Uneven and combined development and the Anglo-German prelude to World War I 1

Introduction

In recent years a burgeoning literature has emerged regarding the application of Leon Trotsky’s concept of ‘uneven and combined development’ (U&CD) to the discipline of International Relations. Faced with the question of why Russian development had skewed so markedly from the uniform trajectory of capitalist development that Marx had anticipated, Trotsky turned to U&CD as a way of understanding the singularity of the Russian experience. ² Building from Justin Rosenberg’s (1996, 2006) astute extension of the explanatory parameters of the concept, scholars have attempted to utilize Trotsky’s ideas in order to overcome the perceived inability of classical social theory to encompass a dynamic concept of the ‘international’ within its explanatory scope. By broadening the reach of Trotsky’s original use of the concept, Rosenberg (2006) has sought to establish U&CD as a trans-historic property of human social development.

International Relations scholarship has been hamstrung by a long-standing level-of-analysis problematic (Singer, 1961). Neo-Realist scholars have conjured the dominant theorization of the ‘international’, ³ but have achieved their focus by trivializing the influence of domestic political processes upon global politics. Historical materialist accounts, by contrast, have stressed the importance of social forces, engendered by production relations, as key determinants of world politics. Yet they have so far failed to adequately integrate interstate dynamics within critical theories of the international relations of capitalist modernity. ⁴ Consequently, Rosenberg and others have called for scholars to overcome the dichotomy between the national and the international in a manner that challenges the Realist reification of international relations.

By positing U&CD as the ontological basis of the ‘international’, suggests Rosenberg (2006: 312), we can overcome both the ahistorical reification of international relations as a distinct social realm governed by a timeless law of anarchy (neo-Realism), and the crude domestic reductionism that eschews the significance of Realpolitik (classical social theory). Rosenberg hopes that by doing so we can establish the basis for a properly historical and holistic analysis of the full spectrum of international relations, one that captures the connectivity between societal and inter-societal dynamics.

Despite the substantial amount of theoretical debate that has occurred regarding Trotsky’s ideas and their application to IR (Allinson and Anievas, 2009; Ashman, 2009; Callinicos and Rosenberg, 2008; Rosenberg, 2006), there has been little application of the concept to comparative inquiry. Although U&CD has been offered as an alternative to Realist analyses of international relations, it has yet to be tested against alternative historical materialist approaches attempting to solve similar problems. From a historical materialist perspective, the ‘World Systems Approach’ (WSA) represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to offer a comprehensive account of change and continuity in IR. In particular, Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver (1999: 1–37) have attempted to refine WSA by taking into consideration the mutually constitutive relationship between social forces, states and the world capitalist system.

The dearth of empirical analysis informed by theoretical considerations of U&CD has meant that the interstices between U&CD as a conceptual abstraction and historically specific social force strategies have so far remained unexplored. With this in mind, therefore, my intention here is to explore empirically the analytical potential of U&CD as an alternative to existing frameworks of analysis within IR. This article will begin with a critical engagement with Beverly Silver’s (2003) Forces of Labour: Workers’ Movements and Globalization since 1870. Particular attention will be paid to her treatment of the relationship between pre-war European labour movements, the Great Depression as a global crisis of capitalism and the outbreak of World War I.

The argument will then move to an investigation of the pre-war period, focusing upon British and German labour movements within the context of capitalist development. My analysis will demonstrate the relationship between U&CD, social force strategies and interstate rivalries. I will propose that Silver’s analysis of labour movements and their relation to international politics suffers from a debilitating degree of historical insensitivity. Consequently, her analysis severely overstates the causal uniformity imparted onto states, and the class struggles within them, by the crisis tendencies within the capitalist world system. Silver’s inability to account for the diverse patterns of European development leads her towards erroneous conclusions regarding the degree to which there is a causal relation between labour unrest and interstate competition.

Building from the conclusions of the historical investigation, I will then expound the potential of U&CD as an alternative explanatory mechanism to existing historical materialist and Realist approaches to understanding the emergence of Anglo-German rivalry prior to World War I. In order to understand the preconditions of World War I, I will suggest, we must look towards differential trajectories of capitalist development within Europe. The specific path of German late development, rather than the notion of an overall systemic challenge to British hegemony, is of particular importance for understanding the prelude to World War I. By way of conclusion, I will suggest that U&CD enhances our ability to capture the fundamental interactivity of capitalist development, class practices and statecraft, enabling us to embed interstate relations within developmental dynamics.

World systems analysis, labour movements and international relations: Beverly Silver’s account

Beverly Silver (2003) attempts to clarify the current status of labour movements by examining them within a historical framework that stretches from the late 19th century up to the present era. According to Silver, much of the scholarship on labour movement politics has been characterized by a tendency to treat the state as an independent unit. This has led to an under-appreciation of the impact of the world economy in shaping labour movements across the world. Silver’s study is therefore an attempt to move beyond the ‘comparative-historical literature’, that goes about ‘splitting’ the world labour movement in search of distinctiveness rather than ‘lumping’ the cases in search of commonalities and generalizations (Silver, 2003: 37).

Silver offers us a dynamic understanding of the relationship between states and labour movements in which labour movements are continually made and remade as the state evolves. The conceptual categories of ‘Marx-type’ and ‘Polanyi-type’ labour unrest are used by Silver as ideal-typical categories to structure the analysis. These twin concepts are framed within what Silver refers to as a ‘system-level problem’ that characterizes capitalism. This system-level problem manifests itself in the form of a fundamentally contradictory logic through which the spread of capitalism strengthens labour movements, forcing capital to make concessions to labour but provoking a crisis of profitability in doing so.

Now, let us raise some objections to Silver’s theoretical framework. In shifting the focus away from the differences between labour movements and state actors, and towards the generalities and relationships between them, Silver moves from one extreme point of focus to the other. Stressing generality, Silver leaves the constitutive role of actors within the system undifferentiated; all actors are presumed to be functionally similar. The historical process is shackled within the twin ideal-typical rhythms of Marx-type and Polanyi-type development. The only distinction made between different forms of state–labour complexes is a binary one at the systemic level; between labour movements and states in geographical areas of capitalist expansion and commodification, on the one hand, and those that are by contrast relatively decommodified, on the other. Consequently, the impact of individual and historically specific state–capital–labour relations of countries within the different Polanyian extremities is left unexplored. This amounts to a rather shallow theorization of the state, as will become clear with our subsequent empirical inquiry.

