Playing the Blame Game

Each of the historians under discussion in Disputing Disaster represents, implicitly or explicitly, a political current within the twentieth century. The fate of their lives and careers differed greatly, however. They can be divided, roughly, into three camps. Renouvin and Fischer amassed enormous institutional power within their respective national academic systems; Albertini, Fischer, and Clark achieved international celebrity and renown, their books selling millions of copies; and Wilson and Schroeder labored in quiet obscurity, although the former did so entirely while the latter’s scholarly contributions earned him esteem within the academy but eluded him outside of it.

Their political allegiances also lay across the spectrum. Renouvin, who lost an arm on the front line and was marred by political quietism, gave soft support to the Vichy regime; Albertini was a liberal nationalist and newspaper mogul who endorsed Italy’s entry into World War I and initially held favorable views of the fascists, which he later repudiated at the cost of his own exclusion from public life; Fischer, a Wehrmacht veteran, had a checkered past, which he hid from his acolytes on the establishment right: he had held membership cards for the Sturmabteilung and Nazi Party; Wilson was a man of the Left; Clark, knighted by Britain’s Queen in 2015, remains a variant of left-liberal; and Schroeder was a paleoconservative critic of American foreign policy and a standard-bearer of his country’s isolationist tradition.

Insofar as he can be pinned down, Anderson’s sympathies lie with Wilson, Clark, and Schroeder, rather than Renouvin, Albertini, and Fischer. Renouvin’s work on the war’s origins focused on diplomatic matters. Making use of early archival access made available by the Allied powers in the 1920s, he developed an interpretation of the conflict that became hegemonic within interwar France. Beginning in 1904, Renouvin’s account placed the war’s origins in the breakdown of the system of alliances and the political jockeying between the Great Powers that coincided with this breakdown. The Central Powers — Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria — were, however, ultimately to blame for dangerously upsetting this balance of power.

Albertini’s account, ranging over three volumes, is still held in high regard. He played a role in the war’s outbreak as leading newspaper editor in prewar Italy. He used the organs of his empire in the fourth estate, particularly the Corriere della Sera, and his political influence, to push for Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers. Albertini’s trilogy functioned as a kind of mea culpa, in which he ultimately assigned blame for aggression to the Central Powers who were, he argued, responsible for the outbreak of the war. To support this case, he interviewed hundreds of the leading politicians and military officers on all sides who had taken part in the war and were still alive when Albertini began his research in the 1930s.

Albertini’s books appeared in the early 1940s in Italy, before being translated into English by Oxford University Press in 1953. His account moves the origins back somewhat earlier into the 1890s but, like Renouvin, he remained committed to an approach that sought the war’s causes in the offices of foreign ministries and embassies, a bias that the wide-ranging oral interviews Albertini conducted only heightened. Intrigues held behind closed doors in the halls of power, gambles made by heads of state, and the opportunism of revolutionaries were the ultimate causes of the war, not broader historical or economic forces.

Absent in both Renouvin and Albertini’s reading of the war was, Anderson contends, any serious structural view of the formation of the great power system in Europe at the time. The possibility that European imperialism caused the war is dismissed by both. In place of any broader focus, both men offer microstudies of individual actors. But the main payoff of such a study is to reveal which minister sent which report on which day — a line of inquiry that does little to explain the cause of the war. In place of political analysis, we get transcriptions from the halls of power.

Fischer, a former doyen of West German war history, also faces criticism in Disputing Disaster. His 1961 book, translated into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War, reduced the cause of the conflict to imperial German aggression and plotting. This interpretation rejected Renouvin and Albertini’s view that a mutual collapse of the state order resulting from diplomatic blunders, albeit with the far greater side of the blame residing with the Central Powers, was the ultimate cause of the war. In Fischer’s account, Germany, and Germany alone, was to blame. It had made a fatal gamble to grab for world power — the original title of Fischer’s classic was Griff nach der Weltmacht.

