By Daniel Lazare

In tracing the tortuous path that established historians took in trying to get to the bottom of the war, Perry Anderson doesn’t acknowledge leftwing observers who knew perfectly well what was going on at the time.

Disputing Disaster: A Sextet on the Great War by Perry Anderson. Verso, 400 pages.

Perry Anderson is one of Britain’s most brilliant historians, a penetrating political analyst and a vigorous intellectual combatant. Hence, it’s no surprise that Disputing Disaster, his discussion of the history wars over the origins of World War I, is a lively and fascinating read. But it’s also a puzzle because the real question goes unanswered: why did it take historians so long to discover what others knew from the start?

Anderson discusses dozens of historians but concentrates on just six: Pierre Renouvin, Luigi Albertini, Fritz Fischer, Keith Wilson, Christopher Clark, and Paul Schroeder. One was a Frenchman, another an Italian, and third a German, followed by a Brit, an Aussie, and a Yank. Citizenship is important because interpretation has a way of flowing along national lines, albeit with interesting twists and turns along the way. Renouvin, for example, was born into a comfortable Parisian family in 1893, joined the military at the outbreak of the conflict, and was severely wounded before being invalided out in 1916. While this might have left others thirsting for revenge, he published a historical analysis of the war in 1925 that was calm and judicious. Contrary to French allegations, he exonerated Germany and Austria of charges that they had mapped out war aims before the conflict began. He argued, according to Anderson, that they had “stumbled by miscalculation into conflict … by refusing any solution to Austria’s conflict with Serbia other than force.” They were blind and clumsy, but hardly the satanic figures that Allied propaganda made them out to be.

More than 20 years’ Renouvin’s senior, Albertini was a journalist who took over Milan’s Corriere della Sera and turned it into a pro-war organ as Italian politicians struggled over what to do about the hostilities erupting all around them. Albertini won out when Italy finally declared war on Austria in May 1915, ten months after the shooting began. But his triumph was short-lived because Italy’s disastrous defeat in the Battle of Caporetto left the country reeling and Albertini badly isolated. Desperate for political support, he found it in Benito Mussolini, a man he “disdained … as a plebeian rabble-rouser with a dubious past,” as Anderson puts it. Still, he was a useful ally in combating a rising revolutionary tide. But then, after taking issue with Mussolini’s more extreme methods, Albertini found himself muscled out the Corriere della Sera and cast adrift. He immediately set to work on a massive study on how the war began and why it had ended so badly.

Anderson describes the resultant three volumes as “an unparalleled achievement,” a work that was scrupulous, well researched, and firm. Its conclusion: although Germany and Austria “bore primary responsibility,” as Anderson puts it, blame extended to the other four powers as well, i.e. Russia, France, Britain, and Serbia. All had contributed to a catastrophe that had killed off an entire generation and left Europe a moral and political wreck. “Instead of living in freedom, a series of European countries are oppressed by the most reactionary dictatorships,” Albertini observed mordantly in 1931. “Instead of peace and harmony reigning among nations, bitter conflicts dominate the peoples of Europe, impelling the stronger to armaments and the weaker to talk of disarmament the better to wage war on the stronger.” Everyone was guilty, and everyone was paying the price.

Thirty years later, the atmosphere couldn’t have been more different as gloom gave way to optimism amid the postwar boom. Yet de-Nazification and NATO resulted in a curious chemical reaction in which Germany was somehow required to take the fall. In the 1960s, Fritz Fischer, the third member of Anderson’s sextet, published a series of studies accusing Kaiser Wilhelm II and his military chief of staff, Helmuth von Moltke, of engaging in precisely the sort of pre-war planning that Renouvin had denied, but on an even greater scale. Rather than stumbling blindly, they had drawn up a detailed blueprint for a vast “Mitteleuropa” empire extending from Belgium to Lithuania as well as a “central African colonial empire safeguarded by naval bases and linked to the Near East through the Sudan and Suez.” It was a case of Nazism avant la lettre, an “imperium of grandiose dimensions” that would give Germany “an impregnable position of world economic power.”