Labour unrest, interstate rivalry and the crisis of the late 19th century: The specificity of the German case

The story that Silver tells is of a general destabilization of existing social compacts in Europe towards the end of the 19th century, which created and strengthened emergent working classes, leading to widespread unrest. Inter-imperialist rivalries were fed by, and fed into, the unrest. This led to a ‘widening and deepening “vicious circle” of war and labour unrest’ (Silver, 2003: 129). The key trigger factor in the explosion of labour militancy and international conflict was the Great Depression (1873–96). An intense period of inter-capitalist competition began on a world scale, which led to substantial transformations in world-scale processes of capital accumulation. Global transformations in capital accumulation translated into deep and rapid transformations of modern labour movements, both in Western Europe and North America, as competitive pressures were transferred onto labour. By the 1890s, ‘prices started to rise faster than wages, structural unemployment became persistent and there was a trend toward a growing polarization of wealth between rich and poor’ (Silver, 2003: 113). Working-class parties emerged and demands for universal suffrage proliferated (Silver, 2003: 113). Importantly, Silver views these developments as part of a systemic challenge to British hegemony.

Silver attempts, laudably, to incorporate an analysis of labour movements into a theoretical approach that has tended to stress the centrality of hegemonic agency in altering global dynamics (Arrighi and Silver, 1999). The problem here is that the need to identify system-wide crisis tendencies leads towards a severely inadequate treatment of the nuances of labour movements. Noting national differences, Silver points to variations between the labour movements of the US, Britain and Germany. Rather than carrying her inquiry into national differences further, however, Silver unfortunately prefers to stress that all of these developments were related responses to general systemic pressures emanating from the world market. The singularity of the German experience and the unprecedented politicization of its incipient labour movement are explained as ‘the most striking example of a general process’ (Silver, 2003: 135), ensuring that the integral qualitative difference and historical significance of the German labour movement are glossed over.

By focusing upon the homogenizing impact of systemic pressures, and ignoring distinctions between states, Silver exaggerates the uniformity of the Great Depression’s impact. State formation, labour movement evolution and international relations are reduced to a simple stimulus–response interaction generated by the contradictions of capitalism. World politics and labour politics had, she suggests, already become ‘deeply intertwined’ by the eve of World War I (Silver, 2003: 139). Rulers had come to value small, easily winnable wars that served to establish social cohesion. All this leads Silver to portray the impulse to war as fundamentally ‘European’, in contrast to the idea that any single state was primarily responsible for the outbreak of conflict.

Having established the empirical grounds for her analysis, Silver (2003: 174) then articulates one of the key conclusions of her inquiry: that the re-emergence of interstate conflict in the present conjuncture will be tied to the proliferation of labour unrest. In order to challenge Silver’s claim we must examine in greater detail the processes of capitalist development attendant to the pre-war period. Can we explain the outbreak of hostility as a consequence of a widespread impetus to war arising from the crisis tendencies of global capitalism? Or do we need to understand the prelude to World War I as a consequence of the working-out of nationally specific trajectories of social development and class struggle? Turning our attention to the character of the capitalist state will assist our inquiry into these questions. I will then flesh out an alternative account of the pre-World War I milieu that emphasizes the significance of late German development within a world market dominated by Britain and characterized by ‘unevenness’.

Capitalist development and the schism between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’

As part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the privatized political powers of the feudal appropriating class were gradually transferred to the sovereign state. ⁵ The role of feudal lords was reduced to one of ‘private exploitative powers purified of public, social functions’, while the centralized power of the state increased (Wood, 1995: 39). Within capitalism, formal political functions become exclusively public therefore, and are transferred to the state. Surplus is now appropriated through the functioning of the market rather than the threat of lordly coercion. This amounts to a crucial transformation of the form in which power is exercised. Fundamentally, the ‘means of domination’ (coercive political capacity) become separated out from the ‘means of appropriation’ (the manner in which surplus is accumulated).

In contrast to the feudal productive classes, capitalist workers enjoy legal freedom. They are nonetheless subjected to the power of the capitalists, whose control over private property ensures that workers are compelled to sell their labour on the market, as this is the only path to accessing the means of production. There is, nevertheless, a coercive underpinning to capitalism: a state that guarantees the sanctity of private property.

Yet the state evades any direct implication in the exploitative relations that characterize the production process. In this sense the capitalist state enjoys a degree of relative autonomy from the production process. ⁶ The state takes on a public function and appears to belong to everyone in equal measure, a consequence of the formal separation of class power from state power. This separation manifests itself institutionally in the appearance of the state as a seemingly autonomous entity and finds further expression in ‘the separation of the individual’s relation to the state from his immediate relation to capital, in the separation of the worker into worker and citizen, in the separation of his struggle into “economic struggle” and “political struggle”’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1991: 114).

Overall, these structural changes have enormous implications for the character of class relations within capitalism. The exclusion of politics from areas of traditional involvement lends a novel quality to class struggle because ‘the struggle over appropriation appears not as a political struggle but as a battle over the terms and conditions of work’ (Wood, 1995: 44; emphasis added). This transformation in the profile of class antagonisms constitutes the ‘localization of class struggle’ (Wood, 1995: 44–45). Rather than focusing on the inherently political relationships of surplus extraction and appropriation, struggle becomes concentrated at the point of production.

Despite the magnitude of this transformation, labour struggles in capitalist societies are not exclusively confined to ‘economic’ parameters. ⁷ Class struggles within capitalism attain a more political hue when they move beyond the confines of the individual workplace and begin to engage more directly with state power, threatening the separation of the two spheres. ⁸ Nevertheless, this occurs only as a secondary moment of struggle with respect to a mature social formation, which has developed institutions that enable the state–society complex to accommodate pressures generated by capitalist social relations. In the case of a state rapidly emerging from a condition of backwardness, however, with an accelerated rate of development, the attempt to inculcate and encourage processes of capitalist development may lead to different outcomes and institutional arrangements that are less immediately able to accommodate the sorts of social antagonisms generated by capitalism.

