How Europe Went to War in 1914. Tans Lecture Maastricht University

so let me let me all welcome you here for the dance lecture of this year it is really a full house and it reminds me of the fact that this is pretty embarrassing to professor clark that i also gave this dance lecture once three years ago and i think it was filled up to the four rows from here it goes to show that this topic is of course of great interest to students but i think also to citizens here in this city because of course 1914 is of course something which many people from their parents their grandparents my own grandfather fought in the war on the belgian side it would have been nice to hear be here with my colleague martin powell president of the universities whose grand family also fought on the german side and of course the citizens here in maastricht witnessed of course the beginning of that war by just climbing on the mescherberg and they could see the german troops invading or trying to cross at that time the river news and all the opposition which then occurred leading to the first set of atrocities of germans in belgium which is of course one of the features which i as a kid was very much taught in courses etc so it's a particular delight to have here with us tonight professor christopher clark let me just read a couple of things about chris was educated at the sydney grammar school between 1972 and 78 and afterwards the university of sydney where he studied history and between 1985 and 87 at the freight university berlin and then chris moved to cambridge where he obtained his phd having been a member of pembroke college in cambridge and finally became their professor in modern european history in september 2014 he succeeded richard evans as regis professor of history at cambridge chris is an australian and from an australian perspective it's obvious very interested to see how you can explain this great interest in history and as he has said he recalls being fascinated at the age of 10 by instead looking at history the middle ages and as he says i like the restrained clarity of the text pilgrims usually walked on their long journeys and the use of contemporary illustrations the effect was one of distance a sense that we must take seriously the differences between then and now there were no courtesy exercises of the kind that came along in later textbooks i hated all that stuff but then the lord of the rings trilogy which i read repeatedly from 12 onwards cemented my determination to become a medievalist it used to be embarrassing to admit but things are different now thanks to film director peter jackson only in my 20s did i move to modernity it was berlin that seduced me and i think it explains why australians have such a great impact on current history insights and it's with great pleasure therefore that chris may i invite you to give your lecture here tonight how europe went to war in 1914 with professor chris clark but i'd like um first of all to thank the director professor luke sulter for the these very kind and generous words of introduction i'd like to thank yap janssen and the committee of the uh tons lecture for inviting me to to this beautiful city and um i'd like to thank you all um for being here uh tonight in such numbers i wanted to start with some images um which will help us to revisit the events of the 28th of june 1914. the events uh which in a sense started the immediate cascade of crises that led to the outbreak of war in 1914. of course these events the events of sarajevo on the 28th of june will be familiar to most if not all of you but they have a kind of density a sort of dramatic and semiotic density which repays revisiting them they're always it's always interesting to go back to them there's so much going on on that eventful day so i wanted to begin with a couple who i think it's fair to say are about to have a very bad day that's franz ferdinand outfield franz ferdinand sitting beside him uh it's it's not actually uh if truth be told the mourning of the assassinations the day before so they're wearing different outfits and it's a different car but um they're sitting beside each other as they were on the 28th of june he's franz ferdinand the heir apparent to the austrian throne she's of sophie hotek the descendant of a very distinguished lineage of czech or bohemian nobility not distinguished enough for the habsburg royal family um she she was not regarded of being of sufficiently aristocratic or high aristocratic lineage to qualify as a member of the royal family in vienna for which reason she was never allowed for example to sit in the royal carriage with its golden wheels beside her husband when he was officiating in the capital and that's one reason why on that day on the 28th of june 1914 she did insist on sitting beside him because in sarajevo which was a relatively marginal place on the very edges of the vast sprawling commonwealth of the habsburg or the habsburg monarchy the austro-hungarian empire in that relatively peripheral location she could sit beside him in a way that she could not have done you know officiate with him in the way that she could not have done uh in vienna there's another reason why she wanted to sit beside him um throughout that day and that is that 28th of june happened to be their wedding anniversary and uh this was a by dynastic the standards of dynastic life at the time uh a relatively or a very tender and warm marriage not all dynastic marriages were like that but this one was the 28th of june unfortunately for them also happened to be important for another reason it was one of the red letter days in the serbian and the calendar of serbian national memory because it was the day of the defeat at kosovo the field of blackbirds in the year 1389 when serbian forces in fact a mixed army of serbs and other non-serbian including uh ottoman forces fought a much larger ottoman force and were defeated bringing an end to the era of serbian independence the great empire of tsar duchamp um the great medieval history of serbia and this recollection of a lost battle in 13 in 1389 was still very fresh in the minds of of serbs and serbian nationalists especially of young enthusiasts for the serbian national cause so this was a a day the the very date of this day was already charged with different meanings by the different participants in the uh events of that day and this is just a picture of um franz ferdinand with his entourage arriving on the day of the uh of the visit to sarajevo itself um there's no trouble at this point which is not surprising because virtually everybody in this picture is an austrian official but uh they're in front they're not far from sarajevo railway station and um as you can see he's waving to everyone i've included this picture because you can see uh on it that he's wearing very good they're all wearing very gaudy green gordy green ostrich feathers now i know you can't tell they're green you'll just have to take my word for it it's a black and white photo but i can assure you they were green and i'll be coming back to the gaudy green ostrich feathers uh in a moment among other things they made it very easy to recognize the archduke on that day uh the ostrich feathers could be seen above the heads of the crowd as the cars rolled along the uphill key this is just a map of the balkans i've included this because i think one can never look too often at the map of the balkans it always repays re-looking because it's so complex and changing so fast in the last years before 1914 that simply simply memorizing where everything is is quite difficult i i gave a talk it wasn't exactly this talk but it was a it was on on 1914 and different from a different angle and i showed her an image of the balkans and i said this at a talk i gave in zagreb in croatia and i noticed everybody looking at me with a puzzled expression and then i realized of course we were in the balkans so they know exactly where everything is that's the one place where everybody really does know where everything is um but in any case in cambridge you're endlessly having to remind british students of where these balkan countries are these are the the the the the proverbial country far away countries of which we know little as chamber than later uh said speaking of czechoslovakia okay so um there there there is the vulcans now i've included these two images they're a bit like those twin images on the back of a serial packet a cornflakes packet where you're asked to identify the 11 differences between two apparently identical pictures and i think the differences are interesting the most obvious one and i'm not going to mention all of them but the most obvious one is simply the the obvious recession the withdrawal of ottoman imperial dominion between 1911 and 1914 this is a three-year period and the ottoman empire as you can see is in a process of very swift collapse and this swift collapse destabilizes the geopolitics of the entire balkan uh region in all kinds of different ways which we don't have time to go into another point about something that changes well you can see incidentally with a sort of inaudible plop albania suddenly appears in 1913 but there's also the fact that serbia increases in size it becomes twice as big and this is a matter of some importance in the run-up to 1914 because in the course of the two wars the two balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 wars which today are largely forgotten but were actually very traumatic and very bloody conflicts that extracted a huge toll in life and treasure in the course of these two balkan wars serbia uh increased its its its surface area and its population by more than 100 and more than doubled uh both figures and as a consequence it became a more serious antagonist for vienna the relationship between serbia and vienna was deteriorating from 1903 when there's a change of dynasty right down to 1914 it was a very toxic relationship plagued by prejudice and animosity on both sides the austrians were not innocent in this uh poisoning of the mutual relationship between the two um and um and and as a consequence of the two wars serbia became a more serious factor a factor to be reckoned with and you can read this in all the military reports uh from the military attache uh in belgrade the tone in 1912 1314 is we've got to take these people seriously in earlier years reporting on the serbs had been very dismissive people had said these the serbs are nothing more than naughty boys who are stealing apples from the austrian orchard well come 1913 and 1912 and 1913 when they see how swiftly a massive serbian army is mobilized and how brilliantly served the serbs conduct their campaigns in both the balkan wars the reports change their tone and they say it's no longer sufficient to assume that we need one austrian troop for every three serbs we're going to need one man for one man these people have become a serious military and power political factor on the balkans and that also further stresses the situation for austria one last point this these dramatic changes between 1911 and 1914 basically forced austria to completely rethink its geopolitics to rethink its security policy for the balkan peninsula and come 1914 the policymakers in vienna are still in a process of panicked reassessment and improvisation when they are surprised and shocked by the news of the assassinations at uh sarajevo and without that background of change instability rapid flux i think it's difficult to imagine the crisis that's area over uh cascading into a war in the way that it did one last point about something that remains the same and that's the location of belgrade and the point i want to make there is simply that belgrade the capital city of the kingdom of serbia is virtually in austria-hungary it's a few minutes drive from the austrian border and that tells us something about the intimacy of this very difficult this very toxic relationship there were serbs of course serbia itself was largely inhabited by serbs though there are minorities in serbia uh but there are also serbs in in in bosnia herzegovina over 40 percent of the population of bosnia-herzegovina were serbs there were serbs in the voivodina in this area along here and so there's a sort of serbian diaspora a larger serbia a larger ethnic serbia which exceeds the political the political survey you can see on the map there and that's part of the reason for the tension between these two states because serbian nationalism seeks the creation of a larger serbian fatherland and of course there's nothing unusual in that this is the default setting for europeans it's the italians had sought to create an italian fatherland through military action through conflict they achieved that in between 1859 and 1866 the germans did the same between 1864 and 1871 um by 1912 13 14 it's the serbs and the other balkan states who are striving to build lasting expanded nation states that will form a homeland for all their um ethnic brothers and sisters okay now this is the closest that the early 20th century got to google earth it's an it's an it's an an engraving from the the wonderful bay decker travel guides um this is the travel guide to the austro-hungarian dominions and and in brackets including the balkan states and um this is their map of sarajevo from the air a sort of imagined aerial view and i've included it really just to show you the structure of this town which is organized around a river that runs through a valley the river miliatska a fairly swift running river very