Perry Anderson’s new book exploring the causes of World War I based on accounts of the work of six historians, is important and relevant to today, argues Chris Bambery

I wrote this review of Perry Anderson’s Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War just as December began. It’s a time when you are often asked what is your book of the year. If asked, my answer would be this volume. That was not my first thought when I received a copy.

Disputing Disaster is an examination of the reasons six historians from six different countries gave as to why Europe, and then the globe, descended into the First World War and why the war started in the summer of 1914 (two related but separate arguments). The six are Pierre Renouvin (France), Luigi Albertini (Italy), Fritz Fischer (Germany), Keith Wilson (Britain), Christopher Clark (Australia), and Paul Schroeder (the United States).

Some I was familiar with to an extent, some not. At first glance, that was off-putting but immediately on picking up and reading Disputing Disaster I was gripped utterly.

What Anderson does in a brief volume – no bad thing – is to give a sweeping account of the writings of all six, but to build on that to point to others he has read on this topic, which is truly extensive, and in an understated way to give us his analysis, delivering in that same understated way, a verdict.

In looking at why the balance of power broke down in Europe at the start of the twentieth century and why what seemed like an unimportant event, the assassination of the imperial Austro-Hungarian heir and his wife in Sarajevo, sparked war, Anderson addresses important arguments today in a world clearly dividing into two camps.

Anderson’s ire is the tendency of historians to examine ‘short-range precipitants of the conflict at the expense of the longer-term pressures building up towards it … It was a convenient myopia: one that honours the few that have escaped it’ (p.138).

The stakes

For him, what is important is not which power bears responsibility for starting the war, but why it was that in 1914 the world order, or balance of power if you like, could break down so quickly in the way it did in July and August 1914.

For those of us in the Marxist tradition, these arguments have added importance because they were being addressed and debated by the likes of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin in the Russian revolutionary movement and by Rosa Luxemburg in Germany at the time.

I would recommend this book be read by all struggling to grasp why another awful round of destruction seems to loom over us; and that you clearly follow up on the writings of Clark, Wilson and Schroeder in particular. The latter, who regarded himself as a conservative, was a bitter critic of the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent, disastrous occupation. The historical knowledge he could bring to bear and the fact he identified as a Burkean conservative gave this added weight.

So, what is at stake in this book? I was brought up in the late 1950s and 1960s when the Second World War dominated our lives. On a Sunday morning, we got to go up our street talking to men washing their cars about what they had done in that war. We played ‘Japs and Commandos’, read war comics and were taken to see films such as The Bridge Over the River Kwai, 633 Squadron and The Longest Day.

Both my grandfathers had fought in the First World War but that was so awful it was never talked about. Because I was interested in history and an avid reader, I was an exception. The only instance I can recall it impacting on popular culture was David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia; a masterpiece but set a long way from the trenches.

The version I got at school, and indeed university, and from the magnificent 1964 BBC TV series, The Great War (available on YouTube) was that Britain was forced to go to war because Germany invaded Belgium and the United Kingdom had a treaty commitment to defend Belgian neutrality; it did not. Another reason offered was Britain could not allow a single European power to control the Channel Ports, but it had never controlled those on the east of the Channel, and its longtime enemy and imperial rival, France, did control so many of them.

The verdict that Germany was guilty was enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles which the Weimar Republic had to sign off on. So where did our six historians stand on that?

French and Italian views

Pierre Renouvin (1893-1974) had volunteered to fight for France in August 1914, being twice badly wounded before being invalided out in 1916. He is described by Anderson as a historian, ‘sober, careful and loyal to the cause of his country and the Entente’ (p.xi).

He did not hold that Germany and Austro-Hungary had deliberately planned a European war but argued that they stumbled into it when Germany offered Vienna the famous ‘blank cheque’ as to how it responded to Serbia, who it held responsible for the assassination of the imperial heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand. Germany was not prepared to offer any other solution than that of war.

Renouvin was a great defender of the French President, Raymond Poincaré, but the latter played a key role in encouraging Russia to mobilise, provoking Germany to follow suit and declare war. He was on a visit to St Petersburg in July 1914 and encouraged Tsar Nicholas to take a hard line in response to Vienna’s ultimatum to Serbia and its subsequent declaration of war. Poincaré, a right-wing conservative, returned to office and went to great lengths to conceal those conversations.