Here we have arrived at the first signpost on our journey towards understanding the uneven texture of European development. The differentiation of the ‘political’ from the ‘economic’ or the ‘means of domination’ from the ‘means of appropriation’ must be viewed as a long-term historical process of capitalist development. ⁹ The existence of the state, however, long pre-dates the advent of capitalist social relations and, internationally, capitalist development has not been a uniform process. Crucially, therefore, capitalist development in Europe occurred at different rates and within the context of markedly different forms of state, that is, under conditions of ‘unevenness’.

This is where Trotsky’s insights regarding development become particularly significant. Trotsky (2008: 4) argued that backward countries could assimilate ‘all the material and intellectual conquests of the advanced countries’. However, this did not mean that they would attempt to replicate fully all the prior developmental stages of advanced countries. Instead, backward countries would adopt their own historically unique path of development that would proceed in a different order to that experienced by the advanced countries. Backwardness could even accord a sort of ‘privilege’ to developing countries as they would be able to adopt, almost immediately, the most advanced technologies and machinery, skipping a succession of intermediate stages in the process (Trotsky, 2008: 4). Trotsky’s first law of the historical process, unevenness, could then facilitate his second law, the law of ‘combined development’.

Combined development occurs as the backward culture, ‘under the whip of external necessity’, is induced to ‘make leaps’ (Trotsky, 2008: 5). The resultant ‘combination’ of different moments of development leads to a ‘drawing-together of the different stages of the journey, a combining of the separate steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms’ (Trotsky, 2008: 5). So, for example, while, on the one hand, we might find in the most advanced country a durable combination of contemporary forms — capitalist production relations with a relatively autonomous, liberal state — we might find in a backward country, on the other hand, a less compatible combination between contemporary and more archaic social forms — emergent capitalist social relations and a form of state that legitimizes feudal hierarchies rather than the new class forces associated with capitalism.

Uneven and combined development, therefore, enables us to account for the interactivity of international development. This interactivity is both produced by and productive of the intended and unintended effects of developmental strategies and their outcomes. Regarding capitalist development, the specific ‘combination’ experienced in a given state and its relative developmental level will have an impact upon and be impacted by, first, the manner, and, second, the outcomes of the attempt to separate the ‘means of domination’ from the ‘means of appropriation’ as part of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. With regard to the manner of the separation, we must examine the time frame of its occurrence, the external pressures through which it is contextualized (i.e. to what extent it is a relatively endogenous or exogenous process), the strategies that are employed (both by those forces who are supportive of the process and those who are resistant), and, crucially, the degree to which the state plays a role as the agent of transformation. In terms of the outcomes of the separation, we must examine the institutional forms that are resultant, the kinds of resistance that are encountered and the success or failure of classes in establishing the separation on a stable institutional basis.

Thinking in this way allows us to go beyond conventional historiography, which has been hamstrung by the inability to effectively articulate the relationship between universal and particular aspects of development. Scholars have tended either to exaggerate particularity and exceptionalism vis-a-vis general developmental outcomes or vice versa. Exemplary of this problem is the German ‘Sonderweg’ thesis. Sonderweg proponents posited a ‘special’, deviant course for German development that distinguished it from the normal European experience, accounting for German bellicosity and the rise of fascism (Blackbourn and Eley, 1984: 5–7). ¹⁰ They erroneously assumed the existence of a ‘normal’ course of development within Europe, failing to note that the British model taken to be exemplary of European development was equally distinctive to that of Germany and by no means ‘typical’.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Arno Mayer’s (1981) work generalizes the German experience into a common European pattern. Mayer locates the origins of World War I within the trans-European persistence of reactionary aristocratic forces. These forces were able to command state power, rendering foreign policy servile to their ideology of Social Darwinism and aggressive Realpolitik (1981: 8, 277–282). Mayer’s broad-brush analysis exaggerates the uniformity of European development, overplaying the primacy of aristocratic power and overlooking the crucial role that working-class movements played in shaping the different strategies of European elites.

Following Mayer, Sandra Halperin (2004: ix–23) identifies the persistence of aristocratic power across Europe as a key factor in the escalation of interstate rivalries. Regrettably, Halperin neglects integral variations relating to the development of national economies and social forces. Her claim that distinctions between the orientations and practices of European working classes were essentially negligible (Halperin, 2004: 23) is extremely dubious, as is the assertion that elite responses to working-class mobilization were practically indistinguishable. Overall, the systemic arguments proffered by Halperin, Mayer and Silver are blind to the key developmental specificities that gave rise to evolving patterns of interstate relations. In positing a relatively uniform transition from feudalism to capitalism throughout Europe, they neglect the conditioning impetus of U&CD.

U&CD allows us to counter the aforementioned analytical shortcomings by negotiating a course that simultaneously conceives of both the particular and universal elements of European capitalist development without unduly subordinating one aspect to the other. The particular course of German development was moulded by the conditioning force field of international development and the gradual universalization of capitalist social relations throughout Europe. There was no ‘typical’ form of development, only particular varieties inscribed by encompassing international pressures that were nationally differentiated according to the contours of unevenness. Comparing Britain and Germany within the context of U&CD enables us to explore the different ways that the epochal transition to capitalism has unfolded within different states, the fundamental interactivity of the attendant processes and their impact upon social relations, class practices and international relations.

From Peterloo to parliamentary party: British labour and British development

In his landmark study of the English working class, E.P. Thompson identified the period 1780–1832 as the generative epoch of the incipient proletariat (Thompson, 1964: 11). The delivery of this new social force was not easy; indeed, this industrial child emerged kicking and screaming after a painful and drawn-out period of labour. Repression was the instinctive response of the British state to the emergence of the working class. Restrictive Combination Acts were imposed in order to stifle the political tendencies of the working class, and at Peterloo, mass organization was met with mass slaughter as belligerent authorities took exception to the political aspirations of the mob (Thompson, 1964: 684). It was a highly volatile movement, in which political disaffection and industrial organization were inextricably linked.

Britain was the pioneering industrial society, isolated by its advancement, as it came to dominate the world market on the basis of industrial production. British society, transformed by the Industrial Revolution, exhibited some of the most deplorable living conditions in the slums of the new urban heartlands, and some of the sharpest inequities of wealth as the captains of industry and finance accumulated massive fortunes (Hobsbawm, 1969; Kemp, 1985). The ideal conditions for a radical revolutionary working-class movement appeared to be in evidence in a society that was sharply polarized by the first half of the 19th century.