beautiful and handsome city built on the slopes that reach up from this river towards sort of what you wouldn't really call the mountains but certainly high hills on either side um the whole city is like a cupped hand and this is what sarah evans will always tell you it's like a cupped hand and between the two hands runs the river in yatsuka and it's along the river along the uphill key that the cars proceeded as they made their way eastwards across the city towards the rathas the city hall i've included this next image because it just expresses with brutal simplicity uh what happened on the morning of the 28th of june um i mean it's fantastically clear isn't it as the as the cars were passing chomurya bridge a young man by the name of chabarinovich through a bomb or it's actually more like a grenade he cracked the detonator it had a chemical fuse uh he cracked the detonator against a lamp post which made a loud sound like a gunshot um and it's possibly on hearing this gun shot thinking it was hearing this this bang that the driver of the second car in which franz ferdinand and his wife were sitting stepped on the accelerator instinctively thinking someone was shooting at the car and for that reason the bomb didn't land inside the car in which case it would have killed um both the people in it along with the london chef the governor of bosnia-herzegovina portugal was sitting in the car with them but rather hit the back of the car rolled off it and exploded under the third car destroying the car and injuring the people in the car along with various bystanders but killing nobody i mean there's a lot of blood but nobody was lethally in lethal danger and of course it also gouged a hole in the road now at this point you might have thought it was time to cancel the visit to sarajevo you know a bomb had been thrown there had been a loud bang the third car was now a wreck and indeed it was proposed to franz ferdinand that they they you know the the the city was clearly not safe one should withdraw from sarajevo and leave the town immediately that's what would have happened at this this has been a properly run security operation but in fact franz ferdinand said don't be ridiculous the man is clearly insane have him taken to an asylum we will continue as planned uh despite the fact that his wife was bleeding from a very small uh wound to her cheek little metal splinter had struck her on the face why did franz ferdinand do this well part of the reason was that he was suffering from a syndrome a medical syndrome known technically as grumpy old man it happens to a lot of us that as we get older we get more and more irritated by less and less and after all having a bomb thrown at you is not a small thing um so he was understandably irritated um but he also was irritated by people telling him what to do he didn't like that and he wasn't having any hearing any advice from any of the security people who had obviously failed in any case because otherwise there wouldn't have been a bomb uh and so he insisted on going ahead as planned what happened next um had it has a sort of comical edge to it because um i mean i've shown this picture partly just to remind you that sarajevo was a muslim city it was the city's government or administrative machine was in muslim hands it was run by bosnian muslims and as you can see all these not all of them but most of these dignitaries you see in the picture are wearing muslim bosnian muslim attire the fezzas being the most obvious marker of that and this is in front of the city hall uh among the men standing there on the stairs and with his hand raised is a man called mehmed church the mayor of the bosnian muslim mayor of sarajevo to whom fell the unenviable task of welcoming the couple with a speech now church hated giving speeches he was always very nervous uh on public occasions so he was already very nervous in any case uh he'd had the speech printed out and and glued onto a sort of wooden paddle which was holding in his hand ready to read it out trembling no doubt and then suddenly this bang was heard from down the street and the news reached him that a bomb had gone off there had been an attack on the royal car but they were coming anyway he still had to give his speech his speech was now totally inadequate to the situation because it began with the words it is with sentiments of the deepest joy that the citizens of sarajevo welcome your highnesses to this beautiful city i mean it's perfect speech on a good day but it was no longer a good day so he'd only got halfway through the first sentence when he was interrupted by mr grumpy who said deepest joy welcome is this how you welcome your guests with bombs uh i mean he had a point at this point his wife was seen leaning towards him and whispering something to him saying something very quietly we don't know what it was but i would suggest that it was probably something along the lines of it's not his fault dear let him go on there are moments like this in every marriage at this point at this point the archduke said very well continue and poor old shortshit continued with his speech there was a reply from well there was supposed to be a reply immediately but in fact the text couldn't be found because it was had been left with his adjutant someone recovered the text but the adjective had been sitting in card in car three so the text was now covered in blood um so it had to be wiped and so bloody blood everywhere you know you can imagine it was not when things were not going well so um she met with some ladies he he chatted with some dignitaries um observers commented that he was starting to show the signs of nervousness he was probably in a sort of you know a minor form of shock he was starting to get a bit jumpy a bit nervous he wanted to be wanted the whole thing to be over with which one can understand and uh so they went up to the uh the the the balcony that overlooks the city they looked briefly at the city he said goodbye to everybody and then this picture we see here uh happened they made their way to the car and i'm not going to go to the details of what happened next you know the the someone forgot to tell the check driver that they were supposed to speed straight back down the appel key so the check driver turned as you can see into francios street towards the bazaar district which they decided not to do but nobody thought this is a very austrian problem nobody thought to tell the czech driver in check that this was the plan um and so the two first cars pulled pulled off to the right and as they which was the advertised route incidentally it sometimes said that it was a fantastic accident that gavrilo princip happened to be standing in front of sheila's general store when the car drove by it's not an accident at all this was the advertised route and um princip was waiting precisely for that uh chance and as it happens he got an even better chance than he expected because just as the car passed schiller's restaurant uh general store um the the the count the bodyguard screamed at the driver you idiot he used actually rather stronger words but i won't repeat them here he streamed that he screamed at the driver you idiot haven't you been told we've changed the route reverse and get back into the uphill key we're going back down there at this point the car pulled to a complete stop in order to go into reverse and there is a picture of what happened next now this is a highly fanciful image what we see here is like a scene from an opera the couple are rising up out of the car and he's singing hi boy and so on but in fact nothing like this actually happened the couple remained completely move motionless why because the bullets had struck them in so effectively him in the jugular in a major vein in his neck her in a huge vein in her abdomen that she was already comatose by the time she slid sideways and her head landed in his lap count in fact who was standing on the running board though in austrian fashion he was standing on the wrong side of the car so he couldn't do anything about the attack and he's seen running around from the side in fact the whole picture is the one wrong way around he fired from the other side but he fired from about as close as you see this young man firing and counter was unaware that they'd been hit until the car pulled back and as it stopped again and drove down the apel key he saw her teetering over and and him asking her was she all right and then he saw blood issuing from his mouth from the archduke's mouth and at this point he heard her heard him saying to her words which would become famous throughout the world over the next twenty four hours the words zafal zafal nish sophie sophie don't die stay alive for our children as i say it was a very tender family with a rather romantic emotional life and uh these words subsequently transformed the reputation of this man who was not a particularly i mean being mr grumpy as i've described he was not a particularly popular or charismatic figure he was not a crowd pleaser but when the news of these words became known and lots of other private details about their life together and their family life in general became known through the media through the immense media hype that followed these murders the man was transformed and there's a an immense wave of media generated emotion it doesn't mean this emotion is inauthentic but it was mediated by and to some extent created by the austrian media and carl koss who understood the mechanisms of media representation better than anyone else possibly in the world at that time but certainly in vienna said that what was silent in his life has become eloquent through his death one last detail on that quote one last point on that picture is of course one thing is very right about the picture and that is the minarets in the background there were over 100 mosques in syria it was one of the capitals one of the beautiful centers of european islam now this is a photo which is often captioned in history books as the arrest of gabriella princip it would have been astonishing given the state of photographic technology in 1914 if someone had managed to get a snapshot like this of the actual arrest of the man after the unforeseen event on the 28th the morning of the 28th of june in fact it's the arrest of another man called fair do beer a couple of days later as part of a police dragnet and the photographer was in fact warned by the police we're going to make an arrest in such and such street why didn't you come along you can get a good picture so he came along and he got what has it has to be said is a fantastic picture it's not a picture of principal's arrest but the journalist in question had a fantastic idea a sort of million dollar idea it occurred to him why not get uh once he developed the picture why not take this picture and market it as a photo of the arrest of princip so he changed the caption the arrest of gorilla princip and made a fortune that's the last time that a journalist has ever behaved like that okay so but what's interesting about this picture it's not telling us what it claims to be telling us it's not telling us what it looked like when princip was arrested but it is telling us something like all visual evidence there's always truth in the source somewhere if you know how to find it and what this source is actually telling us is something else which is that when as this young man is being arrested he's not just being arrested he's being protected he's being protected from angry angry muslim citizens who are furious at the serbs for their involvement in this uh assassination in fact fato bear was not a servant he was a german but he was a suspected of having been involved in the background to this plot against archduke franz he was later released and here's a picture of the young man who took the two fatal shots he and nigel chabrinovich were the two most active commandos there were seven young men in all in syria on that day i won't go into the details of how the group was put together that in itself is an interesting story but um gavrilo uh gavilo princip and um and and his friend nadiel cor chavernovich along with their friends called were the three members of the seven-man group who had actually recently been in serbia they'd been trained uh in marksmanship in a park outside um belgrade by with the with the assistance of members of serbian of a member of serbian military intelligence someone also affiliated with a group called also known as the black hand they'd been provided with guns and bombs by um individuals associated with this network but it must be said although you know um japanese called himself a terrorist during the the court depositions during the court case the court hearings which took place later that year in october 1914 uh although he used about himself the word startstylist state terrorist we have to be i think careful about using the term terrorists about these young men especially if by terrorists we mean someone who delights in carnage in murder the murder of men women and children in marketplaces or department stores the kinds of things we associate with terrorism today these are actually quite tender-hearted young men um when gavrilo princip was read when it was when the words of the archduke to his wife um you know were read out in the in the um in the court um during the proceedings um princip for example burst into tears and when he was asked you know why are you why are you upset he said i'm not a beast and that was true of all of them they were not um they