Sean McMeekin reminds us that the Great War was the first major conflict declared by telegraph, a point that introduces a certain irony into this detailed account of miscommunication and bad timing. Statesmen, diplomats, and officers are rendered with an eye to their longstanding ambitions, fears, and personal rivalries, as they obsessively calculated, talked, hinted, and edited, yet still moved blindly through the dramatic month of July 1914. So much for the wireless communication, railroad transport, and meticulous mobilization schedules that supposedly set the stage for this most modern war; its origins lay just as much in dithering incompetence and poor information.
The war that set its seal on the modern world exploded, of course, from the contradictions of an entrenched, if beleaguered, old regime, which appears here as a kind of idyll, almost untouched by the forces of industry, mass culture, and politics that enveloped it. McMeekin moves between the Wilhelmstrasse and Baltic cruises, among fashionable spas, regattas, and country estates, to render aristocratic and royal Europe at summertime play. Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, wanted to go fly-fishing; Helmuth von Moltke was at Karlsbad on a spa holiday. There are but faint traces in this study of the press or public opinion; of party politics or pressure groups; of the Duma or Reichstag; of class antagonisms or industrial elites—though they do become stronger, especially in the French and British cases, as the account moves toward its climax. Depicting the epic forces at work in the coming of the Great War as histoire événementielle nevertheless has the virtue of breaking down national monoliths (“the French,” “the Germans”) by emphasizing the innumerable variables, contingencies, and countervailing currents of power—macro but especially micro—that eventuated in war. This is a story of personalities, temperaments, and convictions, of individual belligerence and indecisiveness, of francophilia, russophobia, and blind ambition. It offers a vivid, complex picture of interlocking political, diplomatic, and military elites, and of the troubled relations among them as they dealt with the Sarajevo crisis.
This close-up perspective, which magnifies the sense of uncertainty, fear, and regret at the time, helps undermine any idea of the inevitability of war––notwithstanding the great powers' own deep pessimism, prevailing ideas about preventive war, as well as the logics of mobilization and entangling alliances. From the confusion of the moment nevertheless emerges a dominant theme: the culpability of Russia. This is McMeekin's fundamental claim, and it sets his study apart from others that appeared to mark the war's centennial; it is compelling and important, even if, in the end, it results more in refinement and recalibration than in a powerful revision of our understanding of the coming of the war. McMeekin does not, of course, simply brand Russia as guilty, thereby supplanting Fritz Fischer's Germany. Yet, he does render a vivid picture of a belligerent Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov scheming to bring about war, certain of French support and abetted by the incompetence of the British, as well as by Austrian blundering.
The arc of the narrative propels the argument: the absorbing, dramatic opening about the infamous events in Sarajevo in late June 1914 works on a rhetorical level to achieve the reader's identification with Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie—and thus with Austria, and against Serb terrorists, a term used liberally in this study, likely because of its contemporary resonance today. Austria was weak and its prestige was waning, which magnified Serb provocation and aggrandizement in the Balkan wars, as well as Russian patronage of its local ally—but also Germany's role as arbiter of Austrian policy. Austria was dangerous precisely because of its weakness; its foreign and domestic policies were fused by nationalist tumult; its approach to Sarajevo was indeed “dilatory and incompetent” (113). Russia was also weak, of course, but McMeekin emphasizes instead its aggressiveness. Whereas Austria felt it had to act in order to save the monarchy, Russia enjoyed a certain scope of action. It was a grasping, expansionist power moved by Pan-Slavic contempt for Austria and motivated by designs on the Black Sea, Constantinople, and the Balkans, which made it nervous about new Dreadnoughts slated for delivery to the Ottoman empire. It was Russia, led by Sazonov, that began the “countdown to European war” (259) by moving funds from Berlin, drawing up partial mobilization plans, and backing Serbia to the hilt. Russia appears, in this narrative, to have been the most determined power, greeting the news from Sarajevo with cautious opportunism, in contrast to the dithering incompetence––and dismay––of Germany, Austria, and Britain. The last was preoccupied with the question of Irish Home Rule, its diplomats detached to a shocking degree and acutely biased in their assessment of Russian aims. The French, caught up in domestic scandal and the undercurrents of political division, were made dependent on Russia by their fear of Germany.
The fearsome German Reich recedes in this account, which is propelled by McMeekin's impulse to dislodge, or “correct,” the classic case for German culpability. The Germans are still censured for their failure to restrain Austria: they were willing to fight a war and thought they could win it. But the Germans appear here as reacting to Russian moves, rather than the other way around (they also appear naïve, having supposedly been unaware of Russia's secret premobilization on their very borders). They do not seem, in this account, to have understood Austrian intentions. They entered the war, McMeekin writes, with a seeming intent to provoke, “kicking and screaming as the Austrian noose snapped shut around their necks” (405). In the end, of course, the mixture of fatalism and aggression, the endless temporizing, prevarication, and calculation, overwhelmed the panicked czar and kaiser, tasked the Hungarian Prime Minister István Tisza's stubborn moderation, and, more generally, undermined the many factors pointing toward peaceful resolution. We are left with a greater sense of Russian responsibility, but not really a revised sense of the war's origins so much as a rebalanced view of collective responsibility resulting from the contingent and shifting patterns of British detachment and ineptitude, German passivity, Austrian muddling, and Russian bellicosity.
