Applying Alex Broadbent’s Reverse Counterfactual Theory to the Outbreak of World War I: A Novel Causal Analysis

is the pacy, sensitive and formidably argued history of the causes of the First World War, from acclaimed historian and author Christopher Clark. book was the winner of the Financial Times Books of the Year 2014. It was a winners of Sunday Times and Independent Books of the Year 2012. book was also the winner of the Los Angeles Times History Book Prize 2014. The moments that it took Gavrilo Princip to step forward to the stalled car and shoot dead Franz Ferdinand and his wife were perhaps the most fateful of the modern era. An act of terrorism of staggering efficiency, it fulfilled its every aim: it would liberate Bosnia from Habsburg rule and it created a powerful new Serbia, but it also brought down four great empires, killed millions of men and destroyed a civilization. What made a seemingly prosperous and complacent Europe so vulnerable to the impact of this assassination? The Sleepwalkers Christopher retells the story of the outbreak of the First World War and its causes. Above all, it shows how the failure to understand the seriousness of the chaotic, near genocidal fighting in the Balkans would drag Europe into catastrophe. Reviews: Formidable...one of the most impressive and stimulating studies of the period ever published. (Max Hastings, Sunday Times). Easily the best book ever written on the subject...A work of rare beauty that combines meticulous research with sensitive analysis and elegant prose. The enormous weight of its quality inspires amazement and awe...Academics should take note: Good history can still be a good story. (Washington Post).A lovingly researched work of the highest It is hard to believe we will ever see a better narrative of what was perhaps the biggest collective blunder in the history of international relations. (Niall Ferguson). [Reading The Sleepwalkers], it is as if a light had been turned on a half-darkened stage of shadowy characters cursing among themselves without reason...[Clark] demolishes the standard view...The brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue...In conception, steely scholarship and piercing insights, his book is a masterpiece. (Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review). Impeccably researched, provocatively argued and elegantly written...a model of scholarship. (Sunday Times Books of the Year). Superb...effectively consigns the old historical consensus to the bin...It's not often that one has the privilege of reading a book that reforges our understanding of one of the seminal events of world history. (Mail Online). A monumental new volume...Revelatory, even revolutionary...Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable. (Boston Globe). Superb...One of the great mysteries of history is how Europe's great powers could have stumbled into World War I...This is the single best book I have read on this important topic. (Fareed Zakaria). A meticulously researched, superbly organized, and handsomely written account Military History is a masterly historian...His account vividly reconstructs key decision points while deftly sketching the context driving them...A magisterial work. (Wall Street Journal). This compelling examination of the causes of World War I deserves to become the new standard one-volume account of that contentious subject. (Foreign Affairs). A brilliant contribution. (Times Higher Education). Clark is fully alive to the challenges of the subject...He provides vivid portraits of leading figures...[He] also gives a rich sense of what contemporaries believed was at stake in the crises leading up to the war. (Irish Times). In recent decades, many analysts had tended to put most blame for the disaster [of the First World War] on Germany. strongly renews an older interpretation which sees the statesmen of many countries as blundering blindly together into war. (Stephen Howe, Independent Books of the Year). About the author: Christopher is Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of The Politics of Conversion, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Iron Kingdom. He is widely praised around the world, Iron Kingdom became a major bestseller. He has been awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Two statements which generations of students have been invited to discuss as essay questions encapsulate the most popular and contradictory explanations of the causes of World War II: ‘The origins of World War II lie in the Versailles Settlement’ and ‘The causes of the Second World War can be summed up in one word, Hitler’. A third thesis, which has recently gained ground, is that the First and Second World wars were inextricably linked with a common cause, the upsetting of the balance of power of Europe by the emergence of a united Germany with expansionist ambitions.

Dieter Groh’s article on the Sonderweg debate from which these passages are taken examines the arguments for and against the thesis. While accepting the criticisms of Blackboum and Eley, he suggests that they have been more successful in undermining a pre-existing explanatory model than they have been in offering a new one.Where the history of West Germany is concerned, the positive image of the Sonderweg disappeared once and for all in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the widening of the historiographical perspective resulting from the ‘Fischer controversy’. This controversy was sparked off by the work carried out by Fritz Fischer, a historian at Hamburg University; since 1958 he had been trying with his students to prove empirically the overwhelming culpability of the German Empire in triggering the First World War. The debate first used the traditional methods of narrative history; but soon moved away, as regards both content and method, from its immediate purpose. The history of the Second Reich in all its aspects, above all its social and economic history, became the number one theme of historiography in the German Federal Republic.

