No The Wall Street Journal, o historiador Gary D. Sheffield analisa os
seguintes livros sobre as origens da guerra de 1914:
The Month That Changed the World: July 1914, de Gordon Martel. Oxford University Press, 512 pages, $39.95
July Crisis: The World's Descent Into War, Summer 1914, de T.G.
Otte. Cambridge
University Press, 530 pages, $29.99
The Outbreak of the First World War: Structure, Politics, and
Decision-Making, de Jack S. Levy and John A.
Vasquez. Cambridge
University Press, 305 pages, $34.99
A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the
Habsburg Empire, de Geoffrey Wawro. Basic Books, 440 pages, $29.99
Dos quatro, só li o
terceiro ("The Outbreak of the First World War"). Recomendo esse livro, que reúne ensaios de nove
estudiosos, especialmente para os que, além de História, pretendem cursar, estão
cursando e já cursaram Relações Internacionais. Gostei muito das análises sobre
a guerra preventiva (quem é meu aluno do Terceiro Ano sabe do que estou
falando).
Seguem as
análises de Sheffield, em inglês. No final, ele sugere outros livros
BOOK REVIEW: THE WORLD WAR I BLAME GAME
A minor incident in the
Balkans escalated into a global cataclysm—was it an accident or a crime?
By Gary D. Sheffield
Was anyone responsible for the outbreak of
World War I? The victorious powers of 1918 certainly thought so. The "war
guilt clause" of the Treaty of Versailles blamed the conflict on "the
aggression of Germany and her allies."
Yet within a few years, the allocation of
guilt had gone out of fashion. In 1929, the American historian Sidney B. Fay,
after an exhaustive study of the available documentation, stated: "No one
country and no one man was solely, or probably even mainly, to blame."
Fay's view was supported by the testimony of David Lloyd George, who had been
intimately involved in the "July Crisis" and served as British prime
minister in the second half of the war. In his memoirs, Lloyd George argued
that the war had been a tragic accident. Following the assassination on June
28, 1914, in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian
throne, "nobody wanted war," he wrote, but European governments had
"slithered over the brink."
Such views capture the zeitgeist of the
interwar years. Surveying the wreckage, it was all too easy to wonder if nearly
10 million men had died unnecessarily. As the world neared and then plunged
into a second, even greater, conflict, the 1914-18 war appeared futile indeed.
It was judged to have been allowed to escalate from a minor incident in the
Balkans into a global cataclysm and blamed on international alliances,
militarism, unscrupulous arms merchants, and blundering politicians and
diplomats.
This consensus was broken in 1961 by the
German historian Fritz Fischer. The uncompromising German title of his first
book set out his stall; World War I was caused by "Germany's Grab for
World Power" (Griff nach der Weltmacht, translated into milder
English as "Germany's Aims in the First World War"). Fischer pointed
to the "War Council" of Dec. 8, 1912, where Wilhelm II and his inner
circle had decided to go to war 18 months later. The assassination in Sarajevo
was just an opportunity to precipitate their plans. Fischer's most explosive
discovery was the 1914 "September program" that set out extensive
territorial annexations to cement Germany's domination of the continent. He
highlighted clear continuities between the foreign policies of Kaiser Wilhelm
and of Hitler. Many Germans struggling to come to terms with World War II had
turned to the Kaiserreich as the true, decent Germany. For such people,
Fischer's claims, as he admitted, were "nothing short of treason."
Fischer's thesis, though often modified,
became the new orthodoxy, and only very recently has a serious challenge
appeared. In 2012, the Cambridge-based historian Christopher Clark published
"The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914." He argued
strongly against the allocation of blame for the outbreak of the war. In his
view, all the major actors played a role: "Viewed in this light, the
outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime." In Germany, the book became a
best seller. Germans, it seems, appreciate a foreigner—Mr. Clark is
Australian—telling them that their country cannot be blamed for launching the
first of the world wars. Margaret MacMillan, an Oxford-based historian, was
also equivocal about apportioning the "blame" for the war in her
600-page "The War That Ended Peace" (2013). This return to the
"no one or everyone was to blame" stance of the 1920s and '30s easily
leads to the view that the war was futile, a position adopted by numerous
commentators as we mark the war's centennial this year.
