The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 Paperback – March 18, 2014

THE SLEEPWALKERS: How Europe went to war in 1914.Let me state it at the outset. "The Sleepwalkers" by Cristopher Clark is one of the best books ever written about the causes of World War 1. Mr. Clark begins with an informed and perceptive analysis of Balkan politics, and follows this with an equally cogent and lucid examination of European politics with special emphasis on the evolution of Anglo-German relations. Each of the nations of the Triple Entente is critiqued in turn. About Russia, Clark writes:"In taking these steps [Ministerial Councils of July 24 and 25], Sazonov and his colleagues escalated the crisis and greatly increased the likelihood of a general European war. For one thing, Russian pre-mobilization altered the political chemistry in Serbia, making it unthinkable that the Belgrade government, which had originally given serious consideration to accepting the ultimatum, would back down in the face of Austrian pressure. It also heightened the domestic pressure on the Russian administration, for the sight of uniformed men and the news that Russia would not `remain indifferent' to the fate of Serbia stirred euphoria in the nationalist press. It sounded alarm bells in Austria-Hungary. Most importantly of all, these measures drastically raised the pressure on Germany, which had so far abstained from military preparations and was still counting on the localization of the Austro-Serbian conflict. Why did Sazonov do it? He was not a candid man and never produced a reliable account of his actions or motivations during these days, but the most plausible and obvious answer lies in his very first reaction to the news of the ultimatum: `C'est la guerre Européenne!' Sazonov believed from the outset that an Austrian military action against Serbia must trigger a Russian counter-attack. His response to the ultimatum was entirely consistent with his earlier commitments. Sazonov had never acknowledged that Austria-Hungary had a right to counter-measures in the face of Serbian irredentism. On the contrary, he had endorsed the politics of Balkan irredentism and had explicitly aligned himself with the view that Serbia was the rightful successor to the lands of unredeemed South Slavdom within the dual monarchy, an obsolete multi-ethnic structure whose days , in his view, were in any case numbered. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the days of the autocratic, multi-ethnic Russian Empire, whose minority relations were in worse condition than Austria-Hungary's, might also be numbered. Sazonov had denied from the start Austria's right to take action of any kind against Belgrade after the assassinations. He had repeatedly indicated in a range of contexts that he would respond militarily to any action against the client state. Already on 18 July, shortly after it became known that an Austrian note of some sort was in preparation, Sazonov had told Sir George Buchanan that `anything resembling an Austrian ultimatum in Belgrade could not leave Russia indifferent, and she might be forced to take some precautionary military measures."Clark, Christopher (2013-03-19). The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (pp. 480-481). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.And . . ."Was all this done on Serbia's behalf alone? Was Russia really willing to risk war in order to protect the integrity of its distant client? We have seen that Serbia's importance in Russian eyes grew during the last years before the war, partly because of the deepening alienation from Sofia and partly because Serbia was a better instrument than Bulgaria for applying pressure to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Sympathy with the Serbian cause was strong in Russian pan-Slavist and nationalist circles - this was an issue with which the government could build useful bridges to its middle-class public. On the other hand, St Petersburg had been willing to leave Belgrade to its own devices in October 1913, when the Austrians had issued an ultimatum demanding their withdrawal from northern Albania . And unlike Russia's neighbour Bulgaria, which possessed a piece of Black Sea coast, Serbia could hardly be seen as geopolitically crucial to Russian security."Clark, Christopher (2013-03-19). The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (p. 484). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.And . . ."On the other hand, the Straits issue doubtless carried considerable weight for Krivoshein, whose responsibility for agricultural exports made him especially aware of the vulnerability of Russian commercial shipping. Recent instability in the Balkans had tended to fuse the Balkan theatre with the Straits question, so that the peninsula came increasingly to be seen as the crucial strategic hinterland to the Straits. Russian control of the Balkans would place St Petersburg in a far better position to prevent unwanted intrusions on the Bosphorus. Designs on the Straits were thus an important reinforcing factor in the decision to stand firm over the threat to Serbia. Whatever the precise order of geopolitical priorities, the Russians were already on the road to war. At this point, the horizons of possibility began to narrow. It becomes in retrospect harder (though not impossible) to imagine alternatives to the war that actually did break out in the first days of August 1914. This is doubtless what General Dobrorolsky, head of the Russian army's mobilization department, meant when he remarked in 1921 that after the St Petersburg meetings of 24 and 25 July `the war was already a decided thing, and all the flood of telegrams between the governments of Russia and Germany were nothing but the staging for an historical drama'. And yet throughout the crucial days of the fourth week of July, the Russians and their French partners continued to speak of a policy of peace. The policy of `firmness', as expounded by Poincaré, Sazonov, Paléologue, Izvolsky, Krivoshein and their colleagues was a policy that aimed, in the words of the Tsar , `to safeguard peace by the demonstration of force'."Clark, Christopher (2013-03-19). The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (p. 480). