Who started the Great War? Six historians try to answer

Perry Anderson’s remarkably erudite book, Disputing Disaster, examines six versions of events from different historians across the world

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History is enormously popular; but there is less public interest in the different interpretations of it, or the different ways of writing it – the study of historiography. Perry Anderson, now in his eighties, something of a polymath and a long-time professor of history at UCLA, has produced a remarkably erudite book of historiography on how different men (they are all men) from different nationalities have written about the reasons for the outbreak of the Great War. 
One or two of the subjects of Disputing Disaster are little known even to those of us in the profession of history; most are, or were, famous only in their own countries. That, though, hardly matters: it is the well-reasoned divergence of view about a conflict whose causes many, certainly in Britain among the vast audience that loves to read about the Great War, have long decided upon, namely that it was all Germany’s fault, and the Second Reich got what was coming to it. The facts are usually indisputable; but why they came about is usually not.
Anderson’s sextet comprises Pierre Renouvin, a Frenchman; Luigi Albertini, an Italian; Fritz Fischer, a German; Keith Wilson, an Englishman; Christopher Clark, an Australian; and Paul Schroeder, an American. All come from nations combatant in the war; Clark alone is not associated with one of the European belligerents, his country having been committed to the war when Britain declared it not merely on behalf of herself, but her whole empire. The essays on Clark and Schroeder are by far the longest, not least because Anderson goes off-subject extensively in both, to write about Clark’s excellent book, published last year, on the European revolutions of 1848-49, and about Schroeder’s attitude to American foreign policy and politics in the last years of his life (he died in 2020). But he draws extensively on their work – Clark in his enormously influential Sleepwalkers (2012), and Schroeder in a series of articles in learned journals (he published few books) – to make the point he believes most relevant: not why the war happened, but how.
Renouvin, who fought in the war, was like the other historians more concerned with “why?”. He blamed the Central Powers, who had, as Anderson puts it, “imposed” war on Europe. Albertini was an unusual historian: he had been a journalist, and then proprietor, of the Corriere della Sera, a post from which he was removed by Mussolini despite his having been an early supporter of Fascism. Renouvin’s argument, effectively, was that Italy fought in the Great War in order to prove to Europe that it was really one of the great powers; it was, of course, not, and an appalling cost in lives, money and reputation was exacted in Italy’s attempt to pretend otherwise.
Fischer, meanwhile, was lauded by a generation of Germans, and influenced many subsequent historians, in arguing that the guilt for the war was entirely his own country’s. His own reputation was compromised, however, by his membership of the Nazi party – which Anderson concedes he had to join, because career advancement was otherwise closed to him – their paramilitary the Sturmabteilung, and his flirtations with anti-Semitism. He owned up to some of this, and Anderson muses why he did not better cover his tracks. Even so, it didn’t affect the power of his analysis of the causes of the war; he claimed (and Anderson implies that he believes Fischer was telling the truth) that he knew nothing of the atrocities of Nazism until they were exposed at the end of the war. This turned him against the regime he had supported, and against the cultural doctrine of obedience instilled first in Prussians, then the German empire to which Prussia gave birth.
 As for the chapter on Wilson, it serves the purpose of celebrating a contrarian whom Anderson admires, and who holds that it was the obsession with imperialism that caused the war – against apparently unanswerable arguments that Germany’s desire for world domination was the root cause, and that from Bismarck’s era onwards the country was always looking for a set of circumstances that could be exploited to facilitate that end.
The Great War, in truth, was always going to happen, because of tensions in Europe that were not settled by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, and were fuelled by the creation of the German Empire after the Prussian victory over France in 1871. As Anderson writes, “had Princip missed in Sarajevo, would Serbia have ceased to aim at the break-up of the Habsburg Empire, or Austro-Hungary at a breakdown of Serbia, or Russia at retribution against Austria? Would Germany have abandoned Weltpolitik, France hope of avenging Alsace-Lorraine, England command of the seas?” He adds that these “are not credible counterfactuals”.
Anderson is occasionally prolix; on rare occasions, he is even wrong. (For example, Kaiser Wilhelm II was not in his twenties when he dismissed Bismarck; he was 31.) But Disputing Disaster is nonetheless a book of immense learning and interest that should be read by everyone with an interest in the history of the Great War – and it will ensure that a healthy discussion about its origins will go on.
Disputing Disaster by Perry Anderson is published by Verso at £30. To order your copy for £25, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
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