The origins of the First World War - the how rather than why

Coincidentally, the historian who has written the new, detailed study of the origins of the First World War which I mentioned yesterday (Christopher Clark) has just reviewed a couple of other books on the same subject. It starts the same way as the book itself (which kept me captivated for five full days).  Its appeal lies, for me, in showing how a few players seem to have tipped the balance in the declaration of war - particularly Poincare. In the opening pages we learn of the scale and significance of French loans to Serbia in the period preceding and during the 2 Balkan wars; and, later, how Poincare buttered up the Russians and helped push them to full and final mobilisation. 

The book suggests (rightly or not I can't say) that the Balkans itself has tended to be relegated in most serious accounts of the causes of the war and his book certainly puts it back in central place. It also has an interesting section emphasising that his account is more concerned with the "how" of events, rather than the "why"......      

The debate over the origins of the First World War is older than the war itself. Even before the first shots were fired, Europe’s statesmen constructed narratives depicting themselves as innocents and their opponents as predators and breachers of the peace. Since then, the debate has spawned a historical literature of unrivalled size, sophistication and moral intensity. In 1991, a survey by the American historian John Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone.
The debate is still going strong today, for several reasons. First, the war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed four multiethnic empires (the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman). It killed at least ten million young men and wounded at least twenty million more. It disorganised the international system in immensely destructive ways. Without this conflict it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917, the rise of Stalinism, the ascendancy of Italian Fascism, the Nazi seizure of power or the Holocaust. It was, as the historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. It is hard to imagine a worse initial condition for the modern era of which we are the inheritors.
A second reason is the exceptionally intricate character of the crisis that brought war to Europe in 1914. The Cuban Missile Crisis was complex enough, yet it involved just two principal protagonists plus a range of proxies and subordinate players. By contrast, the story of how the First World War came about must make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance – Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Russia and Britain – or six if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war.
To make matters worse, the executives of these states were anything but unified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the respective governments. The chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the years leading up to the war. It also helps explain why the July Crisis of 1914 became the most opaque political crisis of modern times. There is virtually no viewpoint on its origins that can’t be supported by selecting among the available sources. Some accounts have focused on the culpability of one bad-apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in ‘the system’. There has always been enough complexity to keep the argument going.
The debate is old, but the issues it raises are still fresh. One might even say that the political crisis of July 1914 seems less remote – less illegible – now than it did thirty or forty years ago……………. What must strike any 21st-century reader who follows the course of the crisis is its raw modernity. It began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers: the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on 28 June 1914 had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge: extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders, its links to any sovereign government were oblique.
Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has given way to a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.
It is less clear now that we should dismiss the assassination at Sarajevo as a mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001 is an example of the way in which a single symbolic event – however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes – can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potentially lethal nature of Balkan nationalism. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914. This doesn’t mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present. Rather, it means acknowledging those features of the past where our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view.
The impact of these changes can be discerned in recent writing on the origins of the war. There has been a globalisation of the field of vision. The prewar polarisation of Europe into opposed alliance blocs now looks less like a purely continental European story and more like the European consequence of world-historical realignments driven by conflicts along a range of imperial peripheries in China, Africa and Central Asia. Rather than searching for the antecedents of the actual war that broke out in 1914, recent studies have tended to stress the open-endedness of international relations in a world in which nearly all the key players had more than one potential enemy. The European alliances, it has been argued, didn’t necessarily make war more likely: they could have the opposite effect if one ally refused to back the adventurism of another, as happened on several occasions in the decade before the war. Anglo-German naval rivalry may not have predestined an armed conflict between Britain and Germany: a number of recent monographs have shown how decisively Britain saw off the German naval challenge and have questioned how much impact the matter had on British geopolitical thinking. Periods of détente before 1914 were not deceptive moments of respite from mutual hostility but represented a genuine potentiality of the international system. On the eve of the July Crisis, as a recent article by T.G. Otte has shown, the British Foreign Office was on the verge of dropping the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 and seeking a rapprochement with Germany. Far from being inevitable, in other words, this war may actually have been improbable. On this reading, it was not the consequence of long-run historical ‘forces’, but of short-term realignments and shocks to the international system.

