Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 - Christopher Clark

what ladies and gentlemen I'd like to begin by searched Evans and Valerie shrimp Lynn for inviting me to present this lecture the same thing and I'd like to also to thank all of you for coming along and I'd like to thank and also apologize to the people who are standing outside and one hopes perhaps watching this from home in the form of a podcast for the fact that we couldn't that they couldn't get in now I wanted today to it is indeed a great a matter of great pride to be succeeding Sir Richard as as Regius professor though I hasten to I want to reinforce his comment about the duties of the professorship they are rather moderate that is one of the key attractions of that post now I wanted to begin by taking us back to the 28th of June 1914 which I think is the right pace there's to begin you know the that we shall begin at the very beginning the very the very best place to start in the words of the famous song since especially since this is the first lecture in a long series on 1914 and of course it does all in a sense start not everything not all the the back stories of 1914 start on the 28th of June but short certainly the sort of short history of the cause immediate the immediate causes of the of the front the cause push in as Pierre Novak called them they do begin on the 20th of June and there's a sort of dramatic drama and a density to the events of that day which I think repays revisiting them and I wanted to start with this picture here of a couple who are about to have what I think can only fairly be described as a very bad day that's actually not them at that photo was taken a couple of days before you know as you'll see they're wearing different clothes on the day and sorry ever but this that certainly them he's Archduke Franz Ferdinand the heir apparent to the austro-hungarian throne she's off Ecotec the descendant of a very distinguished Poe he Mian lineage not distinguished enough to rate in the eyes of the Habsburg family as a prophet as of appropriate standing to be a member of Habsburg royalty for which reason she was never allowed in Vienna for example to sit beside her husband in the royal carriage with its beautiful gilded wheels and that of course is one reason why on the 28th of June in Sarajevo she insisted on being beside in the car this was a rare opportunity for the couple and they were very tender and close couple by the standards of dynastic familial culture of that era that was one reason why she insisted on sitting beside her husband on that day the other reason was that the 28th of June was a red-letter day it was of course a red-letter day in the Serbian national calendar I'll come back to that in a moment but it was also a red-letter day in their own private history because it was the anniversary of their wedding and that's one reason why she was beside him in the car on that debt on that morning here we see a couple of final images before the assassination this is one which shows the Archduke and his entourage waving to two various military individuals and near the the Secretary of a railway station and as you can see there their headgear is adorned with gaudy green ostrich feathers you can't tell that they're green because this is a black-and-white photo but they are taking take my word for it and I'll come back to those ostrich feathers in a moment that's a map of the Balkans because I think that one can never look enough at the map of the Balkans it always repays inspection these are the the far away countries that nurse Neville Neville Chamberlain called them that we are which we know nothing or little and it's important to to reefa Miller eyes ourselves with the map I made this comment once and I was giving a similar lecture to this one in Zagreb in Croatia and I said you know it's totally important to familiarize oneself with it but I just said it automatically with the Balkans and then suddenly I realized I was in the Balkans and and I think the micro ad audience was looking at me with a puzzled expressions but I've chosen these two maps because it's like two almost identical images on the back of a cereal package where you've got to identify the eleven differences between image one and image two and I wanted to draw your attention just to a couple one is that with no further ado Albania suddenly appears between 1911 and 1914 it's suddenly there in 1913 a new nation-state appears on the Balkan Peninsula another is that Serbia greatly increases in its extent and both of these events are the consequence of the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 today largely forgotten conflicts but actually very bloody traumatic conflicts for the societies involved Bulgaria Serbia in the second case of the second Balkan war Romania Montenegro and of course the Ottoman Empire so those are two important differences and all of this has to do with there is the receding the the withdrawal of Ottoman power the collapse of power of Ottoman imperial power on the periphery of Ottoman the Ottoman Empire the loss of most not all but most of Ottoman Europe of Islamic Europe the other point I want to make is about something that both maps have in common and that is the the fact that Belgrade and this particular this map here because of a printing error Belgrade almost looks as if it's inside the austro-hungarian monarchy of course it's not it's the capital city of the kingdom of Serbia but it's a few minutes drive by carriage from Belgrade to the the border with Austria Hungary when the Austrian representative in Belgrade packed up his bags and left the broke off diplomatic relations and left the city of Belgrade having received the Serbian reply to the Austrian ultimatum on the 23rd of July as around the 25th of July it took him a few minutes to get back into on to his their own native terrain and this tells us something about the about the intimate relations between the intimate character of this relationship between Serbia and the sprawling multi-ethnic Commonwealth of austria-hungary a relationship which was toxic and poisonous but also very close two countries have watched each other with a sort of perspicacity driven by hostile mutual hostility now this is the closest thing that the early 20th century got to Google Earth it's an engraving from the Baedeker Travel Guide and it shows the city of Sarajevo sorry havens we'll all tell you it's a kind of cliche in the city that the the city is is a cupped hand like this and the between the two hands between the two cupped hands runs the river milliard sky which you can see crossing the city from the west to the east and it's along this river on the key the uphill key along this river that the cars past bearing well bearing various people but including of course the Archduke and his wife and in car to making the way towards the building marked here as the Hart House the City Hall the next image I'm very fond of because