The European continent was at peace on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that began that summer mobilized 65 million troops, claimed three empires, 20 million military and civilian deaths, and 21 million wounded. The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’.1 The debate over why it happened began before the first shots were fired and has been running ever since. It has spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity. For international relations theorists the events of 1914 remain the political crisis par excellence, intricate enough to accommodate any number of hypotheses.
The historian who seeks to understand the genesis of the First World War confronts several problems. The first and most obvious is an oversupply of sources. Each of the belligerent states produced official multi-volume editions of diplomatic papers, vast works of collective archival labour. There are treacherous currents in this ocean of sources. Most of the official document editions produced in the interwar period have an apologetic spin. The fifty-seven-volume German publication Die Grosse Politik, comprising 15,889 documents organized in 300 subject areas, was not prepared with purely scholarly objectives in mind; it was hoped that the disclosure of the pre-war record would suffice to refute the ‘war guilt’ thesis enshrined in the terms of the Versailles treaty.2 For the French government too, the post-war publication of documents was an enterprise of ‘essentially political character’, as Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou put it in May 1934. Its purpose was to ‘counter-balance the campaign launched by Germany following the Treaty of Versailles’.3 In Vienna, as Ludwig Bittner, co-editor of the eight-volume collection Österreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, pointed out in 1926, the aim was to produce an authoritative source edition before some international body – the League of Nations perhaps? – forced the Austrian government into publication under less auspicious circumstances.4 The early Soviet documentary publications were motivated in part by the desire to prove that the war had been initiated by the autocratic Tsar and his alliance partner, the bourgeois Raymond Poincaré, in the hope of de-legitimizing French demands for the repayment of pre-war loans.5 Even in Britain, where British Documents on the Origins of the War was launched amid high-minded appeals to disinterested scholarship, the resulting documentary record was not without tendentious omissions that produced a somewhat unbalanced picture of Britain’s place in the events preceding the outbreak of war in 1914.6 In short, the great European documentary editions were, for all their undeniable value to scholars, munitions in a ‘world war of documents’, as the German military historian Bernhard Schwertfeger remarked in a critical study of 1929.7
The memoirs of statesmen, commanders and other key decision-makers, though indispensable to anyone trying to understand what happened on the road to war, are no less problematic. Some are frustratingly reticent on questions of burning interest. To name just a few examples: the Reflections on the World War published in 1919 by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg has virtually nothing to say on the subject of his actions or those of his colleagues during the July Crisis of 1914; Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov’s political memoirs are breezy, pompous, intermittently mendacious and totally uninformative about his own role in key events; French President Raymond Poincaré’s ten-volume memoir of his years in power is propagandistic rather than revelatory – there are striking discrepancies between his ‘recollections’ of events during the crisis and the contemporary jottings in his unpublished diary.8 The amiable memoirs of British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey are sketchy on the delicate question of the commitments he had made to the Entente powers before August 1914 and the role these played in his handling of the crisis.9
When the American historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt of the University of Chicago travelled to Europe in the late 1920s with letters of introduction to interview former politicians who had played a role in events, he was struck by the apparently total immunity of his interlocutors to self-doubt. (The one exception was Grey, who ‘spontaneously remarked’ that he had made a tactical error in seeking to negotiate with Vienna through Berlin during the July Crisis, but the misjudgement alluded to was of subordinate importance and the comment reflected a specifically English style of mandarin self-deprecation rather than a genuine concession of responsibility.)10 There were problems with memory, too. Schmitt tracked down Peter Bark, the former Russian minister of finance, now a London banker. In 1914, Bark had participated in meetings at which decisions of momentous importance were made. Yet when Schmitt met him, Bark insisted that he had ‘little recollection of events from that era’.11 Fortunately, the former minister’s own contemporary notes are more informative. When the researcher Luciano Magrini travelled to Belgrade in the autumn of 1937 to interview every surviving figure with a known link to the Sarajevo conspiracy, he found that there were some witnesses who attested to matters of which they could have no knowledge, others who ‘remained dumb or gave a false account of what they know’, and others again who ‘added adornments to their statements or were mainly interested in self-justification’.12
There are, moreover, still significant gaps in our knowledge. Many important exchanges between key actors were verbal and are not recorded – they can be reconstructed only from indirect evidence or later testimony. The Serbian organizations linked with the assassination at Sarajevo were extremely secretive and left virtually no paper trail. Dragutin Dimitrijević, head of Serbian military intelligence, a key figure in the plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, regularly burned his papers. Much remains unknown about the precise content of the earliest discussions between Vienna and Berlin on what should be done in response to the assassinations at Sarajevo. The minutes of the summit meetings that took place between the French and Russian political leaderships in St Petersburg on 20–23 June, documents of potentially enormous importance to understanding the last phase of the crisis, have never been found (the Russian protocols were probably simply lost; the French team entrusted with editing the Documents Diplomatiques Français failed to find the French version). The Bolsheviks did publish many key diplomatic documents in an effort to discredit the imperialist machinations of the great powers, but these appeared at irregular intervals in no particular order and were generally focused on specific issues, such as Russian designs on the Bosphorus. Some documents (the exact number is still unknown) were lost in transit during the chaos of the Civil War and the Soviet Union never produced a systematically compiled documentary record to rival the British, French, German and Austrian source editions.13 The published record on the Russian side remains, to this day, far from complete.
