The unbelievably intricate path to catastrophe
Review of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark
The title, The Sleepwalkers, says it all. I have never understood why the great powers of Europe went to war in 1914 and after reading this, it is clear that they did not know either. This book is about how it happened, in a huge narrative on all the contributing players, from the tubercular assassin of Archduke Ferdinand to the ineffectual Tsar in Russia and the erratic Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, to struggling bureaucrats in the French and British Foreign Ministries. It is agonizingly fascinating and above all, as Clark keeps reminding the reader, it didn't have to turn out the way it did; the what-ifs are innumerable and plausible. The Great War might have been avoided. After all, even the major powers persisted right up to the end in thinking that the crisis could be resolved in a few months, if not weeks.
The grenade pin for all this seems to have been Serbia, a brutal backwater and recently established kingdom in the Balkans. As the Ottomans were beaten back, the impoverished societies that remained began to fight each other for territory, irredentist ambitions, and proto-fascist nationalism. Because Austria-Hungary was involved in Croatia, the Serbs became a proxy for Russia as it pursued an ill-defined pan-Slavism and harassed its Habsburg rivals. How did Serbia become such a crucial player?
With the exception of republican France, all the involved European powers were monarchies, ranging from a constitutional one in the UK, through the semi-autocracies in Austria-Hungary and Germany, to full blown despotism in Russia. In their evolving modalities, the foreign policy apparati were in chaotic states, with the sovereign in nominal control while bureaucrats and aristocrats fought for influence; in theory, the executives should issue official orders and at best, play the role of balancing all the competing interests, but none of them seemed up to that task. As a result, policy making was an opaque process in which aims, signals, and actions were impossible to discern clearly; this increased uncertainty and led the actors into decisions that aggravated the dangers and uncertainties. Moreover, there was no neutral power or multi-lateral diplomatic institution that could mediate, provide a space to openly yet discreetly discuss the situation, or de-escalate situations in which military courses of action had been initiated. It was like a massive Rube Goldberg machine with ten entry points, each player trying to balance complex equations of military stability, prestige, ego, societal and economic needs, and the like. One might also picture the situation as a teetering boulder atop a mountain with all manner of actors throwing rocks at it and at each other.
Another unfortunate development was the diplomatic configuration that had emerged with secret protocols, vague promises, and volatile pronouncements. On the one hand, there was the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy), which pledged mutual defense. On the other hand, there was the looser Entente, whereby Britain, France, and Russia pledged to defend each other if attacked or in the event that any member of the Triple Alliance fully mobilized its military. The end result was extreme polarization, pitting central European powers against vast colonial Empires. Their principal playing field consisted of the territories opening up with the Ottoman retreat and peripheral areas such as Serbia and Bulgaria (they were intermittently at war); the former was allied to Russia, the latter to Austria-Hungary. There were so many flash points, with multiple crises resolved, that it all became grist for the mill.
The concerns of each country are examined in detail. Not only are there fascinating mini-biographies, but the geopolitical situations are explained and subtly interpreted. Beyond the obvious, such as Germany's fear of a war on two fronts, there are many surprises here. The cumbersome dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, for example, was by no means doomed in Clark's view, but an evolving and stabilizing force; even Archduke Ferdinand comes off as a man of great potential in spite of his unpopularity. Perhaps this kind of detail is of interest only for history buffs, but I learned an immense amount from these analyses.
The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo was the last straw, the pebble that loosed the boulder and sent it to smash everything. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia and issued demands for an investigation and humiliating surrenders of sovereignty. Russia backed Serbia, emboldening it to resist, and began to mobilize its troops, triggering Germany to mobilize in support of Austria-Hungary. France of course supported Russia and, after some hemming and hawing, the UK committed itself to the defense of France, particularly if neutral Belgium was attacked by Germany. Although in the weeks between the assassination and war's outbreak, there were many opportunities where mobilizations were ordered to halt so that talks could begin, once in motion the military machines appeared unstoppable and operating according to their own logic. Kaiser Wilhelm even cut short his summer vacation to slow things down, but his orders were ignored or lost. The book ends on the eve of the war.
This is one of the most satisfying reading experiences I have had in years. Clark is a great writer, finding the right biographical detail or quote to support a point, always with extremely human sensibilities and empathy. He questions many accepted conventions, which are sure to be controversial but highly stimulating. I cannot recommend this book more highly or more enthusiastically. If the book occasionally gets bogged down or lost in detail, it always returns to a powerful narrative, whose momentum builds over nearly 600 pages. This is a masterpiece.
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