it conveys with such brutal simplicity the narrative of that morning so I mean you can't ask for simpler than that as the cars past the chu Moria bridge just here a young man corny gel coat a Villanova CH young Bosnian Serb and one of seven young men who have come to the city gathered in the city to attempt to assassinate the couple or not to assassinate a couple important distinction they want to assassinate him though in the case of chopping knowledge he was willing to take the risk of assassinating her as well because he threw will we call it a bomb in fact it was a bit more like a grenade with the chemical fuse he broke at the detonation cap against a lamp post that made a loud bang it's thought that the driver hearing this bang thought that somebody had fired a shot and pressed hit the accelerator and that is why instead of landing inside the car where it would have you know killed or very seriously maimed the Archduke and his wife it landed behind the car it may also have been swatted away from the car by the altitude there the the eyewitness testimony is confusing or is conflicting on this question but in any case it rolled and the car number three exploded under the car gouging a hole in the road injuring the people inside the car but not seriously a lot of superficial cuts a lot of blood everywhere but nobody in danger in serious danger the people in the third car were carried off to hospital the third car beak it was a sort of stricken Hulk the other cars picked their way around the third car and at this point you might have thought it might have been time to call off the visit to Sarajevo and indeed this point was made to Franz Ferdinand - was suggested you know things are not going well the bomb has been thrown shouldn't we be leaving and upon which the Archduke replied absolutely not don't be ridiculous the man is clearly insane have him taken to an asylum he was suffering from a syndrome of which the technical term is grumpy old man something that happens to a lot of us would get more and more irritated by less and less but of course having a bomb thrown at it was no small irritation but in any case he was having none of it and he didn't to be given advice he didn't like security details he didn't like all the fuss that went with that and he insisted on on business as usual carrying on as planned even though his wife there was a sort of trickle of blood down his wife's cheek she'd been struck by one of the metal splinters from the bomb that had exploded under car number three and so it happened came to became about that the cars continued their progress along the Appel key alongside the river Williams car towards the the city hall which you can't see on that map and the next picture I'm particularly fond of because it shows the it's actually a still from a film and it shows them coming out from various meetings that took place at the city hall I mean the the arrival at City Hall was in itself something to behold because of course by the time they got to the city hall the mayor may admit shortage to whom fell the unenviable task of welcoming the couple of course the noise of the bomb had already been heard he'd been informed you know Obama's gone off it's going terribly badly he was a nervous man at the best of times he didn't like giving public speeches and now he hid the speech he had and had prepared to give which had been glued on to a sort of paddle of wood for him to read from was woefully inadequate to the situation because it began with but he was too nervous to change the text it began with the words which he then proceeded to read out in a trembling voice it is with sentiments of the deepest joy that the citizens of Sarajevo welcome your Highnesses to our beautiful city halfway through this sentence he was interrupted by a grumpy old man with the words deepest joy welcome is this how you welcome your visitors with bombs I mean he had a point and at this point his wife was seen Sophie kwatak was seen leaning towards him and whispering something into his ear it's not known what it was but it was probably something long lines have you no don't don't you know let him get get on with a dear it's not his fault there are moments like this in every marriage and he said very well you may continue and the and George continued with his with his talk and then it was time for the Archduke to reply whereupon it turned out that the text of his reply speech and reply had been in the pocket of the adjutant who had been in car number three so it was now covered in blood and a lot of wiping and scraping had to be done so that he could read the text I mean things were going really horribly wrong and at this point and they then met with she met with Muslim ladies he went up to the balcony and took a look at the last look at the city shattered with various dignitaries at which point by this point he there were signs according to our witnesses signs that he was started to get nervous he was talking to get jumpy and his voice was getting higher and higher and he was clearly keen to be off they came back down it got back into the car and of course what happened next you all know this is a fanciful french rendering of what happened next from the pretty journal which is beloved of historians because the wonderful color the lithographs that this journal specialized in these this is a front-page image they really were fantastic pictures of course this is does not give you anything like an accurate rendering of what was what actually happened on that day the shot has been fired from the wrong side of the car prints if in fact was standing on the other side they didn't rise up like figures in Opera here it looks as if as if that his singing I don't I thought in fact nothing of that kind happened the shots were both so effective one struck him in the jugular vein the other struck her deep in the abdomen that they remain sitting seated exactly where they were and it was not clear even to the bodyguard count haha who was standing on the running board of the car though of course it very Austrian fashion on the wrong side it was not clear even to qantarah that they had been struck by by the the shots fired by the assassin it looked as if the shots might have gone wide and governor Potiorek who was sitting in the jump seat the spring seat opposite the the jump seat it's called I think the opposite the couple you can't see him in that picture he's been left out he recalled in his G position before the court at which these young men were arraigned that before which they were arraigned he recorded his deposition that it wasn't clear to him that these shots had actually met their mark he he hadn't even managed to hear the shots he saw the young man step forward and hold the gun up to up to eye level like this and fire from point-blank range but he didn't hear any reports he saw flags of smoke and the next thing he knew someone was a was shouting to the Czech driver to get back into