Europe: Then and Now, featuring Professor Christopher Clark

i'm senior fellow and director of the europe program here at csis and i can tell all of you um have come with a very important purpose because you would not come through the the wind and rainstorm uh that you had to to join us today because you are as excited as i am for the next hour and a half of conversation we are so delighted to welcome professor chris clark um here with us for an incredibly important conversation as we talk about the centenary of the first world war and professor clark whom so many of you know is the professor of modern european history at the university of cambridge and of course the most much celebrated author of the sleepwalkers how europe went to war in 1914 and of course new storm clouds are also gathering uh on the european horizon uh certainly today as we speak as we watch events unfold in eastern ukraine so we're going to i'm going to invite professor clark to the podium he's going to give us a presentation on some of the broader themes of the sleepwalkers and then we're going to come up and have a bit of a a conversation on on some issues both of a hundred years ago but perhaps uh bringing more to the modern time and discuss current events today and then i'm going to unleash all of you on professor clark so without further ado please join me in welcoming professor clark thank you well thank you very much and congratulations on getting here can you can you hear me they told me that washington was lovely in the spring and um and i haven't been disappointed um i wanted to start just by showing you a couple of images just to put us into 1914 very briefly before we sort of pull ourselves back out again it wasn't a very good year um there's a couple who are about to have what i think you could fairly describe as a very bad day um he is franz ferdinand the arch arch duke and heir apparent uh to the austrian austro-hungarian throne she's sophie his wife the the descendant of a very distinguished czech lineage not distinguished enough really to be regarded by the habsburg royal house as appropriate material for um habsburg royalty but um for which reason she was never allowed to travel with him for example in the open carriage the royal open carriage in vienna or to sit next to him at dinner as she always sat far away because she was of such supposedly lowly stock and that's one reason why on the 28th of june she insisted on sitting with him all day in the car because among other things it was a chance in this attractive handsome uh and rather oriental looking city on the edge on the periphery of the um austro-hungarian empire to officiate together as they both imagined they would do when uh her husband eventually acceded to the throne and of course um the day was important it was a very important date the 28th of june was their wedding anniversary so for that reason too she insisted on being with him uh in the open car it also happened to be the uh anniversary of the the defeat of the serbian armies at kosovo polia at the at the field of blackbirds by the by an ottoman force by mixed ottoman and slav force um an event from the year 1389 which um brought the existence of an independent serbia to an end an event which might seem to have been very remote but which in fact to many sub um you know national nationally minded serbs um felt like felt very intimate felt felt like it belonged to a very close past a past that was still remembered a past that was still felt so on both sides there um a lot of emotion riding on that day here we see them greeting the crowds at the uh cereal of a railway station as you can see he has ostrich feathers on his hat i'll come back to those on his helmet i'll come back to those feathers in a moment here you see a map of the balkans in 1911 and 1914. i've just included this partly because one can never look often enough at maps of the balkans they're just they never exhaust their interest but the main thing is i've just offered these two pictures it's a little bit like the two pictures you see on the serial packet where there are you're asked to identify the differences between between two almost identical images and you can see that in 1911 there's no albania and suddenly with an almost inaudible plop albanian appears and albania appears in 1913 you can see that serbia changes shape it acquires almost its entire territorial size again it increases by more than 100 percent bulgaria changes its extent so does romania and all this happens of course because of the the helter skelter retreat of ottoman power um across southeastern europe the other thing to bear in mind is just the intimate relationship between the serbian polity and austria-hungary belgrade looks on that map almost as if it's inside the dual monarchy inside austria-hungary it was right on the border it was a few minutes drive from the serbian capital to austrian territory um okay this is the closest that the early 20th century had to google earth um it's an engraving from the bay decker travel guide and it shows syria and what you see there is sarajevo like a cupped hand it's in situated in a river valley the river miliaca there's a road running along the valley the the um the uphill key along which the car the the sort of cavalcade the motorcade bearing franz ferdinand and his wife travelled eastwards across the city towards the um the great horse it's mark there's house the the city hall which you can see there um just next to the bazaar district and what happened next um is with almost um with a sort of brutal simplicity illustrated by this diagram as they passed the churmurya bridge a bomb was thrown by a young man called nyadelko chavarrinovich the bomb missed the second car and exploded under the third car causing some injuries but superficial injuries at this point you might have thought that the visit to sarajevo would be called off and indeed various people proposed to franz ferdinand that he leave the car and that they leave the city he didn't like being told what to do um he suffered from a syndrome which for which the technical name is grumpy old man um it happens to a lot of us as we get older we get more and more irritated by this and less he didn't like being told what to do and he said the man is obviously insane have him taken to an asylum we'll continue as planned uh and so the journey went on and they arrived at the right house the city city hall there um and what i've well the reason i've included this image is because you can see many of the gentlemen standing there are wearing pheasants that's because this was a as far as the the elite the urban elite of sarajevo was concerned this was a very muslim town the mayor was a bosnian muslim and you can see them all there greeting the couple among them is mehmet churchich the bosnian mayor of sarajevo to whom fell the um the unfortunate task of the unenviable task of welcoming the couple which he did with a speech he had prepared um which by the time they arrived was completely inadequate to the situation because the opening words were it is with sentiments of the deepest joy that the citizens of sarajevo welcome your highnesses to this city whereupon he was interrupted by franz ferdinand who said in her deepest joy welcome is this how you welcome your guests with bombs um of course he had a point um but at this point his wife was seen to whisper something to him along the lines of you know it's not his fault dear let him continue and um and so he let him go on and what happened next is shown here in this very fanciful image from the the the petit journal uh a contemporary parisian journal which is you can see illustrations in the video now all over history books from this era because they're such attractive illustrations beautiful color lithographs of course this has nothing to do with what actually happened on that day um it's highly fanciful there is young gabrilo princip um wearing a sort of dap rakishly angled hat taking a shot from uh and they're standing up like figures from an operetta he's saying hi die in fact nothing like this happened they remained seated exactly as they had been the shots were so accurate that they they didn't move uh in fact she was slipping into a coma by the time the the car pulled back and and traveled back at speed down the upper key and it was then that he uttered the words which became very famous uh within the next few hours of the uh as the media picked this up it sort of went viral he said to her zafal zafar nish so if we don't die stay alive for our children um and um this became part of the sort of media generated wave of emotion um which followed the assassination of a man who actually hadn't been very popular but became as it were a figure of emotional identification after his death partly because of the details about his private life that were revealed uh following his his uh murder and there we see the picture of the arrest of a suspect this is often shown in history books as the arrest of gabriela princip of course it would be astonishing if someone had managed with a 1914 camera to capture the assassination just by accident um and that indeed did not happen this photographer was pre-warned by the police that they were they were carrying out a drag net they were going to arrest suspects and he took his camera along and phil and took this shot of the arrest of a suspect called fedor bear um who was distantly connected to the network behind the assassination but in fact was completely innocent and was released shortly afterwards but um the photographer then cleverly sold this image as a picture of the arrest of princip and it was syndicated around the world and he made a lot of money out of this picture of something um which claimed to be a picture of something it wasn't um there's a picture of gravida princip a slender young man not a not a terrorist in our contemporary sense not someone who rejoiced in suffering or death a very um rather gentle rather finely built uh he was probably suffering from from skeletal tuberculosis by the time this photograph was taken um he and his his comrades um you know were not terrorists in in our contemporary sense at all they were they were rather high-minded idealist boys they there was not too much in the way of alcohol no visits to brothels um very little in the way of girlfriends they were rich in ideals and poor inexperience so but perhaps partly for that reason they were um excellent the sorts of stuff that irredentist movements um so often find it easy to feed on and um just one last thought about the background to the assassinations there was a you know a very oblique and indirect link to serbia the the serbian government as such did not endorse and did not help to plan or did not and did not support this assassination on the country the prime minister nikola pashic an extremely far-sighted and intelligent shrewd uh politician