Yet despite the apparent ripeness of social conditions, both the revolutionary threat of the British working class and the more extreme measures of state repression had passed by 1850 with the defeat of the Chartist movement. By the last third of the 19th century, the British labour movement had become thoroughly reformist in its outlook and economistic in its priorities. Unionized elements of the working class had adopted a reformist strategy of ‘labourism’ that ‘recognized the possibilities of social change within existing society’ (Saville, 1988: 14).

On the continent, in contrast, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) had sparked a process of radicalization embodied by its leadership of the Second International (Joll, 1974; Sassoon, 1997), and borne out in the electoral successes of socialist parties (Sassoon, 1997). British labour bucked the European trend with its aversion to socialism. Instead, they favoured reformism and when a permanent political expression for working-class interests finally did arrive late on the European scene, with the formation of the Labour Party in 1906 (Hunt, 1981; McKibbin, 1984; Saville, 1988), it operated strictly within the twin limits of parliamentary perimeters and piecemeal priorities. The key question that we must interrogate, therefore, is; why the British working class, the first and largest of its kind, exhibited such markedly reformist and accommodating tendencies when compared to Germany?

Let us begin with the manner in which the epochal separation of the ‘political’ from the ‘economic’ unfolded in Britain. Britain experienced an early and endogenous transition to capitalist social relations beginning in the Early Modern period. The gradual progression of land enclosure and the erosion of customary rights to land use over the preceding centuries had brought about the consolidation of exclusive private property and the emergence of agrarian capitalism (Brenner, 1985: 298–299; Wood, 2002: 97). The landlord class, with their incomes derived from capitalist farmers, established their political predominance through the extension of parliamentary power and curbed the domain of monarchical authority through the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Their means of wealth accumulation were now independent of the direct political power of the state and its military apparatus, resting instead upon the legal guarantee of private property. The emergence of agrarian capitalism in England had heralded ‘the end of the age-old “fusion” of the “economic” and the “political”, and the initial emergence of an institutional separation between state and civil society’ (Brenner, 1985: 299). This marked out a distinctively British path of socio-economic development in stark contrast to the patterns of Absolutist monarchy and feudal society evidenced on the Continent.

Building upon the prior agrarian transformation, British industrial development occurred in a distinctly endogenous manner, without the intense pressures of world market competition experienced by late-industrializing societies (Hobsbawm, 1969; Kemp, 1985). During the 18th century Britain utilized naval supremacy to capture and monopolize the export markets of other countries, destroying foreign competition in the process through war and colonization (Hobsbawm, 1969: 48). Through this process it came to constitute and dominate a world market for goods. The achievement of world market dominance, at a very early stage of industrial development, was to cocoon Britain from serious competitive pressure until the last quarter of the 19th century. Prior to World War I, the productive structures of the British economy were keenly affected by their relative exemption from international competition. ¹¹ By sheltering British firms from the need to modernize, the insulated privilege of the pioneer subsequently came to serve as a debilitation in the face of more dynamic industrial competitors leading the second Industrial Revolution.

State involvement in steering economic growth was, and remained, limited in Britain (Harvee, 1999: 481; Kemp, 1985: 17). Capitalist entrepreneurs, financed independently of the state-run banks typical of continental development, conducted their business with scant state assistance. Although the Industrial Revolution brought about enormous changes in terms of urbanization, production techniques and other facets of social life, it nevertheless occurred within an existent frame of capitalist social property relations (Cain and Hopkins, 1993; Hobsbawm, 1969; Kemp, 1985) that pre-dated the development of industrialization, limiting the degree of rupture between the old and the new. Change occurred within the limits of fundamental continuity.

The manner of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Britain had particular impacts upon developmental outcomes. Though parliamentary supremacy was by no means synonymous with democracy, it rendered the state visible, at least symbolically, as the ‘public thing’. The subordinate classes did not view the state as merely a private instrument of feudal domination, but rather as an arena of political contestation between representatives; in this sense it had a distinctively modern form. ¹²

Labour struggles in Britain were characterized by a fundamental respect for constitutional parameters (Harvee, 1999). Parliament’s function as the centre of political power enabled the ruling class to exhibit a degree of flexibility and adaptability that was unavailable to continental Absolutism. Repeatedly, parliamentary reform took the sting out of working-class radicalism with the series of Reform Acts passed throughout the 19th century (MacRaild and Martin, 2000). These Reform Acts reflected the adaptability of the British system (Daunton, 2000: 93). The impact of this course of development upon resistance strategies was such that by the mid-19th century, the working class viewed the state as a neutral institution, a situation that was unimaginable in Germany (Price, 1990; Saville, 1988).

Regarding the political strategies of the dominant social classes, the absence of a politically cohesive bourgeoisie in Britain ensured that securing the support of the working class became important for establishing political dominance in parliament and influencing policy. Of the two relatively new sources of wealth creation in Britain, finance and industry, it was financial accumulation that was most readily accepted into the normative and political framework of the aristocratic land-owning elite, while industrial and manufacturing capitalists were excluded (Cain and Hopkins, 1993). Britain’s divided bourgeoisie was a consequence of its specific developmental trajectory, characterized by the coincidence of industrial development with a pre-existing class of mercantile financiers based in the City whose sources of wealth were largely independent from those of the industrialists (Ingham, 1984: 43).

Garnering working-class support became increasingly important as the franchise was extended and industrial areas achieved parliamentary representation. Periods of working-class agitation were often met by acts of reconciliation by the middle class. After 1848 the middle class intervened far more widely and positively in working-class leisure activity (Yeo, 1981: 175–176). Ruling-class power was based upon a reluctant but increasingly substantive inclusion of labour within the political process. ¹³ Incorporation was made possible in part by the slower rhythm of capitalist development in Britain, which provided a more germane context for the piecemeal accommodation of emerging social forces. Without acute international pressures generated by relative backwardness, the requirement for a robust state-led developmental strategy was obviated and a less abrasive ‘night-watchman’ posture was enabled.