Renouvin stayed silent on this. During World War II, he sided with Marshal Pétain’s decision to capitulate and with his subsequent Vichy regime, until the Allies invaded North Africa and were set to re-enter continental Europe. A diary he kept in the early years of the war remains under lock and key. In post-war France he was hugely influential under the Fourth Republic and de Gaulle.

The second of the six is Luigi Albertini, who edited the hugely important Milanese daily, Corriere della Sera, from 1900 to 1925. These were momentous years in the history of the young Italy. Anderson gives a concise and accurate account of the flawed state which emerged from the Risorgimento, the process of Italian unification in the 1850s to 60s.

Luigi Albertini was on the right of the underdeveloped political spectrum, thoroughly opposed to the emerging socialist and trade-union movement, supportive of Italian imperialism, which culminated in the 1911 invasion of Ottoman Libya, and of Italy’s decision to join the war on the side of the Entente in 1915.

In 1919, faced with factory occupations and land seizures, Albertini began to champion Benito Mussolini, whom he disliked, and in 1923, his taking of power. After that, relations soured and, in 1925, Mussolini took over Corriere della Sera, ousting Albertini, who retired to his massive estate outside Rome to write history.

Albertini’s three-volume, The Origins of the War of 1914, written in his de facto internal exile, was his outstanding achievement bringing him world fame. He researched and wrote it with the assistance of Luciano Magrini, a former Corriere della Sera foreign correspondent who was fluent in German. Magrini interviewed many of the key figures from the First World War, and accessed a great number of key documents which are reproduced in the books, published in Italian in 1942 and 1943.

Anderson says of this: ‘Albertini argued that the Central Powers bore primary responsibility for the conflict, but extended the blame for its outbreak to all four of the other powers that resorted to arms that August. None of the powers of the Triple Entente, Russia, France or England, escaped reasoned, often severe judgement, not to speak of Serbia, whose part in detonating the disaster received the most substantial and critical treatment to which it had yet been subject’ (p.75).

A German revisionist

The third of the six, Franz Fischer, I know quite well because at university he was held up as proof of the traditional Franco-British views of German war guilt. In 1961, by now a Professor at the University of Hamburg, Fischer published Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914–1918 (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), in which he argued, based on documents he had accessed in archives in East Germany, that Germany had long planned and instigated World War I, because it sought to become the world power.

Above all, Fischer argued that the Kaiser and the German government used the assassination of Franz Ferdinand to launch a European war against the Entente to create a German-dominated Europe, and Mittelafrika, a German-dominated Africa. Fischer argued that Germany did not want war with the British Empire, but in seeking global hegemony, was prepared to run that risk. Fischer went on to make a direct comparison between Wilhelmine Germany and Nazi Germany in their war aims and methods.

Coming at a time when West Germany was desperate to turn a page in history, Fischer’s account went down well at home and in the Anglo-Saxon world. That would overcome criticism of his research and the revelation that not only had he been a member of the Nazi Party, but of other nationalistic and anti-Semitic groups in the inter-war years.

The Anglosphere

The final three of the six belong to the English speaking world. Keith Wilson was unknown to me. His focus was on the British Foreign Office (unlike now a great office of state) and the Foreign Secretary in August 1914, Sir Edward Grey. Grey has all too often been portrayed as a tragic figure, dragged reluctantly to advise the Cabinet that war must be declared on Germany and, when returning to his office, looking out at the lights going out in Whitehall and remarking: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’

Poor Sir Edward. However, he had built on the initial Entente Cordiale with France, agreed by the previous Conservative government, by holding military talks with it and promising Britain would intervene if France was attacked by Germany. It was also agreed that, in that event, the Royal Navy would defend the North Sea and Atlantic approaches, allowing the French navy to concentrate on the Mediterranean. He had also brokered a pact with Tsarist Russia, something he had to keep mum about with Cabinet colleagues who upheld the Liberal abhorrence of Romanov autocracy.

When German armies swept into Belgium with the aim of brushing the Channel coast and sweeping round Paris to envelope the French army, Grey threatened resignation if Britain did not honour its commitments to France. His Cabinet colleague, Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, without consulting anyone, had mobilised the Royal Navy to its agreed battle stations; that was effectively an act of war.

