The Origins of World War I (review)

Confronted with a volume over five hundred pages in length on the origins of World War I, this reviewer rather predictably wondered whether anything still remained to be said on what George F. Kennan has rightly termed "the great seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." Richard F. Hamilton, Holger H. Herwig, and their distinguished team of nine additional contributors prove triumphantly that indeed there is. Building on a carefully crafted conference held at Ohio State University in 1999, their book focuses on precisely who, within both the major and several of the minor belligerent states of World War I, took the decisions to go to war, and how and why they reached those decisions. Two introductory chapters survey and find wanting those broader interpretations and "big causes" often advanced for the outbreak in 1914 of general European war: the structure of alliance commitments, nationalism, social Darwinism, imperialism, militarism, the influence of the popular press, and the need to channel domestic discontent into external conflict. They also reject the once-popular thesis, especially popular with such leading politicians as David Lloyd George, that Europe's great nations inadvertently slid into war.

The editors' own hypothesis, advanced after detailed examination of each state's decision for war, is "the strategic argument": "that the decision makers of the five major powers sought to save, maintain, or enhance the power and prestige of the nation" (p. 41). Within each state highly restricted political, diplomatic, and military elites, conspicuously absent from which were representatives of business, labor, agriculture, the churches, or the press, chose measures they believed would in all probability provoke general European war. The primary responsibility, according to Hamilton and Herwig, lay upon the three great dynastic states of Europe, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. In each the ruler and his close advisers perceived their country as threatened by encirclement, inevitable decline, and the loss of great power status, to avoid which was worth risking general war and even the existing regime's collapse. French leaders, conscious of their country's weakness, affirmed their alliance commitments to Russia, while Great Britain intervened, not to defend Belgium, but primarily to preserve the European balance of power. Once war had begun a second tier of smaller states eventually entered the war, carefully calculating the specific territorial and other advantages they expected to gain from intervention. Particularly welcome is Frederick R. Dickinson's nuanced account of Japan's speedy accession to the Allies, stressing the crucial role of Foreign Minister Kato Takaaki and the relationship of Japan's adhesion to Great Britain rather than Germany to broader alternatives facing both Japanese domestic and international politics.

The editors have drawn broad and provocative conclusions as to the causes of World War I, but might have gone yet further. Introductory chapters suggest that from the seventeenth century to 1815 six world wars occurred involving fighting between at least five great powers on at least two continents. For the following ninety-nine years a hiatus prevailed, marked by many minor wars, often involving one or more European powers, but no major conflicts. The editors do not entirely attain their stated objective of accounting for the ending of this long European peace. Hamilton and Herwig might profitably have discussed whether it was purely coincidental that those three European dynastic empires to whom they ascribe primary responsibility for the outbreak of World War I were autocratic or semiautocratic monarchies. Did the sense of threat all three rulers and their close advisers apparently shared stem from some broader common perception that, confronting separatist, liberal, nationalist, and democratic challenges, the type of regime in which they all held power was swiftly becoming obsolete? Did this, perhaps, encourage those nations' politico-military elites to opt for questionable policies in 1914, and to prefer risking...