Question Of War Guilt Research Articles

The “One Guilty Nation” Myth: Edith Durham, R.W. Seton-Watson and a Footnote in the History of the Outbreak of the First World War

ABSTRACT This paper will investigate the development of the War Guilt Question in interwar Europe through an examination of the dispute between two of Britain’s leading experts on the Balkans, Mary Edith Durham and R.W. Seton-Watson. The locus of their disagreement centred on the question of Serbian complicity in the plot to murder Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, and the subsequent debate over their responsibility for the outbreak of War. The dispute was prompted by revelations published by Ljuba Jovanović, former Serb Minister of Public Instruction. The debate over the Serb complicity in the Sarajevo crime, fundamentally shifted the debate over responsibility for the failure of peace in 1914, moving the focus away from Berlin, back to the Balkans.

The War Guilt Question: A Note on Politics and Historiography in the Weimar Republic

The War Guilt Question: A Note on Politics and Historiography in the Weimar Republic

ヴァイマル初期の戦争責任問題 -ドイツ外務省の対応を中心に-:1920年代欧州の国際関係

ヴァイマル初期の戦争責任問題 -ドイツ外務省の対応を中心に-:1920年代欧州の国際関係

The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus

Introduction Part 1: The question of war guilt during the war at the Versailles peace negotiations Part 2: Revisionist and anti- revisionists Part 3: The origins of the war and the question of continuity in German History Part 4: Post - Fischer consensus and continuing Debates Conclusion Bibliography Index

The Repressed Defeat. Political Public and the Question of War Guilt in the Weimar Republic

The Repressed Defeat. Political Public and the Question of War Guilt in the Weimar Republic

Allied diplomacy in the Second World War

Is there such a subject? The study of Allied diplomacy has been slow to establish itself, partly because the bulk of the American and British records have only recently become available, but mainly because of the debate about the origins of the Cold War – the contemporary equivalent of the war-guilt question. Because of the paucity of Soviet material it has in practice turned into an argument about American policy and has not, of course, been confined to the wartime period. The search for origins, turning-points and causes employs the advantage of hindsight in deciding what is relevant. It, therefore, tends to overlook the side issues, dead ends and the short-term nature of much wartime diplomacy. Nobody would deny the importance of the origins of the Cold War or of wartime American-Soviet relations. Yet it is misleading to see Allied diplomacy solely in terms of this one theme. There is room for an attempt to examine some other wartime issues and to indicate topics worthy of further exploration. In the rest of this article, therefore, the Cold War will as far as possible be ignored.

History as Propaganda: the German Foreign Office and the “Enlightenment” of American Historians on the War Guilt Question, 1930-1933

History as Propaganda: the German Foreign Office and the “Enlightenment” of American Historians on the War Guilt Question, 1930-1933

From Fort Sumter to Poland: The Question of War Guilt

It is now more than a hundred years since the first shot was fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, precipitating four years of terrible conflict. Since then, the question of who was responsible for the opening salvo of the Civil War has continued to occupy the attention of publicists, polemicists, politicians, and scholars.

War Guilt in the History of Thucydides

The fact that the question of war guilt has frequently followed in the wake of major wars has contributed little, if anything, to a clarification of the concept. The perplexing difficulties raised by it are amply illustrated by the unsuccessful attempts, made periodically at various ages and on various levels of civilization, to arrive at criteria permitting a differentiation between the bellum justum and the bellum injustum. States, unlike individuals, are not confronted with simple choices between obeying or violating the law. Determination of the initial violation of existing covenants sheds little, if any, light on the responsibility for commencing war. Nor is such responsibility necessarily incurred by launching the first attack. Nothing could be more futile than to equate this act with aggressive and unjust war. The initial attack may be a legitimate response to an existing situation, and a war of aggression, as St. Augustine already pointed out, a just war; nor is there any reason to assume that the party forced into the defensive is invariably innocent. If war guilt is to be more than a specious pretense for inflicting punishment upon the vanquished, it can be measured only in terms of the alternatives available to a state, and the choice has to be viewed in the light of historical, ethical, and political factors. The assessment of such guilt is a problem of extraordinary complexity. To confine it to formal legal considerations would result not only in gross injustice, but would tend to perpetuate international tensions.

The War-Guilt Question and American Disillusionment, 1918-1928

The War-Guilt Question and American Disillusionment, 1918-1928

The Public Significance of the War-Guilt Question

The Public Significance of the War-Guilt Question

Reflections on the Question of War Guilt

Reflections on the Question of War Guilt