were not natural born killers they were young men very poor inexperienced as young people tend to be in a wonderful i mean that in a wonderful and positive way to the young people in the room um but rich in ideals and that can be a wonderful thing it's one of the wonderful things about being young but of course it's also something which which makes it easy for for irredentists and extremist movements to prey on young people especially when they feel as princip certainly did under respected by the the male uh role models in their own lives he had a very tormented relationship with his father and also with with the male teachers at his various schools and this actually is a theme that runs through the lives of all these young men is that in some sense they'd sort of fall and follow the of the key male figures in their own lives and what happened to them when they went to serbia was that they were groomed by sophisticated older men who who gave them a sense that they could do something meaningful and worthwhile that they could make something of themselves by giving themselves to an immortal and beautiful cause i want to throw myself what do you say i want to burn like a candle for my people was what bogdan jedice the uh the man a man who had taken tried to kill the croat police chief of bosnia-herzegovina had written in his diary in 1910 and sharaish was one of the heroes of the seven men who gathered in sarajevo on the 28th of june that's a picture of some of the other um the other um conspirators i should add by the way that as you've probably seen already that gabriela princip was not in a good state of health by the time he carried out the assassination he was suffering quite seriously from tuberculosis and when the the judge the german judge pfeffer who interrogated him during those very hot um days of of june 19 june and early july 1914 when leo pfeffer saw him for the first time he wrote in his report he was such a fine fine and fragile looking young man it was hard to imagine him having been guilty of such an appalling crime uh there's a great sort of irony about this relationship between leo pfeffer the interrogating judge and gabriel princip princip of course died a few years later in teresian state fortress which would later become the core of the trajectory concentration camp and leo pfeffer was killed in the tracing concentration camp as a jew during the holocaust in the next war to follow also known as arpis very is in a characteristically conspiratorial pose i mean he's really performing here for the camera with a couple of close friends as you can see um and he's the man who really masterminded the the the group known as union or death founded in 1911 um from sort of circles associated with the regicide of the uh abrahav brnovich dynasty in 1903 um very um again you know in many ways you might call them patriots freedom fighters uh but they were running an underground organization which was only really very partially under the control uh or overview of the government this is an important point arpis was not really although he was part of the serbian state he was not or did not behave in a way that suggests that he was answerable to the serbian state and certainly um he was not in the under the control of the serbian prime minister nikola pashich who found it impossible to interdict his activities although pashich and other cabinet ministers in belgrade were aware that apis and his people were running guns and bombs and young men across the borders with the assistance of parts of the serbian uh customs organization that were affiliated with the black hand although paschick knew these things there was nothing he felt nothing that he could do um to to to to roll up to suppress these activities by his own military intelligence um organization okay so there i think um that's as much as i wanted to do by way of revisiting those those events on the 28th of june and i wanted from there to go on just to remind you of something you know already which is on the on that morning the morning of the 28th of june 1914 when sophie kotec and franz ferdinand arrived in sarajevo europe was at peace and if you'd asked the statesman of that era whether they expect thought that a major conflagration a continental war was likely in the near future then all of them i think i can't think of any exception would have told you that in re in the last 18 months or two years war had actually been getting less likely rather than more likely a major war why would they have said that well because uh the two above all because the two balkan wars had come and gone without triggering a european conflagration and this is a point that margaret macmillan has made that the sort of drum beat of repeated crises before 1914 rather than reminding people making them alert to the danger of a major conflict had the opposite effect it numbed people it deadened their awareness of danger because crises seem to come and go as crises often do and there's a warning in this of course uh for us today not to not never as it were to cease being vigilant in the face of political crisis and we have the eloquent testimony of arthur nicholson the senior functionary in the british foreign office permanent under secretary in the british foreign office in london who comments in a letter to a colleague in may 1914 since all the years that i've been at the foreign office i have never seen such calm international waters so this is not one of the starry hours of diplomatic prognosis but 37 days after the visit europe is of course at war and the world war that unfolds from that war um has i think with justice been described as the primary catastrophe of the 20th century now i know this term is now controversial it's not a primary catastrophe for everybody it's not for the polls for example poland is reborn in this war um and so we have to bear in mind that there are many perspectives on this vast conflict as one would expect it's not really a primary catastrophe for australia for australia it's the sort of founding act of the nation state australia only exists as a nation-state from 1901 when it's confederated up until then it was just a bunch of separate colonies all ruled independently from london now it's a nation-state and entering this war is the first political act of national unity it's the the baptism of fire as it was often called in the australian press at the time and afterwards in the interwar period so for australia i think despite the very high mortalities among the those who volunteer to fight in the fields of belgium northern france mesopotamia northern africa and so on despite all of that um for the australians too it's not really a primary catastrophe nevertheless if we think about all the poison and dislocation that is fed into the world system by this war then i think the term primary catastrophe or primal catastrophe is is is justified this war destroyed four world empires the ottoman empire the austro-hungarian empire the russian empire and the german empire it consumed the lives of at least 10 million young men on its many fields of battle it accounted for between 15 and 20 million wounded and by this i mean seriously wounded men lightly wounded men never counted um but you have vast numbers of seriously wounded men and people of my age in australia all remember from their childhood older men relatives friends of the family who were still carrying these the effects of these wounds with them and still would and the trauma also the first world war and would continue to do so uh until the end of their lives and so i think fritz down is right when he refers to this war as the disaster the calamity from which all the other calamities of the 20th century sprang it's very difficult to imagine the rise of fascism in italy without this war difficult to imagine the october revolution in the russian empire virtually impossible in fact it's very easy to imagine something like the february revolution of 1917 which virtually everybody had predicted you know a collapse of tsarism a takeover of power by a coalition of nationalists and centrist groups in the from the russian duma supported by other extra parliamentary elements but the october revolution carried out by the bolsheviks and the creation thereafter of a one-party state of a kind that had never been seen in world history none of that had been predicted and nor was it is it possible to imagine without the titanic stresses brought to bear on german society under russian society uh by this war and to which of course we have to add the fact that lenin and his assistants and his entourage are as it were injected funneled into uh russia in the secret train in the very hope that the bacillus of revolution will infect the ailing russian state and finally it's hard to imagine german history taking the disastrous turn into darkness that it takes in the 20th century without the extraordinary effects of this war on german society i don't have time to go into that but i think the rise and seizure power of the nazi movement the national socialist movement and also thereby as a consequence the holocaust are very difficult to imagine in a world which hasn't already been blighted by this conflict so i think my former cambridge colleague adam twos who has now gone to uh going to colombia and he wasn't he's at yale now but he's moving to colombia is right when he speaks so the book is in the book that he's just written the deluge of this war is having unhinged the global system um and he goes into all the different ways in which that happens and i don't have time to go into that now but i think it really is a catastrophic uh event that poisons um the century that follows so the question it follows from all that the question of how this war came about um attracts a certain intrinsic interest and i don't want to disappoint you but i'm not the first person to have noticed this it's a this is an old debate uh in fact in some respects it's older than the war itself because the argument over who was responsible for bringing this war into the world began before the first shots were fired and it's striking how many of the arguments even the most sophisticated ones that we find in the secondary literature on this war you could already find on the lips of the statesman who brought this war about a man called john w langdon an american historian did a count in 1991 in a book he published with the oxford university press that's the only time this evening i'll mention oxford um but he did a book he did a book with a certain university press called the long debate and the title is in a way um is in a way the thesis of the book and in this book he said he didn't bother counting all the publications but he said there if you if you're interested in how many books and articles in english you really have to read in order to master this topic then that's 25 000. so that gives you a sense of the size of what he regarded as the kind of core literature on this subject and of course a lot of books have appeared since then um rebecca west the great british novelist um who wrote in my view one of the deepest reflections on the place of the balkans in 20th century european history she was someone who loved the balkans and the peoples of the balkan peninsula very much um she traveled to sarajevo in 1937 to see the places where the the crisis the sort of sequence of crises began that brought the war about which this is when she was researching for her sort of mega book um black lamb grey falcon a kind of mix of personal reportage history um travel log um diary and so on and while she was in the city she went to the balcony of the city hall um the place where franz ferdinand had taken his last look over this very handsome city and she turned her husband and she said i shall never understand how it all happened it's not that we know too little it's that we know too much and that was in 1937 well of course today we know a hell of a lot more so the question then arises why add yet another book to the pyramid of paper that already exists on this subject and of course as you can imagine my colleagues at cambridge were very swift to pose this question while i was working on the book um you know i was constantly being asked why are you doing a book on this subject surely this has been done to death you know um there can be nothing more left and it's been squeezed out like a lemon and so on and i think that's one of the wonderful things about one's colleagues perhaps perhaps at cambridge in particular that just as you're struggling with the with the cruelties of a really difficult problem they come up with excellent reasons why you should curl up and die of course one has to find an answer to these taunts and my answer was and is that yes the debate is old and the books are numerous but although the debate is old the subject is still fresh in fact in many ways the subject is fresher today than it was when i first encountered it in the 1970s as a school boy in sydney when i first discovered this topic at high school it's one of the central topics of australian secondary education you know it's a very important war for us too after all uh and when i first encountered this topic a lot of period charm had accumulated around the events of 1914 this was europe's last summer to borrow the title of david fromkin's book there was a lot of tennis and gin and tonic when when read the books by barbara tuchman fantastic narrative histories which i recommend to everyone by the way they're still they're full of really profound