the a bulky and to drive back towards the conic the the palace where they were going to see what should be done next and the sonya is out driving back down Pelkey that it became clear and some blood began issuing from his mouth Sophie chotek Sophie chotek sort of tilted sideways and until her head was resting on his lap and at this point how I heard the the Archduke say to his wife words which very quickly became famous throughout the monarchy they became a cat they went viral I mean they really went global very very swiftly he said to her Sophie's off he is off a load off alleys and za files off house del vanished I believe importance of the kinder Sophia so V don't die stay alive for our children this is an extremely as I say very unusually tender family with very intense familial life and that was a very typical sort of a moment and how I've recorded that in fact that the letter in which hark reports these words to his wife was just the other day was just the other day auction I think at Christie's for a vast sum an undisclosed sum as far as I know in any case that's what happened next and here you see what an image that was sold worldwide as a photo at the time as a photograph of the arrest of Gavrilo Princip the the most active commander the man who took the two shots outside Chile's general store on the 28th of June the man who killed the two people in the car and of course if if given the the state of photography that its technological development in 1914 somebody had managed to get a snapshot like this of the arrest of Prince if it would be nothing short of a miracle in fact this is not the rest of Prince if the photographer who took this picture had been warned in advance that an arrest was going to take place it took place a couple of days later it's the arrest of a man called Theodore bear who was picked up along with a lot of other suspects during the sort of police dragnet that inevitably always follows assassinate political assassinations of this kind but I've included this picture because I mean firstly it's a marvelous example of journalistic resourcefulness and which because the journal the journalist - the photo journalist who took this picture subsequently captured has captured it as the arrest of Prince even made an absolute fortune from it's indication though that was of course the last time in which are the stir occasionally a journalist has behaved like that the picture is also interesting because what you can see it of course all images even if this is a this image is false in as much as it purports to show the arrest of prints if it's true in the sense that it shows the arrest of someone and what it also shows us is as this young man is not just being arrested he is also being protected by the Austrian officials who were arresting him and he's being protected from local Bosnian Muslims you can tell because they're wearing fezzes and that's a reminder of two things first that that Sarajevo was a very Bosnian Muslim town the Muslim elite ran the the sort of machinery of city administration the mayor made church which was himself a Muslim Bosnian Muslim and as you may recall from that image showing the couple issuing from the City Hall a lot of the people standing there were sort of waving them on or welcoming them rather saying goodbye to them as they leave rather as they leave to get back into the car are wearing feathers in the in the Bosnian Muslim fashion and so what that tells us is something about the very extreme emotion that responded that that was triggered by these these two assassinations there's a lot of Bosnian Muslim violence against Serbs in Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia Herzegovina and also violence by Croats against Serbs so in other words this assassination awakened sort of inter-ethnic tensions which were always fairly alive in the region in any case this is an image of the the young man who took the two shots as you can see his slender and and rather sallow he was already quite ill by the time he took these two shots not mentally ill but suffering from quite seriously from tuberculosis of which he subsequently died in the Torres instat prison one of the many sort of I would iron knees or you know tragic resonances of this story is that he died in draisine start later of such such evil Fame you towards wrote the role it played in the Holocaust the interesting thing about in Princip and his friends is simply couple of points to bear in mind they were not terrorists in the sort of 21st century sense they did not rejoice in in the secure industry carnage when the words of the Archduke you know his odds offer stir banished and so on were read out and at court Princip visibly wept he was upset he hadn't intended to kill the Archduke's wife he was the several of the boys were shocked to see that she was riding beside him this made this worried them several in a couple of cases it may be the reason why they failed to take their shots or to throw their bombs they didn't want to kill a lady they wanted to kill him because he was a representative of political power so there were carriers of a sort of state terrorism which is narrowly focused on the carriers of power the second shot fired was not aimed at her but in all illness in you know in all probability it's true that his principal aims he was aiming at governor Potiorek a very hated figure in the province of in the in Bosnia had to governor the in the lunch as it was called of Bosnia excellent of Bosnia Herzegovina but that he missed because his arm was probably already being grabbed by someone in the crowd or he's being jostled by someone in the crowd as you can imagine as people would once the first shot had been fired the other thing to bear in mind here at some of his collaborators should we love it chaplain ovitch Ilic and rubbish is simply that these seven men six of them are Bosnian Serbs they were not subject to the cert of the kingdom of Serbia they were Bosnian Bosnians in other words they were subjects of the austro-hungarian monarchy though of course six of them were served nationalists there was a young man by the name of magnet bash each who was a Bosnian Muslim but not a religious man a man who took the radical socialist why he had was recruited to the group is not clear but one reason maybe he wasn't actually recruited in Belgrade he was recruited by Daniel Ilic a local operative working with in Sarajevo itself and he may have done that because he wanted to sort of D so bein eyes.the the group it's not clear made passage had a record of sort of failed political actions he'd already failed to carry out an assassination on another occasion so it's rather mystifying that he should have been chosen for this task and in any case of the group of seven young men and men in the city the three most active ones chaplain Novick gray beige and Princip had all been and this was quickly established by the Austrians had all been supplied with their guns and