The Origins of the First World War (review)

Many will ask, “Why write another book about the origins of World War I, which has been a controversial subject for almost the century since the war’s beginning in 1914?” The answer implicit as well as explicit in this book is Mulligan’s insistence that the years from 1871 to 1914 are too often seen through the prism of the war itself. The central argument of this study is that the maintenance of peace between the major powers in the preceding decades merits examination on its own terms and that the developments did not point to an inevitable worldwide conflict.

Utilizing the relevant literature, and especially publications of the most recent years, Mulligan reviews the initial controversies about the so-called war-guilt question and more recent arguments and interpretations. The longest chapter engages the international relations of the forty years of peace between the major powers and the evolution of the alliance system. Mulligan emphasizes that all of the countries involved saw alliances primarily in defensive terms. While emphasizing German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s role in the maintenance of peace, however, he neglects to mention Bismarck’s obtaining a bribe from Austria-Hungary—dropping the plebiscite in Schleswig from the 1866 peace treaty—before his acting as “honest broker” at the Berlin Conference of 1878. The contribution of this bribe to the estrangement between Germany and Russia needs emphasis. The maps are unfortunately inadequate, especially in a book designed for serious scholarship.

In separate chapters, Mulligan engages the roles of the military and of public opinion. He exposes the defensive patriotism in all of the major powers, none of which had much enthusiasm for offensive warfare in Europe, in spite of friction in Africa, East Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. Absent from the discussion of the military is the fundamental shift from the basically defensive plans of Helmut von Moltke the Elder to the offensive plans thereafter. The kind of stalemate that would have grown out of Moltke’s plans would have been entirely different from what developed in 1914.

A fascinating chapter examines the changes in the world system of communications and in the global economy. Utilizing statistics, Mulligan illuminates how global markets in goods and capital changed the world dramatically between 1871 and 1914, but without war being an inevitable outcome of whatever rivalries developed. The statistical tables, which show the evolution of each major power, serve to illuminate aspects of the period.

Mulligan stresses how changes in the views of Berlin, Vienna, and St. Petersburg after the Second Morocco Crisis of 1911 contributed to a weakening of the restraints on war and contributed to turning the July 1914 crisis into a reason for war. He points out that, for Germany alone, mobilization meant war but fails to explain why. In the conclusion, he relates his findings to later events in the twentieth century but unfortunately misses how the German plan to save the great-power status of Austria-Hungary by invading Belgium prefigures the 1938 French plan to rescue Czechoslovakia by invading Libya from Tunisia.