Yet this school of thought has failed to
convince the majority of historians. While recognizing the importance of Mr.
Clark's meticulous study of the background to the war, critics have pointed to
the fact that he rushes through the events of the last week in July 1914—surely
the most significant period of the entire prewar period. Similarly, military
planning and preparedness, seen by many as essential to understanding the
outbreak of war, get little attention from Mr. Clark. The most controversial of
his ideas, though, is that of the sovereigns, politicians and generals of
Europe collectively "sleepwalking" into catastrophe. It makes
responsibility between individuals and states relative. Far from
somnambulating, the key players knew all too well the paths they were
traveling.
Whatever reservations one might have about
Mr. Clark's broader thesis, in "The Sleepwalkers" he did a very
valuable service in putting Austria-Hungary, Serbia and the Balkans back at the
center of the debate and in demonstrating the immense complexity of the issues
at stake. The emergence of Austria-Hungary out of Germany's shadow is one of the
most significant post-Fischer historiographical developments. Shut out of its
traditional spheres of influence in Italy and Germany by the creation of those
nations, Austria-Hungary increasingly looked to the Balkans in the early 20th
century. There the decline of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) appeared to offer
rich territorial pickings. But the Austro-Hungarians faced a rival force in the
form of Balkan nationalism, centered on the resurgent state of Serbia, which
aspired to create "Yugoslavia," a nation encompassing all Serbs,
including the large number living under Habsburg rule in provinces like Bosnia,
Croatia and Vojvodina. In the background loomed Russia, which saw itself as the
protector of the South Slavic people.
In "A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak
of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire" (Basic, 440 pages,
$29.99), Geoffrey Wawro accepts German "war guilt" but makes a
powerful case for sharing it with Vienna. Mr. Wawro, an American military
historian, offers a picture of an Austro-Hungarian leadership that was reckless
in the extreme. A fatalistic sense of "now or never" gripped men such
as Emperor Franz Josef —depicted here not as a charming anachronism but as
"an altogether malevolent force"—the foreign minister, Count
Berchtold, and the army chief of staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf. The outrage in
Sarajevo offered an opportunity to settle accounts once and for all with
Serbia, suspected of being behind the crime. The decision-makers were very
aware that an attack on Serbia might bring in Russia, and Vienna did not want a
general war. But wishful thinking prevailed. Serbia was presented with an
ultimatum designed to be rejected. When, to general surprise, the Serbs
accepted nearly all the demands, Austria attacked anyway.
Out-of-control elements of the Belgrade
government had certainly encouraged the assassins, and Mr. Wawro makes clear
that Vienna regarded Serbia as a rogue state deserving of dismemberment. The
Habsburg leadership ignored the possibility of chastisement without war. British
Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey offered mediation or an international
conference on no fewer than six occasions that summer. If the crisis had been
internationalized in this way, it is highly likely to have resulted in Serbia
being punished but also with its sovereignty left intact—and with the threat of
a European war averted.
Alongside those pointing the finger of blame
at this or that politician or state, there have been no shortage of writers
eager to assign responsibility to long-term structural forces like imperialism,
economic rivalry, militarism or arms races. Such explanations have the whiff of
inevitability about them. In 1981, the German historian Wolfgang Mommsen went
so far as to write an essay about "The Topos of Inevitable War in Germany
in the Decade Before 1914." Such deterministic interpretations are much
less in favor these days, and both Gordon Martel, in "The Month That
Changed the World: July 1914" (Oxford, 484 pages, $34.95), and T.G.
Otte, in "July Crisis: The World's Descent Into War" (Cambridge,
534 pages, $29.99), argue persuasively and at length that what individuals
did during the July Crisis really mattered. These books are minute dissections
of the events and the decisions that were made between the Sarajevo
assassination and the outbreak of a general war on Aug. 4. Mr. Martel, a
Canadian professor of history, argues that too much investigation of the
origins of the war has taken place under "a dark cloud of
predetermination, of profound forces having produced a situation in which war
was inevitable."