historical reflection but nevertheless when one read her books the proud tower and the guns of august one was struck by the loving detail with which she described uniforms beautiful gordy uniforms you know ostrich feathers um caught etiquette all the rules about where babies were allowed to be presented at court for example in which order did the prams have to be presented um the there's a wonderful little vignette about lord salisbury riding to the house of commons on a tricycle which he had built himself um a tricycle with pneumatically tired wheels it was the first pneumatically tired tricycle in all london he was understandably excited he was being pushed by his valet james he had to be pushed because the thing had no pedals on it but the point is as one read all these details the ornamentalism as david canadian would call it the ornamentalism of this world of 1914 of the pr what we now think of as the pre-war though of course we must never forget the people of the pre-war did not know they were of the pre-war um the the as one you know encountered all the ornamentalism of this world the assumption stealthily asserted itself that these must be bygone people people of a of another era people who had nothing in common with us that if their helmets and hats had gordy green ostrich feathers on them then perhaps their thoughts and arguments and dreams also had green ostrich feathers in other words that they had nothing to say to us the link between them and us that the bond had been torn forever and yet if we think again or look back at the events of the 28th of june from our perspective the perspective of people in the not quite beginning 21st century then it seems to me one has exactly the opposite feeling one can't help but be struck by the raw modernity of the events their raw contemporaneity uh if you look at if you run through your mind the events on the apple key the cavalcade of automobiles no prancing horses no carriages just motor cars then you can't help but have at the back of your head the images of november 1963 in dallas if you think of the fact that the story begins with a squad of suicide bombers and these young men were suicide bombers in a very literal sense they were carrying not just guns and bombs but also potassium cyanide with which they'd been instructed to take their own lives as soon as they'd carried out their mission and behind these young men were underground networks obliquely linked to a nation-state entity to the uh kingdom of survey to the belgrade government very loosely and obliquely linked but not of the government not not not as it were equatable with the government itself only loosely connected to any sovereign entity very hard to pin down very hard to trace no no paper trail no membership lists operating in small cells uh often largely ignorant of each other's activities so there are features of this story which are actually familiar aspects familiar in our own political scenery and our compass has shifted or changed in other ways as well if we think about how the yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the power of balkan nationalism we're less inclined now to simply to airbrush the balkans out of the scene it's a very striking feature of much of the literature on 1914 on the origins of the first world war that the balkans are scarcely visible uh and it seemed to me that the 1990s were a reminder that we needed to look more careful look more closely at the question of where they fit in uh to the larger story and then there's the fact that the war the world we inhabit um is no longer the world of the post-cold war dominated by one the only superpower left standing the united states the unipolar world of post 1989 has now given way to the post-post cold war as george friedman has called it sorry i can't think of anything more picturesque but that's his those are his words the po in the post-post cold war we're back in the in an era of genuine multi-polarity with a wearing uh titan or weary titan growing steadily more and more tired of its global role feeling overextended like london in 1914 now it's washington in 2014 with rising a rising power that is challenging the existing global order and i'm not talking about russia and with numerous regional crises that seem to rage on out of control creating the space for the emergence of new and potentially destabilizing regional players who are all in a competition to expand their own local and regional uh purchase their own local and regional leverage and these shifts in perspective which in in other words the point is that this the world we're in now is in some ways much more like the world of 1914 so even as 1914 recedes into the past which it has to do it has no choice but to do that on the other hand it speaks to us more and more freshly because the world we're in is more and more like that world and these shifts in perspective it seems to me prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to europe in 1914 and accepting that challenge emphatically does not mean embracing a kind of vulgar presentism a presentees as uh that that remakes the past simply to meet the needs of the present rather it means acknowledging those features of the past which before we couldn't see because our standpoint was different but of which we now have a better view thanks to the change in our perspective the change in our vantage point i think this is one of the things that keeps history alive that the present is always changing and so it's as if we're contemplating a huge and immensely complex building a very complex edifice and when we move even a few footsteps we can see aspects of that structure that were hidden to from us before and what we have to do is try and integrate these new perspectives these new insights into our understanding bearing all of this in mind how does one go about refreshing the narrative and i want to in the last few minutes just to touch on a few points about that the first thing that i tried to do to make the narrative fresher for me and i i hope for the for readers was uh rather than trying to find a different answer to the question why was there a war between 1914 and 1918 um to try changing the question i mean this is something you can do if you're an historian you can try either play around with the answer or you can play around with the question and i think changing the question is in some ways a bit better than playing around with the answer because playing around with the answer involves already deciding that you know what the answer is but the fact is with a complex problem like the outbreak of 1914 you shouldn't even start embark on research it seems to me if you already know the answer there's no point so the idea was to change the question and instead of asking the question why did this war come to ask how did it come now you might object to that that questions of how and why are not really separable they're inextricably linked but questions about why leaders in in a particular direction they pull us in search of causes so we look for large by causes we mean large categorical words nationalism the rise of the rise of uh social darwinism the phenomenon of arms races um imperialism is another favorite one and so as you trawl through the decades before 1914 you collect all these causes and you pile them up one on top of each other and finally the scale begins to tilt from a possible war to a probable war to an inevitable war and the the causal pressure seems so great there's no room left for the people who made the decisions that actually brought this war into the world they are squeezed out of the field of vision what we have is causes that are already in place a war that has to happen that is inevitable and yet some of the most interesting writing on this wall on this war has made the exact opposite point i'm thinking of holger affleck's book the improbable war question mark where he makes the point in his introductory essay that in many ways war was getting less likely before it got more likely there is no linear accumulation of causation there's no linear accumulation of pressure for war the outbreak of war is not like the eruption of a volcano the eruption of a volcano is a natural event it really is the consequence of the accumulation of pressures but the the outbreak of a war is a political event it's the consequence of choices people have to choose to take a world or a country from peace into war and i was interested in those choices and how they came about asking the question how leads us in a different direction but before i come to that one more point about the problem with why questions and that's a point that's made by a bulgarian historian the balkan wars who remarks in the introduction to his book and i quote when we ask the question why guilt soon becomes the focal point so in other words when we ask why what we often mean is who who brought this terrible war into the world and the answer that's often been found to that question um is the germans germany brought the war into the world europe was a nice peaceful place there was a psychopath star estate that brought a war uh deliberately caused the war planned the war in advance that was the argument made by um fritz fisher john roane my colleague in britain still making it today that the germans didn't just start the war they actually planned it in advance and on those occasions when they actually didn't cause a war they were in his words merely postponing it um so you have a kind of a moment where a view of the world where world history is being controlled from berlin that's what happens when you build a narrative around the idea of blame when you look for a culprit and then try and find out how this culprit caused did this terrible thing where's all the where's all the vice material you gather all the proofs and they tend to come from the german archives fritz fisher didn't look at any other archives he was only interested in germany he was a very fine historic historian but he was only interested in germany but of course it's not simply not possible to explain the outbreak of a war that involved so many states by reference only to the sources in one state so i wanted to get away from that blame-based approach which takes us in the direction of a culprit or a potential suspect and instead asked the question how an approach which takes you on a different journey through the events that are made more more likely the places in which risk accumulated so you're looking at where risks are accumulating where mechanisms are being put in place pieces of causality that may be that may be um being that may be occurring not uh in in accordance with an intended with a plan or some kind of long laid intention but may simply be accumulating for all kinds of other reasons partly by accident partly because intentions and consequences never end up being entirely commensurate so that was the idea to change um the focus in that way and that does not mean excluding questions of responsibility in the end you do have to face the question of responsibility for the outbreak of this war but it involved trying to get the questions about why out of the answers to the questions about how rather than the other way around okay so a couple more points about how one how i tried to sort of refresh the narrative and i just want to make a couple of very brief points here uh about the book and then i'll close the first was you know like all historians do i tried to capture trends in the literature now this is one of the most interesting literatures in the history of historical writing it has captured the interest of some of the best you know brains working on history so there are just hundreds upon hundreds of really excellent books by colleagues alive and dead so you can actually get a lot done simply by reading and reading and reading and then building new constellations from the arguments that are there in the literature trying to make sense of arguments that have been perhaps underexposed have received not enough credit need more attention to connect old arguments with the latest impulses in the in the uh research and so on so forth and one of the most interesting things that's been happening in the research on 1914 has been the kind of globalization of the field of vision we used to think of 1914 as caused by the polarization of europe into alliances uh i was taught at school that the the two alliance systems emerged because the germans behaved so provocatively that the other states unified against them then the germans got upset because they felt encircled but it was all their fault anyway and um europe got more and more polarized and so and i remember my teacher holding up his hand he was a fantastic teacher incidentally and no disrespect to him and the fact that i remember this lesson is a testimony to his skills and i think anybody in this room who's studying history um probably owes this interest to the encounter with a very interesting and charismatic teacher but in any case this guy stood up and he held up his hand and he said if you get a question on the outbreak of the first world war he held up his hand like this he said just remember the five german provocations right ships they built ships they shouldn't have built ships that makes the british angry they they challenge the french in morocco you should never challenge the french french and france they're really sensitive about that they don't like that they supported the austrians over the annexation of bosnia-herzegovina that was a bad idea because it