Even before the guns fell silent in 1918, historians have debated the “true” causes of the First World War. In attempting to point a blaming finger, these academics also reflected the times they lived in. So where does the historiographical debate on the origins of World War I stand now? Avan Fata explains.
Depiction of Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. An image from Domenica del Corriere, an Italian newspaper. Image by Achille Beltrame.
The narrative remains unchanged: on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo alongside his wife Countess Sophie by Gavrilo Princip. Just a month later, the so-called “July Crisis” ended with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia. Yet what could have been a “Third Balkan War” instead escalated into a continental war, as the other great powers of Europe joined the conflict.[1] It is not uncommon for writers or documentary-makers to utilize cliché metaphors or dramatic phrases to underscore the sheer scale, brutality, and impact of the fighting between 1914-1918. Indeed, it is perhaps the event which laid the foundations for the conflicts, revolutions, and transformations which characterized the “short 20th century”, to borrow a phrase from Eric Hobsbawm.[2] It is no surprise then, that even before the Treaty of Versailles had been signed to formally end the war, people were asking a duo of questions which continues to generate debate to this day.
How did the war start? Why did it start?
Yet in attempting to answer those questions, postwar academics and politicians inevitably began to write with the mood of their times. In Weimar Germany for example, historians seeking to exonerate the previous German Empire for the blame that the Diktat von Versailles had supposedly attached to them were generously funded by the government and given unprecedented access to the archives; so long as their ‘findings’ showed that Germany was not to blame.[3] In attempting to answer how the war had started, these writers were all haunted by the question which their theses, source selection, and areas of focus directly implied: who started it? This article traces the evolution of those arguments and the contours of the debate around the events which began with a shooting in Sarajevo.
Wartime Justification, Postwar Ponderance
The debate over the origins of the First World War began even while the war was being fought by the great powers. Governments of the great powers, in seeking to portray their involvement in the war as a just and noble act of self-defense, called upon historians to justify the country’s fighting as a just and moral decision.[4]
In some cases, this produced about-turns in the historical writings of entire academic communities. Herbert Fisher, a noted British historian who had praised Germany’s rise to power in the years before the war, changed his tone in a 1914 article titled The War, where he noted that:
"Prussia has been made by the sword...That is one of the unalterable facts of history graven upon the mind of every German schoolboy, and shaping his whole outlook on the world.[5]"
These arguments were not debates in the traditional sense. How could they be? With the war still raging, historians were unable to engage in the international realm of discussion that had flourished in the prewar years. However, by the time the guns fell silent and the Treaty of Versailles had brought the war to an end, the opportunity arose for new debates on the origins of the War to End All Wars.
During the interwar years, governments still sought to remove themselves of the blame of “starting” the war. They amassed multi-volume collections of thousands of archived materials (many of which had been previously classified), publishing them in the hopes that historians would find proof that their country had not been the one to engulf Europe in flames. Chief among these collections was the forty-volume Die Grosse Politik, published by the Weimar government, which contained documents dating from 1871-1914.[6]
These sources, previously inaccessible during the war, gave rise to new strains of historiography, which began to re-assess the "justifications" produced by each nation at the beginning of the war. In Britain, these collections of sources generated debates on the extent to which the German nation could be blamed for the First World War. This crusade's most prominent leader was George Peabody Gooch, a former Liberal M.P and author of distinguished historical works.[7] One of the first revisionists on the First World War, he argued alongside William Harbutt Dawson (another prominent historian on German), Raymond Beazely, and a few other British historians that the Germans were not the sole arbiters of war, and as such the peace treaty of Versailles was a flawed one.[8] Unsurprisingly, liberal parties in the Weimar Republic (and followers of a rising Nazi party) cheered the rise of these revisionist "Collective War Guilt" theses. German historians for their part, were re-mobilized to support and propagate these theses (with noticeably more nationalistic overtones). As historian Dennis Showalter describes:
"Strongly nationalistic and patriotic in orientation, matchless researchers and unrivaled polemics - controversy has long been an art form among German intellectuals - the pundits and professors rallied behind a cause lost by the soldiers. Given a previously unheard of access to government documents and frequently supported by government money, a generation of revisionists challenged and denied Germany's sole responsibility.[9]”
An Unavoidable War?
In the 1930s, these revisionist historians found a way to wash their nations conscience clean of the war. They pointed towards “larger forces”, the “mass demands” which had compelled the statesmen of 1914 to declare war. These forces, among them Social Darwinism, nationalism, and imperialism, provided the perfect solution. By assigning blame to these invisible movements and not a physical group or nation, the problem of “war guilt” could be swept neatly aside.[10]
Politicians also helped give rise to another historiographical norm during the 1930s, the idea of an “inadvertent war”. Simply put, they portrayed the decisions for war not as deliberate, measured choices made by well-informed statesmen, but as decisions made in the dark by leaders who were unaware of the consequences. Going further, several historians propagated the belief that the military had manipulated the civilian leaders into declaring war, or, as George Quester puts it: “at the decisive moment the military took over the direction of affairs and imposed their law.”[11]
Fischer, Taylor, and Historiography during the Cold War
As the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, First World War historiography was revived. Fritz Fischer is the name most associated with this revival, in part due to his namesake "Fischer Thesis", which argued that Germany was, as the first non-German historians had argued during the war, the responsible nation. This of course went against the previously accepted idea that the war had been the collective fault of the governments at the time, and Fischer's book Griff Nach der Weltmacht (Germany's War Aims in the First World War) was hotly debated by other European and American historians alike.[12]
In an era of antiwar sentiments, the First World War was now viewed as something of a pointless conflict, with many in the public pointing towards the interwar instability and Second World War as proof of how hollow the soldiers’ sacrifice had been a half century earlier.[13] With this prevailing mood, the “inadvertent war” theses found greater popularity. A notable work in this regard is A.J.P Taylor’s “War by Timetable”, which proposed that the Great War had been inevitable, accelerated greatly by the meticulous and inflexible mobilization plans that Europe’s powers had developed by 1914.[14]
Beyond the academic debate, the Cold War also influenced popular-history works on the July Crisis. Chief among them is Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which not only agreed with the “inadvertent war” theses, but portrayed Germany as a “barbaric” and warmongering European power whose armies marched “like predatory ants” across Belgium.[15] To a Western public that was locked in a geopolitical standoff with the monolithic empire of the Soviet Union, such rhetoric may have resonated well.