and bombs in in Belgrade they'd been trained in marksmanship in a park outside the capital city they'd be they had made it across the borders this is also quickly established across the Serbian borders with the assistance of members of the Serbian border force in other words of the Soviet border troop what the Austrians did not succeed in demonstrating was direct involvement by the Serbian state and in fact we can say now with confidence that the Serbian state as such was not complicit in their carrying out of this assassination the president passage Nicola passage had foreknowledge of the the movement of bombs and guns and young men across the border from Serbia into Bosnia Herzegovina shortly before the the arrival of the of the Archduke in the province but he was unable to prevent it because these movements were taking place under the control of an underground network that was operating with support for the support of part of the of the officer corps of the Serbian army a movement known as we had nearly smurt Union or death or also famously in history as the black hand and it was this there was passages inability to control this movement which gave rise to the problems the sense allowed the assassination to happen not his direct complicity or the intention of the Serbian government as such to carry out an assassination of this kind partially to recognize perfectly clearly that this form of ultra violent irredentist activity posed a very grave security risk to his state okay well there there are the events of the 20th of November 1914 and I just want to start really the more formal part of what what I want to say by reminding you of something you all know already which is it on on that morning the morning of the 28th of June when this couple arrived at Sarajevo railway station Europe was a peace and in fact if you'd asked the states when the best informed statesmen there were all men in this era of Europe whether they believed that a major continental contribution a major continental war was imminent or highly probable then the great majority probably all of them would have told you that in the last 12 to 18 months war had been becoming less likely not more likely after all one had made it through the two Balkan wars these two major Wars and the Balkan Peninsula they're in an interstitial space between the austro-hungarian Empire the Russian Empire and the failing or receding Ottoman Empire without without there being a broader configuration and Margaret Macmillan has written very persuasively and spoken very persuasively of the sort of deadening drumbeat of crisis in the pre-war era you know we tend to think that you know people are warned by crises that you know they become each crisis makes us more acute more acutely aware of the dangers to come but actually repeated crises can have the opposite effect they can dead in our awareness of danger and in some ways that seems to have been happening in 1911 12 and 13 and we have the very eloquent testimony of Sir Arthur Nicholson a senior functionary in the British Foreign Office who commented to a wrote to a colleague in may 1914 may 1914 he wrote to a colleague in all the years I have been at the Foreign Office I have never seen such calm international waters so not a starry hour of diplomatic prognosis in any case 37 days after the visit to Sarajevo only 37 days later of course as you all know a war had broken out a European war had broken out and out of this European war there emerged or there evolved a global war what a world war and this war I think is rightly been described as the primal catastrophe the term is is kennen's George F kennen's originally the primal catastrophe of the 20th century it's been widely taken up in the German language historiography the Orcutt has to offer it has a sort of war cuttest warfare has a kind of I don't know a hairy scary sort of feel to it which primal catastrophe doesn't but in any case if it consumed and this term primal catastrophe is now is now controversial the point has been made that you know this war was not a primary catastrophe for everybody it wasn't for the Baltic States or for Poland it's it's a painful moment of birth those states you know I had a very interesting conversation with the Polish journalist Adam Kaminski and he made the point he said you know I can't possibly be asked to do lament the first world war that's that is the birth hour the hour of birth of the Polish nation state how are you supposed to have a modern Poland without this war there is no other conceivable way to unlock the Polish nation from the control exercised over by Russians Germans and Austrians so for Poland clearly it's not a primal catastrophe it probably isn't for Australians either frost rayleigh-ritz of course it's a very bloody war the the sacrifice in terms of blood and treasure is great as it is for so many other countries but Australians all fighters volunteers they all go to war willingly they and and the war becomes a kind of mythopoeic moment it's it's a very important constituent and then in the myth of Australian nationhood it's the first major political act of the Australian nation state after Confederation in 1901 this is the first war that Australia chooses as a sort of out of its own free initiative and so it's not a primal catastrophe for everybody but it is I think if we think about the amount of poison released into the European political system by this war about its destabilizing effect on global politics about its long-term consequences in the Middle East it is I think our right to think of this warrens global frame as a primal catastrophe it consumed four great empires the German Empire the Russian Empire the Ottoman Empire and of course the now was the fourth one the Ottomans the other three austro-hungarian of course the austro-hungarian the Russian the Ottoman and the German all consumed in the in the in the cauldron of this war it more importantly it caused the deaths of between 10 and 13 million young men these are just military deaths on its numerous fields of conflict the the global statistics about wounded men are not very reliable but it's estimate the estimates sort of oscillate between 15 and 21 million wounded men and I'm not talking here about lightly wounded men who were treated in theatres or in in local in you know in field hospitals just behind the front but men who had carried serious wounds many of whom felt the effects of these wounds right through and to the end of their lives and certainly people of my generation in Australia and it's not different it's no different in Britain or in Germany or France we remember from their youth elderly relatives and elderly friends of the family elderly men of course who were still carrying around with them the effects of wounds that they had that they had got in that in that conflict and so I think that Fritz down the the german-american sort of emigres a Jewish German American historian wonderful historian