Fischer’s account was compelling in the postwar period because it heaped blame on Germany, thus aligning with the mood of West German reconciliation with its Nazi past. But the cost of providing a national narrative was to reduce the complexity of the war’s origins to the actions of a single state. The imperialistic demands of other states for a “place in the sun” became, in Fischer’s account, of negligible importance. His history lent support to the Sonderweg narrative of German history, according to which responsibility for the rise of fascism lay in an aggressive militarism and antisemitism that was always a part of Germany’s historical development as a nation since at least the early nineteenth century. But while his narrative had its political utility, what it left out — the pro-war interests of other nations — deprived it of explanatory power. Laying the blame entirely on Germany exculpated the rest of the powers in the conflict — rather than helping to explain the war’s origins, the Fischer thesis explained them away.

What About Imperialism?

Wilson, a British diplomatic historian, managed to avoid the failings that Anderson diagnoses in Renouvin, Albertini, and Fischer. Wilson’s contribution consisted in critically examining the ideas and policies of the British Foreign Office from the latter nineteenth century up to start of the war. His scholarly work in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing on the depths of archival sources, amounted to a sweeping analysis of the increasingly bellicose and imperialistic worldview of Britain’s foreign policy officialdom during the lead-up to the war. For Wilson, Britain was not an innocent bystander sucked into the war by a bullying and expansionary Germany that had invaded Belgium. Rather, Britain created the conditions on the continent that heightened tensions and instability through its foreign policy, the chief aim of which was advancing the United Kingdom’s imperial interests, even when those interests came in conflict with those of other Great Powers.

The success of British imperialism, and the desperate attempts by the country’s Foreign Office to guard that success, ultimately proved to be self-undermining. Foreign meddling and Machiavellian strategies ended up producing the war it sought to avoid. British officials in charge of foreign policy saw the rise of Germany as an existential threat, which risked upsetting the balance of power on the continent. From the late nineteenth century onward, British governments worked to build an unsteady system of alliances to create a kind of cordon sanitaire around Germany. This attempt to hem in Germany and preserve a continental balance ended up forcing Britain into the arms of former enemies and antagonists, namely France and Russia. Both saw British security guarantees as offering license, and tacit endorsement of, their own imperialist endeavors and brinkmanship with Germany.

When an inciting incident came in the form of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, Britain found itself overextended. Support for both France and Russia demanded too much; panic swept over British officialdom, and a hysterical anti-German sentiment predominated in the Foreign Office. The liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith’s entry into the war and thereby its further expansion was almost impossible to avoid. Britain had overextended itself and the Central Powers were calling its credibility into question.

Wilson’s approach is decidedly narrow, digging through piles of archival material with a focus that Anderson describes as akin to an “an arrow-slit” or “a microscope.” But while this offers insight into the motivations and intentions of actors, it misses in its gradual attention the broader sweeping narrative of the tragedy. This Anderson finds most forcefully in the work of Clark, whose 2012 book, The Sleepwalkers, received global and near-universal acclaim, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in Germany alone. Anderson reserves high praise for Clark’s book, although he concedes it does not properly answer the question of the origins of the war.

The virtues of Clark’s account — a vast knowledge of both primary and secondary sources, a fast-paced novelistic narrative, and a focus on all of the combatants in the war, especially in the bringing in of Serbia and the Balkan nexus, often ignored in the major accounts of the war — outweigh but do not excuse its limitations. For Clark, the causes of the war are best summed up by the title of his monograph: Europe sleepwalked into catastrophe in 1914, a tragic stumble in which all bore responsibility, but none exclusive blame. Clark’s narrative is thus one of contingency, concerned less with why the war happened than how it happened.

Absent in this story is any explanation of the causal mechanisms that led to the war, however. Clark of course emphasizes how the war started, but a how is no alternative to a why. Focusing broadly on the nature of the war accounts, Anderson observes, for the literary quality of Clark’s work: unconstrained by the demand to provide an analytic account of different causes, The Sleepwalkers was free to completely embrace narrative. This also explains the book’s commercial success.

