‘Disputing Disaster’ by Perry Anderson review

Disputing Disaster is a book about the First World War’s origins and causes, not – as its title suggests – the war itself. It discusses six historians who have written on a century-old debate that has swung from an acceptance of German war guilt (as stated in the Paris Peace Agreement in 1919) to sharing responsibility among all the players. Today the scholarly needle, as in the early 1930s, points more to the latter conclusion than the former.

Perry Anderson’s own position prioritises the systemic origins over the proximate and contingent causes of the July 1914 crisis. He aligns the war’s outbreak with the collapse of the Concert of Europe – confirmed by Austria-Hungary’s decision to abandon a system which had served it well since 1815 – and the emergence of ‘new’ imperialism after 1885. Austria-Hungary was not party to this late flowering of empire and its use of war overseas, neither was Germany, but the Entente powers of Britain, France, Russia, and, ultimately, Italy were, with consequences which from 1909 were visited on Europe via the Balkans. Perversely, the historian of Anderson’s six who best encapsulates this argument is not known primarily for his work on the Great War. In his magisterial book on European international relations between 1763 and 1848 Paul Schroeder identified the moment in 1815 when the great powers (and Schroeder argued lesser ones too, though Anderson disagrees), fearing that war might trigger revolution, prioritised peace and so created an international order.

Anderson’s sextet is so diverse, and his treatment of each historian so different, that it is hard to find consistency between them. The repeated refrains – that the July crisis is itself an insufficient explanation for the war, that the long-term origins matter as much as the causes – have been the stuff of debate since the 1920s when German historians responded to the war guilt charge by releasing documents that appeared to situate the beginning of the story with Germany’s unification in 1871.

To cover this opening period, Anderson begins with Pierre Renouvin, a historian who, as well as being himself a mutilé de guerre, occupied the high ground in French scholarship on the war until his death in 1974. The chapter puts Renouvin in context, by incorporating not just his French contemporaries but also the Americans Sidney Fay and Bernadotte Schmitt who, in 1928 and 1930, wrote the first major works addressing the war’s causes in comparative terms. Fay argued that the system had failed and that responsibility was therefore shared. Renouvin disagreed: Germany was guilty because of its decisions in 1914. Anderson’s discussion of this historiographical phase is rewarding but it will be hard going for the lay reader: it takes unfamiliar names for granted and gives no account of the war’s outbreak. That does not come until the chapter on Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers.

Luigi Albertini, the author of the three-volume standard work on July 1914, follows Renouvin. Anderson provides a full account of the failure of Italian liberalism before and after the war to explain Albertini’s role, as the editor of the Corriere della Sera, in supporting the war and Mussolini’s rise to power. Bizarrely, he says less about Albertini’s book, the product of his enforced retirement after 1925, or its eventual impact after the Second World War.

Anderson’s concern with the inherent conservatism of both Renouvin and Albertini finds its fullest flowering in his third case study. Fritz Fischer’s two books on German aims during and before the war, published in 1961 and 1969, reignited the debate around German war guilt. They did so by discounting the actions of the other powers and by using fresh evidence in ways that were selective. Anderson is inclined to forgive Fischer because in the process he contributed to Germany’s wider liberalisation. However, he is less interested in the furore Fischer provoked (and in who supported him) than in Fischer’s credentials as a Nazi and the reasons he changed his political views after the Second World War.

Keith Wilson, Anderson’s fourth subject, never published his doctoral thesis and is best known for a brief book of essays, The Policy of the Entente, which for all their individual excellence lack an overarching argument and focus entirely on Britain. Although Anderson makes the case for Wilson as a scholar with a broader international perspective, the chapter fails to locate Wilson’s output sufficiently in the work of others. Finally we come to Clark and Schroeder. Their chapters are the longest, largely because they are the most discursive: that on Clark gives equal treatment to his most recent book, on the 1848 revolutions; that on Schroeder devotes space to his critique of US foreign policy after 9/11 (another moment when a great power ruptured the order on which it relied).

They have two other features in common. Both historians took the focus away from Germany to Austria-Hungary and the Balkans. In this they were anticipated by a historian whom Anderson does not mention. Samuel Williamson’s first book, on Anglo-French strategic relations between 1904 and 1914, published in 1969, addressed issues directly relevant to the discussion of Keith Wilson, but it was his book on Austria-Hungary and the war’s origins which most effectively shifted the focus of the debate away from Fischer’s fixation with Germany. The dual monarchy was the first power to decide on war and it did so because the current system no longer guaranteed its security in the Balkans. Williamson’s absence from Disputing Disaster is regrettable.

Both Clark and Schroeder also sought to make what they wrote relevant to international relations theory. Clark did so in ways which, as Anderson says, were anachronistic. Schroeder’s engagement with theory was much more sophisticated and sustained. The irony is that neither has had much impact on international relations theory, which takes the outbreak of the First World War as a case study of war’s origins but remains stubbornly wedded to the Fischer thesis. The 1914 debate has become a case study of disciplinary division, not fusion.

• Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War
  Perry Anderson
  Verso, 400pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Hew Strachan is Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews.