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A review by susanhecht
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark
5.0
It look me months to get all the way through this book, because it wanted to read it carefully, and I found it very rewarding.
The overall thrust of the book is that the outbreak of WWI was not inevitable, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Josef was not merely a pretext for a war everybody (*cough* Germany) wanted to happen. Clark takes Serbian nationalism and irrendentism very seriously, and thinks that Austria-Hungary was probably right to want to punish the Serbs over the assassination. But the Great Powers of Europe, in an era of strengthening alliances (esp. the one between France and Russia), military buildup, and hawkish leadership (all of which were fairly recent occurrences and may well have waned over the next few years) decided it was worth going to war over.
The book goes deep into the weeds of the various people who were involved in decision making in the UK, France, Russia, Germany, Serbia, and Austria-Hungry, a cast of characters (monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, War Ministers, etc.) that changed over the last couple of decades before 1914. There are lots of arguments about colonies and borders within Europe (esp. in the Balkans) which contribute to the conditions of 1914, as well as power struggles inside each country. Laying out these struggles takes a lot of pages, and serves the overall argument that assigning blame for the war's outbreak to any one country or person doesn't make sense--there were a lot of moving parts that could have moved a different direction.
The overall thrust of the book is that the outbreak of WWI was not inevitable, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Josef was not merely a pretext for a war everybody (*cough* Germany) wanted to happen. Clark takes Serbian nationalism and irrendentism very seriously, and thinks that Austria-Hungary was probably right to want to punish the Serbs over the assassination. But the Great Powers of Europe, in an era of strengthening alliances (esp. the one between France and Russia), military buildup, and hawkish leadership (all of which were fairly recent occurrences and may well have waned over the next few years) decided it was worth going to war over.
The book goes deep into the weeds of the various people who were involved in decision making in the UK, France, Russia, Germany, Serbia, and Austria-Hungry, a cast of characters (monarchs, Presidents, Prime Ministers, Foreign Ministers, War Ministers, etc.) that changed over the last couple of decades before 1914. There are lots of arguments about colonies and borders within Europe (esp. in the Balkans) which contribute to the conditions of 1914, as well as power struggles inside each country. Laying out these struggles takes a lot of pages, and serves the overall argument that assigning blame for the war's outbreak to any one country or person doesn't make sense--there were a lot of moving parts that could have moved a different direction.