The exceptionally intricate structure of this crisis is another distinctive feature. The Cuban missile crisis was complex enough, yet it involved just two principal protagonists (the USA and the Soviet Union), plus a range of proxies and subordinate players. By contrast, the story of how this war came about must make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance – Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia and Britain – six, if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant and equally autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war.
A further element of convolution arises from the fact that policy-making processes within the states caught up in the crisis were often far from transparent. One can think of July 1914 as an ‘international’ crisis, a term that suggests an array of nation-states, conceived as compact, autonomous, discrete entities, like billiard balls on a table. But the sovereign structures that generated policy during the crisis were profoundly disunified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the various executives, and ‘policies’ – or at least policy-driving initiatives of various kinds – did not necessarily come from the apex of the system; they could emanate from quite peripheral locations in the diplomatic apparatus, from military commanders, from ministerial officials and even from ambassadors, who were often policy-makers in their own right.
The surviving sources thus offer up a chaos of promises, threats, plans and prognostications – and this in turn helps to explain why the outbreak of this war has proved susceptible to such a bewildering variety of interpretations. There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that cannot be supported from a selection of the available sources. And this helps in turn to explain why the ‘WWI origins’ literature has assumed such vast dimensions that no single historian (not even a fantasy figure with an easy command of all the necessary languages) could hope to read it in one lifetime – twenty years ago, an overview of the current literature counted 25,000 books and articles.14 Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but not one of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in the ‘system’. There was always enough complexity to keep the argument going. And beyond the debates of the historians, which have tended to turn on questions of culpability or the relationship between individual agency and structural constraint, there is a substantial international relations commentary, in which categories such as deterrence, détente and inadvertence, or universalizable mechanisms such as balancing, bargaining and bandwagoning, occupy centre stage. Though the debate on this subject is now nearly a century old, there is no reason to believe that it has run its course.15
But if the debate is old, the subject is still fresh – in fact it is fresher and more relevant now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. The changes in our own world have altered our perspective on the events of 1914. In the 1960s–80s, a kind of period charm accumulated in popular awareness around the events of 1914. It was easy to imagine the disaster of Europe’s ‘last summer’ as an Edwardian costume drama. The effete rituals and gaudy uniforms, the ‘ornamentalism’ of a world still largely organized around hereditary monarchy had a distancing effect on present-day recollection. They seemed to signal that the protagonists were people from another, vanished world. The presumption stealthily asserted itself that if the actors’ hats had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them, then their thoughts and motivations probably did too.16
And yet what must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 is its raw modernity. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade of automobiles. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organization with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organization was extra-territorial, without a clear geographical or political location; it was scattered in cells across political borders, it was unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique, hidden and certainly very difficult to discern from outside the organization. Indeed, one could even say that July 1914 is less remote from us – less illegible – now than it was in the 1980s. Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has made way for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe. Accepting this challenge does not mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present, but rather acknowledging those features of the past of which our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view.
Among these is the Balkan context of the war’s inception. Serbia is one of the blind spots in the historiography of the July Crisis. The assassination at Sarajevo is treated in many accounts as a mere pretext, an event with little bearing on the real forces whose interaction brought about the conflict. In an excellent recent account of the outbreak of war in 1914, the authors declare that ‘the killings [at Sarajevo] by themselves caused nothing. It was the use made of this event that brought the nations to war.’17 The marginalization of the Serbian and thereby of the larger Balkan dimension of the story began during the July Crisis itself, which opened as a response to the murders at Sarajevo, but later changed gear, entering a geopolitical phase in which Serbia and its actions occupied a subordinate place.
Our moral compass has shifted, too. The fact that Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia emerged as one of the victor states of the war seemed implicitly to vindicate the act of the man who pulled the trigger on 28 June – certainly that was the view of the Yugoslav authorities, who marked the spot where he did so with bronze footprints and a plaque celebrating the assassin’s ‘first steps into Yugoslav freedom’. In an era when the national idea was still full of promise, there was an intuitive sympathy with South Slav nationalism and little affection for the ponderous multinational commonwealth of the Habsburg Empire. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s have reminded us of the lethality of Balkan nationalism. Since Srebrenica and the siege of Sarajevo, it has become harder to think of Serbia as the mere object or victim of great power politics and easier to conceive of Serbian nationalism as an historical force in its own right. From the perspective of today’s European Union we are inclined to look more sympathetically – or at least less contemptuously – than we used to on the vanished imperial patchwork of Habsburg Austria-Hungary.