is right when he says that this is the disaster out of which all the disasters of the 20th century sprang it's very difficult to imagine the rise and seizure of power of fascism in Italy without this war it's difficult to imagine the October Revolution in the Russian Empire without the first world war everybody predicted something like the February revolution collapse of Tsarist autocratic authority a seizure of power by a sort of middling coalition of political entities you know social so right-wing social democrats perhaps cadets in your constitutional democrats nationalists and so on but no one had foreseen the coup like a takeover of power by the Bolsheviks and the the creation thereafter of a one-party state under Bolshevik control which of course in its character with it was attended by a further Russian civil war that consumed yet another five to seven million lives there again we don't have very good statistics and of course it's difficult to imagine German history taking the disastrous and appalling turn that it took in the direction of Nazism and of the Holocaust without the Titanic pressures brought to bear on German podrían society and above all of German political culture by this by this vast conflict and so I think that my former Richards and my former colleague in Cambridge now teaching at Yale University I think he's about to move to Columbia Adam to's is right when he speaks in a book that he just finished writing called the deluge about the long-term legacy of this war his right I think to speak of the of this war as unhinging the global international the global political system and the book goes into great detail like we don't have time to do that today on the various ways in which it did and the consequences that they had and so from all of this it follows that the question of how this war came about possesses a certain intrinsic interest I don't want to disappoint you but I'm not the first person to have noticed that this is an old debate in fact it's as old as the war itself and it's even slightly older than the war because the argument about who was responsible who was guilty of bringing this war into the world began before the first shots were fired and it's amazing how many of the theses and arguments including some of the most sophisticated ones that you can find in the secondary literature you can already find on the lips of those who themselves helped to bring this war into the world so it's an old debate according to john w Langdon the American historian who who published a book called the long debate in 1991 he counted 25,000 books and articles in English that you really ought to read in order to be in control of this subject matter and we have the even more eloquent example of Rebecca West the author in my view of the the one of the deepest and most sophisticated reflection on the place of the Balkans in 20th century history a person who loved the Balkans and its peoples and I'm thinking of her book black lamb gray Falcon she traveled to Sarajevo in 1937 to see the place where the the sort of the fuse was lit and she she walked up the stairs with her husband Paul to the to the balcony and they looked out over the city and she turned to him and she said I shall never understand how it all came to pass it's not that we know too little it's that we know too much and that was 1937 and of course today we know a hell of a lot more so the question then arises why I add yet another book to this pyramid of paper and as you can imagine my colleagues were not slow to ask this question surely this has been done to death I remember a colleague at my college is saying to me for about the ninth time once at lunch and you know one of those moments when you feel that just like dumping your cutlery and walking away and I think that colleagues often have a sort of genius at this in your justice with the cruelities of a really difficult problem they come up with excellent reasons why you should just curl up and die but of course you have to find an answer to these taunts and and I did find an answer and the answer is this that yes the debate is old there's no doubt about that but the subject is still fresh in many ways the subject is fresher now than it was ten twenty or thirty years ago when I first encountered the problem of the first rewards an absolutely central problem in history teaching at Australian schools I grew up in Sydney Australia and when I first encountered my high school in Sydney the kind of period charm had accumulated around the events of 1914 this was Europe's last summer there was a lot of gin and tonic and tennis if you read the marvelous books of Barbara Tuchman but which by the way I still recommend to everyone I think they're still fantastic pieces of historical reflection on the problems of the world that brought this war into existence but if you read these books you notice that there was a lot of or notices now the loving detail with which uniforms are described eccentric personalities you know you have Lord Salisbury riding to to the House of Commons on London's first pneumatically tired tricycle pushed by his valet James he has to be pushed because there are no pedals on this thing didn't occur to him to put any on and as you and there's a lot of detail on on the on the the menus at gathered dinners and on details of habsburg court precedence on the sort of this sort of extraordinary late flowering of courtly excess which which was a characteristic of Europe in the last couple of decades before the outbreak of the First World War and as one is acquainted with the sort of panoply the the the Vista of the ornamental ism of this world then gradually the assumption stealthily asserts itself that these must be the inhabitants of a bygone world that if their hats had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them then perhaps their dreams their thoughts and arguments also had gaudy green ostrich feathers perhaps these are people who are actually uncontested and yet if you take another look at the events of the 28th of June not from the perspective of the of the 90 70s but from the perspective of today as people of the early not quite beginning 21st century and you think of what happened on that day the cavalcade of automobiles on the on the on the Appel key you can't help but be reminded of Dallas in November 1963 it's the walk it's the raw modernity of the events that strikes you the story starts with a squad of suicide bombers exotic figures when they first appeared in it when they when they when they you know populated Europeans the historiography of the first world war in the 1970s but much less exotic figures now and they're very they're very familiar part of our historical landscape and of course behind these young men were underground networks with with weather only obliquely linked to any kind of sovereign structure I mentioned before they're very oblique connections between the Serbian state and the underground