IST 605: WWI Origins

Clark analyzes the events taking place in the key decision centers of Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade. He focuses on the history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Clark argues that all of Europe’s rulers, including Britain’s, were blameworthy, but he sees their myopic misreadings of international politics, not their aristocratic values, as culpable, thus he distances himself from the previous thesis, led by British historian A.J.P. Taylor, of "lions led by donkeys" which pointed to the incapability of the ruling elite, belonging to an anachronistic social class which had lost touch with reality. Through his detailed analysis of short-term political change and contingency in the events leading up to the war, Clark argues that fateful decisions were made not based on outdated class values but on misreadings of international politics.

Hastings re-creates this dramatic year, from the diplomatic crisis to the fighting in Belgium and France on the Western front, and Serbia and Galicia to the east. In the first chapters, Hastings explores the breakdown of diplomacy, and unlike Christopher Clark, he reaffirms the "war guilt" thesis, stating that Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame for the outbreak of war. For Hastings, the most important cause of the war was Germany's support of the Austro-Hungarian invasion of Serbia, motivated by the false belief that the Central powers could win a wider European conflict if the invasion led to an escalation. It is interesting to compare this reading with the contemporary consensus, which has shifted towards a verdict closer to Clark's, who advances that there was indeed no "smoking gun" and that the governments of all European powers share the responsibility for the catastrophe that followed.