For today's generation, the First World War is an event dating back one hundred years. After the Second World War, the First World War nearly disappeared from Austrian historiography, especially in the university sphere. The Fischer controversy which became a controversial issue in the 1960s in the Federal Republic of Germany caused hardly any reaction. The combination of history in scenic surroundings and intellectual engagement with the same topic in the museum became a tourist attraction before cultural tourism had been invented. Since the late 1980s and from the 1990s onwards the impulses of the emerging new military history inspired research on the First World War and broadened the topics and the methods employed towards a history of everyday life, the history of mentality and women's history. The most recent approach is that of cultural history. Keywords: Austria; cultural legacy; cultural tourism; European Heritage; Germany; Slovenia

In the autumn of 1914 the German Foreign Office launched a sweeping programme of global insurrection, which created networks of agents and information reaching from Berlin to Tehran, Calcutta and San Francisco. Yet Germany's pioneering role in instigating ‘revolutionary subversion' during the First World War has to date not been fully explored. In Germany's Aims in the First World War, Fritz Fischer placed insurrection at the centre of his study of war aims and strategies, yet what he called the ‘revolution programme' was quickly sidelined as a topic during the early years of the Fischer controversy. This article explores this absence. It analyses the historiographical place of the revolution programme in the Fischer controversy and argues for a general re-evaluation of Fischer's work in order to raise questions about how Germany's Aims could contribute to a ‘global turn' in the exploration of German actions in the First World War.

The article offers an overview of modern historical data on the origins, causes of World War II, the decisive role of the USSR in its victorious end, and also records the main results and lessons of World War II.Hitler's Germany was the main cause of World War II. Nazism, racial theory, mixed with far-reaching geopolitical designs, became the combustible mixture that ignited the fire of glob­al conflict. The war with the Soviet Union was planned to be waged with particular cruelty.The preconditions for the outbreak of World War II were the humiliating provisions of the Versailles Peace Treaty for the German people, as well as the attitude of the "Western de­mocracies" to Russia after 1917 and the Soviet Union as an outcast of world development. Great Britain, France, the United States chose for themselves a policy of ignoring Moscow's interests, they were more likely to cooperate with Hitler's Germany than with Soviet Russia. It was the "Munich Agreement" that became the point of no return to the beginning of the Second World War. Under these conditions, for the USSR, its own security and the conclusion of a non-aggression pact with Germany began to come to the fore, defining the "spheres of interests" of the parties in order to limit the advance of German troops towards the Soviet borders in the event of German aggression against Poland. The non-aggression pact gave the USSR just under two years to rebuild the army and consolidate its defensive potential and pushed the Soviet borders hundreds of kilometers westward. The signing of the Pact was preceded by the failure in August 1939 of the negotiations between the military mis­sions of Britain, France and the USSR, although Moscow took the Anglo-French-Soviet nego­tiations with all seriousness.The huge losses of the USSR in the summer of 1941 are explained by the following circum­stances: before the war, a large-scale modernization of the Red Army was launched, a gradu­ate of a military school did not have sufficient experience in managing an entrusted unit by June 22, 1941; the Red Army was going to bleed the enemy in border battles, stop it with short counterattacks by covering units, carry out defensive operations, and then strike a de­cisive blow into the depths of the enemy's territory, so the importance of a multi-echeloned long-term defense in 1941 was underestimated by the command of the Red Army and it was not ready for it; significant groupings of the Western Special Military District were drawn into potential salients, which was used by the Germans at the initial stage of the war; Stalin's fear of provoking Hitler to start a war led to slowness in making the most urgent and necessary decisions to bring troops to combat readiness.The Allies delayed the opening of the second front for an unreasonably long time. They, of course, achieved outstanding success in the landing operation in France, however, the en­emy's losses in only one Soviet strategic operation in the summer of 1944 ("Bagration") are not inferior, and even exceed, the enemy’s losses on the second front. One of the goals of "Bagration" was to help the Allies.Soviet soldiers liberated Europe at the cost of their lives. At the same time, Moscow could not afford to re-establish a cordon sanitaire around its borders after the war, so that anti- Soviet forces would come to power in the border states. The United States and Great Britain took all measures available to them to quickly remove from the governments of Italy, France and other Western states all the left-wing forces that in 1944-1945 had a serious impact on the politics of their countries.