networks that were driving this kind of violent irredentism and I think our compass has shifted in other ways as well if you think about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s one of the extraordinary features of the literature on the outbreak of the First World War and the literature on the origins of the First World War was that in large parts of this literature with a few distinguished exceptions but in large parts of it the Balkans are almost entirely airbrushed from the scene it's as if they're not there this is all about relations between the great powers the peripheral zones simply not visible they're not in the field of vision but I think since the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s it makes less sense or it's less obvious that we should dismiss or disregard the power of bulk and nationalism it's it's its role as an historical factor in its own right and then there's the fact that 9/11 the attack on the the twin towers in New York reminded us of the power of an event the power of a terrorist event freighted with with symbolic meanings and by that I don't wish to suggest a kind of cheap comparison or equivalent you know an equivalence between the extraordinary carnage in New York and the murder of two people in Sarajevo but nevertheless the effect of this event on in particular on the austro-hungarian polity on the political mood the chemistry of politics and decision-making in Vienna is absolutely beyond doubt and I think it's worth remembering this because the event has litical category has sometimes fallen out of favor with historians there was a time in the 1970s and 80s when it was very trendy to cite and resize and recite the beautiful quotation or the beautiful comment by film or daily I mean one of the eloquent where the great doyon of the Nile school of history in France who commented that you know events were the sort of soft contemptible foam that rides on the back of the great waves that are history structures so that historians who worked on events were just barking up the wrong tree that was not the part of history that mattered what mattered was the deep long delay of structures changing slowly over many generations but of course it can be the other way around I mean there's certainly a lot in what Bedell says but it can be the other way around sometimes events can be hard and structures can be soft we need to think more dialectically about the relationship between these two categories and finally there's the fact that you know we're no longer in the era of bipolar stability that we used to call the Cold War and we're still sort of scratching our heads and trying to work out what that means I went to an interesting paper in Belgrade by George Friedman the American political scientist and he commented that you know we had the Cold War then we had the post Cold War that was the period from 1989 until about 2007 and that was an era of total unipolarity there was only one great power left and everybody was watching Washington and there was talk of full spectrum dominance and so on that era is now passed over now and what he calls the post post Cold War it gets more and more unwieldy I was hoping he'd come up with something a bit more a bit more handy but no the post post Cold War and that's the this is an era when it's no longer unipolar we're back in a period of auth which is authentically multipolar with him with numerous centers of power a world populated not just by on the one hand a weary Titan that was the term sometimes used about Britain before 1914 and some might like today to describe Washington as a weary Titan it's not you know it's not in decline in any kind of metrical approvable sense but it's certainly wearying in some respects of its subjectively at least of its world role or parts of it are on the one hand we have that on the other hand we have rising powers one in particular which is in a rattling at the cage of the geopolitical system in ways which could set on many chancelleries and this is here I'm not of course referring to Russia so these shifts in perspective which I mean this is of course a world which in many ways resembles 1914 more and more rather than less and less so we have a paradoxical situation where even as 1914 recedes further away into the past it actually in some ways feels more relevant it's it speaks to us more intimately and more urgently and these shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914 accepting that challenge doesn't mean you know embracing a vulgar present ISM which remakes the past to suit the political preferences or demands of the present rather it means acknowledging those features of the past of which our changed vantage point can afford us a clear view bearing all this in mind how does one go about refreshing the narrative how do you develop a distinctive approach to a question like this one and in the last part of what I want to say today I would have touched on some other ways in which I tried to do that the first was and this is some all historians have to you know we're all we all have to sort of now keep by coming out coming up with something new to say and one way you can do that is you can try and think of a new answer to an old problem but in the case of 1914 that's really difficult because in a way all the possible answers have already been given it was it was nobody it was everybody it was Germany it was Russia it was France we even have the Neil Ferguson who were you know in a sort of perverse moment of brilliance blamed Britain for the outbreak of the first world war and so you know it's the point is not to find a new answer I thought it might be more interesting to find a new question in other words instead of asking the question which is the heart of the origins literature why did this walk I'm about I thought it might be more interesting to ask the question how did peace become war why does that make a difference after all how and why questions are intrinsically linked they're like Cathy and Heathcliff Heathcliff they kind of entangled at the root you can't pull them entirely apart and yet they do leaders in different questions because why questions leaders in the direction of categorical causes or of categories that are deemed to be causes like for example national the rise of imperialism the spread of social Darwinism Almond stockpiling and as you pile you know as you as you troll the last few decades before the outbreak of war looking for causes you you start to fall prey to an optical illusion as you pile the causes onto the scale the tongue of the scale tilts from a possible war to a likely war to a highly probable war to an inevitable war and as it tilts the agency of those individuals there are statesmen who chose this war because this war was not a natural event it wasn't as a volcanic eruption it didn't have to happen it was a war that like all wars was chosen by the individuals who made it the the agency of those people