Lastly, it is perhaps less obvious now that we should dismiss the two killings at Sarajevo as a mere mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 exemplified the way in which a single, symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. Putting Sarajevo and the Balkans back at the centre of the story does not mean demonizing the Serbs or their statesmen, nor does it dispense us from the obligation to understand the forces working on and in those Serbian politicians, officers and activists whose behaviour and decisions helped to determine what kind of consequences the shootings at Sarajevo would have.
This book thus strives to understand the July Crisis of 1914 as a modern event, the most complex of modern times, perhaps of any time so far. It is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization. The why approach brings a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure; the factors pile up on top of each other pushing down on the events; political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control.
The story this book tells is, by contrast, saturated with agency. The key decision-makers – kings, emperors, foreign ministers, ambassadors, military commanders and a host of lesser officials – walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps. The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and formed the best judgements they could on the basis of the best information they had to hand. Nationalism, armaments, alliances and finance were all part of the story, but they can be made to carry real explanatory weight only if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that – in combination – made war break out.
A Bulgarian historian of the Balkan Wars recently observed that ‘once we pose the question “why”, guilt becomes the focal point’.18 Questions of guilt and responsibility in the outbreak of war entered this story even before the war had begun. The entire source record is full of ascriptions of blame (this was a world in which aggressive intentions were always assigned to the opponent and defensive intentions to oneself) and the judgement delivered by Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles has ensured the continuing prominence of the ‘war guilt’ question. Here, too, the focus on how suggests an alternative approach: a journey through the events that is not driven by the need to draw up a charge sheet against this or that state or individual, but aims to identify the decisions that brought war about and to understand the reasoning or emotions behind them. This does not mean excluding questions of responsibility entirely from the discussion – the aim is rather to let the why answers grow, as it were, out of the how answers, rather than the other way around.
This book tells the story of how war came to continental Europe. It traces the paths to war in a multi-layered narrative encompassing the key decision-centres in Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris, London and Belgrade with brief excursions to Rome, Constantinople and Sofia. It is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the two antagonists, Serbia and Austria-Hungary, whose quarrel ignited the conflict, following their interaction down to the eve of the Sarajevo assassinations. Part II breaks with the narrative approach to ask four questions in four chapters: how did the polarization of Europe into opposed blocs come about? How did the governments of the European states generate foreign policy? How did the Balkans – a peripheral region far from Europe’s centres of power and wealth – come to be the theatre of a crisis of such magnitude? How did an international system that seemed to be entering an era of détente produce a general war? Part III opens with the assassinations at Sarajevo and offers a narrative of the July Crisis itself, examining the interactions between the key decision-centres and bringing to light the calculations, misunderstandings and decisions that drove the crisis from one phase to the next.
It is a central argument of this book that the events of July 1914 make sense only when we illuminate the journeys travelled by the key decision-makers. To do this, we need to do more than simply revisit the sequence of international ‘crises’ that preceded the outbreak of war – we need to understand how those events were experienced and woven into narratives that structured perceptions and motivated behaviour. Why did the men whose decisions took Europe to war behave and see things as they did? How did the sense of fearfulness and foreboding that one finds in so many of the sources connect with the arrogance and swaggering we encounter – often in the very same individuals? Why did such exotic features of the pre-war scene as the Albanian Question and the ‘Bulgarian loan’ matter so much, and how were they joined up in the heads of those who had political power? When decision-makers discoursed on the international situation or on external threats, were they seeing something real, or projecting their own fears and desires on to their opponents, or both? The aim has been to reconstruct as vividly as possible the highly dynamic ‘decision positions’ occupied by the key actors before and during the summer of 1914.
Some of the most interesting recent writing on the subject has argued that, far from being inevitable, this war was in fact ‘improbable’ – at least until it actually happened.19 From this it would follow that the conflict was not the consequence of a long-run deterioration, but of short-term shocks to the international system. Whether one accepts this view or not, it has the merit of opening the story to an element of contingency. And it is certainly true that while some of the developments I examine in this book seem to point unequivocally in the direction of what actually transpired in 1914, there are other vectors of pre-war change that suggest different, unrealized outcomes. With this in mind, the book aims to show how the pieces of causality were assembled that, once in place, enabled the war to happen, but to do so without over-determining the outcome. I have tried to remain alert to the fact that the people, events and forces described in this book carried in them the seeds of other, perhaps less terrible, futures.