History, Security Studies, and the July Crisis

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Notes

¹ Robert Zaretsky, ‘Struggling with destiny: Barbara Tuchman’s legacy as an historian’. Times Literary Supplement, 24 Feb. 2012.

² Not reviewed here – since it is not a general account of the war’s origins – but well worth reading is Nicholas Lambert’s Planning Armageddon: British Economic Warfare and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP 2012). Lambert offers a sharp and quite radical challenge to the conventional wisdom surrounding British naval strategy and plans before the war. See review essay in Journal of Strategic Studies 36/3 (June 2013), 454–79.

³ This is a theme of all the books reviewed here, but Great Britain’s chaotic domestic politics before the war was first and most elegantly spelled out in George Dangerfield’s 1935 classic, The Strange Death of Liberal England.

⁴ Innenpolitik refers to the school in German historiography, exemplified by Eckart Kehr, that emphasizes the primacy of domestic factors in the making of foreign policy. For a summary that focuses on its relevance among American international relations theorists, see Gideon Rose, ‘Neoclassical Realism and Theories of Foreign Policy’, World Politics 51/1 (Oct. 1998), 144–72.

⁵ Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books 1999).

⁶ In 1961, the German historian Fritz Fischer published his controversial book, Griff nach der Weltmacht, that claimed Germany’s leaders had expansionist war aims and had decided in a crucial meeting in Dec. 1912 for an eventual war of conquest. His 1969 book, Krieg der Illusionen, furthered pushed the idea of an expansionist Germany but also highlighted the desire of German leaders to distract dissatisfied citizens and deflect their demands for increasing democracy into war. The argument caused an uproar in 1960s West Germany, as it made explicit links between Wilhelmine Germany’s ambitions before and behavior during World War I and the behavior of Hitler’s Germany. Fischer’s works were translated into English and his arguments were quite popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but the with the exception of Hastings, the works reviewed here reflect a rather steep discounting of his thesis. In some ways, Fischer’s arguments and the reaction reflected academic sensibilities and the politics of their time, especially in a Federal Republic of Germany struggling to make sense of German history and find its place in the world.

⁷ For an excellent review of Schmidt’s work, see Marc Trachtenberg, ‘French Foreign Policy in the July Crisis, 1914: A Review Article,’ a discussion of Stefan Schmidt, Frankreichs Aussenpolitik in der Julikrise 1914: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Ausbruchs des Ersten Weltkrieges (Munich: Oldenbourg 2009), <www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/3-Trachtenberg.pdf>.

⁸ For an extraordinary, in-depth review of recent historiography before the recent slate of books, see Samuel R. Williamson Jr and Ernest R. May, ‘An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914,’ The Journal of Modern History 79 (June 2007), 335–387.

⁹ John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past (Oxford: OUP 2002).

¹⁰ Consider how the Fischer thesis was largely ignored by French historians, where might think it would be appealing, because of the decades long political rivalries among key French historians. See J.F.V Keiger. ‘The Fischer Controversy, the War Origins Debate and France: A Non-History’, Journal of Contemporary History 48/2 (2013), 363–75.

¹¹ For this point, see Robert Jervis, ‘International Politics and Diplomatic History: Fruitful Differences,’ H-Diplo ISSF (March 2010), <www.h-net.org/~diplo/ISSF/PDF/ISSF-Jervis-InaguralAddress.pdf>.

¹² Margaret MacMillan wrote an essay arguing that there are many similarities in the international political situation of 1914 and 2014. Margaret MacMillan, ‘The Rhyme of History: Lessons of the Great War’, The Brookings Essay, 16 Dec. 2013, <www.brookings.edu/research/essays/2013/rhyme-of-history>. For an excellent caution against drawing such easy lessons from a century ago, see Mira Rapp-Hooper, ‘Rhyme and Reason: Why 2014 Doesn’t Have to be 1914’, The Diplomat, 2 Jan. 2014, <http://thediplomat.com/2014/01/rhyme-and-reason-why-2014-doesnt-have-to-be-1914/>. See also Paul Kennedy, ‘The Great Powers, Then and Now,’ New York Times, 13 Aug. 2013, <www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/opinion/global/the-great-powers-then-and-now.html?_r=0>.

¹³ Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia UP 1959).

¹⁴ For the best examples of this kind of work, see the excellent collection edited by Steven E. Miller, Sean M. Lynn-Jones, and Stephen Van Evera, Military Strategy and the Origins of the First World War, revised and expanded edition (Princeton UP 1991).

¹⁵ The only outcome worse than a complete German victory for the British was an overwhelming victory by the French and Russians. One can imagine that, despite the public rhetoric of Germany’s September Program, German officials might have been tempted to rein in their horns and offer Great Britain enormous concessions if it left the war, or even simply promised not to build up its continental commitment. For the bargaining model of war, see Dan Reiter, ‘Exploring the Bargaining Model of War’, Perspectives on Politics 1/1 (March 2003), 27–43.

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Francis J. Gavin

Francis J. Gavin is the Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Policy Studies at MIT. He is the author of, most recently, the book Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age.