The Financial Times has another excellent review of some books on the causes of the First World War - as does the excellent Dublin Review of Books

The painting is a Popescu - but a Constantin Isache (1888-1967) not Stefan (1872-1948)

Balkan journeys

Despite the name of this blog, I’m actually on the periphery of the Balkans and do not even begin to try to understand its history. I’ve travelled (very briefly) in Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia; spent several years in Bulgaria and have known Romania for 20 odd years but have read few books about the countries in the Region. Lucian Boia is the only serious history historian of the last country with a book currently available (Romania – Borderland of Europe 2001 (although I noticed that the Frost English bookshop has a couple of slim histories in English); if you look really hard you may unearth in Sofia a copy of Richard Crampton’s A Short History of Modern Bulgaria (1987).

Otherwise I’ve read only Mark Mazower’s very brief The Balkans; and Dervla Murphy’s typically punchy description of her cycles through the disintegrating Yugoslavia of the early 1990s Through the Embers of Chaos – Balkan journeys.

However, Christopher Clark’s recent The sleepwalkers – how Europe went to war in 1914 is the first book which really helps me make sense of the region. It is a stunning and gripping read which has also altered my understanding of the respective roles of France, Germany, Russia and England in letting loose  murderous and senseless violence on the peoples of Europe -  

We are introduced to a shadowy world of fanatical terrorist cells engaged in plots that range across state borders, funded and armed by secret organizations that are connected, with carefully constructed plausible deniability, to official government ministries. The fanatics in this case are Serbian nationalists rather than Islamic fundamentalists (though it should be said that Serbian nationalism has long had strong religious overtones), but their outlook and methodology seem startlingly modern. So too are the polarizing pressures and media attention their activities generate, especially in terms of a positive feedback loop in which even presumably moderate figures feel compelled to emphasize their militancy for fear of appearing weak. When, after a series of botched attempts, one youthful member of an organization known as the Black Hand finally succeeds in murdering the heir apparent to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, it triggers a war in which many of the participants have only a peripheral relationship to its proximate cause. Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly don't seem so far away from the Balkans.

The second part of The Sleepwalkers is a traditional diplomatic history reminiscent of A.J.P. Taylor's classic 1954 study The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848-1914. Clark reconstructs the realignment of European great-power politics in the four decades preceding the outbreak of the First World War. The hallmark of his approach is pluralism: he demonstrates that for every national player in this drama, decision-making power was decentralized. In parliamentary societies, there were considerations of party politics, as well as the relationships between the military, the diplomatic corps, and a nation's political leadership. But even in presumably autocratic societies like Russia, policymaking was hardly straightforward; figures like Tsar Nicholas II or Kaiser Wilhelm were often managed by their ministers rather than leading their countries, and public opinion could influence strategic considerations no less than it did in France or England.

The final segment of The Sleepwalkers returns to Sarajevo in 1914, opening with a depiction of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that spools with cinematic clarity. Clark then proceeds to chart the sequence of decisions -- more like miscalculations -- that culminated in catastrophe. In light of his preceding analysis, it's clear that he rejects the notion of an overriding cause or a principal villain. As he explains in his conclusion, "The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol." And yet the weight of his own analysis makes clear that Clark blames some figures more than others. Serbian nationalists were not only irresponsible in the intensity of their fervour, but in their insistence on the legitimacy of territorial claims flatly denied the realities of history and the presence of non-Serbs in places like Albania and Bosnia. (Serbian conquests in the Balkans in 1912-13 were followed by atrocities strongly reminiscent of ethnic cleansing.)

Russia's support of the Serbs was part of a larger pan-Slavic strategy that had less to do with mystic chords of memory than trying to realize a long-term goal of succeeding Ottoman Turkey as the master of the Straits of Bosphorus, one that led the Russians to take dangerous risks. And French desperation for a strong partner to counter Germany virtually goaded the Russians to take those risks.