Divisions within the dominant classes ensured that British liberalism was distinctively open to, and inclusive of, the working class. This accounts for the preponderance of liberal trade union leaders, the continuity of working-class backing for the Liberal Party, and the weakness of socialist radicalism (Matthew, 1999; Price, 1990; Zollberg, 1986). Early candidates of the Independent Labour Party enjoyed minimal electoral success. The distinction between economic relations and political affairs was upheld and reinforced by the trade unions. The adherence to liberalism reflected the degree of institutional separation between what were considered ‘economic’ and ‘political’ issues in British society. Despite the early radicalism of the working classes, in the long run the problem of separating out the ‘means of domination’ from the ‘means of appropriation’ was resolved successfully in Britain. By the late 19th century the new form of social organization was institutionally embedded and socially accepted. ¹⁴

In sum, from the late 1840s on, a relatively synchronous process of state democratization and labour domestication emerged that was a consequence of Britain’s distinctive development and the insulation attendant to its status as the first industrialized country. The whip of external necessity did not bloody the back of the British state therefore, as it was Albion who brandished the whip aloft. Britain’s steady and early transition to capitalism, along with the priority of parliamentary rule, enabled a gradual evolution of the state and labour in response to sporadic class conflict.

The growing pains of German development: A hostile state and radical labour

In early 19th-century Germany, unlike Britain, there existed no real working class to speak of. ¹⁵ The embers of feudalism were still burning brightly and any observable aspects of wage labour were embedded within various pre-capitalist social structures and practices (Kocka, 1986: 287). Yet despite the absence of an organized working-class movement before the 1850s, by the eve of World War I the German labour movement had given rise to the largest and most radical mass political party in Europe, the SPD. ¹⁶ It had achieved this not through the espousal of liberal reformism, but rather through the widespread adoption of Marxist ideas that were explicitly hostile to state power and private property. How did the labour movements in Britain and Germany experience such a large divergence?

The manner of capitalist transition in Germany stands in marked contrast to the British experience. From the outset, the German state, prompted by the pressures of economic backwardness, played an active role in pushing through the reforms and legal changes necessary to lay the groundwork for capitalist development (Blackbourn, 1984; Kocka, 1986: 291). Agrarian reforms after 1807 established the framework for the advancement of agrarian capitalism. The transition was undertaken in a way that minimized the hardship for the landowners; the Junkers were able to utilize their privileged status to maintain predominance within society and to ‘boycott reforms of the state’s political constitution almost entirely’ (Schissler, 1991: 106). ¹⁷ The state played a similarly proactive function with regard to industrial development (Kemp, 1985: 90), which really gathered pace from the mid-19th century onwards (Kocka, 1986; Nolan, 1986; Wehler, 1985). State resources were employed to found large banks that provided financial support to industry.

A symptom of international unevenness, the desire to catch up with Britain’s more advanced economy under the pressures of an already-existing world market and the interstate rivalries of central Europe added urgency to the attempts of state managers to hasten the process of transformation. The rapidity of the transition in Germany was quite awesome; the economy was transformed from a largely agrarian, feudal basis in the first half of the 19th century (Kocka, 1986: 283) to the most modern industrial economy in the world as the same century drew to a close. ¹⁸ Earlier British development had created a market for German goods and had led British capital to pour into Germany, stimulating an interest to use new technology and spurring rapid industrial development in pioneering sectors such as chemical production (Kemp, 1985: 91).

Economic transformation was framed within the context of territorial and political consolidation: German late development was inscribed not only with accelerated economic transition therefore, but also with a uniquely simultaneous sovereign consolidation. Both processes were responses to the pressures of European unevenness, which were manifested in the need to enhance economic, political and military power in order to retain Germany’s relative international standing. National Unification occurred in 1871, under the direction of the Prussian state, which retained a special position within the Empire (Wehler, 1985: 54). Consequently, the overall constitutional structure of Imperial Germany was decidedly authoritarian (Kemp, 1985; Nolan, 1986; Schorske, 1983). Although universal male suffrage was introduced in 1867, it had little practical effect as the parliament could be dissolved at will by both the Emperor and Federal Council; rendering it essentially impotent (Kocka, 1986: 291; Nolan, 1981, 1986: 359).

The apex of the Imperial state consisted in an unstable unity between the aristocratic Junkers and the ascendant industrialists. These groups pursued different and at times conflicting political strategies with regard to securing their power within the emergent capitalist economy. The Junkers accepted the termination of their legal rights over the peasantry, but only in return for privileged access to, and composition of, state institutions (Lidtke, 1966: 4; Schissler, 1991). ¹⁹ The internal unevenness of German development meant that their rural power, based in land ownership, was buttressed by popular peasant support.

The growing wealth and power of the industrial bourgeoisie threatened the traditional dominance of the agrarian Junkers. These classes were, however, able to find common cause in their staunch opposition to the SPD and in support of protectionism from the late 1870s. Throughout the 1850s/60s, the Junkers had profited enormously through free trade with Britain. With increased competition from the USA and Canada, they switched to protectionism during the 1870s and successfully employed state power to pursue their interests at great cost to the rest of society (Schissler, 1991: 106). This shift brought their interests into line with the captains of German industry, who also sought protection from the state during the Depression era. The petit bourgeoisie and urban middle classes, having failed to achieve a liberal revolution in 1848, consigned themselves to a reluctant acceptance of aristocratic privilege. They did so under the bargain that the state would secure their property rights and maintain an active stance of repression towards the working class. The state ably upheld its side of the bargain throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. ²⁰

What, then, were the outcomes of this course of development within Germany? The union between banking and industrial capital and the uneasy alliance forged with Junker conservatism presented an overwhelmingly hostile state that bore down upon the working class with enormous repressive weight, serving to radicalize the labour movement. State repression alienated the working class from the state, creating an early rupture between the state and the labour movement that cast the relationship in strictly oppositional terms (Evans, 1987: 211; Katznelson, 1986: 27; Lidtke, 1966: 13). As a consequence, German workers’ struggles were, from the very beginning, explicitly political in that rather than focusing primarily upon ‘industrial’ or ‘economic’ grievances such as wage levels, they were, by necessity, involved in a political struggle for civil rights and legal freedom (Guttsman, 1981: 15). ²¹

The state-sponsored creation of large-scale banks, closely connected to industry, gave rise to huge companies that monopolized key sectors. Factory sizes were much larger than in Britain and the exercise of discipline over the workers was stronger (Kocka, 1986; Grebing, 1969; Nolan, 1981). The structure of the German industrial economy ensured that German capitalism was ‘arguably the most successful in restricting working class demands at the point of production’ through trade union restrictions and black lists (Blackbourn, 1984: 266).

