The late American historian Paul Schroeder’s interpretation of the causes of World War I focuses on the breakdown of a fragile imperial order at the end of the nineteenth century, finds Chris Bambery

Perry Anderson’s Debating Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War, was my book of the year in 2024. It looks at six historians of World War I and how they explain its outbreak. One of these, the last of the six, was the American, Paul W. Schroeder, who described himself as ‘a Burkean conservative’ and who had started out as a Lutheran minister before becoming a historian specialising in European inter-state relations in the nineteenth century. By the time he died in 2020, he was a trenchant critic of US foreign policy from President George Bush Senior onwards.

Now Anderson and Verso books have given us Schroeder’s Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered. I have a strong suspicion it will be in the running for my book of the year come December. The importance of the debates fought between historians is obvious given the importance of the Great War in shaping our world: not least the rise of US imperialism.

The debate started from the famous ‘war-guilt’ clauses of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which the new German Republic had to accept. The thesis that Germany was solely responsible for the war is still one accepted today by many historians. The reaction to it within Germany was to argue that Germany was forced into a defensive war having been encircled by the three entente powers; Russia, France and Britain. From there it was an easy step to accept the ‘stab in the back’ argument, that Germany was not defeated from without but from within by the Communists, Socialists and Jews. Post-1945, we know where that led.

Schroeder does not accept the whole ‘war-guilt’ argument, instead explaining how the breakdown of the European state order, ‘the concert of Europe’, whereby if one power threatened continental war, the others would gang up to restrain them, created the conditions whereby crises grew and grew and war became more and more likely.

Falling empires

He focuses on the weakest of those powers; the Hapsburg or Austria-Hungarian Empire, in particular, and on one area of sub-continent, the Balkans, where on 28 June 1914, the Hapsburg heir was assassinated, along with his wife, by Serbian-backed terrorists while on a visit to Sarajevo in Bosnia to oversee military manoeuvres (aimed as a warning to Serbia).

The multi-national Hapsburg Empire was ruled by the minority German and Hungarian populations, who administered Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, all of whom by 1914 were asserting their national rights. They could look across the imperial borders to both Russia, the supposed champion of Pan-Slavism, and Serbia, which openly stated it wanted to forge a southern Slav state.

In south-east Europe, by the summer of 1914, there was one Empire which was a walking cadaver, the Ottoman Empire, and another, the Hapsburg Empire, which seemed to be on a life-support system waiting for it to be switched off. Russia, on the other hand, though weakened gravely in 1905 by its defeat at the hands of Japan and by revolution, now seemed full of vigour, economically and militarily. The Balkans was the interface between these three empires. Schroeder explains why Sarajevo would see Europe, then the world, go to war.

At one point he mentions its ‘uneven development’, I would go further in arguing it was a case of ‘uneven and combined development’, the Marxist theory developed by Trotsky, who knew the region well (he was a war correspondent there during the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913). Compared to western Europe, the Balkans remained politically and economically underdeveloped, peasant societies with little industry. But modern ideas of nationalism did take root, with middle-class intellectuals winning peasants to the idea that the answer to all woes was the creation of ethnic, national states.

The problem was this was a multi-ethnic region. In 1912 Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, spurred on by Russia, formed a Balkan League to drive the Turks out of Europe. This they did, with the Turks just holding on to Istanbul (none of the European powers, including Russia, wanted Bulgaria to control the Dardanelles). Yet then, the victors fell out over Macedonia, a great ethnic mix of a region, and the others, joined by Rumania, turned on Bulgaria which lost.

Both wars were marked by ethnic cleansing, as the victors began to try to create ethnic states. A state like Serbia, the eventual big winner, might be economically backward but it was supplied with the most modern artillery by France and up-to-date rifles by Germany.

Austria-Hungary looked at all this with alarm knowing Serbia had its eyes on Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Loss of those territories could only encourage unrest in Poland, Ukraine and the Czech lands, and reduce Austria-Hungary downwards from being rated as a great power.

Wages of imperialism

All well and good you might say, but how could the Balkans and the fate of Austria-Hungary lead to world war? The answer is that Europe was divided into two armed blocs; the entente between Russia, France and Britain on the one side; the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and, nominally, Italy, on the other.

In the wake of 1905, Russia felt it had been humiliated in the Balkans by Austria-Hungary with the support of Germany on a number of occasions and did not want a repeat. It was also allied to Serbia, but was hardly in control of its smaller ally.

Austria-Hungary felt it was facing extinction unless it re-asserted its power in the region. In previous crises, its military threats against Russia had forced the latter to back off. In July 1914, it felt it could repeat that trick when it sought revenge on Serbia. Austria’s ally, Germany, gambled that if Vienna inflicted quick military punishment on Serbia, Russia might accept a fait accompli, or at worst there would be a localised war. The wager went badly wrong. Meanwhile, France was urging Russia to take a hard stand and promising military support against Germany. Thus, both Paris and Berlin issued ‘blank cheques’ for their allies to cash in.

I shall let you discover the Spanish saying from which the book takes its title but in July 1914, Schroeder describes what happens as from something in the Wild West. A cowboy (Austria-Hungary) is playing poker and losing badly. He feels cheated but there is no umpire, no system of mediation. So he kicks over the table and starts shooting.

Schroeder describes how from the defeat of Napoleon to the Crimean War, the European powers had operated a system based on the Congress of Vienna where they acted together to prevent war in Europe (colonial wars were another matter). That broke down but, on several occasions, crises in Europe were resolved by the powers sitting down together. Nevertheless, the number of wars was growing, both in Europe, and elsewhere, as European imperialism parcelled out Africa and Asia. Schroeder points out that the violence of imperialism fed back into Europe.

Between 1898 and July 1914, a number of these crises were resolved by agreements between the powers, or by certain powers getting away with desperate adventures; ‘stealing horses to great applause’. In 1912, for instance, Italy invaded Ottoman-controlled Libya, which it eventually annexed. It also seized the Dodecanese islands. None of the other European powers did anything because Germany and Austria-Hungary wanted to keep Italy in their camp and the entente wanted to seduce it into theirs. The Balkan states watched this and decided they could repeat the act and escape punishment. They were right.

In July 1914, Austria-Hungary was Germany’s only real ally, and it did not want to lose it. France felt similarly regarding Russia. What of Britain? Its biggest concern was Russia and its advance eastwards which Britain saw as threatening its rule in India and its unofficial empire in places like Iran and China. Schroeder and others have argued, convincingly, that Britain joined the entente so as to remove its concerns about Russian expansionism. It had no issues over colonies with Germany.

In July 1914, Britain’s number one concern was to keep Russia, and to a lesser extent, France on side. And here was the problem. The most recent crises which had been resolved by Britain and Germany, representing the two rival camps. In July 1914, each prioritised maintaining their alliance with Russia, in the case of London, and with Austria-Hungary, in the case of Berlin.

‘War guilt’ cannot explain that. All the major powers were playing the same, anarchic game where might was right. It’s generally now agreed that Austria-Hungary set the fuse alight but by July 1914, as Schroeder argues, it’s surprising some other spark had not lit the fire earlier. From a Hapsburg point of view, this was a rational choice.

This is an excellent book I hugely enjoyed, learning much from it. A world divided into two armed camps where international ‘order’ does not exist; does that sound familiar? It did to Paul Schroeder at the end of his life.