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| The Decisions of July: The European Elite Goes to War in 1914 |
| 2015-07-05 |
| Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. –A.E. Housman The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, is a wonderful, magisterial diplomatic history of how Europe went to war in the summer of 1914. (Read it, and The Guns of August will never seem the same; for one thing, Clark shows clearly how players in chancelleries all over Europe wanted war; it’s not just down to the Germans.) Thomas Lacquer in the London Review of Books: The Sleepwalkers is also a book for our time in its emphasis on contingency and the role of what Clark calls the multiple ‘mental maps’ in the decisions that were taken. The war in his account was not the consequence of two great alliances yielding to specific provocations. If anything, it was the opposite; it was the weakness and unreliability of the alliances, and the lack of certainty about who would be on whose side, that exacerbated the crisis of summer 1914 in the capitals of Europe…. |
| Posted by:badanov |