Book Reviews

Miks demokraatia Soomet ei päästnud? Ühendkuningriigi-Soome sõda ja demokraatliku rahu teooria [Why did democracy not save Finland? The war between the United Kingdom and Finland, and the democratic peace proposition

PurposeWe aim to recapitulate the rapid development of head and neck radiotherapy in the context of otorhinolaryngology (ORL) medicine starting 125 years ago. This is put into context with the unsuccessful treatment of the laryngeal cancer (LC) of the German emperor Frederick III and its historical consequences.MethodsThe three-step process consisted in the analysis of (1) historical sources of the development of ORL radiotherapy from the discovery of x‑rays and radioactivity until World War I, (2) course and treatment of Frederick’s III LC, (3) political context with a special focus on the escalation towards World War I. Pertinent historical illustrations of technical developments of radiotherapy were summarized in a video.ResultsORL radiotherapy initiated on 03 February 1896, only 65 days after the discovery of X‑rays. By 1914, organ-sparing LC radiotherapy was established with a predominance of curietherapy over roentgentherapy. Correct diagnosis of Frederick III’s primarily radiocurable cT1a glottic LC was delayed by one year, which resulted in advancement to a fatal pT4 pN1 Mx tumour stage. Historically, his successor, William II, was assumed to have contributed to the causes of World War I.ConclusionORL radiotherapy came only eight years late to treat Frederick III who might have impeded World War I. This illustrates the potential impact of modern curative radiotherapy on the future course of public life beyond the personal fate of the patient himself.

The article focuses on the Austrian reaction to Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht in the media and in academia. Although Vienna was host to the International Congress of Historical Sciences in 1965, one of the most prominent events in the unfolding of the Fischer controversy, Austrian historians by and large ignored the questions raised by Fischer. That Germany, not the Habsburg monarchy took centre stage in the new consensus on the outbreak of the First World War, slowly emerging in German historiography, was rather convenient. Only Fritz Fellner, an outsider to Austria's conservative scholarly community, asked for further analysis of Austria-Hungary’s role in 1914.

Berger, Stefan. The Search for Normality: National Identity and Historical Consciousness in Germany since 1800. Providence: Berghahn. 1997. 307 pp. $59.95 This is a rich and informative analysis of the obsession of German historians with the nineteenth-century concept of nation as the guidepost for their professional work and identity. The inclusion of in the title is somewhat misleading: the book is not a treatise on the search for social and cultural normality that has been a preoccupation in twentiethcentury German society and is beginning to be studied as an important clue to the debate about modernization in this country. Instead Berger defines normality as the state of grace to which nineteenth-century historians such as Treitschke elevated their idea of the nation both as the telos of German history and as the rationale of their professional identity, providing a powerful scenario for twentieth-century German historians in their quest for relevance. In this scenario, the year 1945 and the subsequent division of Germany into two states represent the nadir of a nationally conceived historiography while the unification of 1990 allows the reinstatement of traditional conceptions of the of a unified German nation. Berger is primarily concerned with the developments in the West German academy since 1945, with valuable insights and an excellent chapter (7) on the fights over the history and historiography of the GDR, the second German dictatorship. Contrary to the volume's title, national identity and historical consciousness in Germany are not analyzed since 1800 but rather since 1945, with short outlooks on imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany. Berger makes no bones about his sympathies with the liberal Left in their critique of the national paradigm of the German historical profession which was hardly broken by the impact and aftermath of National Socialism. He assails German historians in their insistence on the supreme relevance of the nation, pointing to the fact that nation is a constructed rather than an organically or naturally grown unit of social bonding. The historian, instead of propagating and extending the myths of nation and nationalism, should deconstruct them in order to overcome the nationalist obsession that contributed so much to the human misery of the twentieth century. Of course, applying insights from recent research on nationalism risks fostering unhistorical perceptions of historical developments. However, with his focus on post-1945 historians, Berger can draw on the obvious necessity to rethink the national paradigm after its terrible misuse under Hitler. Berger demonstrates how little historians, in the shadow of Gerhard Ritter and Friedrich Meinecke, re-conceptualized their narrative of the German nation after World War II. He discusses with good arguments how the Fischer controversy in the 1960s-about Germany's responsibility for World War I-triggered a rethinking of the national narrative for which the development of quantifiable social history, lead by Hans-Ulrich Wehler and the Bielefeld School, provided new scholarly impulses. It is not exactly a secret that the profession of history in Germany, despite its great scholarly tradition, has tended to turn into an academic parasite of political nationalism. …