The German invasion of Belgium was used to swing the Liberal Cabinet to vote for war. So was the threat that Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Grey and Churchill would break ranks and enter a coalition government with the pro-war Conservatives.

Keith Wilson considered that, ‘Grey’s personal responsibility for the British decision for war’ to have been ‘considerable’. He argued that claims about the supposed German threat were an ‘invention’ and that ‘some of the claims made about Germany were so remarkable as to be quite hysterical.’ For Wilson, the Foreign Secretary was pursuing an anti-German foreign policy in the years before 1914.ⁱ

The decision of the Asquith government to go to war ensured that what might have been a European war became a global one; because Britain’s first concern was with its Empire. It had entered into alliance with France and Russia in part to counter Germany, now the great economic and military power on the Continent, but in part to safeguard Empire by resolving long-term difficulties it had in Africa with France and in Afghanistan, Iran (Persia) and China with Russia. It had already sealed an important alliance with Japan for the same reason.

The fifth of the six, Chritopher Clark, is best known for The Sleepwalkers, an international bestseller. Anderson gives fulsome praise to but is also critical: ‘… in detail and complexity, no other account of the path to the First World War comes near to it. But, undeniably, it involves a cost when it comes to the origins of the war – not the same thing’ (p.231). Anderson reviewed The Sleepwalkers in New Left Review and that is well worth accessing.

The last of the six is Paul Schroeder, whose death prevented Anderson carrying out a series of interviews in order to write a book on his historical analysis. Anderson says this of him:

‘His founding contrast between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries revolutionised study of international relations in both, enabling him in due course to link the first systematic war of the twentieth century to the last of the eighteenth, rather than to its predecessor in the nineteenth century, rather than to the interbellum of the twentieth century; yet ultimately leading him to fear the emergent conflicts of twenty-first …’ (p.357). Schroeder died before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the war that followed would have been recognisable to him, on terrain which was rather familiar.

Decay of the international system

So why did the international system break down in the summer of 1914? For most of the first half of the nineteenth century the great powers, Russia, Prussia, Austro-Hungary and Britain, joined by France once the monarchy was restored and safe, upheld an agreement made at the Congress of Vienna, held at the conclusion of the Napoleonic wars, to avoid conflict between them. The two major powers, Russia and Britain enforced that. They largely succeeded in this, but the Vienna settlement had three weaknesses.

First, the Ottoman Empire was excluded, despite ruling the Balkans and much else. In the course of the nineteenth century, Ottoman rule weakened, and it became known as the ‘sick man of Europe’, leading to two developments. Russia, in particular, cast greedy eyes at Ottoman possessions, particularly the straits connecting the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Secondly, inspired by the example of the French revolution, nationalist movements emerged desiring to create nation states in the Balkans. This began with the Greek revolt of 1821 and the war of independence which followed, lasting until 1829.

The European powers abhorred the Greek revolt, fearing it might be contagious, but Britain, Russia and France decided the best answer was to intervene on behalf of the Greeks and to then use this to craft a conservative monarchy, which is what the newly independent Greece became. Austro-Hungary, with its own imperial possessions in the Balkans, did not go along with this and sought to maintain Ottoman rule as the least bad option. Bad blood was developing between Vienna and St. Petersburg.

In a brilliant passage, Anderson argues: ‘The settlement between the Great Powers reached at Vienna had rested on a clear-cut demarcation between Europe, where a lasting peace between them would prevail, and the rest of the world, where colonial wars and conquests could proceed unchecked … For this division to hold good, however, there had to be an unambiguous boundary closing the core off from the periphery. The territory of the sultanate, stretching from Europe into Asia and Africa, negated both requirements. The result was that the bellicism which Vienna banished from the core, ricocheted back into it from the Balkan gap in the system, first with the Greek revolt, then via the Principalities [now Romania] into the Crimean War, eventually blowing up the peace of Europe at Sarajevo’ (p.295).

The second factor undermining Vienna was the effects of the unification of Germany and of Italy, which meant that, with the destruction of the small states, dukedoms and so on, the powers of Europe now even more than before faced each other across direct borders. Italy wished to complete the Risorgimento by including the Veneto, Trieste (if not all of Dalmatia) and Alto Adige (south Tirol), plus it too eyed Ottoman lands. France resented the loss, following its defeat in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, of Alsace and much of Lorraine to the newly formed German Empire.