To synthesize narrative and causality, Anderson turns to the historian with whom he has the strongest affinity: Schroeder, a figure he calls “the greatest American historian of his generation.” Schroeder, a paleoconservative who served as a Lutheran pastor before turning historian, would ostensibly seem an odd figure for a Marxist to shower with praise. But both men share a sensibility skeptical of the grand ambitions of liberalism as well as hostility to American Empire and the strong turn to foreign intervention under the Bush administration. Along with these antipathies, Schroeder and Anderson have in common a similar regard for the virtues of wide-ranging structural history.

For Schroeder, the war was inevitable. His work concerned itself with the structural forces underlying the European political system, an approach he developed most rigorously in his 1994 book, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848. By the late nineteenth century, the continuing breakdown of the post-Napoleonic Concert of Powers assured that a war was on the horizon, according to Schroeder. This was a view shared by socialists and other critics of imperialism at the time. For Friedrich Engels, the war was also an inevitability. By late 1887 he could write, in an introduction to a pamphlet criticizing the German military, that “the only war left for Prussia-Germany to wage will be a world war, a world war, moreover of an extent the violence hitherto unimagined.” Even in his apocalyptic predictions, he underestimated the scale of what would become World War I. Nevertheless, he had a clear sense of its potential brutality:

Eight to ten million soldiers will be at each other’s throats and in the process they will strip Europe barer than a swarm of locusts. The depredations of the Thirty Years’ War compressed into three to four years and extended over the entire continent; famine, disease, the universal lapse into barbarism, both of the armies and the people, in the wake of acute misery irretrievable dislocation of our artificial system of’ trade, industry and credit, ending in universal bankruptcy collapse of the old states and their conventional political wisdom to the point where crowns will roll into the gutters by the dozen, and no one will be around to pick them up.

For both Schroeder and Engels, World War I, in its specific form, perhaps could have been prevented. Franz Ferdinand may not have been assassinated, but there was nothing to countervail the causal forces pushing the Great Powers to war. As Schroeder framed the problem in his most prominent essay on the war, “World War I as Galloping Gertie,” the real question for historians to ask was not why the war had broken out, but, “Why not war?” The particular circumstances of the war’s outbreak were contingent, but the structural overdeterminancy of the international system and imperialist competition meant that the war, in some form or other, was inevitable.

Anderson, while not explicitly stating his own position, reveals his sympathies through his reconstructions. Imperialism, for which no single power was directly responsible, created tensions between great powers, which always risked spilling over into war. This was not sleepwalking however, per Clark’s position, but rather a kind of mutual and wide-eyed leap over a cliff, with each jumper thinking he would cushion his fall by landing on top of the others. This conflict and tension were then structural, growing out of capitalism, expressed in imperialist rivalry. War by the early twentieth century then could not be avoided, but the specific form that war would take was not predetermined. Explaining why the war occurred then involves both the intimacies of the actions of individual revolutionaries, ambassadors, and heads of state, as well as a structural vision of the nature of the imperialist and capitalist order as it had come into being and evolved over the course of the nineteenth century.

In our own moment, there is no shortage of symptoms of a crisis in the structure of global politics: The reelection of Donald Trump; the collapse of the German government, coinciding with Alternative für Deutschland’s continued rise; the further consolidation of right-wing anti-immigrant movements across Europe; Emmanuel Macron dancing on a knife’s edge to maintain his parliamentary coalition, while Marine Le Pen waits in the wings for the 2027 elections; the Ukraine war broken down into an exhausted bloodbath, forcing Volodymyr Zelensky’s government to impose ever more punitive conscription measures while Russia fields North Korean soldiers; a brutal civil war in Sudan; and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza by Israel, nested within a broader regional war that threatens to consume the entire Middle East.

Looming over these localized crises is the possibility of a war between the United States and China. The perceived need to confront China has become the foreign policy consensus in the United States, among both the Republicans and the Democrats, regardless of who is president. Disputing Disaster reminds us that the breakdown of a political order built on lightly subdued competition between states can result in catastrophe. But it also confirms that wars, if they do occur, are the product not of random capricious decisions of individual leaders but of long-term structural trends that can be arrested if they are understood and opposed.