irritated the russians which you should never do then they challenged the french again in northern africa they hadn't learned their lesson and then they issued austria with the blank check of support on the 5th and 6th of july 1914 i mean as a piece of pedagogy that is superb and i remember it to this day and i incidentally i use it in my exam and i did very well thank you very much but but the point is the point is that um you know the the view of the these events now is is much broader and we don't think of this simply as a question of how what french people thought what french leaders thought about german leaders and the anglo-german antagonism there's now a vast literature or a growing literature any case on the long-term tensions between britain and russia the importance of the two world empires which were experiencing tension all the way along their periphery in tibet in china um in the far east there's a great deal of interest in the role of japan in the background in 1914 there's an interest in the rise of the china question the increasing importance of china an area which brought the european great powers increasing the detention with each other because that was an area of competition it was the new great game as it were what used to happen in central asia was now happening on the bridgeheads the european bridgeheads of china and these bridgeheads of course had a cataclysmic effect on the domestic life of the chinese empire as you all know the boxer rebellion and so on and so we sort of de-europeanized we provincialized europe to some extent um which i think is a very good thing but i also tried in addition to taking account of those kinds of new trends in the literature i also tried to to make sense of aspects of the story which it seemed to me had been underexposed and one of them is the extremely chaotic character of decision making before 1914 and i just here i want to give you a couple of examples consider the fact that during the tenure in office of sir edward gray the british foreign secretary in london no fewer than 16 french foreign ministers came and went from office and two of them came and went twice which is really quite an achievement there's a there was a before 1914 a kind of heisenbergian uncertainty about the location of power in these complex executive apparatuses um no one the the dispatchers were full of reports or questions rather whatever the one question diplomats were expected to answer was who was actually running the show who's making policy and the answer was often well i'm not sure last week it seemed to be the military this week it's the tsar the minister of wars seems to be very important this morning uh tomorrow maybe the the foreign minister and so on so there's a kind of chorus of dissident voices which are often competing with each other and often it doesn't seem to make sense to speak of a russian foreign policy or a russian balkan policy you're looking at so many different agents with so many different policies and the same thing applies in austria-hungary which has got a hive-like structure where all kinds of people can feed into the decision-making process so that of course was important before 1914 because it grossly increased the opacity the untransparency of the system the unpredictability and thereby made the system much more prone to crisis and incidentally i don't think this is a problem that's gone away perhaps we could talk about that later a further point to pick up moments in the sort of chain of events that led to 1914 um that have been again underexposed or underweighted received you know less weight and less attention than they should have and one of those was the italian war on libya which broke out in 1911 when the italians without any provocation whatsoever attacked what we now call libya three integral provinces of the ottoman empire called fezzans and tripolitania it was a very bloody war it involved numerous atrocities which were widely reported on in the european press um it was also the first war ever to see aerial bombardments um bombs thrown from planes it was fairly home spun technology by today's standards the pilot had to clutch the bomb between his knees he had to prime it by hand with a fuse activate the fuse and then throw the bomb again by hand while maintaining control of his machine so it was a fairly adventurous business but there were also dirigibles airships which had racks on which you could um in which you could store up to 250 of these bombs and they were thrown by trained bomb throwers and their effect on the toco arabic troops as they were then called on the ground the people we had now called ground troops that the term then didn't exist um was predictably dramatic so it was an important war from that point of view but it was a very important milestone too on the way to 1914 because the war on libya the war on the ottoman empire in northern africa flashed a green light to the balkan states serbia montenegro romania greece bulgaria this is the moment to get what you want from the ottoman empire without the italian attack on libya the two balkan wars could not have happened and i wanted to bring this event this episode into the picture as well because of course it's an event that comes completely out of the blue it has nothing to do with fritz fisher's psychogram of the german elites which is actually quite an accurate portrait of what some of these people are thinking in berlin but of course the italian war in libya was not encouraged by the planners in berlin or the policymakers in berlin the germans and the austrians were appalled at the news of the italian war because they knew exactly that this would destabilize the balkans the austrians were horrified they were not consulted the ones who were egging the italians into this war were the french and the british who were delighted to see to see italy um take its share of the colonial pickings in northern africa uh edward grace explicitly urged them to do it and sooner rather than later and there are lots of other ways in which one can try and change the picture but i want to and i want to close now simply by saying that it gets very hard once you've walked these paths and you've thought about the war from these different perspectives it gets very hard to fit your mind back into the stringencies of the fischer thesis a one-state thesis which which makes one state he claimed to be speaking about primary responsibility for the war but in practical terms since fischer never has anything to say about anyone else's responsibility he really meant sole responsibility and john the world has made i think that case even more explicit when he says that 20 germans started uh planned and started the first world wars 20 men and they were all german and it gets harder and harder i think once you think in this wider frame about the events that brought war in 1914 to return to the simplicities of these sort of unipolar feet blame theses there's no question about the appeal of the blame game dishing out blame gives pleasure it gives a kind of moral pleasure to the one not to the one who's getting the blame incidentally being blamed is not very pleasurable at all but blaming others is a very pleasurable activity but the problem is the problem is not and this i won't really want to stress this the problem is not that you might end up blaming the wrong party because frankly it doesn't matter if we blame the russians if you're in the business of blaming it doesn't matter which state you blame neil ferguson has even been brilliant and perverse enough to blame the british for starting the first world war although he's in a sort of school of one i think on that but um the the russians have been blamed recently by sean mcmeakin the french have been blamed in a number of studies of course the germans are still the most popular but um you know there's also a small group of uh there's also fritz fellner who made a great case he was furious at the germans for blaming themselves he said what about us what about the austrians surely we have a place in this you know we're the ones who waged war on serbia you know what is it with these germans they give us nothing they don't even give us the blame share the blame around so um so i have to revise what i just said sometimes being blamed does give pleasure i've noted that notice that notice that recently in germany that sometimes he would try and take away just part of someone's blame and there are places where that that itself can cause pain um in any case the point is not that you might end up blaming one state the problem is simply that um in seeking a villain in looking for a single culprit you're just going to lose from view you'll you'll you'll um exclude from the field of vision the intensely interactive quality of this war um because this the story of how this war came about and this is where i'm going to close um i was at a paper a little while ago and somebody kept on saying in conclusion inclusion finally said you're probably wondering why i keep on saying in conclusion i say in conclusion to keep hope alive um but anyway i really am concluding this is not just to keep your hope alive um in conclusion i would say that the story of how this war came about uh was not a james bond movie right we don't find at the end of this story a sort of mountain hideaway with velvet jacketed villains you know stroking a white cat with a steel prosthetic hand and saying no mr bond i expect you to die um this is and then it's it's not that kind of story it's not an agatha christie murder mystery in which at the end of the story we're going to find the vicar with a blood-stained swordfish standing beside the prone corpse of lady carrington in the conservatory um it's not that kind of story it it was it was intensely interactive it was complex in fact i think the crisis of 19 of the summer of 1914 was the most complex event of modern times quite possibly of any times i'm just being a modest person i want to confine my claim to modernity but um nevertheless i think probably it is the most complex event of any time it was um genuinely interactive genuinely multipolar and multi-vectorial and finally and most importantly genuinely european this was a european disaster you can call it a tragedy if you like it was a european disaster a european cataclysm and it needs to be studied and understood in a genuinely continental way it was it was brought about by a gallery of political actors who shared a fundamentally similar and european political culture and it was to illuminate those aspects of how war came in 1914 that i wrote this book thank you very much for coming [Applause] tonight [Applause] thank you very much professor clark i think this was a really impressive lecture would you agree that we have a absolutely half an hour at least for some questions i'm sure there are many so there's a mic here you can sit here and let's go for this set of questions so who am i can i ask the floor please raise your hand and then jack will try to get there i start here go backwards turn around okay uh thank you so much sir for a debating and funny talk uh just one question isn't the question of visiting all of the all of the choices and who made those choices isn't it also tantamount to abortioning blame it is a more nuanced abortion proportioning but isn't it also yeah do you want me to answer a question one by one yeah okay yes thank you very much for that question it's a very interesting uh question and you're right that um in the end you know looking at res at decisions means looking at responsibility but i think there is a difference between responsibility and blame because um i think that you know if you're looking at if you're if you find in 1914 a behavior in one camp in one state one executive which is at variance with the behavior everywhere else um you know like a scene in a in an urban in a suburban park where everybody's just sitting in on the swings and having a good time and then a psychopath appears with a with a with a sword or something well um then you've got an aberrant behavior which is going to endanger the peace and there there you could talk about blame or or you know responsibility there but if you're looking at modes of behavior if you find that these modes of behavior are very distributed that they are common to most or all of the actors involved then blame becomes a less salient concept it seems to get less and less leverage and there you do need to talk about uh apportioning responsibility and of course one does have to apportion responsibility and this responsibility has a different quality for the different actors as well i mean if you for example if you confine your your view to the july crisis alone the period from the 28th of june june to 90 to uh the you know say the fourth of august 1914 uh then the the blank check does look like a you know it's one it's possibly the single most dangerous step taken that they're all make taking risks but the german risk looks a little larger than everybody else's so you might give them a slightly larger slice of the pie of responsibility but they're not doing anything that's essentially different from anything that anybody else is doing on the other hand if you stretch the chronological envelope back and look at the period 12 13 14 and you ask yourself the question who is doing most to destabilize the situation in southeastern europe to create the the circumstances in which a war is going to break out not of course in the intention of creating a war but simply creating these risks