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Review
| Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?, by David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. 368 pages. $26.95, cloth.
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| David Fromkin's study of the origins of the First World War has a clear and decided point of view. Fromkin places the blame for the war squarely on the shoulders of Austria-Hungary and Germany, each of whom feared a neighboring Slavic state. The Hapsburg Empire had its eye on Serbia (recent victor in the two Balkan Wars), while Germany feared Russia, which it perceived as rapidly modernizing. While it is useful to think of the two villains in Fromkin's story as the Germanic states, it is also well to remember that Austria-Hungary's fifty million inhabitants "encompassed a variety of languages, ethnic groups, and climates...[and] comprised eleven or so nations." (24) Even the German. core state, Austria itself, could claim only ten of its twenty-eight millions as German Europeans in the know had begun to refer to the Hapsburg's teetering Empire as the new "sick man of Europe," the designation traditionally applied to the ramshackle Ottoman Empire. As for the Germans, Fromkin draws a clear picture of that still relatively new nation's pessimistic, nearly paranoid strains, and also of its paradoxes, calling it "an advanced country inside a backward governmental structure, broadly humanist yet narrowly militarist." (63) All of Europe saw Germany as the powerful, influential and still-rising nation that she was, the country with the strongest army, most productive economy and the best educated citizenry on the continent. Yet the Germans saw themselves in the decade prior to the war as bound for an inevitable decline of fortune that had already set in. Several of its military leaders (though not those in the still-catching-up-to-Britain navy) opined that if Germany were to avoid the encirclement that was ever her fear, then the war that would make this possible had better come sooner rather than later. The problem remained to find the proper means of beginning such a war, so both states awaited the proper moment with simmering bellicosity. In this preemptive mode of thought, one sees the roots of the postwar German claims of having fought only so as to defend itself, even though the rest of the world saw that Germany's first military action was to march against France through neutral Belgium, following Moltke's adaptations of the famous Schlieffen plan. |
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With this background carefully set, Fromkin's thorough walkthrough of the events of July and August 1914 takes on an air of inevitability. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by a self-styled Serbian "freedom fighter" provided the pretext for war. Colluding and secretive in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, Germany and Austria lied to and manipulated the other European powers. "The German-speaking combine was not seeking justice for the slain Archduke," Fromkin plainly states, "instead it was engaging in a power play intended to alter the balance of power in the Balkans in their favor." (163) There was no illusion that the harshly worded ultimatum delivered by Austria to Serbia would lead to a peaceful way out of conflict. The Hapsburg Empire would feel free to set about crushing Serbia, and Germany would seek to use that trumped up war to its own long-desired ends: a preemptive war to rid itself of the Russian threat. Fromkin argues that there were really two wars that began with near simultaneity, a local war (Austria-Hungary vs. Serbia) and the wider war set in motion by Germany's desire to confront Russia as a step toward maintaining its continental power. The prewar machinations of Germany and Austria worked largely, if sometimes unconsciously, in bellicose concert, but then collided when the fighting began. Each country had expected the other to make its own war aims secondary, but neither did. These intrigues were, then, the first steps toward the tragedy of the Great War, which Hew Strachan has recently taken pains to emphasize truly was the first world war. The Hapsburg Empire, of course, ceased to exist at war's end, and the Germans were left to live out the subsequent nightmare of their own making. (And here one bears in mind a main point of Margaret MacMillan's recent Paris 1919: that decades-old conventional judgments about the postwar peace terms don't hold water. They were not all harsh, nor ruinous.) So much for the preemptive war of the losers, war aims that disrupted a sometimes precarious, but long-held period of European peace. And goodbye to all that nineteenth-century aristocratic diplomacy which had been the means of maintaining that peace. When the Germans and Austrians stopped playing the great game by the established rules, it could never be played again. |
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Europe's Last Summer may fall short of the exceedingly high standard that its author set in Peace to End All Peace, his 1989 study of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, but it shares that book's great strengths, not least its lively readability. As with that study, the present book mostly depends upon a thoughtful synthesis of work already done in the field. Typical of the author's productions, Europe's Last Summer strikes a judicious balance between the deep backgrounding and the telling, immediate detail. Fromkin continues to write books that serious scholars should attend to, but which are also pleasantly accessible to the general reader, including the university student. |
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| Boston University |
Matthew Stewart |
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