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.Clark notes the following about Sir Edward Grey:"Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign . George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey's continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey's arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe."Clark, Christopher (2013-03-19). The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (p. 200). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.Clark seems to endorse the legion of post-War French critics who accused Poincare of fomenting a European war in order to conquer Alsace/Lorraine, but there is a curious disconnect between these observations and his final "Conclusion," in which he adheres to a determined neutrality:"Where does this leave the question of culpability? By asserting that Germany and her allies were morally responsible for the outbreak of war, Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty ensured that questions of culpability would remain at or near the centre of the debate over the war's origins. The blame game has never lost its appeal. The most influential articulation of this tradition is the `Fischer thesis' - shorthand for a bundle of arguments elaborated in the 1960s by Fritz Fischer, Imanuel Geiss and a score of younger German colleagues, who identified Germany as the power chiefly culpable in the outbreak of war. According to this view (leaving aside the many variations within the Fischer school), the Germans did not stumble or slither into war. They chose it - worse, they planned it in advance, in the hope of breaking out of their European isolation and launching a bid for world power. Recent studies of the resulting Fischer controversy have highlighted the links between this debate and the fraught process by which German intellectuals came to terms with the contaminating moral legacy of the Nazi era, and Fischer's arguments have been subjected to criticism on many points. Nonetheless, a diluted version of the Fischer thesis still dominates in studies of Germany's road to war. Do we really need to make the case against a single guilty state, or to rank the states according to their respective share in responsibility for the outbreak of war? In one classical study from the origins literature, Paul Kennedy remarked that it is `flaccid' to dodge the search for a culprit by blaming all or none of the belligerent states. A stiffer approach, Kennedy implies, ought not to shrink from pointing the finger. The problem with a blame-centered account is not that one may end up blaming the wrong party. It is rather that accounts structured around blame come with built -in assumptions. They tend, firstly, to presume that in conflictual interactions one protagonist must ultimately be right and the other wrong. Were the Serbs wrong to seek to unify Serbdom? Were the Austrians wrong to insist on the independence of Albania? Was one of these enterprises more wrong than the other? The question is meaningless. A further drawback of prosecutorial narratives is that they narrow the field of vision by focusing on the political temperament and initiatives of one particular state rather than on multilateral processes of interaction. Then there is the problem that the quest for blame predisposes the investigator to construe the actions of decision-makers as planned and driven by a coherent intention. You have to show that someone willed war as well as caused it. In its extreme form, this mode of procedure produces conspiratorial narratives in which a coterie of powerful individuals, like velvet-jacketed Bond villains, controls events from behind the scene in accordance with a malevolent plan. There is no denying the moral satisfaction delivered by such narratives, and it is not, of course, logically impossible that war came about in this manner in the summer of 1914, but the view expounded in this book is that such arguments are not supported by the evidence. The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime."This conclusion is disappointing, coming as it does after a number of Clark's earlier conclusions which do indeed point the finger of blame at the nations of the Triple Entente. The Great War came because some influential groups of leaders wanted it to come and used the opposing coalitions to bring it about, using the pretext of "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans . . ." (Bismarck) Both Russia [Isvolsky/Sasonov] and France [Poincare] were prepared to risk a European war to realize their respective objectives as long as they felt reasonably certain of victory. Great Britain [Grey]provided that certainty and Clark does not fail to make the point - except in his final "Conclusion." The Fischer thesis of war-guilt has been discredited by any number of historians including one of Clark's own contemporaries, Niall Ferguson. Christopher Clark has nevertheless written an impressive volume which deserves top billing on any list of `must read' books for serious students of WW1.