Conversely, Clark rejects the view that Austria-Hungary was an empty husk of an empire lurching toward collapse -- indeed, Franz Ferdinand had a plausible scenario for a reformed and federalized polity that reduced the disproportionate influence of Hungary and gave more representation for Slavs, including Serbians (one reason why radicals wishing to see the empire break up were so intent on killing him). Vienna's demands in the aftermath of the assassination were not unrealistic, though its delay in issuing them -- here again the baleful influence of internal divisions, one of which were foot-dragging Hungarians -- led rivals to mobilize their opposition. Germany is often portrayed as ratcheting up the pressure by giving the Austrians the notorious "blank check," but Clark depicts Berlin as believing the crisis could be resolved locally long after everyone else had concluded otherwise. British Conservatives welcomed war as a means of preventing Irish Home Rule, since fighting Germany would deprive Liberals of the military tools to implement a policy that had vocal, and possibly violent, opponents

Those wanting a brief overview of the origins of the war can do worse than the Authentic History reference. And the masochists who want to explore the representation of the Balkans in various writings can attempt these two academic pieces Imagining the Balkans and Balkanism in political context

update; here's a long and critical Serbian review of the book - http://www.balcanica.rs/balcanica/uploaded/balcanica/balcanica_44/18%204%20M%20Vojinovic%20The%20Slipwalkers.pdf

Be very afraid!

I’m pleased that my readers have chosen, without any encouragement from me, to elevate a 2 year old post about the financial crisis to top of today’s pops. Perhaps you had, telepathically picked up my study last week of FT journalist Gillian Tett’s 2009 book Fool’s Gold about how the toxic new financial instruments were invented in the 1990s and how they subverted our social systems. One of the LRB reviewers summarises her book very well here (apologies if this is behind a firewall)

One of my favourite (rather manic) bloggers has a typically caustic description of this period - and then moves to some prescriptions -

The new movements we need now (and I’m increasingly drifting away from anything ‘political’) should be underpinned by these five very simple ideas:
1. Small, creative and vulnerable must triumph against big, monied and powerful
2. The co-operative side of our species nature must be given a larger role in the shape of mutuality
3. The centralised, bureaucratic State must have its influence reduced in favour of communitarian entrepreneurial ideas
4. Globalist mercantilism must be abandoned in favour of self-sufficiency and limited trade
5. Education must teach more civics, offer more personal challenge, and give an equal role to socio-cultural subjects

Despite the rhetoric of the past 5 years, the excesses of the banking class continue – indeed intensify. And point to a new phase of collapse - with eurocrats leading the way in setting the scene for wholesale robbery of what’s left of middle-class people like me. Shades of Weimar! Who said history never repeats itself??

Theft of a nation

As I was writing yesterday’s post, I realised how little I knew about how the restitution of Romanian property (seized by the communists a half-century ago) had actually been attempted in recent years.
It seems I am not alone! The assessments seem to be subjective, confused and out-of-date. I was particularly disappointed by the 2008 study Property Restitution - What went wrong in Romania? by the Romanian Academic Society which promised to tell all but from which I emerged little the wiser - but at least knowing that the Romanian process was indeed distinctive (in central Europe) in its laggardly and utter confusing approach

A very short article in a recent issue of Journal of Property Rights in Transition updates a substantial and enlightening 2006 academic article on the subject entitled The Roof over Our Heads: Property Restitution in Romania; by Lavinia Stan - in The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics, Vol.22, No.2, June 2006, pp.180–205 (which can be accessed and downloaded from www.academia.edu

Until 2005 successive Romanian governments blocked attempts by owners to recover their dwellings, siding with the tenants who were using the dwellings (well connected political, business, and cultural luminaries) against the owners (elderly persons or residents of foreign countries). Only 5 percent of all owners received their homes back. In 2005, a Property Fund (Fondul Proprietatea) started to compensate owners whose properties could not be returned because they had been demolished, bought by the tenants living in them, or (abusively) retained by the government offices (mayoralties and ministry departments) using them. The Property Fund relied on shares in large state-owned companies.

Because it was constituted over 15 years after the privatization process was launched, during which most such companies had been transferred into private hands, the Fund controlled few assets effectively. As such, many owners continued to receive neither property, nor compensation. Executive interference in the activity of the judiciary meant that many courts disregarded procedure and infringed both the Romanian Constitution and the European Convention of Human Rights when hearing restitution cases, thus prompting an increasing number of owners to approach the ECHR. This is why in 2010 the Court asked the government to revamp its property restitution scheme.