um was profoundly opposed to any activity of this kind and done what he could to repress these networks but on the other hand they this this kind of iridescent activity was supported from deep within the heart of this of serbian military intelligence and in particular by the head of serbian military intelligence this man here ragutin dimitriyevich known as um as apis so there was a link there to the serbian state but we have to be differentiated about the character of that link we can't say serbia as such was responsible for these assassinations well as you know on the morning of that day europe was still at peace and none of the great powers was planning a war of aggression against another power and yet only 37 days later europe was at war and the war that followed from that moment has rightly been described as the original catastrophe of modernity the ore catastrophe is the term widely used in the german literature the primal catastrophe it consumed four major empires um the russian the austro-hungarian the german and the um the ottoman uh sort of multi-ethnic ottoman empire it consumed much more importantly the deaths of between 10 and 20 million soldiers and civilians depending on how you do the count it accounted for between 15 and 21 million serious wound serious wounded light light wounds were treated in theater they have never been counted but you know the presence of mutilated uh and badly damaged veterans in all the the belligerent societies after uh this war was part of the visual memory uh an indelible part of the visual memory of this conflict and i think fritz stone the the german emigre um u.s historian was right when he described the first world war as the disaster from which all the other disasters of the 20th century sprang because without this war it's hard to imagine the rise of italian fascism it's hard to imagine the bolshevik october revolution it's easy to imagine the february revolution everyone had predicted a collapse or a crisis of tsarism which would be followed by a transition to a some kind of constitutional monarchy a seizure of power by cadets by liberals by nationalists and possibly by the more moderate elements of the russian left but no one had predicted the kind of coup-like seizure of power followed by the establishment of a one-party state that actually occurred in russia following the october revolution um and of course that means we have to encounter the five million consumed the five million lives consumed by the russian civil war that followed that and everything that came out of the establishment of a bolshevik system lastly it's hard to imagine the rise of national socialism in germany without this war without its profoundly disorganizing effect on german society uh and therefore it's hard to imagine also the holocaust so we might be looking at a very very different 20th century without this war my former colleague at cambridge now at the university of yale adam twos is right i think when he refers in the book he's just written a book called the deluge which is about the long-term impact of this war um he's right i think when he re refers to the unhinging of the world system the unhinging of the global system by this war and he goes into great detail about the various vectors of disorganization that um that come out of this extraordinary conflict now when i first encountered the story of how this war came about and in particular the events in sarajevo and the story of the july crisis you know one of the most intricate and complex crises perhaps the most complex event of all times when i first encountered this material as a schoolboy in sydney in the 1970s a great deal of period charm had accumulated around the story of how this war came about there was a lot of tennis and waltzing uh it was a last sort of last summer scenario was it like a merchant ivory um drama and the our chief sort of historiographical guide to these events was the wonderful barbara tuchman whose books beautifully written narrative histories still read today um dwelt with love in loving detail on uniforms the details of uniforms on the extravagant menus for gala dinners on lord salisbury riding to the house of commons on london's first pneumatically tired tricycle pushed by his valet james and you know the as one read of the ornamentalism to use david canadian's turn turn term as one read of the ornamentalism of this of this sort of last phase in in european court culture one couldn't help feeling that if these people's helmets had gordy green ostrich feathers on them then perhaps their dreams their arguments their ideas also had gordy green ostrich feathers perhaps they were bygone people from a moribund bygone world people who had nothing to say to us anymore people locked in the drama which belonged to a distant past but if we look again at these events from today's perspective the early early ish 21st century um then it seems to me one can't help but be struck by the raw modernity of these events they don't begin even if we think of the events of that that day the 28th of june it doesn't start with prancing horses and golden carriages it starts with a line of automobiles with a motorcade and if you run through the events on the apel key on the 28th of june 1914 you can't help but have the film of of november 1963 in dallas playing at the back of your head it starts with a squad of suicide bombers there were seven young men who had gone to sarajevo they were suicide bombers in a very um literal sense they were carrying potassium cyanide which they tried to take the two most active members of the squad championovich and princip both tried to take their poison but the poison was bad um there and and behind them was an underground organization a hazy fuzzy underground organization difficult to pin down no paper trails with a very oblique relationship to any sovereign state authority an organization driven by i'm thinking i'm talking now about the black hand or yet unity or death or union or death as it was called an organization extra extra territorial or trans territorial which operated sort of operated out of belgrade but also had networks in bosnia and herzegovina um as well an organization marked by a cult of death revenge and self-sacrifice and there again we can think of sort of contemporary analogues so in many ways these these events seem to speak to us more freshly and more intimately than they did in the era of the cold war and there are other reasons why this has happened as well i think our compass has shifted in other ways as well the the first there's the fact that um the 911 reminded us of the power of an event now it would be it would be absurd to compare the carnage of 911 with the killing of two people on francios street in 1914 but nevertheless what 911 did was to remind us of how an event can change the chemistry of politics and i think the the events of the 28th of june certainly did that for austria-hungary they created a an extremely militant and unanimous desire for war um in vienna which had not been there before and then there's i think the fact that we're still coming to terms we're coming to terms right now in the recent days with the end of bipolar stability we're no longer in a bipolar cold war world where the global system is disciplined by the standoff between two superpowers um we're in a world with um a titan a weary titan was the term that was often used um of the united of great britain in 1914 or the last years before the outbreak of war it's sometimes now used about washington not that washing this is not a titan that's actually weakening but it may be growing somewhat weary of its uh complex international role it's a world with rising powers that are challenging the norms of the global system uh and there's more than one of those i don't we can talk about that perhaps later it's a world marked by regional crises it's a world that is increasingly less transparent more unpredictable and in many respects more dangerous and more difficult to read than the world of the uh of the cold war for all the violence of those proxy wars of the cold war era this is a world that is much more complex and much more difficult to read and it's getting more complex by the day and there too i think you know 1914 feels much it's a paradox of course that even as it slips further back into the historical past 1914 seems to speak to us more intimately than it did in a in a prior era and these perspectival shifts challenge us to rethink the story of how war came to europe and adopt accepting this challenge doesn't mean adopting a kind of vulgar presentism where you remake the past to to suit the the priorities of the present that but that's really not if that were what we were about then we could forget the whole thing um it means profiting from our changed vantage point to see aspects of the past which in the which which previously were sort of airbrushed from the scene or which previously we failed to pay attention to and in this in the time left to us and i don't want to take too much of your time with the formal bit of this meeting um i'd like to direct to to dwell briefly on some of the aspects of the etiology of this war some of the aspects of its causation that particularly caught my attention and that perhaps are particularly handy for thinking about links between then and now before going on to to to dwell briefly on their relevance to current developments okay so first of all there's the fact that when we think of you know we it might be handy to think of 1914 as an international crisis but when you use the word international a kind of picture forms in one's mind which is a little bit like the cartoons the caricatures of the pre-war world where you see a bunch of characters each one of which represents a state so it's marian if it's france often an attractive young woman then it's um the kaiser with his bristling and erect mustaches that's williams he's germany and um then there's the the tsar and the case of russia and george v ring and so on and the assumption that's built into these images is that states are compact discrete entities which can which have a single and unified will but in fact the world of 1914 wasn't remotely like this the executives that produced policy in 1914 were anything but unified and power was constantly flowing around inside them moving from one node in the system to another so for example if you'd asked a very well informed observer in saint petersburg who runs the show who makes foreign policy in russia the answer in january 1904 would have been the tsar but after the russo-japanese war which is in large part a consequence of the policies of the tsar himself if you'd asked the same question again in 1906 the answer would be now that sarah has really disappeared from politics he's sort of licking his wounds after the war against japan which of course the russians lost now it's piotr