Christopher Clark alters the sociological approach that so many scholars have relied upon and instead of continuing to ask "why" Europe went to war, rather he asks "how" did Europe go to war in 1914. While Clark's interpretation is fresh for a twenty-first century methodology, the ideas he poses in his thesis may hold negative reverberations among future decision-making by state-leaders. Scholars recognize that Barbara W. Tuchman's 1962 monograph, The Guns of August, influenced the decision-making of a generation of Cold Warriors, including President John F. Kennedy who relied on Tuchman's conclusions for averting war over the Cuban Missile Crisis. For Tuchman holds the Germans, and the myriad of European diplomat's, culpable for their failure to effectively navigate communications between states and leaders (Tuchman, vii). Clark, on the other hand, asserts that it was a slow-build of interdependent factors which culminated beginning with the assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 thus triggering the July Crisis and consequent Austrian Ultimatum. Carefully and cleverly Clark navigates the same ambiguous terrain that by his conclusion he draws parallels between the delicate situation that confronted statesmen in 1914 with those that confront contemporary leaders concerning the Eurozone crisis. The Eurozone crisis provides an example for where actors, "like those of 1914, were aware that there was a possible outcome that would be generally catastrophic" (Clark, 555). It is in this sense that makes Clark's new interpretation so remarkable, yet altogether precarious.Clark, a history professor at Cambridge University, recognizes the importance of the basic structural causes, such as the inflexible alliance in the terms set by the Austro-German Alliance. Germany was indebted to lend its support to Austria in a conflict with Russia. And conversely, the terms of alliance between France and Russia, as both parties were obliged to move against Germany if either became involved in a defensive war with Germany. Therefore, Germany would have to fight a war on two fronts against both France and Russia. Understanding Germany's disposition in the pre-war years is crucial to Clark's thesis in absolving Germany from further possessing much of the fault for the outbreak of war.Within this intricate relationship, Clark interweaves an argument that defends the hasty reactions and misconceptions of Germany. In the decade before the outbreak of war, Germany, Austria, Serbia, and Bosnia were entangled in espionage that further exacerbated the mistrust between them (Clark, 92-94). This combined with the pulls of war amid a rapidly growing militarized European continent only served to aggravate the already heightened emotional climate. Finally, the idiosyncrasies of dictatorial decision-making further served to deteriorate international relations that consequently channeled a preponderance of power to the leaders. In other words, leaders began to ignore their council of diplomats' careful plans, thus they consolidated their power within their respective states. Such was the case concerning Germany's misreading of Russia. This misreading served to foster a great deal of conspiracy and suspicion among diplomats and leaders (Clark, 418-419). Yet Clark contends that these struggles alone do not account for the outbreak of war, but were merely factors among an already devolving continental relationship.Clark further contends that a peaceful resolve was just as attainable. War emerged out of a series of complex aggregate factors beginning in the 1880s when the Serbian political culture "was transformed . . . by the emergence of political parties of modern type with newspapers, caucuses, manifestos, campaign strategies, and local communities" (Clark, 7). Previous scholarship has analyzed the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Yet Clark expands the scope to incorporate the cultural transformations that unfolded in Serbia over the preceding decade to provide a deeper comprehension for the rising calamity.Altogether Clark effectively shows leaders' inherent irrationality in decision-making, and diplomats' miscommunications and hyperboles concerning the actions and opinions of state leaders. Each nation exuded its own grand illusions of power and possessed archaic stereotypes and ideas of sovereignty in relation to their respective enemies. To make matters more tangled, European leaders capitulated to the demands of domestic alliances, and furthermore, misperceived their regional surroundings for no apparent reason. Clark shows how all these disparate events culminated in Europe that led leaders to 'sleepwalk' into a world war.If it is to be that Clark's thesis serves as the new twenty first century interpretation of WWI, one may want to approach this new interpretation with a degree of caution. The twentieth century, the century of the Cold War, an era not uncommon for superpowers to face off carrying with them the propensity to march the world into world war, sought council through the pages of WWI historiography. As aforementioned, much of the previous scholarship focuses on leaving Germany culpable for the outbreak of war. Yet Clark spends a great deal of time absolving Germany of that fault in recognizing that it was not any one factor or set of factors independently which led to the outbreak of war. While his conclusions are well-argued and expertly steeped in evidence, one should not so easily dismiss the power that such an interpretation of WWI may command; it is sure to influence statesmen to foster new ideas concerning trepidations that pave the narrow road to war.