The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan

Did it matter that during the July Crisis both Austria-Hungary (Berchtold) and Russia (Sazonov) had foreign ministers who were weaker and less decisive than their predecessors? Would it have made a difference if Austria's chief of staff Hötzendorf had been less of a fire‑eater or German chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg less of a fatalist? In our post‑structuralist age, the importance of individuals within the decision-making process has returned to centre stage, along with counterfactual ('what if?') history. There is, finally, the question of the decisions made by a score or so of men (and they were all men) in half a dozen capitals. The current consensus seems to be that there is no consensus. The 'Fischer thesis' became the orthodoxy for a while, but has been plausibly challenged in recent years by historians who have pointed the finger almost everywhere except at Berlin. After Hitler's war, though, English-speaking historians were more likely to see a pattern of German aggression stretching back before 1914, and in 1961 the Hamburg historian Fritz Fischer made the controversial case (bitterly opposed by most German historians) that Germany had mounted a pre-emptive strike. It was widely questioned in the interwar years, not only in Germany but in Britain and the US (although not in France). The idea that Germany was the prime mover has enjoyed a brilliant, if chequered career ever since. The victorious allies stuck the blame on Germany at the Versailles Peace Conference, in the 'war guilt clause'. Who, or what, was to blame? What role do we attribute to underlying trends such as militarism, the arms race and imperialist rivalry? How important was the system of alliances that divided Europe into two armed camps? Then there is the question of which power or powers carry the greatest responsibility for the coming of war. While there is broad agreement about the consequences of the war, the causes have always been contentious.

It brought down four European empires and weakened the colonial powers that ended on the winning side, Britain and France it spawned communism and fascism, and changed relations between Europeans and non-Europeans, town and country, governments and peoples, men and women. The war was one of history's great turning points, the beginning of what Eric Hobsbawm dubbed the 'short 20th century' (which ended in 1989). Sixty-five million men served in the conflict, 9 million of them died and 20 million were wounded. This set in train the July Crisis, the moves and counter-moves that would lead to general European war, the 'great black tornado', as Theodore Roosevelt called it. A rchduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated on 28 July 1914 in Sarajevo.

The War That Ended Peace by Margaret MacMillan