The production process itself was characterized by class domination and the ‘freeing’ up of labour associated with capitalist social relations did not occur on a scale comparable to that experienced in Britain. The different paths that led from feudal society towards capitalism in Britain and Germany, delineated by U&CD, thus keenly determined working-class experiences in the two countries. In Germany, where the feudal overhang in the social relations of production was much more pronounced during the later 19th century than in Britain, workplace relations were accordingly more explicitly politicized. Industrialists, imitating the Junkers, adopted the feudal attitude of ‘master in my own house’ in their dealings with the workers (Nolan, 1986; Wehler, 1985: 45). This condition was aggravated by the onset of the Depression, which caused companies to form political organizations designed to lobby the state in order to regulate production and frustrate the aspirations of the working class (Eley, 1984: 106; Nolan, 1981: 15).

As a consequence of overbearing state authority and the continuity of Junker privilege, German liberalism was weak. It was nationalism rather than liberalism that served as the major legitimizing force of German development. German nationalism was premised upon the idea of ‘negative integration’ (Wehler, 1985: 91). ²² Bismarck utilized the national question expertly in order to disorient bourgeois-liberal opposition by cloaking the private, feudal class character of the German state with a veil of popular universality. Bismarck’s project drove a wedge between the liberals, who by and large acquiesced in the nationalist scheme (Schissler, 1991: 43), and the working class, who saw that the liberals could not be counted upon as a reliable ally. The German political system was not, therefore, subject to incremental democratization in the way that Britain’s had been, and the possibility of an allegiance between the liberals and the labour movement was foreclosed early (Zolberg, 1986).

In sum, German development gave rise to an inauspicious combination of social forms: a modern industrial economy characterized by high levels of concentration and cartelization that hosted rapid working-class formation, with an archaic and rigid authoritarian state form beset by the wilting tendencies of feudal society. The intersection and synthetic consummation of these societal forms, within the conditioning force field of uneven international development, produced a situation of hyperpoliticization within the German state form. The numerous nationalist pressure groups, organized agrarian interests, industrial organizations and institutions of organized labour that sought to establish a controlling influence over state power exemplified this. The working class experienced increased discipline and coercion at the point of production, while the dominant classes achieved their fragile cohesion by waging a campaign of subordination against workers.

The German state emerged from its condition of backwardness harried by the threats of a radical working-class party and cradling within itself the manifold scars of its combined development. The institutionalization of the new class relations brought about during capitalist transition was incomplete and incredibly unstable. This failure manifested itself in the radicalization of the political strategies of the dominant and subordinate social classes, resulting in a sharp polarity between left and right and an overall dynamic of social disintegration. At the root of social disharmony lay the greatly accelerated tempo at which economic and social transformation had occurred in Germany, the so-called ‘privilege of backwardness’, and the temporal coincidence of these transformations with an authoritarian political consolidation. Both processes were motivated by the desire of German elites to escape the shackles of backwardness in order to secure their position within the European interstate hierarchy.

Anglo-German rivalry and the approach of World War I

The haunting cries of the Somme now lie buried deep in the annals of history, overtaken by the rapid pace of modernity. In the public conscience, they are exhumed only momentarily by the symbolic gesture of a single red poppy worn in remembrance. Within the terrain of IR scholarship, however, the genesis of World War I stands as a perennial battlefield upon which theoretical scores are settled and explanatory credibility is adjudicated. Yet despite the substantial volume of ink spilt over the causes of the sharpening rivalries preceding World War I, the answers remain unsatisfactory.

Realists proclaim that the events of 1914–18 stand as a testament to the inevitable ‘tragedy of Great Power politics’ (Mearsheimer, 2001). Viewed through Realist eyes, the world is condemned to perpetual Great Power conflict. In the international realm, the ordering principle of anarchy conditions states into a survivalist mentality, motivated by the ubiquity of fear (Mearsheimer, 2001; Waltz, 1979). Power, defined purely in terms of material capabilities, provides the currency of change in international politics. As states’ relative power shifts, so does the configuration of the international system, with the ‘balance of power’ acting as a self-regulating mechanism of power distribution (Waltz, 1979: 120).

Realism’s theoretical parsimony enables a simplistic explanation of the outbreak of hostilities. According to Mearsheimer (2001: 2), emergent Great Powers are inevitably ‘primed for offense’. Emboldened by rapid industrialization, Germany sought to maximize its power and was therefore ‘bent on upsetting the European balance of power and increasing its share of military might’ (Mearsheimer, 2001: 156). For Mearsheimer, aggressive German behaviour had no bearing upon the posture of the other major European powers. ²³

Mearsheimer’s analysis is premised on a complete abstraction from the internal complexion of the states involved in the conflict, an aspect that was absolutely critical in determining the unfolding of events (Gordon, 1974; Kennedy, 1980). This abstraction is derived from the integral schism of neo-Realist theory; that between the hierarchically ordered nature of domestic politics on the one hand, and the anarchical ordering of international politics on the other (Waltz, 1979: 81). It is by essentializing and disaggregating these two spheres that neo-Realists construct their foundational theoretical fallacy: that the ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ realms exist as distinct spheres, conditioned by different logics, and existing in a relationship of causal hierarchy whereby geostrategic considerations ultimately determine international outcomes. Realists dissociate international politics from any form of sociological grounding, preferring instead to stress the primacy of Realpolitik. The question remains, have historical materialist accounts faired any better?

According to Rosenberg, historical materialist approaches to IR, grounded in a mode-of-production analysis, have tended to suffer from two related problems. They either: (a) ‘Superimpose intra-societal categories of social structure onto inter-societal phenomena, obscuring the determinations that might arise from the fact of geopolitical multiplicity itself’; or (b) impose an additional interstate logic that modifies and over determines the more strictly sociological categories. In other words, the ‘facticity of the international’ evades conceptualization by historical materialists (Callinicos and Rosenberg, 2008). ²⁴

Lenin’s (1971: 232) theory of ‘Imperialism’, for example, ultimately reduces the great power dynamics of the period to the crisis tendencies of advanced capitalism by suggesting that ‘Imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism’. Lenin is guilty of Rosenberg’s first sin therefore by reducing international dynamics to superimposed sociological categories. Yet Lenin’s writing contains the germ of a profitable species of analysis, by acknowledging the fact of inter-societal unevenness. Lenin (1971) rebuts Kautsky’s (1970) notion of a pacifistic ‘Ultra-Imperialism’ by referring to the uneven nature of capitalist development: ‘the even development of different undertakings of industry, or countries is impossible under capitalism’. By suggesting that the shifting basis of power engendered by capitalist social relations militates against the peaceful coexistence of states, Lenin approximates neo-Realism’s attentiveness to the differential growth of state power and its impact upon the prospects for pacific international relations. This should not come as any particular surprise because, as Gilpin (1981: 93) notes, both Marxism and Realism ‘explain the dynamics of IR in terms of the differential growth of power among states’. ²⁵

