement on who was right and who was wrong and to see the ‘actions of decision-makers as planned and driven by a coherent intention’. ⁸⁹ This, to my mind, is to conflate ‘guilt’ and ‘responsibility’. While it can be plausibly argued that all the actors in the July crisis had their own motives, each generated by differing perceptions of events and historical contexts (thus making the apportioning of ‘guilt’, presupposing shared values and perspectives, near impossible), that is quite different from saying that ‘responsibility’ cannot be apportioned. The fact that, for whatever reasons, Austria-Hungary was prepared to go war (and did so) and that Berlin was prepared to support Vienna (and did so), means that their responsibility for the war seems undeniable.

Thomas Otte’s magisterial examination of the July crisis, which is about to be published, speaks directly to this issue. ⁹⁰ It is impossible to do justice to his work in the space given. It is sufficient here simply to outline its approach, the bases upon which it rests and to mention the conclusions of what surely will be the definitive account of the July crisis for the foreseeable future. The structure of the book is straightforward: it begins with the events at Sarajevo and then takes the reader day-by-day throughout July to the outbreak of the war. Unlike any of the books discussed above (which are to a greater or lesser extent works of synthesis), it is based almost entirely on documentary sources, while being informed by and engaging with the very best secondary literature in (among others) English, French, German, Italian and Russian. The documentary sources – both governmental and private papers – are similarly polyglot and multi-archival. The depth of Otte’s research in the primary materials is unique. He has found many previously unknown documents and has seen the deeper significance of the material concerning one state by viewing it in the context of material pertaining to other states. As might be expected of someone with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the foreign-policy-making elites of all the major powers (he is particularly good on the British), Otte is especially adept at outlining the backgrounds and unspoken assumptions of the various decision-makers, showing how they affected the policies adopted in 1914. ⁹¹

Otte’s conclusions are firm and judicial. He rejects the idea that the Powers ‘slithered’ into war in 1914. He cuts the ground out from under a number of general interpretations of the sort mentioned above. He is firm that such abstracts as the ‘alliance system’ and the ‘balance of power’ did not lead to war. Nor, he contends, did states somehow push their peoples into an acceptance of conflict. Instead, he sees individuals, working within the generally shared norms and mechanisms for dealing with international crises, as the key to understanding why a world war emerged from a local Balkan conflict. The actions of the decision-makers were decisive. War was not inevitable, for, as Otte shows on a number of occasions, it could have been avoided had slightly different decisions been taken. Military factors (including war plans) were not significant determinants of policy except perhaps in the last few days of July. Instead, what he sees as central was the poor quality of decision-making (itself partly a derivative of incoherent governmental structures), particularly in Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia. A contributing factor for all of the powers’ decisions (except for Britain) was a concern that to back down would demonstrate weakness, something fatal to the status of a great power. A crucial issue for Otte at a systemic level is that how to manage the decline of Austria-Hungary had not been worked out by the other powers. This generated instability in the same fashion that the decay of the Ottoman Empire (something subsumed under the sobriquet of the Eastern Question) had in the nineteenth century.

Otte rejects the positions taken by McMeekin in the Russian Origins book and by Clark in Sleepwalkers. Russia’s policy, Otte argues, cannot be reduced to St Petersburg’s long-term concern about the Ottoman Empire, and Sazonov’s policy was an attempt – albeit a failed one – to employ simultaneously deterrence and diplomacy rather than a Machiavellian attempt to deceive both his allies and enemies. Otte likewise finds Clark’s unwillingness to attach blame to the actions of any of the individuals (and states) as an unacceptable reluctance to make judgements. For Otte, Austria-Hungary and Germany were guilty of supreme recklessness, while France and Russia were unwilling (or unable) to work to defuse the situation. Only Grey, here seen as a ‘man of action’ as opposed to McMeekin’s feckless fisherman, emerges largely unscathed. The foreign secretary’s attempts to use the accepted international means of dealing with such crises proved inadequate to avert the catastrophe but this was not due to his own failings but rather to the Austro-Hungarian and German willingness to risk war.

What sort of conclusion can we reach about the state of writing about the First World War and where is there room for future development? First, it is easy to agree with a recent survey that no ‘identity of opinion’ about the causes of the war is likely. ⁹² However, what is evident is that we have a level of analysis and detail that enrich our understanding of what occurred. All of the major studies above also have restored the primacy of agency (the actions of people) over the two sets of theoretical models, the first set generated by historians in the 1920s and 1930s and the second created by political scientists in the 1960s and 1970s. ⁹³ While individuals operated in contexts, it was their decisions that caused events to occur. To believe otherwise would be to impart a certain air of inevitability to the events of 1914.

As to whither now, this returns us to Simms’s contention of the centrality of Germany for understanding European affairs. The accounts above, with the exception of Otte, are affected by what might be termed the teleology of 1914. That is, they are written with an eye on the outbreak of war in 1914. Thus, all the events are interpreted only as they pertain or lead to the coming conflict, eliminating any consideration of other options that policy-makers could have taken. This means at least two things: that they are inevitably German-centred and that the other possibilities of the era are ignored. In short, they conflate the study of the relations between and among the great powers with the study of the origins of the war. This unconscious bias is particularly noticeable when Britain’s role in the July crisis is considered. Britain’s position as a global, not just a European power, meant that events were seen in a different light – Britain’s responses to them had to be considered in an imperial context. Only when historians begin to look at European power politics before 1914 without seeing them as prefiguring an inevitable war and without being concerned primarily with Germany, are we likely to create an understanding of the origins of the war that differs greatly from the perspective we now enjoy.