Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914 (review)

Tender souls in military history use metaphors like “the rising tide of insecurity turned all eyes to the dykes” (414). Sentences like these suggest a certain pathos of sentiment but reveal an unease about exploring the power of emotion, here, for example, insecurity. Military historians are more familiar with statements like the one that immediately follows the above: “In addition to deterrence and defence, armed forces were needed for political leverage” (414). This kind of statement makes up a history that invests the study of war with an instrumental rationality. However, the truth about the beginning of modern wars lies between a (metaphorically cloaked) sense of insecurity and a (realistically overdetermined) politics of force. David Stevenson’s Armaments and the Coming of War tries to evade this tension by positioning the argument on the neutral ground of thick historical description of the events leading to the outbreak of World War I. He records both the impact of a historical sense of insecurity and of power-politics.

Stevenson’s extensive study stands in between cycles of explanation that have tried to make sense of the origins of World War I. Over the past thirty years, historiography has developed in terms of the aftereffect of Fritz Fischer’s challenge to seek the origins of World War I in the single-minded and preplanned German pursuit of world power. ¹ While denouncing German intentions, Fischer unwittingly made Germany the center of the world. In the meantime, political scientists have busied themselves in extrapolating the logic of arms races from murky statistics. While they do not agree on the origins of these arms races (some emphasize the systemic quality of the international systems, others highlight technology, or, for that matter, capitalism), they nonetheless all insist that arms races are the “systemic” source of war. However, the “hot” wars of the twentieth century were not initiated by a sustained arms race; and the one genuine arms race—the “Cold War”—did not lead to a major war. Both strategies of interpretation/explanation are themselves reflections of a passing historical conjuncture; they are effects of the century that they tried to explain. In contrast, Stevenson recaptures the moment of this century’s origin.

Stevenson has used archival research to remarkable effect. He multiplied his archival base, exploring the records of not just one or two countries but of almost every country that was implicated in the events leading up to World War I—the noteworthy exceptions being Russia, Serbia, and Montenegro. In this, he most resembles David Herrmann, who has also published a book on World War I recently. ² Both have set new standards. Stevenson, however, proceeds far more deliberately in highlighting what he calls the “marchlands” of Europe, that is, the zones inbetween the Great Powers: the Balkans and the eastern Adriatic on the one hand and what came to be the Benelux countries and the North Sea on the other. He shows how these areas not only became the site for a latent while nonetheless extreme conflict of interests, but also were invested with an extraordinary symbolic value. Thus, Belgium was far more than a site of competing interests; it was where the purity of Great Power intentions was established. By the same token, the loss of influence over the Balkans was treated as if it meant an end to Great Power status. That is, Russia, Austria-Hungary, and Germany persuaded themselves that they would have to prevail over the Balkans or cease to be Great Powers. Why these areas were inscribed with such extraordinary symbolic value remains unclear. In addition, what happened locally (no less than three wars on the Balkans and in the eastern Mediterranean) is not sufficiently understood. Stevenson nonetheless establishes convincingly that these zones (rather than “the” arms race) hold the key to understanding the dynamic that developed in the direction of war. What may appear at first sight as peripheral, a sideshow at the margins of Europe, is in fact...