From October 2010 to April 2013 Romania did nothing to comply with the ECHR request. The vested interests of powerful political elite members in retaining ownership of the nationalized dwellings by disregarding the rights of the owners explain why the authorities did not consult with the owners, although consultations were recommended by the Court and would have involved little effort.

Political instability was also at play. There were no fewer than four cabinets during that time period (headed by Prime Ministers Emil Boc, Mihai Razvan Ungureanu, and Vasile Ponta), the first three of which were weak cabinets delegitimized by scandals, frequent replacements of ministers, and an unclear policy direction. Instead of solving the restitution cases, by providing the Property Fund with the means needed to compensate owners, punishing Fund leaders for mismanagement and waste, and protecting owners from undue pressure to renounce their property rights, these governments perpetuated an untenable system.

According to some reports, 1,000 intermediaries well connected to the Fund cashed in 1.5 billion Euros for property claims they brought from disillusioned initial owners, who simply gave up the fight. These intermediaries received compensation at higher rates and faster than thousands of owners whose claims the Fund refused to consider promptly and honestly.

All of this serves to prove just how right Tom Gallagher got it with the subtitle for his 2005 book Romania – theft of a nation. And his 2006 article for Open Democracy is perhaps as pithy a summary as you will get anywhere of this kleptomania and how it has been sustained.

And I see that this book by Lavinia Stan has just been published Transitional Justice in post-communist Romania – the politics of memory

Romanian "elites" shameless in theft

The restitution of property nationalised by the Romanian communist regime has been a long saga – with only 10,000 homes apparently restored and 200,000 cases outstanding at April 2013. Many glorious fin de siècle buildings have crumbled to dust under the combination of neglect, uncertainty, squatting, anticipated costs of rehab and illegal demolitions. Curiously every Romanian city has a clutch of grand palaces waving the flags of political parties which seem to have escaped what has passed as the restitution process.
The aftermath of the sudden Romanian revolution of December 1989 allowed a variety of political parties to assert their rights to an amazing array of places in all the major cities of Romania. God knows what goes on there – the windows are open in the summer but there is absolutely no sign of activity. The properties are worth billions…giving the parties (let alone the individuals who control them at various points of time) access to limitless bank credit. For more on this saga see this May 2013 piece from the Property Rights in Transition Journal

And what about the art collections which I referred to in a recent post? That post mentioned ever so casually that I had come across a very heavy and fascinating 380 page volume (from 2005) which itemises 500 or so paintings in an incredible collection of 60 year-old business-man Tiberiu Postelnica.
In my innocence I wanted to contact him, congratulate him on his taste and, who knows, perhaps even have a viewing. Curiously, however, even the Romanian version of google unearths very few references to either the man or his collection.
But I do discover that he is apparently the nephew of Ceaucescu's last Minister of the Interior and Head of the Securitate, Tudor Postelnica – and worth at least 10 million euros. You can imagine the process by which he came to accumulate the collection he now has and so shamelessly boasts about in this 380 page volume!!!

Gandul newspaper reported 2 years ago how 120 works of classic Romanian art were purchased from the Romanian Union of Artists under strange circumstances for 280,000 euros by an anonymous buyer who was almost certainly Postelnica

"There were two works of Baba, small, two Patrascus, two Palladys, a Lucian Grigorescu, a small Tonitza, two works by Ciucurencu a larger; some Catargi paintings on cardboard; and quite a few drawings by Ressu, "said the President of the Union of Artists. He also explained that he preferred direct selling because it was the quickest way to get money: "It was a public sale but not a public auction. Had I made ​​a public auction, then the Ministry of Culture would have had the first right of refusal. Under these circumstances, I had to do a letter to wait three months for them to come and classify the assets if works or part of the Treasury, and other months in which I address or MCC museum, to ask them if they want to buy these papers etc. they probably would have responded and only then was allowed to come to auction. After these six months, I should have apply to an auction house for the Union circulated, to auction only work of its members, those in life. We have no right to do auction with works of deceased artists. would be delayed so that a half-year auction 

I had started today wanting to blog about my great find – Romanian painter Constantin Artachino who was born on 7 November 1870 of a Turkish family living at the Marmara Sea which came to Bucharest in 1877. His colours are glorious and several of the paintings redolent of some of my Bulgarian painters such as Dobre Dobrev. The example which heads the post - from the Danube - is typical. 

