The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (Making History)

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Clearly, then, some important areas of consensus do exist. But disagreements on nuance and detail continue unabated, and here the devil is in the detail. Historians reading the same evidence come to opposing conclusions or evaluate the importance of specific events in an entirely different way. For example, they continue to argue over the significance of Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, the importance of the Russian mobilization, as well as about the nature of, and intention behind, the British mediation proposals. In fact, the most recent publications spend a great deal of time considering these controversial aspects in particular.

It was the choices that men made during those fateful days that plunged the world into war. They did not walk in their sleep. They knew what they were doing. They were not stupid. They were not ignorant. The choices they made were rational, carefully calculated, premised on the assumptions and attitudes, ideas and experiences that they had accumulated over the years. Real people, actual flesh-and-blood human beings, were responsible for the tragedy of 1914—not unseen, barely understood forces beyond their control. Footnote 95 The Fischer controversy, documents, and the ‘truth’ about the Origins of the First World War (2013-04) Also published in Serbian - ISBN 978-86-7102-452-5 and Croatian translation - ISBN 978-953-303-726-4 - with a new foreword, 2014)Even a hundred years ago the Versailles verdict was not without its critics, of course, particularly in Weimar Germany, whose leaders and citizens saw themselves unfairly punished for a war they thought had been defensive in nature. There were also critical voices outside of Germany that assigned responsibility not to Berlin, but rather to Paris and St. Petersburg. But in the main, such revisionists were drowned out by those who blamed Germany until a more conciliatory consensus, reached by the 1930s, blamed impersonal forces, rather than German decision-makers, for the outbreak of the war. Footnote 10 This was an acceptable position for most. Soon an even more terrible war shifted the focus away from 1914, and in the aftermath of World War II, explaining the inhuman horrors of an even more deadly conflict overshadowed the once so bitterly debated question of the origins of World War I. Footnote 11 The Kaiser. New Research on Wilhelm II’s role in Imperial Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2003 (edited with Wilhelm Deist) Find out more about this book This reinterpretation of Serbia's role was not welcome in contemporary Serbia, where the national story told about the country's entry into the war has traditionally been one of victimhood. The Belgrade government, in this interpretation, had been unfairly targeted by the imperial power Austria-Hungary, which wrongly sought to punish it for having allegedly instigated the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. In present-day Serbia, i.e., in the aftermath of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the fighting of the 1990s, the history of the country's twentieth-century wars remains politically relevant and contested, and the suggestion that Serbia had played a decisive role in causing the outbreak of World War I was greeted with national outrage. Footnote 35 It should come as no surprise that Serbian nationalists considered unacceptable both Clark's comparison of the events of June 28, 1914 with September 11, 2001, as well as his discussion of Serbia's more recent Balkan Wars in the same breath as Serbia's alleged aggressive prewar foreign policy at the beginning of the twentieth century. Indeed, Clark's account paints a lurid picture of Serbia's violent past, and he argues that our “moral compass” has changed in recent years: “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.” Footnote 36

In: Epkenhans, Michael; Foerster, Stig and Hagemann, Karen eds. Militaerische Erinnerungskultur. Soldaten im Spiegel von Biographien, Memoiren und Selbstzeugnissen (pp. 132-151) Of War Plans and War Guilt: the Debate surrounding the Schlieffen Plan’, The Journal of Strategic Studies, vol. 28, 5, 2006, pp.857-885Gerhard Hirschfeld: I don't see parallels. History does not repeat itself. History is, in a way, dependent on certain factors and conditions that are different from what we used to have. There are no parallels between 1914 and 2014. Having said that, there is one element, however, that, I'm afraid, creates continuity and this is the human factor. People do not change. They have the same feelings, emotions, ambitions, strivings for power. So, when it comes to judging the personal factor, the ambitions of politicians, there I would say is an element of continuity. But the historical context changed dramatically. We didn't have a NATO in 1914, we didn't have an OSCE, an EU. We didn't have international organizations and alliances that are controlling elements of a crisis. You have the same emotions, but not the same conditions and historical structures as in the past. Das Bild Helmuth von Moltkes in der Biography’, in Michael Epkenhans, Stig Förster and Karen Hagemann (eds), Militärische Erinnerungskultur. Soldaten im Spiegel von Biographien, Memoiren und Selbstzeugnissen, Paderborn, Schöningh 2006, pp.132-151

