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American diplomat George Kennan once called World War I “the great disaster of the 20th century.” How and why the great powers went to war in 1914 has been the subject of more than 25,000 titles and remains one of the most voluminous topics in modern historical writing.
In Contesting the disasterthe famous historian of international politics Perry Anderson takes the measure of a century of heated debates. Instead of attempting comprehensive coverage, his hard-hitting but wide-ranging book consists of six essays, each on a historian from an involved state: France, Italy, Germany, Britain, Australia and the United States.
For decades, the origins of the war have been a political minefield. In the interwar period, the first chroniclers of the conflict often espoused the national cause of their country. The French historian Pierre Renouvin was one of the first defenders of the correctness of the Entente between France, Great Britain and Russia and castigated the aggression of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria- Hungary.
A more balanced view came from Italian newspaper editor Luigi Albertini. Its three volumes Origins of the War of 1914first published in Italian in 1942, considered Germany and Austria the main instigators. But by digging into the files and interviewing surviving decision-makers, Albertini concluded that all European states shared responsibility. This consensus on diffuse responsibility was radically overturned in the 1960s by the German historian Fritz Fischer, whose dramatic assertions about premeditated German plans for world domination simplified history for the purposes of the Cold War.
Only recently has Fischer’s view been replaced by a more balanced panorama of responsibility. Much of this is the work of Australian-born historian Christopher Clark, whose synoptic and deeply researched book Sleepwalkers became a bestseller in 2014. Clark showed that Austrian belligerence and German recklessness played a role in the escalation to all-out war, but gave equal weight to Russian truculence, French lying and British cover-up.
Anderson’s treatment of literature is typically skillful and erudite, not without a clear methodological preference. His main problem is the tendency to look at “the short-term triggers of conflict at the expense of the long-term pressures that build up” – a perspective he accuses of “convenient myopia”. Investigating which country was most guilty or which individual decision tipped the scales misses the deeper question: how did the world in 1914 become vulnerable to such disastrous systemic collapse?
The star of Contest the disaster is the only American historian who has taken up this analytical challenge by combining a comparative approach between countries with a long-term vision: Paul Schroeder. A Midwestern Lutheran who was a political conservative by temperament, his monumental 1994 study The transformation of European politics showed how the Congress of Vienna in 1815 marked a revolution in the international system, ushering in a shift from a rapacious power struggle to gentle, norm-driven diplomacy. For Schroeder, this order helped maintain peace for almost a century. But Anderson convincingly suggests that his work contains the best clues to why stability was shattered during the bloodshed of the First World War.
What destroyed the Vienna settlement were three flaws. First, the Ottoman Empire was neither invited to the Congress of Vienna nor admitted into the inner circle of European powers. As the Muslim state known as the “sick man of Europe” lost territory to nationalist revolts in the Balkans, its erosion tempted all other empires to encroach on it.
A second problem was the disappearance of confederations of small states in Central Europe. For centuries, the Italian peninsula and German-speaking countries were patchworks of loosely grouped principalities, city-states, and minor kingdoms that served as buffers mitigating great power rivalry. When unified Italian and German nation-states emerged in the 1860s and 1870s, these buffer zones were swept away. Nationalist governments now confront each other directly.
Finally, the Viennese system was unable to handle the results of uneven economic growth in the late 19th century. The United States and Russia were expanding rapidly, but more worrying was the economic growth of Imperial Germany, which by the 1910s had become Europe’s leading industrial power. Berlin’s ambitious “world policy” put it on a collision course with the British Empire.
These three flaws caused a domino effect when Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914: the murder sparked a regional conflict in the Balkans that sparked a war in continental Europe, which quickly turned into a global conflagration titanic.
These historical reflections take on obvious urgency today given the interstate war in Ukraine, the escalation of regional conflict in the Middle East, and rising global tensions between the United States and China. A systemic, long-term perspective offers our best hope for confronting the deficiencies in our international order that proved so cataclysmic 110 years ago – when what Schroeder called “the collective tide of recklessness” swept across the world. world.
Disputing disaster: a sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson Verso £30, 400 pages
Nicholas Mulder is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and author of “The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War.”
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