So Anderson sums up Fischer’s findings. The great debate over the war’s origins was now back where it started, with Germany as the guilty party and the western allies as wronged innocents. While it may seem odd that West Germany would be so eager to take on sole responsibility, Fischer’s thesis fit in neatly with the ideological needs of an Atlantic alliance whose purpose, in the famous words of Lord Hastings Ismay, NATO’s first general secretary, was to keep “the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” German militarism was the great constant during the entire 1914-45 period because it had to be. The United States was the great liberating force because it had to be from a West German standpoint as well. The country was deeply grateful for Fischer’s services, which is why Anderson says that the tributes “were virtually universal” when he died in 1999.

Should it be a surprise that Serbia struck the match that set off World War I? Photo: Gresham College

But then came a series of muckraking reports revealing that Fischer had been an enthusiastic ultra-rightist from the 1920s on. He had joined the Nazi Party as soon as possible, lectured on “Jewish penetration” of German culture and politics, and wrote that Germany “must win” or else face “a reign of blood” at the hands of America, world Jewry, and the Soviets. After serving one imperial master during the war, he covered up his past so as to better serve another after. The effect was to cast pro-western German liberalism, and Fischer’s role in it, in a very different light.

Keith Wilson, number four in Anderson’s historiographical lineup, is a little-known academic whom he nonetheless credits with sending the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction by zeroing in on British imperialism as the ultimate destabilizing force. The connection may seem distant and round-about. But, since imperial Russia posed the greatest threat to British dominance in South Asia, the best strategy of neutralizing it that the British could come up with was roping Russia into a long-term alliance. The upshot, according to Anderson, was a “Copernican” shift in historical analysis from Germany to Britain, whose eagerness to protect its foreign possessions turned out to have unexpected consequences closer to home.

Number five is Christopher Clark, the Australian historian, now at Cambridge, who hit the jackpot with The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, an international best-seller published to wide acclaim in 2012. Anderson calls The Sleepwalkers “a great work of history,” one that ranges over the length and breadth of European politics with “polymathic ease.” Clark’s perspective from “down under” is especially important because it gives him an advantage in sizing up the conflict as a whole. “Distance of geography and of generation from the scene of the disaster has obviously played a role,” Anderson comments, “…permitting for the first time a level-headed treatment … of all the European powers that took to arms in 1914.”

Still, what stands out about The Sleepwalkers is its focus on Serbia, a country that historians had previously tended to whitewash or dismiss. Not so, Clark says, since it struck the match that set Europe ablaze. Dominated by hard-core ultra-nationalists, Serbia had doubled its territory in a series of Balkan wars that began in 1912 and now aimed to expand even more by detaching its ethnic enclaves from the polyglot Austro-Hungarian empire and assuming control over them. Recognizing that it was too small to do the job alone, the country’s goal was to provoke a showdown with Austria that would induce czarist Russia, Serbia’s traditional protector, to enter the fray. The scheme worked all too well. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, by a handful of Serbian nationalists led Austria to declare war, which led Russia to declare war on Serbia’s side. Unfortunately, it also led other countries to declare war, with the result that little Serbia wound up being crushed in the ensuing melee.

After nearly a century, academic historians had finally achieved a degree of clarity as to why 10 million soldiers had died. Rather than any one empire, it was the fault of the imperial system in general.

The last member of Anderson’s group portrait is a bit of a head-scratcher. A conservative, Paul W. Schroeder had started out as a Lutheran minister but changed career course when a thesis he wrote about U.S.-Japanese relations won a major academic prize. All too predictably, given his support of isolationism, Schroeder argued that the Roosevelt administration had committed “a grave mistake” by backing Japan into a corner and leaving it no choice but to attack. If America had shown more flexibility — by allowing Japan to continue its occupation of China for the time being — Pearl Harbor would not have gone up in flames and the U.S.would have been free to concentrate on finishing off Hitler alone. Once that was out of the way, the U.S. would have then been in a position to demand that Japan withdraw from China too. Three and a half years of hard fighting in both Europe and the Pacific could have been avoided if only Franklin D. Roosevelt had done what Schroeder now decided he should do.