Current Historiography
In the 1990s, the debate over the origins of World War I began to shift towards what it is in the 21st century. With the Cold War having ended, historians were able to adopt a more disinterested yet critical view of 1914, and the resulting journal articles and theses made several things clear:
1. The “larger forces” which had once borne the responsibility of starting the conflict were dismissed. The war was a result of deliberate decisions made by government officials who had a good understanding of what they were getting into. Whilst the “mass demands” may have influenced their mentalities, they did not “force” war as previous historians had argued.
2. The military staffs, far from “taking control” of the decision-making bodies, continued to operate within their official capacities. At no point in any of the to-be belligerents did the military concerns override the diplomatic ones that the civilian statesmen possessed.
3. The diplomatic mentality of the statesmen had been influenced, to varying degrees, by previous diplomatic crises of the 20th century, and investigating why these precedents failed in 1914 is thus a key focus.
Further, as a result of the distance from the First World War, historians in the 1990s emphasized a multinational approach to the matter. No country operated in isolation, and its diplomatic decisions in the lead up to war were influenced by the decisions that the other parties had made. As such, the common trope of assigning “war guilt” is noticeably absent in writings from the 1990s, replaced instead with critical analyses of why and how 1914 differed from a decision-making standpoint in each of the halls of power.
Thus, there we have a general overview of how the focuses of historiography on the First World War have shifted in the past century, and it would perhaps not be too far-fetched to suggest that these focuses may very well change within the next century too. The next part shall deal with how the current historiography approaches the July Crisis in both its practices and focuses.
What do you think of World War One historiography? Let us know below.
[1] The other “great powers” in question are Russia, Germany, Britain, and France; joined by the United States in 1917. Other “lesser” powers, whose contributions were still considerable, later included the Ottoman Empire, Bulgaria, Romania, Italy, and Japan. This classification taken from Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig (eds.), The Origins of World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 46-50.
[2] The term was first utilized in Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London: Abacus).
[3] Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War (London: Profile Books, 2014), xxix.
[4] Dennis Showalter, “The Great War and its Historiography.” The Historian 68, no. 4 (2006): 713-715
[5] Quoted in Steven W. Siak. “’The Blood That Is in Our Veins Comes from German Ancestors’: British Historians and the Coming of the First World War.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 30, no. 2 (1998): 226-7
[6] Another noteworthy synthesis of such source materials is Luigi Alberini’s three-volume The Origins of the War of 1914 (1942 – 1943), which for a time remained the work to consult on the matter.
[7] Heather Jones, “As the Centenary Approaches: The Regeneration of First World War Historiography.” The Historical Journal 56 no. 3 (2013): 860-863
[8] Catherine Ann Cline, “British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 20, no. 1 (1988): 46-50
[9] Showalter, “The Great War and Its Historiography.”, 716.
[10] Hamilton and Herwig, The Origins of World War I, 25-33.
[11] Quoted in Hamilton and Herwig, The Origins of World War I, 450.
[12] Frederick A. Hale, “Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One.” The History Teacher 9, no. 2 (1976): 258-260.
[13] Alan Kramer, “Recent Historiography of the First World War (Part I),” Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift Für Moderne Europäische Geschichte / Revue D'histoire Européenne Contemporaine 12, no. 2 (2014): 160-161.
[14] Frederick Hale, ”Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One,” The History Teacher 9, no. 2 (1976): 262-267.
[15] These quotations and poor view of the work are taken from Ulrich Trumpener, “The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman,” The Journal of Modern History 35, no. 1 (Mar. 1963): 94-95.
References
Cline, Catherine Ann. “British Historians and the Treaty of Versailles.” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 20, no. 1 (1988): 46-50. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4049797.
Hale, Frederick A. "Fritz Fischer and the Historiography of World War One." The History Teacher 9, no. 2 (1976): 258-79. https://www.jstor.org/stable/492292
Herwig, Holger H., and Hamilton, Richard F., eds. The Origins of World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Jones, Heather. "As The Centenary Approaches: The Regeneration of First World War Historiography." The Historical Journal 56, no. 3 (2013): 857- 78.http://www.jstor.org/stable/24529097.
Kramer, Alan. "Recent Historiography of the First World War (Part I)." Journal of Modern European History / Zeitschrift Für Moderne Europäische Geschichte / Revue D'histoire Européenne Contemporaine 12, no. 1 (2014): 5- 28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26266110.
MacMillan, Margaret. The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War. London: Profile Books Ltd., 2014.
Showalter, Dennis. "The Great War and Its Historiography." The Historian 68, no. 4 (2006): 713-21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24453743.
Steven W. Siak. ""The Blood That Is in Our Veins Comes from German Ancestors": British Historians and the Coming of the First World War." Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 30, no. 2 (1998): 221-52. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4053522.
Trumpener, Ulrich. “The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman.” The Journal of Modern History 35, no. 1 (1963): 94-95.https://doi.org/10.1086/243637.