who chose and decided for this war is squeezed out of the field of vision they become mere executives of forces beyond their control so that was a sort of optical flaw which for which I wanted to correct in this book the second problem about why questions was was I was alerted to that by a Bulgarian historian of the sect of the the two Balkan wars who makes the interesting comment in the introduction to his book and I quote once we asked the question why guilt soon becomes the focal point in other words when we ask the question why did this war happen what we really mean is who did this who brought this war into the world and in fact that question has been at the center of the literature on the origins of the first world war and it's hard to imagine how it could not have been given that the Versailles Treaty at the end of the first world war named a guilty party it didn't use the term guilt or shoot in the in the original in the actual text of the treaty itself but the accompanying documentation made it clear that Germany was the power Germany and allies but Germany in particular was the power responsible for the outbreak of the war and so since then the question of who brought about this war has been at the center of the origins debate and the problem with a blame centered approach is of course that it tempts us into identifying a suspect we identify a likely suspect and then we draw up a charge state sheet we collect proofs we collect evidence that's exactly what the most influential single utterance on this problem the the historian Fritz Fischer wrote several books on this problem the the Germany's grasp Germany is drive for world power and then much more importantly the war of illusions and various other books that followed in which he argued that it was Germany that caused this war it didn't only caused it it planned it in advance and so Germany alone in the sense I mean he never used the term sole culpability but that's in effect what his books were arguing because he took no interest whatsoever in any other state so one consequence of the blame focused approach is that you use zero in you now you can you narrow the field division to examine the behavior of one supposedly blameworthy state at the expense of thinking hard about how the behavior of this state interacts with the behavior of other states by contrast the the how approach does something different it aims to draw a sort of line a plot a track through the events that that and the decisions and the behaviors and the developments that allowed risks to accumulate within the European system before 1914 this does not mean excluding questions of responsibility or guilt you have to face him in the end but the my objective was to try and answer the how questions first and then answer the why questions rather than deciding to answer the wire rather the who question first and then find out how that particular state did what it did which is effectively the way that fits Fischer proceeded and people who operated in that who worked in that tradition now of course there are other things one has to do I had to do as well in order to refresh this debate or to try and refresh the debate one was to capture trends from the literature and this is you know it's sometimes claimed that we have a consensus in the in the literature on 1914 I will be very wary of accepting that claim this is an extremely interesting literature it's in very rapid and drought and transition right at the moment and one of the most interesting recent developments in writing on the first world war has been a globalization of the field of vision we don't anymore think of the origin of the first world war as a solely European matter you know in terms of an Anglo German antagonism or you know the tension between France and Germany there have been recent studies by Thomas ot for example of the China question showing how the rising importance of China creates tensions between the great powers and increasingly it's become clear in recent writing on the International System before 1914 that this was a world in which each of the great powers had more than one enemy the new school on British naval history for example has shown that Britain the great the Empire of Great Britain faced or lived within what they perceived in London to be a threat rich environment it wasn't just about Germany Russia was also perceived as a very serious threat there was deep hostility to Russia in London and that one has to complicate these narratives which like the one that I was told at school and by a teacher of fantastic the effective teacher was a pupil of fritz Fisher he was very excited by the Fisher thesis it was then in the 1970s the absolutely fresh orthodoxy on the question of the origins of the war and I still remember him standing up in front of the class with his hand held up like this and saying boys if you get a question on the outbreak of the first world war just remember the five German provocations right ships they built ships that upset the British you should never build ships cos upsets the British Morocco the Moroccan crisis they challenged the French in northern Africa they should never do that the French get very upset when you do that there's the Bosnian annexation they support Austria over baktun Bosnia that upset the Russians you shouldn't upset the Russians Russians they they they challenged the French and Morocco again in the second drokken crisis and they issued a blank cheque of support to Austria on the fifth of July 1914 now that is inspired piece of teaching and I still remember every single one of those points though I no longer agree with them but they are mean well they're all true but they just have to be embedded in a larger picture so you know the idea was to get away from I mean that clearly once you think about these there's of a multipolarity of the system before 1914 it becomes harder and harder to think in terms of the five German provocations and then there are just a couple of other points before I close the first is that I was very struck when I worked on the background to the to the 1914 at the chaotic quality of decision-making in the executive structures of Europe time and I don't have time to dwell on this in any detail but suffice it to say that power is buzzing around in these systems from one point one node in the structure to another and one of the questions that you know diplomats are constantly being asked to answer in their various stations and their various embassies and missions is who's actually running the show who is determining foreign policy and if the answers coming from Russian at Russia are constantly changing it's the foreign minister no it's not sorry it's that's our that czars intervening directly no it's not he's now disappeared from politics now it's the the the Ministry of War no now it's the foreign minister again and now the Prime Minister stolypin has taken over and so on so there's a sense in which there's