The Games of July: Explaining the Great War

Chapter Eight: Questions, Answers, Implications

We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. john mccray chapter eight Questions, Answers, Implications The Great War was clearly a turning point in the history of Europe. Not only did this hegemonic struggle bring“to a terrible end an extraordinary period of a great civilization” (Kagan 1995: 81), but it also “changed everything” that followed (Andelman 2008: 3). So profound was its impact that it is almost impossible to imagine what the state system would look like today had the war not occurred. The turbulent saga of the twentieth century would certainly have been much different. While the war’s geopolitical signi‹cance all but demands a causal analysis, the utter complexity of its origins stands in the way. Nonetheless, explanation (rather than description) of the events of late July and early August 1914 constitutes a principal objective of this work.Accordingly, this chapter begins with a discussion of the key features of the explanation I construct before turning to this book’s other major purpose, theoretical assessment. I make absolutely no claim, however, that the explanation I develop is exhaustive . Indeed, I do not address many aspects of the con›ict at all. For example , I make no attempt to explain Belgium’s decision to resist the German invasion on August 4; similarly, I give short shrift to Serbia’s reaction to Austria ’s July 23 ultimatum. In ignoring these and other aspects of the con›ict, I do not mean to suggest that they were in any way unimportant. But constructing a logically consistent and theoretically rigorous explanation of the outbreak of the Great War requires one to make choices. For this reason I have focused only on those decisions and processes I consider central to the tragic resolution of the crisis. 171 8.1. Explanation Many of those who have studied World War I believe that the con›ict was overdetermined (e.g., Schroeder 1972: 320). Lurking behind this assessment is a view of causation that Gasking (1955) calls recipe-type causality, that Kaplan (1964) dubs the pattern model, and that Goertz (2003), thinking probabilistically , labels correlational causality. In general, those who view causality in this way equate cause with manipulation (Nagel 1975: 17). But the basic idea is best understood in terms of joint suf‹ciency: a cause is taken to be any element in a set of conditions that, when satis‹ed, will likely, if not certainly, bring about a speci‹ed effect.1 As Goertz (2003: 51) notes, those who think in terms of a “constant conjunction of cause with effect” are prone to see “multiple causes [that add] up to produce the resultant effect.” Crawford (2003: 77–78) is among those who have concluded that World War I was overdetermined. Thus, it should not be surprising that he sees a “panoply” of causes: “multipolarity, offensive doctrines and strategic beliefs, arms races, imperial competition, domestic politics, psychological biases, social revolution, and even the ‘mood’ of 1914, which made war more ‘thinkable’ than before.” Because there were so many other causes, Crawford ‹nds it “well nigh impossible to infer” that the war had been brought about because Great Britain’s foreign policy was ambiguous. In other words,“when taken together,” these other causes “would seem to swamp” whatever impact one might attribute to Edward Grey’s diplomacy. Cashman and Robinson (2007: 84) also see the Great War as overdetermined . Like Crawford, they argue that “a large variety of causal factors combined together to produce the war.” Moreover, because these factors interacted “synergistically with one another,” the probability of war in 1914 was “extremely high.” Cashman and Robinson provide a list of causes that is nearly exhaustive. Indeed, one would be hard put to ‹nd a potential causal variable that is not included in their graphical summary. They ‹nd that “almost all of the underlying conditions identi‹ed by political scientists as producing war were present.” Thus, World War I was the result of “‘a perfect storm’—the near simultaneous combination of an extremely large number of factors associated historically with the outbreak of war” (2007: 86). 172 the games of july 1. Since no single element in a set of jointly suf‹cient conditions is individually necessary or suf‹cient for the effect , each element of the set can be thought of as a “contributing” cause (Goertz and Levy 2007: 10). Since his offense-defense theory...