What Lenin’s account lacks is the ‘combined’ element of development. Lenin (1971: 180) assumes that the various Imperialist states are equivalent and thus destined to pursue similar competitive strategies. His theory allows no differentiation between the units themselves, and the particularities of different ruling-class strategies. Silver’s account, similarly, recognizes the fact of ‘unevenness’ by differentiating core states from peripheral ones, but misses altogether the aspect of ‘combination’, by treating core states alike. This oversight leads her to mistakenly identify the pressures emanating from highly specific courses of national development and class strategies, as systemic tendencies expressive of a challenge to British hegemony. Now, as we have suggested above, U&CD allows us to capture the interactivity of social development and its impact upon international politics. In order to demonstrate this empirically we must return to developmental ‘outcomes’ of Germany and Britain, exploring the foreign policy dimensions of these outcomes.

By 1906 the Anglo-German antagonism had become firmly set. Precipitous German naval expansion was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back (Kennedy, 1980: 325), yet it was the aggressive tone of German foreign policy rather than simply crude power calculations that hardened the British stance (Gordon, 1974; Kennedy, 1980: 431). ²⁶ A notable feature of late 19th-century Germany was the prevalence of the ‘national question’ within domestic politics. ²⁷ In the context of a sharply divided society, resultant from the rapid transition to capitalist social relations, the national question served both as a diversion from the class politics espoused by the SPD and as a unifying ideological mechanism that transcended party-political divisions. Peculiar to this source of cohesion was the degree to which it relied upon extraterritorial foundations.

These foundations are best understood in terms of ‘Social Imperialism’. German Social Imperialism was an expansionist form of foreign policy in which the dominant motive was the ‘preservation of the traditional social hierarchy’ (Wehler, 1970: 122). A form of Social Imperialism was also espoused in Britain towards the turn of the 20th century (Semmel, 1960). The form, content and fate of British Social Imperialism were fundamentally different however (Gordon, 1974; Semmel, 1960). The coexistence of Social Imperialism in both Britain and Germany speaks to the fundamental interactivity of inter-societal development and the tendency towards ‘emulation’. The key distinctions in the characteristics of British and German Social Imperialism reflect the fundamental divergences in their developmental trajectories.

Bismarck inaugurated German Social Imperialism in the 1870s. Initially, Imperial expansion was premised upon the emulation of British ‘Informal Imperialism’ that operated through the extension of markets for free trade without entailing formal colonial control (Wehler, 1970: 125). As the Great Depression unfolded in the 1870s, however, a powerful alliance of conservative Junkers and industrialists within Germany prompted Bismarck to introduce protectionist measures (Wehler, 1970: 132). By the early 1880s Germany had begun to assume formal control of some colonial territories, prompted by growing criticism of the regime from within society and the expansionary behaviour of other colonial powers. Although expansionary, Bismarck’s brand of Social Imperialism was shorn of the radical nationalism and ‘Weltpolitik’ that would subsequently come to dominate German foreign policy.

The year 1897 marked a turning point in German Social Imperialism; Germany’s foreign policy assumed an increasingly militaristic form that went beyond the calculated parameters of Bismarck’s brinkmanship towards a forthrightly aggressive disposition towards Britain. ²⁸ As domestic tensions increased in line with the rise of the SPD and strike activity, a plethora of nationalist intellectuals and pan-Germans began to demand a unifying ‘Weltpolitik’ premised upon extensive expansion of German naval power. ²⁹ Domestic discontent with the Kaiser and the growing menace of the SPD stoked up a storm of nationalistic and chauvinist fervour, prompting the government to attempt a renewed resolution of the long-standing problem of German social integration. ³⁰ The anti-modernist and anti-British agrarian forces behind the powerful ‘Bund der Landwirte’ gave nationalist sentiment a particularly sharp edge (Kennedy, 1980: 323). The growth of radical nationalist groups in the 1890s reflected the inability of the German party system to accommodate the new social forces of industrial capitalism. Extreme nationalist groups such as the Navy League sought to bypass the weak and divided Reichstag and appeal directly to the bureaucracy (Eley, 1978: 341). Ultra-nationalism continued to gather momentum prior to the war and received its final spur from the SPD’s electoral triumph in 1912 (Gordon, 1974: 199; Schorske, 1983). It was Weltpolitik and the aggressive nationalism spawned by the contradictions of German development that prompted the formation of the Triple Entente and drove Germany inexorably into conflict with France, Britain and Russia in 1914 (Gordon, 1974; Kennedy, 1980).

Social Imperialism within Britain, in contrast, was divided into several competing strands. Liberal Imperialists espoused a vision of Empire characterized by cooperation, free trade and peaceful coexistence (Semmel, 1960: 53). The most vehemently advocated form of British Social Imperialism, however, was associated with Joseph Chamberlain and supporters of the Tariff Reform League and Imperial Preference (Semmel, 1960: 53). Just as Bismarck had earlier sought to emulate British Informal Empire, the proponents of Tariff Reform now looked to Germany and the Bismarckian combination of welfare implementation and neo-mercantilist protectionism as the example to follow (Dutton, 1981; Semmel, 1960: 23; Thompson, 1997: 1042). After the gains made by Labour in the 1906 elections, conservative forces within British society aped Bismarck, exaggerating the threat of socialism and stressing the need for cohesive Imperialism (Semmel, 1960: 83).

Despite the vigorous advocacy of Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference, this form of Social Imperialism never took hold to a degree comparable to that experienced in Germany (Thompson, 1997: 177). Crucially, the manner of British development had given the working class a substantial stake in the state by the late 19th century. Since the working class, and the prominent banking interests of the City, tended to hold firmly to the principles of free trade, the electoral support base open to the neo-mercantilists was restricted.