salipin the the the prime minister effectively the president of the council of ministers if we'd ask the question a few days a few years later during the bosnian annexation crisis the answer would be it's the foreign minister he's now running the show a few years later you'd say it's to leaping again then leaping's assassinated then the answer would be we don't really know who's running the show the ambassadors are all making it up as they go and so on this was russia before 1914 but the picture elsewhere was virtually the same in france just to give you one example during the tenure in office of the british foreign secretary sir edward gray 16 french foreign ministers came and went from office and two of them came and went twice that's really quite an achievement um so and even in britain where you had a structurally very secure and powerful foreign uh minister in the form of foreign secretaries redwood gray even there gray cannot speak clearly his intentions in foreign policy because he has to deal with a majority with his within his own cabinet that does not support his view of british foreign interests in particular his commitment to the on tank with france and by extension to the to the oblique relationship with saint petersburg with russia so in other words um this is a situation where um the crisis-proneness of the system is greatly enhanced by confusion about how how policy is being made and what direction it's going to take next unpredictabilities built into this system at every level so that's one point i think with that might be worth thinking about from the point of view of looking for analogies or not with contemporary developments then there's the fact that and this is um something that really struck me when i was writing the book because when i got to 19 to um the point where i was writing about the italian attack on libya in 1911. now this is a really important war without any provocation the italians attacked the three villains the three provinces of the ottoman empire today known as libya in northern africa and um this war was important because it flashed a green light to the balkan states it said it's time for free for all at the expense of the ottoman empire everyone take what they can uh it was the it really was the the war that started the two wars in the balkans and in fact the serbian uh the head of the serbian political department of the serbian foreign ministry a man called spallacovic after the first world war commented to a french journalist he said this war against libya in 1911 which everybody's forgotten today he was saying this in 1921 this war ten years ago in 1911 was actually that was ceti la premiere gracion that was the first aggression it started the two wars in the balkans and out of that came the great war so this is the one of the best informed serbian statesmen commenting on the relationship between this war and these and and the the the war that subsequently came and what was interesting about that was i was just writing about this war in 2011 when suddenly the very names the very place names that i was writing about misrata zawiyah you know and so on were all in the headlines once again because once again exactly 100 years later there were airstrikes on libya and in fact this war of 1911 had been the first war in which airstrikes were used this is the first time that bombs were thrown from planes it wasn't very impressive technologically they were hand thrown they had to be primed by hand where they were gripped between the knees of the pilot but nevertheless you had dirigible balloons which could throw 250 bombs from racks um for the uh built into the to the um to the to the galleys for the for that purpose and so you know i almost there was almost a sort of out-of-body experience as i found myself wondering whether by writing these words i was making these events happen in the present now i assure you this distillation only lasted for a few nanoseconds and i quickly recovered but the point is that um this was at one of those moments when history in an almost sort of spooky way was rhyming it wasn't repeating itself but as mark twain said you know although it doesn't repeat itself it does rhyme and this is certainly a very pronounced moment of rhyming uh and one which one might reflect on because of course we know that just as the libyan war was a way station towards 1914 so it's been claimed that the experience of libyan intervention by the western powers what played an important role in putting in place the narrative that's now currently motivating vladimir putin's policy on on the ukraine um he's he was very vehement in his protests at what at the at the way in which the libyan situation as he saw it got out of control um and sort of drifted in the direction of regime change and um it's it's widely believed that um and certainly has been claimed by some associates of putin that libya was an important episode in forming his uh current view of policy and of events finally there's one last point i want to draw your attention to and that is something about something that changed in the international system in the last years before 1914 and it has to do with the nature of the alliance established between russia and france in 1892. in 1892 russia and france formed an alliance um it was basically an alliance from france's point of view it was an alliance designed to um designed to ensure that in if the front if germany waged war on either france or russia um both states would mobilize in tandem and attack germany on two fronts and placed russia under placed germany under the threat of a war on in the east and the west simultaneously that was its purpose but throughout the um 1890s and into the 1900s the french and the russians constantly warned each other not to overuse this alliance so what they meant by that was the russians said to the french don't count on us for some kind of adventure in morocco if you go into morocco and you know and make the germans annoyed and expect us to pull your chestnuts out of the fire over northern africa forget it we're not interested in northern africa and the french said to the russians if you think we're going to back you over adventures in the balkans forget it we're not where france does not recognize the balkans of vital interests for russia or for france but this changed in the last 18 24 months before the outbreak of the first world war at the end of 1911 in particular during the balkan wars themselves 1912 and 1913 the french leadership in particularly raymond poincare but also many other members of the french military started assuring the russians they started saying that we we see the importance of the balkans for russia now and we wish to make it known to you that if you feel at some point as a result of a conflict in the balkans that breaks up between austria and a balkan state most probably serbia we want you to understand that france will stand by you so in other words the alliance changed in character and by by as a consequence of that serbia began to become not by any wish of serbia itself this is not by serbia's own doing but serbia became became more and more an instrument a salient a security salient for the uh on taunt powers for russia and france in particular as they bought into the future scenario of a war of balkan inception a war that would begin in the balkans nobody really minded who who's going to start this war it might be the serbs it might be the austrians who knew but the point was there would be a war in the balkans and not a war which directly threatened russia but the the alliance would respond nonetheless and would become it would view this conflict as a casual spelling as a casual feederis as a trigger for the alliance okay so that was obviously a very important development for um for in the pre-war system which made the the events of 1914 possible and i want to stop there virtually and just close now with a few thoughts on analogies between now and then the question we have to ask ourselves is how deep does the does any kind of analogy you want to draw really go the specter of 1914 of course is useful uh and it gets it becomes it's present in our minds whenever uncertainty grows because it's a reminder of how terrible the costs can be when politics fails when conversation stops when compromise becomes impossible so in that sense it's it's understandably present in our thoughts and our discourses um at the moment and not just because of the anniversary but in fact the alignments implicated in the ukrainian emergency that we're looking at now bear little relation to the geopolitical constellations of 1914. at that time two central powers faced a trio of world empires on europe's eastern and western peripheries today a broad coalition of western and central european states is united in protesting russia's interventions in the ukraine they are not at all united on what the policy implications of that might be and the restless ambitious german kaiser of 1914 scarcely resembles the eu a sort of you know multi-state conglomerate focused on economic integration and the rule of law that finds it incredibly difficult to project power or to formulate a unified external policy in some ways the crimean war of 1853-6 might offer a better fit here at least we can speak of a coalition of western states united in opposition to russian imperial ventures this conflict which ultimately consumed well over half a million lives so it was not a trivial war escalated when russia sent 80 000 troops into the ottoman-controlled danubian principalities of moldova and wallachia russia argued that it had the right and obligation to act as the guardian of orthodox christians within the ottoman empire much as it today claims the right to say to safeguard the interests of ethnic russians in eastern ukraine but here too it would be as you know as a mistake to push the analogy too far in the 1850s the western powers feared that russian predations against the ottomans would destabilize the entire zone from the middle east to central asia undermining the security of the british and french world empires since neither the ottoman empire nor its english or french counterparts exists today the mechanisms of trans-imperial destabilization are absent in the current crisis we're not looking at that kind of global vulnerability the current crisis rather involves the relationship between russia and one relatively isolated former client state on its periphery or former peripheral federal member state on its periphery pushing back further into the past we can discern more distant precedence which further complicate the picture namely the russian annexation of the eastern half of the ukraine after 1654 it's important to remember that this relationship is older than the union between england and scotland um and the the um the penetration of of the russians into or of muscovy uh into kossactum