The third factor was the uneven economic growth in the late nineteenth century. Germany post-unification would overtake Britain industrially, while the USA already had. When Wilhelm II began talking of Germany’s ‘world policy’ and began constructing a navy, this thoroughly alarmed Britain. Previously, the German Chancellor, Bismarck, had avoided doing either thing and was able to impose a degree of order on Europe, diverting his rivals into colonial expansion with the Scramble for Africa. His removal by Wilhelm II meant Germany no longer played that role. In truth, the Kaiser’s initial bellicose statements were usually followed by more cautious actions.

The British governments of Gladstone and Lord Salisbury did not step into Bismarck’s shoes because, in large part, its priority was the Empire. It still viewed French expansion in Africa with alarm. The two countries nearly came to war in 1898 with the Fashoda Incident, a territorial dispute between the two countries over control of the Upper Nile river basin. However, Britain’s great bugbear was Russia’s expansion in the east and southwards towards the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. To counter that, Britain propped up both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires and waged unsuccessful wars in an effort to control Afghanistan. The Entente with France and then Russia resolved these imperial tensions, but Britain was now drawn into a military alliance with both powers.

Imperialism and war

It was the Austro-Hungarian Empire where the key fault line lay as nation states emerged in the Balkans, particularly Serbia, allied with Russia, and both states encouraging discontent among the Slav subjects of the Hapsburgs. Anderson quotes the American historian Laurence Lafore to good effect: ‘While Great Powers might be excused for decorous meddling in the affairs of small ones, Austro-Hungary was by 1914 unique in being a Great Power in whose affairs small ones meddled. The [International] System had no procedure for handling such a situation’ (p.225).

In July 1914, no European power had the ability or nous to impose an equivalent of the Congresses of Vienna or Berlin to reach a solution to Balkan affairs in the wake of Sarajevo. The result, Anderson points out was that: ‘… the Hapsburg elites took matters into their own hands in a last desperate bid to solve it [the supposed Serb threat]. Treaty bound to help it, Germany – traditionally unfamiliar and impatient with quarrels in the backward Balkans – was blind to the probable consequences of doing so; Russia, France and England no less, in their reactions to the condensation of imperialist contradictions in south-eastern Europe, as modern and pre-modern forms and forces fused after Sarajevo. Uneven development had released a chain-reaction beyond any collective control’ (p.225).

The war that followed was a modern industrial war. Millions of shells were manufactured, and millions of servicemen mobilised on a far greater scale than any previous conflict. The result was what might be called a ‘bad war’, in which none of the warring powers achieved their goals, where the butcher’s bill of dead and mutilated was far worse than had been expected in August 1914, and the outcome in Europe was, essentially, an armed truce.

In July and August 1914, few drew the lessons from the American Civil-War, the Russo-Japanese war or the two Balkan wars that new ways of mass slaughter were ready to be deployed. Added into this mix was the barbarism the imperial powers had deployed in Africa and Asia; the use of chemical weapons and starvation of the German civilian population for instance.

Paul Schroeder includes in this his home country, which joined the Allies eventually in 1917. Arguing that without ever facing a serious foreign threat it, ‘carried out an unprecedented rapid and extensive course of territorial expansion, marked by aggressive war, treaty violations, ethnic cleansing, coercive diplomacy and widespread organised and spontaneous violence’ (p.345). Anderson ends with Paul Schroeder’s criticism of the USA’s attempts to impose its New World Order.

What makes this book such an important read is that the world today is retreating into two armed camps: the USA and its allies and satraps on the one hand, and China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, which Washington has done so much to bind together, on the other. We are currently living through a US proxy war in Ukraine with Russia. Washington backed Israel’s wars in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon and the threat of one with Iran. Then there is the cold war in the South China Sea and the Pacific between the US, its regional allies and the UK with China.

I have warned a Franz Ferdinand moment threatens because matters are balanced so finely. Disputing Disasters is a must read to understand not just 1914 but today’s break down of US global power and how easily things can escalate to calamity.

i Keith Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of British Foreign Policy, 1904-1914, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.143, p.101, and chapter 6: ‘The Invention of Germany’.