Germany looms large in these discussions. It is
unthinkable that Austria would have taken the path of confrontation with Serbia
without the active backing of the Continent's dominant military power. This
support was the result of a conscious decision taken by a tiny group of the
German imperial elite, and on July 5, 1914, Wilhelm II issued what has become
known to history as the "blank check" of unconditional support to
Austria-Hungary. Three days later, a senior Austrian official privately wrote
that there was "complete agreement" with the Germans; Serbia must be
attacked "even at the risk of a world war which is not ruled out [by
Berlin]." This letter, printed in Annika Mombauer's invaluable "The
Origins of the First World War: Diplomatic and Military Documents" (2013),
is one of many pieces of evidence that Fritz Fischer's arguments remain
fundamentally sound. The belligerence of German foreign policy, the readiness
of the German leadership to court war in pursuit of diplomatic objectives (in
this case breaking up the "Triple Entente" of Russia, France and
Britain) and its willingness to initiate an aggressive war are all Fischerite
themes. John Röhl, who studied under Fischer, makes a compelling case in the
recent third volume of his hugely impressive biography of Wilhelm ("Into
the Abyss of War and Exile") that "the military-political
discussions" of the war council of Dec. 8, 1912, "finally led to
Armageddon in the summer of 1914."
Messrs. Martel and Otte are covering
well-trod ground, yet they have produced distinguished and readable books that
offer much detail of the failings and miscalculations of politicians, soldiers
and diplomats across Europe. Mr. Martel's "The Month That Changed the
World" relies on published primary sources (which are exploited very
thoroughly) and secondary works, and the author makes very effective use of a
day-by-day narrative approach. He has some acute insights. He notes that in
1938, during the Sudetenland Crisis, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
was determined to learn from the failure in July 1914 and hold a great-power
conference. This resulted in his meeting with Adolf Hitler at Munich. "Men
do learn from their mistakes," Mr. Martel dryly observes; "they learn
how to make new ones." The book is rich in the traditional resources of
the diplomatic historian: letters, telegrams and memoranda. Mr. Martel's
conclusions are reminiscent of those of Margaret MacMillan: "War was
neither premeditated nor accidental," he writes. He quite specifically
states, moreover, that the leaders of 1914 "did not walk in their sleep."
Mr. Otte is particularly strong on a forensic
revisiting of the sources, which he notes have tended to be played down in
"the focus on impersonal forces." A historian of international
relations at the University of East Anglia, he is balanced in his criticism of
the Germans. While he argues that "No-one at Berlin willed war," his
picture of the behavior of the kaiser and his chancellor, Theobald von Bethmann
Hollweg, is highly unfavorable—showing them concerned time and time again that
Austria-Hungary not back down even as they struggled to localize the quarrel in
the Balkans. Mr. Otte denies that the German leadership had "criminal
intent" but in the same paragraph notes a "recklessness that borders
on the criminal. Theirs comes very close to it." The evidence presented by
these and many other scholars points to the conclusion that at the very least
the Germans were prepared to run the risk of a general war in order to achieve
their diplomatic goals. If Russia did not receive the support of its partners,
it was not unlikely that the alliance would break up.
Russian mobilization on July 30 is often seen
as the act that made war inevitable, and occasionally Russia is painted as the
villain of the piece. Sean McMeekin in "The Russian Origins of the First
World War" (2011) argued that Russia's desire for Constantinople and the
Turkish Straits was a prime driver for war. Much the same criticism can be
directed at this notion as was leveled at Fischer's interpretation of the
"September Program," which proposed the creation of a European system
that Germany would dominate completely. The fact that during the war a
government develops extensive war aims does not mean the state went to war to
achieve them.
In the standout chapter of the essay
collection "The Outbreak of the First World War" (Cambridge, 305
pages, $34.99), Ronald P. Bobroff offers a nuanced study of Russia's
actions in the July Crisis. Enfeebled by defeat by Japan in 1904-05 and by the
subsequent abortive revolution, the Russians had perceived Germany as the major
threat in economic and diplomatic spheres for some time. Failure to respond in
1914, it was believed, would have undermined Russia's status as a great power.
Enough was enough. In July 1914, to quote Mr. Bobroff, "the Russians
reluctantly stood their ground, because they could no longer see any
alternative." France certainly urged its Russian ally to stand firm. The
nightmare for Paris was that the Triple Entente would collapse, leaving France
to face Germany on its own.