into the cossack areas and eventually the push south into the crimea from the reign of peter the great onwards so this is a very old story it's the long slow story of russian territorial expansion a process lasting centuries in which muscovy acquired on average richard pipes made this calculation acquired on average every year an area equivalent in size to modern holland so that was the rate of expansion one holland per year but what none of these historical genealogies captures of course is the unruly dynamic and that's in a way what started the whole current situation is the unruly dynamic of revolution and civil strife in the ukraine itself a phenomenon that evokes very different precedents and following the news last month it was difficult for historians at least not to think of the many parallels with the english civil war there too you had a parliament locked in a standoff with an increasingly controversial uh head of state it was not the office of the king or of the president in the ukraine case whose legitimacy was in question but the behavior of the individuals occupying these officers the conduct of the persons and justice president yanukovych fled from from the capital to an undisclosed croatian a location after the breakdown of order in kiev so charles the first having tried and failed to arrest the ringleaders of the parliamentary opposition in london left the capital only to return seven years later for his arrest and execution trial and execution and in both cases news of a provincial uprising in support of the beleaguered sovereign irish catholics in the case of charles the first and ukrainian russians for yanukovych in the ukrainian case treagle triggered a decisive escalation the difficulty of the current crisis it seems to me lies precisely in the folding together of these very different narratives these very disparate narratives civil upheaval geopolitical tension and imperial expansion the arrangements put in place since the collapse of the soviet union have added a further layer of complexity the eu has invested deeply in the process of democratization in the ukraine that's the kind of thing the eu does for the best possible motives the partnership and cooperation agreement signed in 1998 exists to sustain political and economic transformation within the partner state and ratification as i'm sure you all know of that of a new association agreement negotiated in 2007-11 was made conditional upon the implementation of key domestic reform targets so the eu intervened very deeply in the domestic affairs of the ukraine by contrast nato as the alliance formed to protect western interests in the cold war is focused firmly on the global balance of power just as the crimean coalition was in the 1950s nato and the eu are not of course co-extensive um whom am i saying that too and they're not identical in their interests when the americans the polls and the baltics baltic states propose the extension of nato membership to georgia and ukraine in 2008 france and germany objected just as prussia refused to join the anti-russian crimean coalition of 1854-5 much to the indignation of the french and the british lastly there's the complex political demography of ukraine itself the legacy of centuries of russian penetration and settlement the deep ethnic divisions in the country and the special constitutional and military status of the peninsula make no sense without this history so i want to come to a close now that's why i think that any solution to this problem has to take into account the very different imperatives implied by these narratives and i think it's an awareness of this dimension of complexity that accounts in part for the irresolute or hesitant response of the western powers to the recent seizure of the peninsula and to the events that have followed using the ukraine as a proxy to box the russians in would be insensitive to the period to the history of the region and would merely lead to further instability on the other hand letting the russians do whatever they want will merely invite moscow to continue using the ukraine as a proxy for pushing the west back betting the farm on the ukrainian revolution as the eu did as risky given the unpredictability of all such tumults what's needed is a composite conclu solution that takes account of all the interests each with its own historical hinterland engaged with the conflict so i come to the closing question are we in danger of blundering into a major conflagration in the in the manner of 1914 i don't think so it seems to me that the executives engaged the executives of the states engaged in this emergency today or responding to it are far more streamlined far more transparent and far clearer about their intentions than their predecessors in 1914 there exists today no counterpart for the kind of balkan inception scenario that fueled escalation in 1914 where states bought in to the affairs of a very um of an unstable area with without considering the possible consequences the language of the eu foreign ministers and of the washington administration has been marked on the whole by caution and circumspection too much circumspection for um some people's tastes the responses of western leaders to the provocations offered by mr putin have displayed a level of self-critical reflection and thinking here of stein mr steinmeier the german foreign minister's comments on um eu foreign policy and german foreign policy um that really have no cannot be compared with the behavior of his 20th century of his early 20th century counterparts if anything the danger in this case may be the converse namely that in striving to avoid an escalation and possibly also to avoid the discomforts associated with a strong sanctions regime especially when sensitive energy political issues are involved western leaders risk failing to send the kind of clear signals that are required to make it clear to mr putin that there are limits to their indulgence perhaps most importantly something else is absent in the current constellation this is where i'll stop that was absolutely decisive in 1914 at that time the fragile equilibrium between the two european alliance blocks encouraged both sides both on the one hand to contemplate with relative equanimity the risk of a major conflict because both sides thought they could prevail um and get away as it were without suffering the consequences of the conflict uh or to too greatly suffering them and secondly this equilibrium encouraged both to fear to fear that the failure to take action sooner rather than later might result in the condition of permanent inferiority this is one of the amazing things about 1914 that on both sides we find paranoia and fear that if one doesn't act soon one will drift into permanent inferiority vis-a-vis the other side today the situation is quite different there is no equilibrium we are not working against the clocks as against the clock as so many of the decision makers of 1914 felt they were there is time to to think about what needs to be done and this is not an argument for complacency because i do think that recent events in the ukraine have revealed many weaknesses in the crisis management of the western powers but it is on the other hand an argument for calm considered determined and unified action thank you professor clark thank you my gosh wasn't that a rich historical walk um and a jog a sprint sprint sorry exactly i know people in washington are busy i didn't want to take up treatment no no no that was perfect and you leave us hungry for more in a good discussion um i'm going to make a confession i'm halfway through the book i'm not the entire way through but i love it and it it's dense and it's rich but it you you you get immersed in it and uh it's it's it's required reading i know many in our audience have read it what i'd like to do is read you a quick quote this was actually a new york times uh review of the book by uh harold evans who's the editor at large at reuters and and i want to pulse let me quickly read the brilliance of clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue the participants were coordinated to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment shore of their own moral compass but unknowingly impaired impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures patriotism and paranoia sentiments of history folk memory ambition and intrigue they were in clark's terms sleepwalk sleepwalkers watchful but unseen haunted by dreams yet blind to the reality of the heart that they were about to bring into the world as i've read the book quite frankly i'm not sure they were sleepwalking they had their purpose misperceptions the historical issues the perceptions of others it seemed to me that they were just they had blinders on rather than sleepwalking and and that was and some some reviewers have critiqued the book and saying they weren't sleepwalking they just in some perspectives were were unaware uh of the consequences of what they were doing is that a fair i think that i think that is a fair challenge i mean the sleepwalking is the sleepwalker metaphor is just a metaphor so if it were 100 applicable it would be a description so it only works in part and what i wanted to evoke with the with a picture of the sleepwalker is the thing that i think is most uncanny about a sleepwalker which is that sleepwalkers can form a purpose they can conceive of a purpose they may not be fully conscious that's to say not all their mind is conscious but they can i mean i met this journalist who um told me that every night he goes he gets out of bed and and packs the the bags to go on holiday but there are no bags and he's just putting you know stuff from the night table on the floor and after a while his his girlfriend wakes up and says you know come back to bed you you wake up and get this is silly so he goes back to bed this happens almost every night so um he's he he is able to think holidays this is someone who obviously doesn't enjoy his job he's able to think you know i'm going on holidays i'm packing my bags and so on it's just that he's not aware that there aren't any bags so it's that it's a limited quality of that consciousness that's what i wanted to capture and the the the the the juxtaposition on the one hand of propositive purpose-directed goal-oriented behavior which by people who are you know well-educated and clever and have a lot of information to handle that and calculating risks and so on um with more or less stringency depending on where where we are but um but who seem you know frustratingly unaware of the larger frame in which they're operating i mean part of the problem is simply the problem of complexity that if if a system is complex then the outcomes of the system cannot be reduced to the the actions of any one participant in the in the system and that that was one of the problems that they that they lacked