John Keiger: Yes, I'm afraid that, rather pessimistically, I do think that, particularly over Ukraine, but also perhaps over what is going on in the Far East, [where] there is a potential for things to go horribly wrong. One incident in which the pride of a nation becomes implicated -- like, for instance, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 -- that kind of incident, if it came today, say, the assassination of a major person in Ukraine that immediately brought into play the various external powers, then that could provoke a very serious incident. That does concern me. I don't think the United Nations would be able to do very much. It is very hard to know, but, for instance, if the Russian ambassador in Ukraine was assassinated, what would happen? Guilt or Responsibility? The Hundred Year Debate on the Origins of the First World War (2015-12-31)By contrast, few historians argued, until recently, for British responsibility for the outbreak of war. Britain's foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, has traditionally been seen as one of the few decision-makers who honestly worked toward keeping the peace in July 1914. Footnote 24 In fact, most historians agreed that London was the only capital where decision-makers were reluctant to contemplate war. Distracted until the very end of the crisis by the Irish Question, a war on the continent was, for Britain, only a golden opportunity because it could diffuse the domestic crisis: it is no exaggeration to say that a civil war loomed over the Irish Question in the summer of 1914. Margot Asquith's recently published diary, for example, clearly shows the preoccupation with Ireland during the fateful weeks of the summer of 1914, an impression confirmed by other contemporary accounts. “All happened in such a short time,” the Prime Minister's wife recorded on August 4: “On 30 th July everyone was talking of Ireland. The cry of ‘Civil war! Civil war!’ to which The Times and the Tories treated us every day has been stilled in five days.” Footnote 25 General and academic interest in the war peaked well before the actual centenary of its outbreak (the date of which differed, of course, depending on which country was commemorating it). Commemoration, as well as the way historians wrote about the war and the way their audiences received this new work differed, too, depending on the national context. In countries whose past has continued to be affected disproportionately by the events of 1914–1918, or where the war has featured largely in national memory (such as Germany and Serbia, for example), the nature of the debate showed clearly that World War I is not yet “history.”

ANNIKA MOMBAUER: Welcome to World War 1– trauma, memory, controversy. I’m Annika and I’m your guide as we study the impact of the First World War. You will study and explore the trauma suffered by soldiers and civilians alike. This course will help you understand and contextualise the brutality of this war. And to empathise with those who suffered as a result of it. We will ask, what is remembered of this war? And explore its long-term consequences. How do the outcomes still affect us today? And why is there still a controversy about why it started? We begin our explorations by focusing on the physical and mental casualties of the war. Then we will explore how this war affected the lives of civilians. Why did the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 lead to the deaths of millions in a global war of unprecedented scale and ferocity? This question has been the subject of historical, political and public debate for more than 100 years.

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Where is the debate headed? All too often historians have attempted to predict the future of this century-long controversy—and they have nearly always got it wrong, thus making it presumptuous to make confident predictions. Footnote 126 In a summary of the debate as it had developed up to the end of 2012, Gerhard Groß was confident that the topic would continue to exercise public opinion in the run-up to the centenary and provide for “an exciting discussion,” but he did not expect “a new Fischer-controversy with a great deal of public attention like the one in the 1960s.” As we have seen, that turned out to be far from the mark. Footnote 127 The German Reich was not “guilty” of World War I. Such a category did not exist then, for, according to the code of European state wars, sovereign states had the “ ius ad bellum” as long as they could claim a violation of their interests. In 1914, this right to war applied least to Great Britain because the United Kingdom could not claim an immediate interest of coalition obligation for an intervention in a local war (between Austria-Hungary and Serbia). Only the British entry into the war turned the original conflict into a global disaster. Footnote 114 In 2011 she organised, together with Professor John Röhl, an international conference to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Fritz Fischer’s publication Griff nach der Weltmacht, which sparked the infamous Fischer controversy. The conference took place on 13-15 October 2011 at the German Historical Institute in London. She has edited some of the conference proceedings which were published in a special issue of The Journal of Contemporary History, entitled ‘The Fischer Controversy after 50 Years’ (April 2013; 48, 2).