"The Outbreak of the First World
War," edited by Jack S. Levy and John A. Vasquez, is a fruitful
collaboration of historians and political scientists that contains much
high-class scholarship. The editors' introduction says some interesting things
about the differing perspectives of the two scholarly disciplines on the
subject. The four essays on preventive war—addressing the notion that Germany
or Austria-Hungary or Russia was acting to smash a rising rival—for instance,
give multifaceted views on a topic that was once central to the debate but that
has taken a back seat of late. As have causal questions about July 1914:
"A good explanation for the First World War," the editors point out,
"should explain not only why war occurred in 1914, but why it did not
occur before."
London, Paris and St. Petersburg had come
together in a loose grouping that reflected both a fear of Germany and a desire
to defuse long-running colonial rivalries. The British and French armies and
navies had made joint plans, but there was no guarantee they would be honored
by the British government in time of war. The ruling Liberals, led by Prime
Minister H.H. Asquith, were an uneasy coalition that included men such as
Winston Churchill and Sir Edward Grey, who recognized the importance to British
security of supporting France in the face of German aggression, and John Burns
and John Morley, who were to resign in protest at the move to war. The Welsh
radical David Lloyd George was the key man in the cabinet. If he had stood out
against war, Asquith's government may well have collapsed.
In the end, the maladroit German decision to
invade Belgium on August 4 persuaded Lloyd George in favor of war. The brutal
attack on a small neutral state in defiance of international agreements gave
the British a standard around which all parts of the population could rally. It
is entirely possible that had Germany refrained from invading Belgium, Britain
would have stayed out of the war.
The British historian David Stevenson neatly
summed up the relationship between structure and agency: "The European
peace might have been a house of cards, but someone still had to topple
it." War was not inevitable; it occurred because key individuals in
Austria-Hungary and Germany took conscious decisions to achieve diplomatic
objectives, even at the cost of war with Russia and France. The actions of the
Great Powers in limiting the damage during the previous Balkan crises strongly
suggests that, had the Austrians and Germans wished, the crisis of summer 1914
could have been resolved by the international community. Serbia could have been
isolated and punished but left its independence. On this occasion, however,
Austria-Hungary and Germany wanted war with Serbia and accepted the risk of
escalation.
The War Guilt clause of the Versailles Treaty
got it right: The outbreak of World War I was caused by "the aggression of
Germany and her allies."
THE BOOKS OF AUGUST
(indicações de Sheffield)
'A Mad Catastrophe,' 'July Crisis' and 'The
Month that Changed the World' are books by academic historians that were
written with an eye on the wider market and are very accessible to the general
reader (Geoffrey Wawro's book exceptionally so). Yet, given the number of books
on the origins of World War I appearing in this centennial year, there is a
risk that older works might be overlooked. New books are not necessarily the
best on any subject.
The Origins of the War of 1914 (1943)by Luigi Albertini, remains
a text of the utmost importance, acknowledged as the seminal work by modem
historians. Albertini was an Italian journalist who in the 1930s interviewed
many of the participants in the July Crisis and studied the mass of available
documentation. His three-volume account is a detailed chronology of the events
that lead to war and contains many astute insights.
Russia and the Origins of the First World War (1983)
by D.C.B. Lieven is the classic study of the subject, showing how Russia tried,
unsuccessfully, to deter its enemies in 1914. He acknowledges the growing
German fears of Russian power but argues they were exaggerated.
The Origins of the First World War (2010) by
William Mulligan is a short synthesis of modern research. He argues that a
general war was far from inevitable; indeed, it was avoidable. His attention to
the events of July 1914 prefigures the work of recent historians.
An Improbable War? (2007)
edited by Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, is a series of essays loosely
grouped around the question of whether the war of 1914 was 'improbable.' Holger
Afflerbach argued that it was. Economic and cultural ties between states made
general war utterly unlikely. Other contributors, including Samuel Williamson
and John Röhl disagreed, and the result is one of the most stimulating books
ever written on the vexed question of the origins of the war.
Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak
of World War I (2011) by Michael S. Neiberg, examines attitudes before the war and in
the initial months of the conflict. He shows just how wide of the mark is the
notion that Europeans were universally rejoicing when war broke out. Only after
the war was under way did patriotic belligerency become the norm.
—Mr. Sheffield holds the chair of war studies
at the University of Wolverhampton. His "A Short History of the First
World War" will be published in October.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/book-review-the-world-war-i-blame-game-1403302608
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