a kind of sense of the um of the relationship between individual and systemic outcomes and you know that's still i think a problem for politics today but um it was certainly a very very very you know marked problem of of 1914 and that's what i wanted to capture with sleepwalkers the the question of nationalism uh and of course in the first portion of the book we spend an enormous amount of time looking at serbian nationalism and its rise and as i look and and we're obviously focusing on the upcoming european parliament elections where you have uh an expression of growing nationalism uh some would even argue xenophobia rising in europe the role of nationalism as it played in the conflict in 1914 and then fast forwarding to its complexity in today's europe yes because you mentioned serbian nationalism can i i'd like to make one thing clear because i've often been misunderstood on this point you know i'm not blaming the serbs for the outbreak of this war and i you know serbia had was the serbian leadership was operating under extreme pressure from many different directions and was in a very unenviable position so i don't certainly don't want to demonize the serbs or their leadership um i think that um but you're absolutely right nationalism is a very important part of this i think today nationalism is playing a different role um you know the problem with national nationalism with the eu is that it's a it's a it's a dissolve it's a dissolving force it's a force which is dissolving the unity threatens to dissolve the unity of the of the union and um it's deeply interlocked with anti-unionist uh movements so alternative for deutschland you know um the foreign in france or the name says it all um they kind of drift into an increasingly nationalist rhetoric of the hungarian um political culture these are in my view profoundly regrettable um developments and they do undermine the cohesion there's no question they undermine the cohesion of the eu as a shared political culture uh and they raise questions about the future of the eu um over the next 10 or 20 years so i must say i i really hope that the eu survives these these um pains and ills that it's going through at the moment the the the only reason for hope i think is that these it's no accident that these um movements are so strong at a moment of economic um dislocation and so it's to be hoped that as the you know if and when when um the eu emerges into full-scale recovery from the financial crisis uh and the crisis of the eurozone that um these movements will lose a lot of the a lot of their oxygen and will start to to sort of wither away again but um nevertheless so nationalism is in play in that sense and it's uh it's weakening the sort of resolve of the eu it creates a less unified block it um it undermines the legitimacy of the eu's appeal as a to some extent as a sort of social and political model if the if the confidence in that model is you know visibly dwindling within the eu itself um and so these are all bad things which um lessen the weight of europe in international affairs um i must say i would be interested to hear what people in this room think about the place of nationalism in in vladimir putin's political politics um presumably it's a factor there um but how exactly it plays um into into his actions of last couple of months i'm not really um you know qualified to say yes sorry perfect of course no thank you always help us with our mics absolutely yes yes yes good point yeah thank you um one um you talked about the power of the personalities uh throughout uh uh throughout the book and you mentioned it sort of this crisis of masculinity and i just want to draw you out because that's also been part of the conversation around the book help us understand uh in the context of of your writings what do you perceive as the crisis of masculinity well i i was i remember once being sort of stopped by a very wonderful female colleague um who said to me are there any any women in your book and i sort of suddenly thought there was a kind of moment of panic you know i could feel the blood draining from my face and i thought uh no there aren't um it's true it's all about men and then i thought well i i better think a bit about that what it means that these people these characters are all men um now by stress by by stressing masculinity i don't mean you know there used to be a british comedy series called men behaving badly which would be quite a good title for the um for the sort of prequel to in 1914 but um but you know the thing is that um i i didn't really mean by masculinity just that you know man that's the way men are but you know men are like that they sort of you know you know macho and and bullying and aggressive and so on what i meant really was that masculinity was taking forms in the early 20th century which were different from the forms of masculinity taken for example in the by a previous generation of statesmen if you compare the statesmen of the of the generation the cohort of 1900 to 1914 you find their language is saturated with references to their own manliness right so it's you know batman says if to back down over over over the um the provocation to vienna by serbia would be an act of self-castration i mean he those are his words and right um self-unmanning um you know um vicar bharti the of tame the the foreign britain's ambassador in paris says these germans are trying to push us into the water and steal our clothes now this is a picture that comes from a teenage boyhood at eaton college where he went to school where you know you'd go swimming in the pond and then some nasty village boy would come and nick your your staff so you'd have to go back to school with no clothes very embarrassing um you know it's it's a very masculine world you have a lot of talk of being hard de la fermente is is poincare's gospel firmness we must stay hard to the bitter end there's a language of unyielding hardness not conceding an inch of territory which is quite different from the language of the cohort of the statesmen of the era of bismarck cavor you know salisbury and so on in that era what what these statesmen wanted to do was be smarter than the opponent outsmart the enemy it was a kind of a politics of maneuver whereas in 1914 what we see is a language of unyielding determination which i think did in a way sort of down you know it it doesn't exactly prescribe options it doesn't you know make one policy happen rather than another but what it does is it diminishes the flaws the sort of the moral weight of options which are about flexibility suppleness you know and so on and increases the moral weight of uh of hawkish hardline policies and so it was that i was trying to draw attention to and of course that is still a contemporary thing there has been a kind of revival of a certain form of raw feral masculinity in in european um political culture i think mr president is a symbol many times well mr putin riding around with no shirt on a horse and shooting at tiger admittedly only with a tranquilizer dart but nonetheless um a tiger all the same and then being photographed with it uh and so on these are signs of berlusconi is another example it is i mean fortune is not alone there's a sort of new and rather um hardware and put it rather rancid manliness on the show um and you know that that you know there may be a cultural turn going on in that area as well so i think there it was important in 1914 but it's not about masculinity as a sort of trans-historical essence but about styles of male behavior in politics which which are historically specific and time-bound did you think one of the there was this assumption by all like the two balkans awards that this would be short this would be the the the conflict 1914 would be short we'd be home by christmas but they're really they did not understand the calamity because they honestly thought this would be short how much did that play into the psyche of all the leaders as they looked at these two equal powers uh fighting each other well this is one of the oddest problems of 1914 one of the hardest to unravel is that because we know that the actually you know there's plenty of expert commentary on the meaning of a mass war everybody understood what the interaction between the sort of the tactics of mass infantry shock which was still the the which is still the predominant doctrine um the interaction between masses of infantrymen and the high-tech weaponry available in 1914 with stationary machine guns but also even more importantly with fast firing artillery artillery was really the area where the technological change had been very very swift and um some of these you know the the french fast firing artillery pieces could fire more rounds than um than a bolt-action rifle per minute so the the you know and people had done the math and they'd realized well if you put this kind of firepower into masses of men you will have casualty lists that will be so long that that no newspaper will be able to print them all right there there will be it will be unforeseen carnage and there are even novels which predict this there's an extraordinary novel by a german social democratic teacher called das mentioned the human slaughterhouse which is about which describes with uncanny accuracy this is in 1912 um that the the sort of moonscapes of um the psalm and so on so there are both there's both expert commentary and sort of literary fiction which is imagining the way uh in this new world this new war is going to pan out uh should it be allowed to happen on the other hand there's a bizarre continua continuing belief that one can somehow circumvent this carnage by just investing enough in the assault in the in the offensive if you take the enemy's positions fast enough and with enough men and so when observers saw for example in the russo-japanese war saw japanese infantrymen piling up in front of russian machine gun nests around port arthur they concluded that the the japanese were not pressing the attack hard enough they must put more men into harm's way rather than rather than sort of you know as it were changing their approach to the to the assault entirely so in other words there's a kind of sense in which the fear that the war will really be um you know an endless carnage and on the other hand the hope that one will circumvent this outcome through swift action and determined action they held each other in balance uh in a way that as we now know was very dangerous uh it's not that people believed that i mean there was talk of getting home by christmas and there was hope that that might be possible but you know we also find many of the military leaders malta for example oscillating between extreme confidence and nervous breakdown like collapses of confidence where he thinks you know it's not going to work it's all going to collapse and so on they see there are moments when