Untangling the origins of WWI

To the citizens of the Western world in the vibrant years of a new century, war seemed unlikely. The Great Powers had been at peace for nearly 50 years.

“It was a time of free capital flows and free movements of people and goods. Economic and financial intermingling and interdependence were among the powerful trends that made it seem that warfare among the major European powers had become impractical — and, indeed, obsolete,” writes David Fromkin in “Europe’s Last Summer.”

One contemporary believed that it was “a period of exceptional calm,” of optimism and a sunny belief that the best of all possible worlds would only become better. Science and industry, wealth, knowledge and power “exceeded any civilization that ever had existed,” writes Mr. Fromkin, professor of international relations, history and law at Boston University and the author of among other books the splendid “In the Time of the Americans.”

Then on June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princips assassinated Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo. The Hapsburg archduke was the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire. In little more than a month, the young Bosnian Serb’s bomb ignited a war that would spread across the planet, with a loss of life and destruction that was beyond anything before seen.

Such is the one-dimensional explanation of the beginning of “the Great War.”

But it was not so at all, contends Mr. Fromkin. Below the new century’s surface placidity, in fact as its political and military elites recognized, Europe was in the grip of an unprecedented arms race, conspicuously the intense naval competition between Germany and Great Britain.

“[I]nternally the powers were victims of violent social, industrial, and political strife; and [military] general staffs chattered constantly, not about whether there would be a war, but where and when.” Contends Mr. Fromkin, “European civilization was, in fact, breaking down even before war destroyed it.”

In his compelling account of that last summer, Mr. Fromkin notes that much of the precise knowledge of why World War I began has been prised out of the dried leaves of history since the 1960s. After the war, many records were altered, falsified or suppressed, or, during World War II, destroyed. In recent decades, however, historians — particularly several Germans — have winkled out more coherent evidences of accountability.

In a panoramic account of the summer before the cataclysm, Mr. Fromkin lays out his case like a lawyer assembling a brief — with clarity and flavor.

Central Europe in the early years of the 20th century was a stew of nationalism, spiced by nihilists, anarchists, socialists and other fringe groups in the political underground. Serbs, Croats, Czechs and others plotted to disrupt and destroy the Austro-Hungarian empire.

What Vienna was attempting to rule, in the words of one Hapsburg statesman, were “eight nations, seventeen countries, twenty parliamentary groups, twenty-seven parties.” Not to mention, adds Mr. Fromkin, a spectrum of peoples and religions.

This validates the sardonic observation that the Balkans produce more history than can be consumed locally. There is, however, a wider canvas.

The Great Powers were grouped in two major alliances: Britain, France and Russia, and, on the other side, a Germany terrified of “encirclement,” with half-hearted support from Austria-Hungary and Italy.

Kaiser Wilhelm, the grandson of Queen Victoria, was far from the sharpest sword in Germany’s scabbard. He had reversed Otto von Bismarck’s policy of allying with both Austria and Russia to maintain peace between them. “Instead, Germany sided with Austria against Russia in the struggle to control the Balkans, which encouraged Austria to follow a dangerously bellicose policy that seemed likely to provoke an eventual Russian response,” writes Mr. Fromkin.

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