Decisions for War, 1914-1917

In 2003 Cambridge University Press published a substantial book edited by Professors Hamilton and Herwig on The Origins of the First World War. This is an abbreviated version, shorn of all reference notes, intended ‘for classroom use and discussion’. Both versions are concerned with identifying the war's decision-makers, the individuals or groups which decided that their country should go to war. The central thesis is that, in all the five great powers that went to war in July and August 1914, the decision rested with ‘coteries’ of between five and ten men who, while they could hardly have been uninfluenced by any of such considerations as imperialism, the balance of power, social Darwinism and the terms of alliance obligations, were not remotely in thrall to any of them. In the three semi-constitutional monarchies, the authors attach much greater importance to the upbringing and inexperience of the ‘real world’ of the wholly aristocratic-military membership of the coteries and, above all, of the emperors themselves. This could lead to decisions that were steeped in irresponsibility such as the Kaiser's rebuke to a prominent German banker who tried to warn that war might lead to national bankruptcy that such matters did not concern him. And yet the concentration of decision-making reached its ultimate point in the liberal United States of America where, as the German government in 1917 disastrously failed to understand, the president, Woodrow Wilson, was the sole arbiter of war or peace. Faced with contemptuous German provocations, he reluctantly chose the former so that he might have a seat at the eventual peace conference and act as a force for moderation. In Austria-Hungary and Germany there was, it is argued, the paradox that the rulers chose the most extreme solution to perceived problems—the very existence of the state in the former and the retention of great power status in the latter—without expansionist ambitions. The Austro-Hungarian coterie realised that Serbia would be as great a danger incorporated into the Monarchy as it was as an independent state, while Germany was not intent on ‘bidding for world power’. Hamilton and Herwig are rather unpersuasive in allowing that such an ambition was entertained in their German coterie before July 1914 and was revived soon afterwards, and yet was absent at the vital time of deciding to risk a general European war in support of Austria-Hungary. In Russia the tsar and his advisers could not conceive of remaining neutral if Serbia was attacked, and in France the rulers, including the towering figure of Raymond Poincaré, could not conceive of remaining neutral if Russia went to war. In Britain the cabinet was all-important and agonised about whether it could stand by while France was invaded until invasion through Belgium decided the issue, but, even in Britain, there was no ‘slide into war’ and no significant input from outside a very small circle. The authors discuss decisions for war in the other European countries that eventually participated (except for Portugal which is left wholly out of the account), and in the Ottoman Empire and Japan. Though it is not stated explicitly, it would be reasonable from the narratives in the book to divide these later entrants, other than the United States, into two groups. In one, composed of Japan, Italy, Bulgaria and Romania, the ruling coteries entered on an unambiguous agenda of making territorial gains by supporting the side that they expected would win. They were guided by what an Italian prime minister, Antonio Salandra, notoriously called sacro egoisme. In the other, composed of the Ottoman Empire and Greece, motives were more mixed. In the former, interventionists in the government only narrowly had their way, and were motivated by rebuffs from the Entente powers and by a desire to regain strategically important and recently lost territory in Thrace and islands in the eastern Aegean and, vaguely, by a vision of expansion into ‘Turkic’ lands in Transcaucasia and central Asia. Whether appropriately or not, the coerced entry of Greece into the war (as late as June 1917) was to result directly in tragedy a few years later after its army had been routed by a resurgent Turkey. This is a stimulating and excellent book, and none of the claims made for it in the statements of ‘advance praise’ with which it starts are exaggerated

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