they see the future quite clearly um so it's not it's not people used to talk about the illusion of the short war being a crucial factor in the outbreak of war in 1914 it's there but it doesn't have that kind of absolute traction it's more about a mix of fear and hope my final question before uh i i opened this conversation up to the audience um you know there's there's been a bit of political sensitivity about how to commemorate this conflict certainly in in in britain but as well as in in germany how does history reflect on this and as you're watching this uh debate uh what has struck you about how uh how the governments themselves are planning to commemorate this this is an enormous role in well again historical narratives do play an enormous war enormous a role in our own exceptionalism as a country your reflections on this both from the british side but also for the german side well i think that the the most for me the most surprising and striking um insight that's been generated by the by the various memorial um programs that have unfolded in the different states has been the the the distant the degree to which europe remains incapable of remembering this european war in a european way so um the war is still being remembered almost entirely through a nation-state frame um and you know in britain there's been a surprising revival of a kind of jingoistic language you know this was a just war you've had it's become quite common to claim that the first and the second world wars were no different in their moral dimension which i think is an extraordinary claim but it's made in one very um and one best-selling book on britain's war in 1914 by max hastings and you know that's one sort of direction things have taken you know members of the government um michael gove the the the secretary for education um you know very intelligent and well-read man but he's intervened in the debate saying that you know britain should be proud of its role in the first world war it was war just war war fought for good ends to defeat tyranny in the name of democracy and so on boris johnson the quirky and popular mayor of london has weighed in along much the same lines um the kaiser reich the german empire has been described as fascist i mean it's a there's a lot of sort of mixing around and um we sort of rehabilitating this war as a um a war fought for the every right possible reason now um things are different elsewhere in france there is not this kind of triumphalism not at all france has always remembered this war as a trauma among other things is a profound demographic um you know injury to the to the nation um with the massive mortalities involved um it's not a it's not a chauvinist mood at all it's a mood of you know reflection and meditation and um not exactly mourning it's too distant for that but a sort of serious reflection on what this immense toll in lives means for the present um in germany it's been dominated by the question of um you know whether the germans are should still regard themselves as primarily culpable um but uh also by a similar kind of mood to the to the french one in fact really the the germans also regard this well the odd thing about the german memory of the first world war is that it was widely believed the germans didn't remember this war that the the first world war had been buried by the trauma of the second the second is such an in you know the trauma of both of the of the the acknowledgment of german criminality and in the second world war and genocide on the one hand and also the just extraordinary physical effects of the war on the german on germany as a place um had sort of buried the memory of this more distant conflict but what turns out to be the case and this has been one of the most interesting developments i think is that there's a lot of privately archived memory of the first world war in the german population everybody has grandparents whose letters survive whose diaries survive everyone has stories about the first world war they just didn't ever until now correspond to the public culture of memory and now the connection has been started to be forged and the war is being articulated memories of the war being articulated in a new way on a new public plane so it's all been very very interesting but i think it's you know depressing that europe um that there that the memory is so uneuropean and um there hasn't been any cooperation between the french and the germans it's not the french fault the french wanted to collaborate with berlin but berlin announced in 1913 that in 2013 they said we don't have any plans so you have to do this do this on your own you know we just you know and so on so you know what even joint ventures that could have worked haven't really come to pass and i think that is a pity and tells us something about you know the continuing weakness of european identity um it's interesting that in brussels they they they want to open a museum of european history museum of european places of memory but the problem they have is they can't think of what to put in the museum and that is extraordinary i mean um it's not like europe has is under supplied with history indeed thank you so much please uh colleagues if you could raise your hand um and uh you offer your name and uh your affiliation we have microphones just give us a second to get to david ignatius i'll start with you luis simone david ignatius a journalist from the washington post uh fascinating wonderful lecture i want to ask you to um think with us about the counterfactual about the about the counterfactual that is to say um suppose uh franz ferdinand hadn't been assassinated suppose uh this sleepwalking europe of the summer of 1914 hadn't had that um uh catastrophic event that then set things in motion what was the system um underlying uh stable and and capable of continuity or was it headed for some other uh catastrophe and then if you would think uh similarly about about the current situation with um putin's russia and whether had there not been the euro maidan protest suddenly changing the role in the in-betweenness of ukraine was there something else that was going to happen uh that putin would have seized on in what was a much less stable situation than that it may have appeared thank you very much for that very interesting question um you're staying with 1914 to start with um you remind me of a of a headline a joke headline in the san fran i think it was the san francisco chronicle from sometime in the early 1920s which went like this um archduke found alive world war mistake um and you know um i i think it is that actually true or odd as it may seem that if that if franz ferdinand had survived that visit to his area everyone got back home we know several things we can unfold the counterfactual you know the first few steps we are on fairly solid ground because we know that franz ferdinand was first of all had pleaded for peace at every opportunity and went always argued against any kind of adventurism especially in the balkans secondly we know that he was planning after the bosnian summer maneuvers to sac conrad von hutsendorf the most hawkish figure in the leadership the the chief of the general staff who was very keen on the war with serbia he was going to be sacked because uh franz ferdinand just had enough of him um and so that relationship would probably have continued to improve which which it was actually in the spring of 1914 oddly enough relations between serbia and vienna were just beginning to show there was you know the first signs that they could collaborate as neighbors i won't go into the details but various things have been done in collaboration which which you know augured argued for for a better future um what would have happened then well you know the the the key point i'd make is that the system was actually much more openly textured than it appears in retrospect and just to give you one example um in the summer of 1914 the london leadership is pondering dropping altogether the relationship with russia because they're tired of they had this convention signed with russia in 1907 and it was basically a power sharing agreement to keep the russians out of northern india away from northern india by dividing central asia in half and saying you can have the north of the south and the russians had so frequently and repeatedly breached the terms of this agreement that the british were planning to break to drop the agreement not to renew it and to seek instead an understanding with berlin so the personal secretary of sir edward gray was briefed for this mission in the summer of 1914 then came the assassinations the july crisis and the world war so that tells us something about other futures that were never realized but with which this era was pregnant i mean the thing is that you know the it's very hard to um it's very hard to take seriously the fact that the past was as open as the present you know um it's only one future of any given past is ever realized because we don't have we're not living in parallel universes but um every past has you know different futures in it the seeds of many different futures in it just as ours does and so coming then back to to the story about to the to the question of how that question might relate to recent events in the ukraine yes i mean i don't really think the ukraine is a complete bolt out of the blue is it i mean if you think about the georgian events of 2008 ossitia and so on there clearly there is something going on about there there is an instability about the former soviet periphery which um and we and what we really need to us just to establish in the longer term is some kind of set of agreed protocols about how that area should be managed and through a process of communication with russia it's clearly not a debate with russia can be excluded from on the other hand it's not an area in which russia can be allowed to dictate um one side of the unit after the detained outcomes so some kind of some kind of con you know composite solution will have to be found for that entire peripheral area um which is where there are lots of spots with with the potential for instability so in that sense i suppose you know um the ukraine looks like a further iteration of the of the set of issues raised um in georgia of course there are lots of differences as well um there was actually an attack on on russian outposts and at the time of sakashvili in his tenure in office in georgia there's no analogue for that instead we have as you say civil unrest creating um you know unforeseen constellations in the country itself but nevertheless that you can see a link there in in terms of the geopolitical specificity of that area yes sir my name is richard ranger i work for the american petroleum institute but really i'm here as a tourist who's become a student of world war one uh and like many americans starting out behind because