without necessarily being aware of where they're going to lead then your eyes would tend to wander towards russia and france rather than towards vienna and germany who are desperately trying to contain the kind of mayhem unfolding on the balkans so they're conservative powers as it were on the balkan peninsula whereas russia is not so you know it's um it's complex but the point is that nobody no single state is playing by a different rulebook than the others um and so that's why i find blame not very helpful i think that you know there as you say your one is apportioning something but i wouldn't call it blame i'd call it responsibility okay um wasn't it so i remember many countries people said or the the ruler said it will be a short war so before christmas you were you are at home was it that they expected a short war because they had no because it was a modern war with with airplanes a new kind of equipment and they thought oh such a industrial war will be a quick one that's another very interesting question well the um the story on that is the jury is still out on this it's difficult to resolve this question it used to be thought there was a a a sort of topos in the literature the short war illusion that the general staffs all thought you know the the troops will be home by christmas and certainly this um language is widely used in the press at the time in the public sphere um the picture when you look at the decision makers the military decision makers themselves is more mixed and more complex there are a lot of general staff studies done on the next wars that's what general staffs do they're in peace time they haven't got very much going on so that they fill their time with that sort of thing and um there's a very interesting study done by the austrian general stuff called dietzal imprint you know numbered the numbers of war where um they come the the the author of the stud the authors of the study come to the conclusion that the next war is going to involve such vast numbers of casualties or deaths in the field that the newspapers won't be large enough to you know long enough to print all the names um and they this is because of the use of shock tactics against stationary machine guns and against artillery fast firing artillery of the kind in which in which the the french manufacturing particularly got very fast firing firing accurate field pieces which had already seen service in the balkan war so people knew how good they were so um there was reason to believe that there was going to be massive carnage and that the war might drag on even schlieffen the author of the schlieffen plan acknowledged in some of his notes on the plan that things might not the the blitz like you know strike into france might stumble as indeed it did we were talking about this this evening uh even during the opening phases in in when they try and break through belgium the belgians fight with such skill and determination they slow the germans down this may be one of the reasons why things go so wrong at the man so you know um there's a even in the german case there's a fear that the the offensive might not prevail so everyone believes in the idea of a swift offensive everybody fears that it might not work but the problem is that the hope and the fear kind of hold each other in balance the the bottom line is effectively that nobody in 1914 feared war enough they didn't understand in from their as a gut feeling how bad it was going to be uh the middle east by all the standards uh remains one of the most politically unstable uh region of the globe which region does sorry the middle east the middle east the cascade of military conflicts uh unfolding in that regions currently from the war in syria and uh the desegregation of iraq and the subsequent rise to prominence of uh the so-called islamic state in iraq and the event speak million in supporting uh that evidence now according to many uh political uh pundits including the british mp george galloway the huge turmoil in the middle east dates back to the 1916 sykes pico agreement between a french diplomat francois josh uh pico and a british military sir alan sykes so can we claim with a strong degree of evidence and confidence that the huge hatred along tribal lines in the middle east now and the struggle for identity is a result of the or is a long-lasting result of the world war one thank you well thank you very much and um thank you for mentioning george galloway i think i think one has to be very careful to take anything george galloway says with a large rock of salt but um but i but then everything else that you said i agree with i think and i don't think he's wrong about this he can't be wrong about everything he has to be right about something um i think that you know um there's a lot in that claim that sykes pico has a lot to do certainly you know the islamic state and levant um takes that view itself and it's been in its propaganda it has said you know this is the end of sykes pico and it's also the case that after the first world war we don't see a collapse of world empire world imperialism we see on the contrary a last desperate spasm of angler of french competitive imperialism in the middle east which completely redraws the map of the middle east and creates um havoc which is which we're still dealing with today so i think that you know there's a lot in that um a lot in that in that diagnosis i don't disagree with it on the other hand i think that you know nothing has nothing in history has just one cause you know the the middle east has you know um there are patterns of instability and conflict which extend back before sykes pico and have a very very ancient genealogy so it's a combination of older and newer causes i think but sykes pico is certainly part of the mix and so is that last this sort of imperial land grab as and that all has to do of course with the just with the transition from coal to oil the oil revolution and oil-fired navies when the oil-bearing countries of the world suddenly become geopolitical hotspots and i mean you know it's just incalculable the amount of damage that that has done first of all thank you for shining a light upon this very um complex situation uh at that time um you briefly touched upon the yugoslav war in 1990s yes and i was just wondering because these wars are most likely still fresh in the memories of a lot of people here um and there are still a lot of nationalistic sentiments lingering around in that area i was just wondering if these sentiments uh together with for example other conflicts like ukraine in at this point could cause another war major conflict or you know if not the world war in the near future so speaking of 10 to 20 years yes thank you very much for that question well um i think that you're absolutely right nationalist sin feeling has not died away in the balkans it's still very very strong and i noticed that among other things in you know the responses i received when i went i went to belgrade and took part in a um you know i'm not the most popular person in belgrade let's put it that way mildly um you know i think that um and you know i kept on explaining to everyone i'm not blaming the serbs it would be absurd to blame the serbs for the outbreak of the first world war i mean that would be a completely laughable thesis but of course i did want to put serbia into the picture serbia is a very important part of the story of how all this happens it's not the cause of the first world war but it's part of the mix of you know causes and factors and so on which explain why people behave the way they did in 1914 um could there be a further major conflict well um of course i i'm as ignorant of the future as anybody else but i think that um certainly the feelings are still running very very high at the cost of a question this is completely not resolved not in the certainly not in the minds of the serbian sort of intelligentsia so i've been a political elite um i would say something more general about the balkans is there's a lot of victimology there are a lot of people who feel that they're the victims of history and i think that in some respects they are the serbs had a terrible 20th century um and we have to remember that i mean it's the first world war was took more serbian lives as a proportion of the whole population than in any other country uh participate in the war um and the lives lost included the victims of atrocities a bit like the atrocities in belgium but but on a much larger scale between 30 and 50 000 the numbers are not secure um people killed by well i say the austrian but actually it was probably um hungarian honvaid units um during the during the opening months of the first world war um and then of course there was a very rather tumultuous period in the interwar then came the second world war with for the further horrors and you said about concentration camp and uh again you know civil war in serbia itself followed by the creation of yugoslavia which many serbs now see in a rather negative light uh not all but some and um and then followed of course by the wars of yugoslav dissolution the bombing of belgrade by nato and so on so unlike the rest of western europe which has you know a bad half of the 20th century but then a period of milk and honey uh in serbia the whole century has been a trauma and that should not be forgotten that people still there's a lot of pain and a lot of disoriented political disorientation and anger um in serbia and in in other places in the balkans as well and we have to take that seriously and not simply just um you know write it off as some kind of psychological aberration it has to do with the complex geopolitic geopolitics of the peninsula um it doesn't happen we're not talking here about essential differences between cultures i don't think but um yes i think you're right there are still lots of unresolved issues and a further conflict is possible certainly that is what a lot of people predict when you speak to people who are politically informed um and even people in political office in belgrade predict further conflict over the over kosovo but i hope of course it doesn't happen and i see the answer to this um one possible answer in the admission of of serbia to um to the eu if there still is an eu which i very much hope there is um you talked a lot about blame and the complexity of the factors and events you talked about made clear that we cannot place the whole play more responsibility to one country however when we compare this to the treaty of versailles where it says that germany has their own responsibility and should be blamed for the whole war how's that possible then well um you know the winners write the piece and what was unusual about the versailles treaty was i think it would have been i think the germans are expecting to get you know punished i mean losers always do after wars um but the versailles p street is unusual in that um you know i remember a sort of light went on the back of my head when i realized that the word amnesty and the word amnesia were related and they are i mean that an amnesty is a forgetting you know we will forget the crimes you committed against us we will forget everybody will forget the pain his own her own pain and hurt and we'll move on to build a peace now that doesn't have to be in a level playing field the winners can set the terms they can extract a reparation they can um they can make the the defeated opponent pay for the war and that's quite common in warfare um in the history of european warfare but um what happened at versailles was in addition to all of that um the assigned the assignation of blame for the outbreak of the the so-called shruti pakhaf that the word should is not used in the versailles treaty itself uh it stated i think the word that's used is something like the moral the germans are the moral authors of the war the germans and their allies nonetheless that was enough and in the various accompanying documents that were um you know published with the treaty it was made clear that the the blame was what they were talking about um yes i think that this was a probably a regrettable feature that what you know a punitive piece was fine and the germans could have accepted that but the article 231 stuck in people's throats it's very interesting uh that that there isn't there are virtually no germans who accept the versailles verdict this is the odd thing i mean the communists rejected as an imperialist you know foul imperialist peace the social democrats rejected the center party of the catholics rejects it the left liberals the right liberals the dnvp the nationalist party you'd expect them to reject it and of course the nazis turn into their fetish the the november crime and and so on so forth but um and the the stab in the back and the shoot chant paragraph and all this kind of thing shant freedom the peace of shame um but a rejection of versailles is common to all the german parties it's very extraordinary most unusual and that had to do with two three one not with a punitive settlement uh the other aspects of the punitive settlement when i was gave a talk about you know related issues about a year and a half ago in berlin there was a sort of podium discussion and the a very brilliant journalist called gustav zeips turned up to do the questions and conversation and uh he brought with him his um now it was his uncles his great uncles copy a man he'd known as a young boy and was very fond of um his copy of the was the fox oscar the sort of um the popular edition of the versailles