Picking apart such arguments is child’s play. The U.S. couldn’t allow Japan a free hand in China because (a) its reign of terror was exceptionally brutal, (b) it had long regarded China as an American protectorate, and (c) quitting the scene even temporarily would have given the Soviet Union free rein to back Chinese Communists ever more forcefully. Revolution would have arrived even earlier and the China Lobby in Washington would have gone even more berserk. Meanwhile, the Soviets would have been in a position to deal with Japan on their own, an outcome that Washington was determined to avoid. While conspiracy theories about FDR’s supposed foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor are clearly absurd, there is no doubt that the attack came as a relief since it meant that Roosevelt finally had the excuse he needed to enter the war. Indeed, as the neocon historian Robert Kagan notes in his recent book, The Ghost at the Feast, FDR’s greatest fear was that Nazi Germany would not declare war on the U.S. as well. (Hitler finally did so on Dec. 11.) FDR needed to take on Japan first so that America could embark immediately on the long march to global hegemony on both fronts. Schroeder’s contention that it was all an error is an intellectual fantasy that Anderson treats with undue respect.

Still, it’s clear why Schroeder’s writings about World War I would appeal to Anderson. After carving out a career as an expert on 18th and 19th-century European politics, particularly the Congress of Vienna that the Austrian statesman Klemens von Metternich used to impose a general peace after the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, Schroeder was uniquely well suited to explore why the system disintegrated so spectacularly in 1914. He is skilled at showing how each member of the imperial ship of fools played its own special role. But Schroeder is especially good on Britain and its hand-wringing over Russian interference in South Asia. Since Russia was a threat, it had to be courted and appeased. And since Russia was locked in combat with Austria for control of the Balkans, the only option was to let it take the lead.

The effect was to leave Austria isolated, beleaguered, and more dependent on Germany than ever. Unfortunately, Schroeder goes a step further by arguing that Britain could have prevented Austria from lashing out at Serbia because of its role in the Franz Ferdinand assassination if only it had disregarded Russia and extended a helping hand. “Such a policy had worked with Turkey for a long time, and she was far more vulnerable, weak, backward, despised, and dispensable than Austria,” he wrote in 1972. So it could have worked with Austria too.

Serbian socialist Dragiša Lapčević — his warnings about WWI were nothing short of heroic. Photo: Wiki Common

But this is no more realistic than Schroeder’s earlier writings on Japan. As a multi-national federation dominated by a German-speaking minority, Austria was disintegrating under the impact of mounting Balkan nationalism. The more Britain tried to prop it up, the more it risked bogging itself down in a hopeless cause. Schroeder’s escape hatch was nonexistent.

Given this dead end, it is puzzling why Anderson, a one-time Marxist who now describes himself as “an unreconstructed Jacobin,” is so enamored of “a Burkean conservative” like Schroeder. But what’s even more unclear is why, in tracing the tortuous path that established historians took in trying to get to the bottom of the war, he doesn’t acknowledge leftwing observers who knew perfectly well what was going on at the time. Trotsky, for instance, laid out an analysis in The War and the International, a book he published in 1914, that was as astute as anything Christopher Clark had to offer some 98 years later, if not more so.

Even more striking are the Serbian socialists Dragiša Lapčević and Triša Katzlerowitsch, the only members of parliament in all Europe to vote against military funding. “We are being called to war,” Lapčević told his fellow Serbian delegates, “knowing that our government has failed to take the necessary measures to avoid it.” After its victorious war against Turkey in 1912, Serbia had engaged in fratricidal warfare against Bulgaria, suppressed Albanians, and drifted into “slavish dependence on St. Petersburg and the Paris stock exchange.” It had tolerated the intrigues of chauvinist secret societies such as the Black Hand, which were responsible for the assassination and the ensuing crisis. Lapčević reminded Serbs of how Austrian Social Democrats had fought in parliament and the streets in favor of Serbian independence and how they had protested “this very day as one man” against the impending conflict. “It is with pride and with full praise for the proletariat of Austria-Hungary that we Serbian Social Democrats here proclaim that there must be no war between the peoples of Austria-Hungary and the Serbian people.”

This was nothing short of heroic, yet people like Lapčević and Katzlerowitsch do not get so much as a mention in The Sleepwalkers or, for that matter, in Disputing Disaster. The stories historians don’t tell are often more revealing than the ones they do.

Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic and other books about the US Constitution and US policy. He has written for a wide variety of publications including Harper’s and the London Review of Books.