what we remember is high school history where we were taught wilson won it and and then we move on to the uh roaring twenties um my question back to your last statement where you were concluding the dialogue about this odd new approach to the war kind of going nationalist again almost in terms of uh taking sides and i wonder if having read paul fasell among one is is that possibly the response i hate to use the word elites but we'll say leaderships the responsive elites yes starting to overcome what had been a shared memory of the soldiers and the sufferers the poalus as it were that the dominant cultural memory of world war one for much of the 20th century was of the experience of those who served in the trenches and now we're starting to see 100 years later a reassertion of quote-unquote purpose by those in leadership i wonder if you could comment on that that makes any sense that's a fascinating observation i think that's absolutely right because we've seen a reawakening of geopolitics effectively you know geopolitics you might think that the cold war was all about geopolitics it wasn't geopolitics in the same sense now you've got this multipolar geopolitics which is much more complex this complex geometry of different you know powers engaged in a sort of you know in not exactly random interaction but in rather unpredictable in under the directions and they're you know reading the international context and formulating policy and so on suddenly the premium the focus is on that in a way that it wasn't um and certainly as you say the literature of the first world war has been completely dominated by the tommy atkins the trenches and the poi and all this kind of thing and the men who for all their differences were all basically the same young men dying in these in you know in these horrible places and a return to the idea of political purpose and i think that that's absolutely right and that's why we're re-reading this war now um because we're because the affinity it's because of the affinities between that moment and this one it's changed and that that of course it also revealed something paradoxical and slightly self-defeating about the whole business of building historical analogies which is that we can't escape from the fact that the history we see is filtered through our present preoccupations and we have to just we just have to sort of acknowledge that and be honest about it and be extra careful not to you know project into that past scenario um something that isn't actually there and for which we can't find contemporary evidence but you know the fact is that that's how contemporaries read these conflicts in a in a geopolitical way and they focus very much on these issues of purpose and con and um the resolution of interests and so there's a resolution of interest conflicts uh in a way that you know once again seems to make a lot of sense uh whereas diplomatic history as you probably anybody who has worked in the history department in the states or has studied history will know that diplomatic history fell profoundly out of fashion for a very long period um and i think it may be once again back on the up thank you bob we'll take one question here um thank you for a fascinating discussion my name is bob pollard from csas and i'm a former cold war historian so everything you're you're saying is this uh just reawakening some wonderful memories of historiography in graduate school um you know two things first of all i think the reason it's so fascinating this topic and you you've covered it so well is that there's still a lot of mysteries i mean on one hand um i think i agree with you most people would that there's a lot as a series of unforeseen uh consequences to a series of accidents on the other hand you know you think there's always a counter to that argument this was the age of globalization this was a time of tremendous international communication and trade a goal you know a gold standard there's uh borders were fairly open europe was unified in the sense that you had well minorities of population scattered in all these countries it was the european union it was i would stay and it's still hard to believe that it happened but my question is it gets back to the historiography you know the i think for many americans the question is the consequences of the piece that's that's the part that we you know most of us we uh you know remember particularly in the context of the cold war and i was wondering where do you come out on that i mean there's the one argument you know john maynard keynes that the reparations uh and the territorial dismemberment of germany was so harsh that that set the seeds for great depression fascism fascism and world war ii then there's a fritz fisher you know war of elusive argument that if you look at what the germans were doing to the russians during their occupation and their plans uh for europe if they had won the war then in fact germany got off rather lightly so i'd just be interested to hear your views thank you very much yes that's a really difficult question i think that um you know um the yeah i think the the versailles treaty the the what the situation with germany is that we have to remember that several things happen in germany at once and it's hard to um to quantify exactly the the impact of the individual strands of what takes place in germany the end of the first world war first there's the fact that you know they've been through the war so like all religions they're dealing with mass death and all the consequences and the the dislocation um caused by the war and also by the blockade and so on in the last um especially in the last 18 months of the war effort um add to that the fact that then they're one of the defeated parties so it doesn't end in victory so there's no way of bestowing meaning on all this this sacrifice and loss um and but that's they're not alone there i mean um other states have also lost austria and so on they're um you know and hungry um and then add to that the fact that the end of the war is followed by a period of extreme political instability i mean you know um a soviet republic in in bavaria you know widespread fear of a sort of sovietization of germany now these fears of course became uh you know huge mythical uh monsters in the minds in particular of the extreme right but there's no question about the the dislocating effect of and so you've got to see the tandem relation between i mean um otto otto brown the social democratic minister president of prussia who was sort of one of the big machine politic politicians of social democracy in germany between the wars he wrote in his memoirs he said two things explained the collapse of the by my republic versailles and moscow so it was the two things the fact that you had the russian revolution which of course the germans helped to bring about the bolshevik revolution that is the creation of a bolshevik order in the east soviet order in the east fear of sovietization in germany on the one hand on the other hand the kind of what was regarded as the schmuck the stain of war guilt right which is although the word guilt is not whoops cell phone that's it i hope that's not a something being patched in from the ukraine yeah yeah check that exactly um so um yeah so it's all sort of interwoven of course you know i don't think people i'm often asked in german you know surely then the versailles treaty was utterly wrong and so on so forth well i mean you know the it was the demand for the website piece is unusual in the sense that it doesn't carry with it the kind of forgetfulness clauses that had been quite a characteristic of many earlier peace treaties you know the european peace treaty tradition always included the traditional documents always included a treaty saying you know we will forget the the harms caused and we'll try and create a post-war order because you have to forget the the harms in order to move on versailles doesn't do that it says there's a guilty party and on the basis of that reparations will be extracted of course reparations are nothing new but attaching them to guilt to responsibility was new and the germans felt that very keenly on the other hand i think that um you know there's nothing it's completely understandable that the allies did that it also has to do with the fact that the german war effort was not free of atrocities i mean you have the atrocities in belgium um the austrian atrocities in serbia of course the antart has its own atrocities the russians carried out very extensive pogroms and killings in galicia and there are killings in east russia and so on but and the one thing doesn't weigh up the other way you know it doesn't outweigh it doesn't doesn't as it were neutralize the other cancel out the other but um i can understand why something like the vertici treaty was regarded as as you know unavoidable in the situation 1919 so i don't want to really buy into a kind of revisionist rejection of versailles um it was just an expression of the post-war order that had established itself in the aftermath of the german defeat so um yeah but i suppose the the the what i would say about the fritz fisher argument fritz fish is very interesting if we come back to this question that you asked about you know how we're returning to a geopolitical reading of what was happening in 1914 um or thinking more about what statesmen were doing and how they calculated each other's intentions and so on or tried to predict each other's acts if we could say in that respect that we're being sensitized to aspects of the past through a new new dimensions of our present then that was true of fitz fisher i think as well fritz fisher was sensitized to german culpability by his own you know very pained sense of compromise as a result of his relationship with national socialism and it's that whole movement away attempt to decontaminate the german present by inculpating the german past and there's an extent to which i think he back dates you know issues of culpability a sense of contamination which really has to do about with the period 33 to 45. uh he back dates that or it frames his view of the actions of the german leadership in 19 before 1914. um that doesn't mean that fischer made up his sources he made very important discoveries and it's a very powerful they're very powerful books but they're the thing about fisher is he was interested in germany he wasn't interested in what anybody else was doing it was a very domestic a very um german-focused investigation but you can do a fisher if you wanted to you could do a fisher for the russians and say look here's a nasty statement here's an aggressive belligerent um you know letter from a minister and so on so forth you could put together a kind of sound you know carpet of sound bytes um to to create a psychogram of the russian atheist and you'd find plenty of belligerence paranoia and aggression