treaty published in 1920 you know for german for the germans to buy and it was his uncle's personal copy and you know the the booklet is virtually empty except paragraph 231 underlined and deep blue pencil with exclamation mark exclamation mark exclamation mark this caused immense pain to his great uncle that germany was being made to bear the sole blame for this conflict um so yes it was that it was probably in retrospect um you know a mistake to blame the entire war on the germans or to make that part of the peace settlement um given the complexity of the and all the lying that went on on all sides about each state's participation in the crisis that brought war um hello i have a question many people concentrate on the negative impacts of world for one but do you imagine that our society would be like this today if the war didn't happen for example in regard to women's rights for example europe needed to be distracted in order to give women a right to play a crucial role in our society what do you think about this that's a wonderful question and i agree that women the the you know the revolution in the status of women in western european societies is one of the most you know extraordinary and um fruitful and important revolutions of the last you know three or four hundred years so um if not longer so it's a that's a great achievement and there is a very interesting sort of counterfactual that you can run and that is the extraordinary case of switzerland which of course did not participate in either of the two world wars and only granted women sort of equal political rights suffrage rights in the 1970s so um it's very late to come to the sort of gender revolution or the uh and and it also wasn't in the world war so and there clearly is a link between this huge conflict and yeah i think the the giving of rights you you remind me here of a conversation i had with um with the polish uh journalist adam jaminski who um we were talking about this and i was saying oh it's a terrible catastrophe and so on and say it's not a catastrophe for the polls it's wonderful you know without it we wouldn't have poland and um he has a point that you know um without this war how do you get poland how if europe escapes the summer of 1914 without this war starting and you know it sort of chunters on and and the the the breaks up or loosens and the central powers and austria hungary starts to sort of collapse at the edges but in the meanwhile there's been a better understanding between britain and berlin you know you can imagine a sort of counterfactual world how do the polls get their state they have to get it somehow because there is a polish nation that has been for centuries and centuries so adam i think was right to say you know maybe conflicts bring the the they're like the bushfires in australia that burn out whole forests but make new growth possible um there is on the other hand a disturbing um tendency recently in public writing on war i'm thinking of a book by a guy i think his name is nick crocker and another one by a guy called ian morris called war what is it good for which is of course quoting this famous song um which was i forgotten who sang in the first instance but it was it was covered by frankie goes to hollywood and um he says in this book he says he's answered the christian war was it what is it good for is a hell of a lot war is great um without wars we wouldn't have our modern societies the war creates bigger and better political units um i think this is a very worrying direction for us to be taking it reminds me a little bit of the of the tendency of intellectuals before 1914 to speak of war as a form of social and political hygiene it clears away all the dead wood you know all the slowness and frustration is replaced by clearer outlines well personally i don't want clear outlines i'd rather have boring meetings i mean i remember someone in brussels i was talking to someone in brussels about this and he said you know thinking about the first world war i sometimes feel so frustrated sitting in brussels these long meetings which seem to go nowhere but then i think about the alternative you know which is so much worse so i don't think that um you know i think we should um be prepared to live with the with the costs of peace which are you know slower reforms will come but they come more slowly um you know i would rather get them slowly without war than than quickly with massive you know catechisms uh thank you very much mr clerk for a very interesting lecture this summer we saw a lot of commemorations on tv with regard to the outbreak of the first world war and my question to you is what's your impression regarding the political discourse um is there any kind of discourse among current politicians with regard to the outbreak of the first world war and especially with regard to responsibilities thank you thank you for another very interesting question um well um i found it rather depressing actually um the the discourse of commemoration and so on not all of it but quite a lot of it i mean it was particularly depressing when at the beginning of 2014 various members of the british government i mean michael gove the secretary the secretary of state for education um weighed into the debate um by saying you know a bunch of left-wing historians is trying to persuade people that the germans weren't there weren't didn't start the first world war let's face it they were virtually the nazis in 1914 they just needed a bit more polishing and so i mean it was an extraordinary piece and um there was a lot of that sort of jingoism going on in britain in at the beginning of 2014 so there was a sort of sinking back into a national perspective um i thought i think that things were very different in france in france says the memory of the war is conceived in a very cosmopolitan way um around the categories of mourning trauma loss and so on there's it's an eminently europeanizable framework in germany germany is special the germans began 2000 the german government began 2014 with virtually no plans for commemoration whatsoever and i spoke to some of the french people who are running the you know the salton air the whole whole system of commemorations and so on in france and of course they wanted to speak to the germans about partner partnering up on various initiatives and the answer from germany was well we haven't actually planned anything your plans sound nice and you think you should go ahead with those we're not we're not planning anything but thank you for letting us know and the french found this very frustrating so i must say i think that you know um my own ambition you said what was my ambition is that right was my own hope for the for this discourse is that right yeah my own hope is that you know that and that's why i wrote this book in a way was that uh at some point it will become possible to remember this european disaster in a european way to recognize its european framework its european contours and to view it in that way and to let all the voices that made this war possible you know have their say and give make a space for all of the actors uh and for the place of europe and this you know disastrous war uh and the in the inception of this disastrous war of course it becomes a much bigger wall uh once it breaks on professor thank you the title of your lecture is how european to war and my question is when did this process start because already decades thank you already decades before the start of the world war in 1914 all the ingredients the recipe was already ready for a war because england feared germany france was frustrated because the loss of 1870 they wanted back also slaughtering russia lost their power lost their influence in the balkan and they wanted the straits the dardanella so all the ingredients were there and on top already 21 years before the world war started there was a secret agreement between france and russia and the text became known after the sec the first world war and the text was included to demolish germany i mean the start of this war was not 1914 but was maybe already 20 years before and could could have been stopped already before is my question clear to you yes absolutely that's a very good question okay well let's start with the point you make at the end about the franco-russian alliance um i mean the franco-russian alliance dates back to the 1890s and it's true the franco-russian alliance only exists in order to hold germany down i mean it doesn't have the french and the russians have preferred no other strategic interests in common and they're two very different political cultures um it's there in order to counter german the growing input influence and power of germany um but that doesn't mean that a war is inevitable once this alliance has been signed because if you look at how the francois russian alliance functions in the late 1890s and 1900s it actually has a tethering muting effect rather than an escalating one so for example the french are endlessly telling the russians don't go into the balkans don't take any risks in the balkans because france does not recognize in the balkans a vital interest for russia let alone for france and in morocco in 1911 the russians warned paris don't try anything on with morocco because russia does not recognize in morocco a vital interest in france let alone for russia they use the same words in order to make the point clear so this is what um patricia weitzman has called um a tethering alliance an alliance by which the two partners try and manage each other and hold each other back and to some extent the germans do the same with the austrians in the balkans in 1912 and 13. so these alliances have a complexity about them which allows them to function in different ways what happens to the franco-russian alliance and this is where your question gets its salience from is that in from 1912 onwards as the balkan wars take off the french president and his russian interlocutors begin to change the remit of the alliance they change the meaning of the alliance by agreeing that in future um if a quarrel breaks out in the balkans in particular between austria and serbia then france will support russia in an intervention even if russia is not herself under attack or under threat of attack or mobilization so there a mechanism is created which could cause a war that's true which could cause a war though that's not the plan they're not planning to cause a war but it is a piece of causality which if a certain set of other conditions are met could help to bring a war about i wouldn't say it more strongly than that but in connection with the anglo-german antagonism you were mentioning well that that again has been i think overplayed in a lot of the literature the by 1911 the germans have absolutely clearly lost the naval war the british and no longer feel fundamentally threatened by the german navy um and the tibet says we can't keep up forget it we're going to stop trying and the germans begin in 1912-13 to shift funds towards the army because the navy is simply never going to catch up with britain's infinitely superior fiscal and naval system um at around about the same time uh the british start to get more and more irritated with the russians especially over central asia and so by the summer of 1914 we know it has recently been uh rediscovered and and discussed in the in the journals we know that in the summer of 1914 the british foreign office briefs or prepares the personal secretary of the foreign secretary a man called sir william tyrell for a mission to berlin and the idea is to sound out the possibilities of a of a better understanding with berlin after dropping the the convention with russia now this is a this mission never takes place because then the war happens but the point i'm making is that this period before the war was as as pregnant with possible futures as our present is i mean it didn't have to be the future that came to pass there were other futures and you can once you become sensitive to this you can see these under other futures wherever you look you can see people looking into different futures that didn't happen and i think it's very important to remember that and not to think of the of the future as foreclosed we have this tendency to adopt a double standard to the past a different one from the standard we apply to the present we think of the present is open and full of possibilities but of the past is closed and doomed but that's not the case that's why choice is so important because people have people when powerful people make choices they choose between different possible futures you end it by explaining that putting the blame on any single party is not very useful um now i know you're a professor of history but nevertheless i would like to ask you in the present european crisis about ukraine there's a large tendency to put the blame on [Music] president putin as the single person or single power in this enrolled bad guy would you comment on that or are you yes i'd be glad to come into that i mean again i think in history as i said to the gentleman before um in history there is never just one cause and um you know to say it's vladimir putin alone is just you know um is trying to tear up world peace and so on and he just wants a war for war's sake or conflict for conflict's sake would be great just that's just propaganda i think that you know it's a what's produced the ukrainian crisis is a very complex um convergence of different historical vectors and one of these is eastwood enlargement of