This article examines Soviet and post-Soviet historiography on the origins of the Great War, paying special attention to the reverberations of western historiographical disputes in the Soviet Union and Russia. The author argues that Fischer’s thesis was mostly uncontroversial in Russia. Most Soviet historians were predisposed to view his stress on imperialism (and German imperialism in particular) in a favorable way. Later Russian historians have also mainly agreed with Fischer, though by now the controversy is far enough in the past that few of them refer to him directly in their works. Instead, current Russian historians largely seek to place their works both within the context of the Soviet historiography and with contemporary works in Europe and the United States.

Nearly twenty years have now passed since Fritz Fischer enunciated, as little more than an aside in his dense tome on German aims in the First World War, a thesis about German responsibility for the outbreak of the war which Bernadotte Schmitt and Luigi Albertini had defended much more thoroughly and effectively decades earlier. The controversy sparked by Fischer's violation of what had become a taboo in West German historical circles has, since the heat began to yield to light, produced a host of fruitful new inquiries into the motives and methods of Imperial Germany's diplomacy prior to August 1 9 14, as well as into the structure of government and society in the Empire. Of late, moreover, the Fischer controversy has shown signs of broadening into a debate over the character of German foreign policy throughout the first half of this century. In this more general discussion, one repeatedly encounters the term 'continuity/ Widely, if not universally, held among younger West German historians is the view that the Third Reich represented the continuation, under other auspices, of the aggressive, reckless, expansionistic policies pursued by Imperial Germany. According to some German historians, the Weimar period, even - or especially - during the six years when the republic's foreign policy was directed by Gustav Stresemann, also fits into this politically pathological pattern. Fritz Fischer himself gave impetus to this interpretation of Stresemann. Employing phrases drawn from the vocabulary of National Socialism, he attributed to Stresemann the intention of imposing German dominance on eastern Europe and creating a 'grossdeutscher Stoat' which would encompass not only German Austria but also peoples of other nationalities. To be sure, Fischer qualified these remarks by stating that Stresemann hoped to achieve his aims without war.1 Less cautious was Fischer's stu

The seventy-fifth birthday of Fritz Fischer, the Hamburg historian, provides a welcome opportunity to recall his studies in educational history in the 1930s. The Fischer controversy, which has continued to the present day, is linked with his later significant works on the role of the German Empire before and during the First World War. To a certain extent Fischer went the opposite way to Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954), who turned to research in the history of the humanities after political and military historical studies. Fischer's departure from research in educational history during the 1940s broke a line of development in writings in this field from Dilthey, Paulsen, and Troeltsch to Spranger, under whom Fischer had studied.

Experts consider how the lessons of World War I can help prevent U.S.–China conflict. A century ago, Europe's diplomats mismanaged the crisis triggered by the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and the continent plunged into World War I, which killed millions, toppled dynasties, and destroyed empires. Today, as the hundredth anniversary of the Great War prompts renewed debate about the war's causes, scholars and policy experts are also considering the parallels between the present international system and the world of 1914. Are China and the United States fated to follow in the footsteps of previous great power rivals? Will today's alliances drag countries into tomorrow's wars? Can leaders manage power relationships peacefully? Or will East Asia's territorial and maritime disputes trigger a larger conflict, just as rivalries in the Balkans did in 1914? In The Next Great War?, experts reconsider the causes of World War I and explore whether the great powers of the twenty-first century can avoid the mistakes of Europe's statesmen in 1914 and prevent another catastrophic conflict. They find differences as well as similarities between today's world and the world of 1914—but conclude that only a deep understanding of those differences and early action to bring great powers together will likely enable the United States and China to avoid a great war. Contributors Alan Alexandroff, Graham Allison, Richard N. Cooper, Charles S. Maier, Steven E. Miller, Joseph S. Nye Jr., T. G. Otte, David K. Richards, Richard N. Rosecrance, Kevin Rudd, Jack Snyder, Etel Solingen, Arthur A. Stein, Stephen Van Evera