there just as you do in berlin in vienna and indeed even in paris so you know um that's i suppose how i would respond to the the reference you made to fisher great we have a question in the back and then a question there uh britt mitchell renaissance institute baltimore we do travel down here sometimes i sat in this very room about three weeks ago largest crowd that's ever been here at csis was reported 688 people great event this room well opened up they all opened up and the balcony out here was just loaded with people as well you're trying to make me feel bad about this no no i've done what you've done many times but i sat in the room and bob schaefer was the panel leader and he called on brent scowcroft to deliver his 10-minute perspective of what's going on and i'm a social psychologist so sitting in with that crowd of people some of which are here right now it was interesting the tension in the room until brent scowcroft went all the way back to when the swedes moved down into the asia line to the east and he went and explained it the situation in terms of historical significance and social significance and when he finally got to the end where he said this problem is not a here and now problem he said it wasn't a here and now problem at world war one and it wasn't back in 1735 it's a continual thing my question then is and by the way within 15 seconds i looked around and the entire room just sat back in their seats you could literally hear the war fever leave the room when they were faced with factual information now my question is we're going to keep on doing this and it's never going to stop until we get to the point where we begin to tackle that flaw in human socialization do you know of any group of people that are trying to do that to realize that where two tectonic plates come together you are always going to have warn violence until you understand it and stop it and if i make chris take another question because we're getting closer there's a microphone right there yeah i'm michael barone with american enterprise institute uh in your talk you talked about the danger today that you think may uh western leaders may be maybe take facing in trying to avoid a confrontation um by failing to provide clear signals to putin and as i read the sleepwalkers one of the things that i remember is sir edward gray with his wonderful ambiguity to his uninterested cabinet colleagues and to the rest of the world which contributed to the result uh in some significant way um do you see i mean i worry about a danger that the red lines that we have supposedly created by the accession of the nato alliance of poland and the baltic states may be transgressed by putin and that we find ourselves uh not in serbia but in estonia or something in a possible war situation how serious do you think that is yeah and i'm going to add one last one to this wonderful menu it feels as if we're witnessing the second collapse of the soviet union in some ways through this experience whether it's the reformulation of a eurasia union as we saw a hundred years ago as empires collapsed there's still aftershocks and after effects uh i could argue and witness in watching the hungarian elections that they're still talking about the treaty of trionon and empire i mean these expressions have not left europe and they're still formulating political narratives today i just wonder if you could reflect on the continuation of empire collapses and what they need in a modern context yeah wow really rich rich and challenging questions okay to begin with the the the the the toughest one really someone about is there an answer to this problem of social psychology and um i mean when you were saying that i was thinking the quakers you know the peace movements um that they probably aren't the answer or they don't have the have answers um it's one of those questions where i feel like i want to say you know if i had the answer to that question i wouldn't be sitting here or something like that you know um but it's uh i think you're quite right there are there there are fundamental flaws in the in the uh and you know there are and there's of course i'm actually not an expert in this i think you know i'm i'm intuiting that you know much more about this than i do but there's a fascinating literature which i looked at briefly but never found a way of actually integrating into my analysis on questions like why hawks so often win arguments you know why is it that when hawks and doves go into the lists against each other in in situations where people having an argument why do the hawks often prevail um and there are all sorts of psychological reasons why why you know hawkish arguments often work better psychologically they tap people's emotional energies more effectively than davish arguments do because they work with anxiety and anxieties which may be you know you know related to real threats that actually exist um so you know um that's as good much as far as i can go in the direction of a good answer to your question i don't really have one but i think you're absolutely right the fundamental assumption is right that there's a very deep flaw in how we manage conflicts i think that structures can be part of the answer um the eu is a structure which would not have been possible if if the lessons of both world wars hadn't been learned at least for the continent itself and i think it's one of the greatest achievements in human history the european union and um that's why i'm so anxious about its future but um you know i think in the end we have to find ways of solving these problems that don't depend on the social psychology of the psychology of individuals and processes of socialization humans are always going to let us down you know but you know robust structures can help humans to be you know can make their failures less disastrous um yes the ambiguity of gray the red lines and the baltics this is also my anxiety because i do think they have to be read real red lines and um you know um poland is one where i think you know we simply cannot give an inch on that um the baltics are another um you know despite the presence of russians in a country like latvia um that has to be you know the west obviously is going to have to that it would be a very serious um diminution of our commitment to the order established in the aftermath of the cold war to relax the vigilance on any of those red lines so i think you're absolutely right that could be a problem but the key there is very very clear signaling about what is what is up for negotiation and what's not um and at the moment i think probably that signaling is sort of working i mean over flights by you know the reinforcement of border facilities of you know boundary defense facilities over flights by american planes all this kind of thing that's that's helpful and sends clear signals um you know i just very much hope that we won't be tested on that because that could be very dangerous but i but you know then that the question comes through the the quite to a question about the kind of politician and the kind of man vladimir putin is i don't think he's insane i don't think he's a psychopath i don't think i think comparisons between putin and hitler are completely barking up the wrong tree he doesn't have a vision of politics which is grossly and radically at odds with everybody else's the way hitler did you know i i think he's acting rationally he's acting aggressively aggressively and provocatively but rashid rationally um and we have to assume that he'll continue to do that uh at least that he'll continue to act rationally and hope that he doesn't continue to act aggressively so um not a very good answer to that question either a very difficult question but i um but i think that you know um firmness and clarity about the resolution of the west in defending the real red lines um on behalf of nato members is crucial um i'm as astonished by you as you are by the kind of the ability it's like these um these viruses or these tardigrades these tiny living creatures which can sort of go to sleep on an asteroid for several thousand years and then wake up again when they when they when they encounter moisture and warmth you know um there's something about the these imperial discourses which seems able to be to reawaken into into rude life it's like mummies suddenly climbing out of their boxes um and you know the extraordinary reawakening of sensitivity around triangles is very striking and hungry of course it's fed in part by ongoing grievances about hungarians in romania and hungarian diasporas in other countries but um yes but it isn't it is extraordinary and it's um why it's happening is is difficult to say it's clearly linked to the end of the cold war in some way um and the revival of nationalism which seems not to be able to find any it seems to be reaching back into the past rather than rather than adopting nationalism was once a vision of the future it was once a vision about a coherent modern um you know enterprise with infrastructures and national press and this kind of thing it was driven by the by by the wealthiest by the elites not by not from below but this nationalism seems to be feeding on a kind of you know an archive of of partly remembered historical um myths and partly remember partly remembered historical half-truths uh and that's a very worrying development but it's an important one another another feature of the contemporary landscape that we need to be vigilant about and that's of course why historians matter that's why historians are not just you know a pointless decoration they're actually there because history is the best protection we have against myth historians don't always get it right and they don't agree with each other but at least they're committed to an honest conversation based on the best information we have to hand about the past which is of course what the myth mongers and the nationalists and the imperial imperialists are not committed to well professor clark that's why you are so important why sleepwalkers is so important and this has been a fantastic conversation the rain would not stop us and prevent us from hearing uh we haven't stopped the rain either we haven't stopped the rain either you know this morning i was reading um prime minister medvedev had a facebook and i was reading that i thought in preparing for this i thought you know what if twitter was around what would kaiser wilhelm have tweeted out and i i i dread cannot even imagine uh but uh again thank you this has been pretty much just extraordinary i thank you all for joining us thank you very much for coming come back again but please join me in thanking professor thank you very much you

Channel: Center for Strategic & International Studies

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Length: 86min 23sec (5183 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 17 2014