Decisions for War, 1914-1917 (review)

The outbreak of the First World War, the motivations of its participants, and the structural causes of the war are well-researched subjects. This book is almost entirely devoted to the short period of time between the assassination of Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of war. It focuses on the small elite of monarchs, ministers, and army leaders responsible for their countries' decisions in those crucial weeks. The authors analyse not only the principal actors of 1914, but also the countries that were neutral at first and chose sides later, like Italy, the Balkan countries, and the United States. The only countries left out of their analysis are the ones that stayed neutral throughout the conflict.

In their first chapter Hamilton and Herwig discuss the present state of opinion about the origins of the First World War. They dismiss well-known factors such as nationalism, Social Darwinism, militarism, public opinion and the mass media, economic rivalry, etc. They argue that the weight attached to all those cultural factors is impossible to determine because any real data on their spreading and intensity are lacking. The authors' conclusion is clear: the men who decided to go to war in 1914 were unaffected by the mass media and economic, religious, or any other pressure, and were influenced only by considerations of strategy and their country's prestige and power, mostly perceived as being in decline by then.

It may come as no surprise that theories like Fritz Fischer's are dismissed by the authors. The cause of the First World War lies squarely with Vienna's response to the assassination in Sarajevo. The Austrian elite was looking for war, their aim was a third Balkan War, but they took the calculated risk of expanding that war. Austrian decisionmaking is described by Hamilton and Herwig as "a careful, well-thought-out and rational process" (p. 66).

German support for Austrian policy, the well-known carte blanche, was instrumental in turning the conflict into a European affair, but it cannot be interpreted as a calculated German bid for European, or even world, power. Contrary to the Austrian political inner circle, the German elite "was beset by doubts, petty bickering, confusion and lack of vision" (p. 89).

The other main players, Russia and France, did not want war. Hamilton and Herwig argue that the Russians had no idea what their decision to mobilize really meant and that France was no longer obsessed with Alsace-Lorraine, but wanted both its diplomatic and military ties with Russia and Great Britain to be lasting as well as credible.

The role of the military in 1914 was much more limited, say Hamilton and Herwig, than one might expect. In the book remarkably few pages are devoted to military planning, especially the Schlieffen Plan (pp. 34–35, 72) and the differences between the younger Moltke and Schlieffen are hardly touched upon. Nor do the authors discuss the circumstances of 1905 (when the first Plan was made) in comparison with those of 1914, a subject well-researched by Arden Bucholz.

Reading Hamilton and Herwig's challenging book, written from an extreme point of view, can be a sobering experience. The writers have both further weakened the influence of Fischer's thesis and also the importance of the so-called war enthusiasm of 1914, which had already been dismissed by Niall Ferguson and others.