Good bookshops can (and do) beat Amazon - Let the word go out

I feel totally vindicated in my Amazon boycott. The prices I am getting are more than 10% better than Amazon’s deliveries to my Romanian base.

And the relationship I have developed with the very knowledgeable bookshop owner is priceless.

My next step is probably to buy good first editions from online second-hand bookshops – although too many of them seem to have an exclusive tie-in with Amazon which charges about 10 euros for delivering an 8 euros book.
Come on independent bookshops, you can do better than this!!

The cartoon is one of several which Ethical Consumer is now using in their very welcome campaign to boycott Amazon - which also includes this guide on alternatives to the giant.

Zeitgeist

I am trying to identify writers who give us a sense of life at a particular place and time… a zeitgeist. And to understand what exact skills that requires. Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne perhaps abstract too much from their context to qualify; Pepys and Boswell, as diarists, focus perhaps just a bit too narrowly on the London quotidian. Marcel Proust is simply too incestuous.

I am left with names such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Vasily Grossman and Hans Fallada but also people such as Richard Cobb, Tony Judt, Timothy Garton Ash and Geert Mak. 

What do they have in common (apart from all being male!)? Orwell, Grossman and Mak were/are journalists; Koestler and Fallada writers; Cobb, Judt and Garton Ash academics. 

The terms, of course, are arbitrary – indeed my distinctions seem to imply that journalists and academics do not also write! In using these terms, I was simply referring to the main source of income. 

Half of those on the list wrote novels – some (Orwell and Fallada) famously so but that is not quite how we remember them. The sort of writing I am talking about seems to exclude the “suspension of disbelief” required by novelists…..Clearly many good European novels do give a sense of “zeitgeist” (Voltaire’s Candide; Flaubert's Madame Bovary; Zola; Thomas Mann) - but, compared with the writers on my list, they seem to lack a certain “voice”.  

Initially I thought I had identified three features of these writers – range of experience; breadth of insight; and literary capacity. The first group of names all had the harrowing experiences of war; the last group the privileges of access to academic sources about 20^th century European savagery and, in Garton Ash’s case, more direct sources about post-war European change and conflicts. Some writers not on my list (such as Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dervla Murphy and Jan Morris) of course give a terrific sense of place and time - Naples; central Europe in the 1930s and 90s. And Diane Athill is one of several European women I wrote about recently whose diaries give an excellent sense of zeitgeist (Simone de Beauvoir is perhaps the supreme example). Diaries and travelogues, however, always run the risk of self-centredness. In that sense I have a preference for the more detailed analysis which Clive James gives in Cultural Amnesia.

At what point do individual memories become part of social – if not political - history? 
The painting is Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II (1940-42)

Some great blogs

One of the things I look for in analytical writing is generous crediting of the ideas of others. It gives me more confidence in the writer and the article/book when I see such attributions. And I’m not talking of copious footnotes or these silly, academic referencing to entire books. Rather a sense that the writer is familiar with a body of literature and points us to that which (s)he finds most pertinent. Of course I realise that those who write and produce books need to pretend to originality but, for me, this comes as much from style, voice and clarity as from forced insights. One of the things which this blog tries to do is to identify and disseminate quality writing wherever I find it.

Few of us may need daily insights about political life in Hungary – but, if you want a sense of what is going on in contemporary Central Europe then the occasional dip into the Hungarian Spectrum blog is an absolute must. I know of no other blog in the English language (about any country) which paints such large and detailed canvasses.

And A Patriot’s Guide to Romania offers, every week or so, architectural and historical gems of…… Romania. A year ago I offered a guide to blogs about Romania in the English language.

And here’s the latest in the strangely-neglected story about how the Eurocrats are moving to steal our savings from us all.
The painting is by Hans Holbein