a Heisenberg in uncertainty about where power actually is and this applies to all of these systems including Brit the British one where we have a constitutionally very powerful foreign secretary and the person of Edward grey but this is a person who has - whose own support for a policy of on Tod with France is not sustained is not backed by the majority of his cabinet colleagues that learn the majority of British parliamentarians or the majority of his own Liberal Party and so there - you have confusion about what can gray promise and what can't promise how much power does he have to make engagements visa vie France and the classic example I think you can capture it statistically as the fact that during the tenure in office of freedom and gray in Paris 16 foreign ministers came and went from office and two of them came and went twice in France you had a kind of guerilla warfare between the permanent functionaries of the foreign office the kid or say the senior ambassadors in places like London and Berlin you know the brother the brothers combo and you had you know the ambassadors themselves a great independent decision makers I mean you have the case of pol con Boni the French ambassador in London who famously commented in a letter to a colleague he said look when I don't like the instructions I get from Paris I burn them of course you could do that in those days because they had open chimneys and open fireplaces and the offices and there were no smoke alarms one last point before I close and that is I tried to you know to highlight links in the chain of events before 1914 that I thought had been underexposed and one of these was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 now this is today and almost entirely forgotten war it's even forgotten in Italy and yet it was a very traumatic war for for North for the northern African societies affected by it the Italians launched this war without any provocation it was simply an imperial war of annexation they wanted to make it make the Biron way because that Libya wasn't called Libya then it consisted of three integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire faison Seneca and and Tripolitania but the point about this war is it's very interesting in all sorts of ways this is the first war that ever to see the use of planes of airplanes for reconnaissance and bombardment it's the first war ever to see air strikes now these air strikes were primitive by today's standards they involved hand thrown bombs which had to be primed by hand the fuse had to be screwed into the back of the bomb by the pilot who had to grip the bomb between his knees screw the fuse in while controlling the his machine so it was a fairly adventurous business but of course it was much more comfortable on board the the airships that the Italians also deployed which had racks that could carry up to 250 of these bombs which were thrown by train bomb throwers and the effect on the Tokyo Arabic troops troops on the ground the people who today called ground troops was predictably drastic the Serbian head of the Serbian political section of the of the Serbian Foreign Office in Belgrade a man called Miroslav spur Lika which commented in an interesting interview after the first world war to a French journalist he said this Italian war on Libya SAS et la première I guess you won that was the first aggression from that folded all that came there after the true Balkan wars the Great War it all started with the Italian attack on Libya and it's interesting that that you can find many other voices saying this as well including the French Foreign Minister Stephan pshaw who was in charge of the quedagh say at the time in Paris and so that's an interesting moment in the in the prehistory of the war the back story of this war because it's a moment that simply doesn't remove fit into the Fisher view of the world which is a world of you know quiet and come the great powers quietly and and peaceably getting along with their business until one very aggressive and psychopathic power disturbs the peace it's it reminds us of how complex how multi vectorial this system is how many disturbances are occurring from from how many different sources and the the Italian war in Libya is just one of many many other examples that one could give and I want to close by saying that once one walks these paths and thinks about the how rather than the why it becomes very difficult to return to the blame game so brilliantly expounded by Fritz fishermen by calling it a game I don't wish to belittle it any more than game theory is AB littling of what people do when game theorists talk about them but I simply want to suggest that you can't it becomes very difficult to return to the uni polarities and the certainties of a Fisher style view or for that matter to those studies that blame Russia or France for the outbreak of war which I think is equally an equally equally serious misprision of how this war came about there's no question about the appeal of the blame game there's a sort of moral payload when we can finally point our finger at a guilty party but it's not that kind of narrative this is not a James Bond movie script in which at the end we find velvet jacketed villains in a sort of mountain hideaway lined with flashing LEDs stroking a white cat with a prosthetic steel hand and and planning world Armageddon it's not an Agatha Christie murder mystery in which at the end we find the vicar with a blood-stained swordfish standing beside the prone body of lady Carrington and the conservatory this war was the fruit of was the consequence of decisions made in many places with whose effective course was cumulative and interactive decisions made by a gallery of actors who shared a fundamentally similar political culture it was genuinely complex not just complicated but complex it was genuinely multipolar and was genuinely European and it was to highlight or to illuminate these aspects of the story of how this world if this war came into the world that I wrote this book I thank you you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 248,024

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Keywords: world war one, first world war, wwi, world war i, franz ferdinand, the great war, christopher clark, christopher clarke, university of cambridge, cambridge university, how europe went to war in 1914, sleepwalkers wwi, gavrilo princip, 1914, how did ww1 start?

Id: 6snYQFcyiyg

Length: 52min 53sec (3173 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 02 2014

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Overview

This lecture explores new ways of understanding the crisis that brought war to Europe in the summer of 1914; reflects on some of the problems of interpretation that have dogged the debate over the war's origins; and considers the contemporary resonance of a catastrophe that is now nearly a century old.

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