the eu which i think was you know is approach the process which um it's not it's not a bad process in itself but it's been undertaken i think with perhaps um you know in in a spirit of harshly put a geopolitical naivety um i think it was naive of the enp the european um neighborhood neighborhood policy to extend to kiev a kind of choice between the west and um and moscow i think that was geopolitically naive it wasn't done to start a war it's just out of conflict it was done in the wonderful spirit of the eu you know we're having a party everybody's having a great time why didn't you come around as well um but after all it was a very deep form of intervention in the inner life of ukraine because it was it it um pegged the um the signing of an association agreement to quite deep reforms um and so in other words it was actually in intervening deeply in the mechanisms of domestic mechanisms of ukrainian political life and finally there's the whole um you know complex dynamic of ukrainian society itself which is it's a tumultuous area it's not a country which has a long history of homogeneous statehood um it's deeply demographically diverse and it has a very complex history in a very brief and you know unresolved history as a nation-state so although put all those things together and you have the the the you know the means of the the ingredients for conflict that doesn't mean that i i don't see mr putin as contributing his own special how shall i put it chemistry to the current instability um but uh he's a very special person in many ways but um nevertheless just to see it as um you know his to his fault alone is is you know a drastic reduction of the um of the of the complexity of this problem incidentally one last point about putin people who are close to puerton a number of them have said that the moment when putin sort of shifted to a more intransigent line and when his trust in the west plummeted had to do with the libyan intervention of 2011 when um a brief intervention which he supported in the security council um drifted into regime change the murder of qaddafi in the most horrible way on the streets of of the capital and um you know putin felt i've been i've been uh tricked i've been double crossed um by my western partners in inverted commerce and what's interesting there is of course we have another libyan milestone in 2011 just as a hundred years before in 1911 the italian war in libya helped to destabilize the balkans and thank you very much professor for coming here first of all and okay in a certain stage in your lecture you stated that the involvement of the single countries in the conflict was not the product of a trend a pattern but the product of last-minute choices in a sense well if you from what i could understand from a book by dennis mack smith on modern italy i sort of identified a pattern that goes from like the end of the crispy legislation in 1896 up to 1915 in which you can see that italy's sort of drifting apart the from the um triple alliance and so it's sort of directing towards the triple and tongue i mean if you look like if you look at the prince agreement the position of italy and algerica's the reconnection agreement you can actually see that there is there is a pattern um would you like to comment on that thank you very much well yes the it's true as you say that italy is um not a reliable member of the triple alliance um in fact the triple alliance is a misnomer um italy had by 1914 made such a sort of fabric of agreements with france in particular but also with britain sort of formerly informal ones that um edward gray wrote to um what said to his friend paul combo the french ambassador in london he said the the italians are much more useful to us um outside our alliance they're much more useful as allies of the germans and austrians that they could ever be as allies of france and britain and we should try and keep them in that alliance because they're better friends to us as enemies than they would be as friends so um i think what you say about italy is right um it is a sort of you know drift away from the central powers i don't think that you know as there are also as you say trends and patterns that can help to account for this war and of course one can't explain anything in history without an understanding of the slow structural shifts in the environment that you know make a walk make these sorts of events possible on the other hand um surely and this is the case that the book really wants to make what's really striking about the last few years before 1914 is the rapid short sharp changes in the system you know i just gave the example of the balkans that's just one example but you know the sudden appearance of albania the um the the the naval race between the dreadnought rates between the greeks and the turks which gets the the russians really really worried um the collapse of austria's geopolitical security apparatus in in on the balkan peninsula the shift of russian interest from sofia in in bulgaria to belgrade in serbia um you know there are dozens of other examples one could give what's really striking about this environment is how swiftly it's changing and that means a sort of atmosphere of panic prevails among those who have to make decisions everybody's improvising they've scarcely had time to catch up with the last change and already there are new events events acquire kind of raw power the reason i make this point is because you know it was very popular among historians in the 1970s and 60s 70s and 80s to quote a wonderful sort of almost proverbial um phrase by fernando bordell the great exponent of the the ecole di zanal in france uh and bordell once compared and he's been quoted billions of times that it's been sort of metastasized across the literature um rodel said you know events are just the warm contemptible foam um that rides on the backs of the great waves of history structures of structural history so what matters in history is the structures slow structural change and events are just soft foam well i i don't think that's right i think that events can have a raw power and structures can be quite soft and lukewarm it doesn't have to be it can be the other way around events can transform structures so i want to keep patterns and long-term developments in play but i also want to sort of make space for the power of events incidentally a power which we've recently um had to reacquaint ourselves with sorry uh professor clark thank you very much for your very interesting lecture um i would like to ask you a question about the uh current discourse about the first world war or the outbreak um the historian heinrich august winkler has argued that um you underestimate the responsibility of germany in your book i'm very sorry it's kind of what wouldn't it yeah and um and i would like to ask you if you think there might be in the shift of the debate towards a smaller responsibility of german germany um if that might be plain to the cards of let's say more right-wing or nationalist opinions in germany i'm very glad you asked that question um because i it's not my intention to acquit the germans of if we're going to be blaming people we certainly have to give german the german some of the blame and i i don't um in fact you know good good share of the blame i mean i think if you and i have no objection if someone wants to say well when we divide up the pie of blame let's give the germans a slightly larger slice than anyone else that wouldn't bother me at all i think okay fine whatever if you're very interested in the sizes the exact size of the slice i've suggested before that you know i think the size of the slice depends on how you frame the events that bring the war about if you just look at the july crisis the german size looks a bit german slice looks a bit bigger if you look at the whole period 12 to 14 it looks smaller so um you know as i say i can see some room for movement around that and i don't want to certainly do not want to acquit the germans of blame and in the book i mention all the key points of german culpability you know the um the willingness to risk a preventive war the decision to use um to seek a local a local war between austria and serbia but to accept the risk of a russian intervention and to accept that risk because the germans believed if they had to fight a war now that would be a better option than fighting war in a couple of years so the germans take very knowingly take big risks because they're not alone in doing that everybody's playing a game of risk um in this environment um so i don't want to acquit the germans i just wanted to show that we find very similar patterns of behavior elsewhere and so i don't you know i think it would be ludicrous to suggest that you know my account um proposes a a version of german foreign policy which young nationally minded germans today could be proud for example you know they might look back at the kaiser and think what a far-sighted monarch what excellent decisions and so on the kaiser is clearly you know a complete complete the uh you know he's like a sort of a dog off the leash so um you know there are real problems um there and there's a there's the the idiocy of the fleet of the challenge to britain without a you know building ships without any adequate sort of diplomatic program in which to embed that challenge and there are lots of other things but what one can't find is germans acting in a way which is you know categorically different from everybody else there's provocative behavior going on on all sides that's the key problem so my idea was to complicate the story but certainly not to to let the germans you know let the huns off the hook as one hostile uh review suggested i was doing um i get a lot of this kind of thing i mean i got a review in the uh in the um spectator which um said you know professor clark must wear a pickle halber when he gives his he must wear a pickle harbor and he gives his lectures in cambridge and accused me of having been awarded some kind of nazi medal by the german government um i mean there's a lot of that sort of stuff going on um if if revisionists if if you know sort of right-wing revisionist take comfort from my book i'm i regret that and i don't know it's not something i intended i'm not address i didn't write it for them um i'm just i'm trying to complicate the picture and the people who were taking comfort from the book for revisionist reasons were already revisions before they read my book i don't think i've changed the scene in that respect at all well i think i would like to leave it at this i mean i think this was a fascinating debate with the audience here for more than half an hour i think we exploited you up to the limit i think it's also fascinating to have you here with us here in the city of maastricht as i mentioned you know the the first country or the first independent country at that time germany invaded on august the 4th 1914 was nets and i think few people know that that actually this was the first alliance and then moved from plumbier here down to maastricht and to some extent talking about positive impacts of the war of course this region became totally pro-dutch following the war having seen the disaster of this tremendous dramatic catastrophe and i think it is after 2000 after 1918 that actually the gilder became accepted as the currency and that basically around maastricht the region really became dutch in the sense of the alliance to the netherlands so this is a historical place i'm delighted that you were here to tell us more about how europe went to war in 1914 and i think we had a fantastic dance lecture and i think he would have been proud to listen to you here if you still would have been here with us so professor clark many many thanks for this lecture i think we had a fascinating evening here all together and with this i closed the session and you can of course have buy copies of the book of professor clark here in the front row thank you for your question [Applause] you

Channel: Maastricht University

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Keywords: 3896578415001, lecture, _youtube, christopher clark, Universiteit maastricht, WO1, Tans, lezing, eerste wereldoorlog, _SG, Clark, woi, First World War, maastricht university

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Length: 107min 26sec (6446 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 18 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Christopher Clark revisits the century-old debate on the outbreak of the First World War, highlighting the complexity of a crisis that involved sudden changes in the international system. Clark proposes fresh perspectives on an old question

[u/alllie]

Well, I think he explained how Europe went to war in 1914 but he didn't explain why. I've only read one article, decades ago, that, I think, explained why. It was written from a communist POV. They were very much about "follow the money", that wars were fought to profit various members of the ruling class and the working class was tricked or compelled into being cannon fodder in wars to make the rich richer. This article said WWI was about Britain, Germany, Russia, etc, thinking they might be able to steal the Balkans or even the AustroHungarian Empire, the grand duke having been the heir and his heirs all being children easily brushed aside. Certainly that seems more logical than the other reasons I've heard. And the wars I've observed in My lifetime have all been about money, no matter what other excuse they gave us.