Fundamentally, the strategies of German Social Imperialism were likely to fail in Britain. Both the social bases of political power and the dominant ideological creed were fundamentally different from those of Germany. The extreme right wing of German politics dwarfed its British counterpart. ³¹ Moreover, working-class integration in Britain had been achieved primarily under the umbrella of liberal, rather than nationalist, ideology. The gradual, internal integration of the British working class was fundamentally distinct from German attempts to displace seemingly intractable domestic class antagonisms back into the field of interstate competition.

These generative societal differences, resultant from the internationally divergent experiences of capitalist transition conditioned by U&CD, are crucial to understanding the different foreign policy orientations of Germany and Britain prior to World War I. While German foreign policy was aggressive, expansionary, antagonistic and driven by the impulsive demands of ultra-nationalist social forces, British policy was concerned with the maintenance of the status quo and the peaceful accommodation of Germany into a cooperative international order. Since 1815 the scope of Great Power conflict within Europe had for the most part been confined to limited engagements over peripheral colonial territories (Bromley, 1994: 63). German policy makers’ designs upon central European expansion were to change that pattern to devastating effect in 1914.

Returning to Silver’s analysis, we can now reappraise her argument in light of my own empirical conclusions. Where Silver’s approach errs is in understanding the relationship between labour unrest and the intensification of imperial rivalries as the consequence of a general process that constituted a systemic challenge to British hegemony. Her analysis overlooks the fundamental differences within the ‘core’ thrown up by U&CD, and the impact of these distinctions upon class practices and international outcomes. Silver’s (2003: 29) initial assumption of systemic British hegemony, and her overall preference for the systems level of analysis, compels her to seek the causes of hegemonic contestation at the systemic level. As a result she remains caught within an analytical lens that is unable to locate the origin of international contestation beyond a general systemic crisis of capitalism (Silver, 2003: 133). Thus, Silver does not differentiate between the significance of labour unrest in different states, and suggests that the response of state elites to this activity was uniform.

The significance of labour unrest did, however, vary significantly between core states in the global political economy. In Germany, it presented a very tangible threat to the existing social order and was framed within a radical, anti-state discourse. In Britain, labour posed a much less substantial threat to the power of the state and was primarily articulated through a reformist and accommodating liberal discourse. Similarly, while German state elites did subscribe to the notion that an expansionary war could bolster domestic stability (Schorske, 1983), British officials were extremely concerned about the potentially disintegrative impact of conflict upon society and were therefore extremely reluctant to enter into conflict (French, 1982). Silver’s predilection for generality misses the critical distinctions between the meaning and effects of labour unrest in different states. We can only understand these differences by utilizing U&CD to understand the interactivity and particularities of paths of capitalist development and their consequences for class practices and interstate dynamics.

Understanding the radicalization of labour movements and the growth of working-class parties across Europe requires an appreciation of the moulding influence of the SPD (Joll, 1974; Sassoon, 1997). The German labour movement was the first to produce an explicitly working-class political party and it also produced the most radical, best-financed and most internationally influential working-class party. The SPD leadership exerted substantial intellectual influence through the Second International (Joll, 1974). The development of subsequent working-class parties in Europe should be understood partly as a consequence of attempts to emulate the strategies and ideology of the SPD (Zolberg, 1986: 399).

By stressing the Great Depression as the ultimate cause of increased class tensions, Silver fails to appreciate the degree to which states were impacted differently by the Depression. This systems-level preoccupation leads her into a dual error: on the one hand, overstating the role of sporadic capitalist crises and the uniformity of their effects in determining hegemonic transitions, and, on the other hand, underestimating the significance of longer-term, nationally specific processes of capitalist development in reshaping the world order. A fundamental aspect of national processes of capitalist development was the attempt to establish the structural-institutional hegemony of capitalist social relations within society, often, as in the German case, without the hegemony of any particular class. This is a process that really intensified precisely when Britain’s supposed hegemony was experiencing a precipitous decline, yet it is overlooked by Silver in her characterization of the later 19th century as a period of ‘systemic chaos’ and foundering British hegemony. Understanding the nationally distinct processes and class strategies involved in the consolidation of capitalist social relations is crucially important for apprehending the world order context prior to World War I. U&CD enables us to bring to light the gradual, underlying tectonic shifts in world order configurations that give rise, diachronically, to the synchronic, surface ‘earthquakes’ of capitalist crisis and geopolitical conflagration.

Concluding remarks

In terms of understanding the challenge to the British-dominated world order, I have demonstrated that it is necessary to emphasize the degree to which the major challenge emanated principally from the course of German development, rather than a systemically uniform rejection of British leadership. ³² But as I have shown, German development can only be understood in the context of its relationship to British dominance, and the conditioning effects of the capitalist world market that were manifested through U&CD. I have sought to challenge the foundations of the two dominant explanations of the approach to World War I within IR: first, the historical materialist understanding that privileges a sociological explanation focused upon the crisis tendencies of the capitalist mode of production and class struggle across Europe; and, second, the Realist account, which stresses the significance of uneven power potential between states but fails to comprehend the internal characteristics of different social formations and their impact upon foreign policy.

Regarding Silver’s historical materialist framework, the notion of ‘systemic chaos’ that she proposes (Arrighi and Silver, 1999: 31) is unable to capture the extent to which the conflagration of 1914 was not only a result of the crisis of the Great Depression, but more specifically a consequence of the particularities of German development. Indeed, Germany was an integral player in the return to protectionism and the raising of tariffs after 1879 (Semmel, 1960). In much the same way that different ruling classes had sought to emulate British free trade for their own benefits, they now sought to emulate German protectionism. In a similar vein, Mayer and Halperin’s analyses fail to account for the significant divergences between Britain and Germany regarding social force strategies, institutions and foreign policy postures.

Realist analyses have rightly identified the degree to which the emergence of uneven power differentials may cause disturbances to dominant patterns of world order. Where they fail is in committing a twofold abstraction: by abstracting unevenness from its basis in the dynamics of a given mode of production, and by abstracting the material aspects of power from their integral social content. U&CD enables us both to account for the divergences in material capabilities that emerge from uneven economic development, and to account for the different class practices that invest interstate strategies with social content.

The present inquiry has shed only partial light upon the subject; additional research into the developmental specificities of France, Russia and Austria-Hungary is much needed in order to further apprehend the precise contours of the underlying dynamics that resulted in the outbreak of World War I. I have here outlined only the first sketch in an attempt to redraw the theoretical framework and concepts necessary for understanding the approach to the Great War.