Turning Points: Margaret MacMillan Talks About ‘The War That Ended Peace’
By JOHN WILLIAMS
Publishers this year got the jump on commemorating the centenary of World War I, offering many books about the period by leading historians. “The War That Ended Peace” by Margaret MacMillan examines the relations among European countries in the relatively calmer years leading up to 1914. In The New York Times Book Review, Richard Aldous wrote that Ms. MacMillan “neatly recounts the events that led to battle” and that her “portraits of the men who took Europe to war are superb.”
In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. MacMillan discussed the turning points that led to war, Germany’s role in the outbreak of armed conflict and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
Q.
Several times you emphasize the “growing importance of public opinion” in the politics of the early 20th century. What role did it play, and why was public opinion a different force than it had been previously?
A.
Public opinion pushed leaders in certain directions and limited their options. Until the 19th century, statesmen and politicians could make decisions without worrying about what others, apart from their own very small circles, thought. The spread of literacy and mass communications — the most popular newspaper in Moscow was selling more than 800,000 copies a day before 1914 — meant that a much larger public was well-informed and engaged.
Public opinion also became a factor because it was more organized and articulate. In addition to the spread of constitutional government, the extension of the franchise meant that governments, even in autocracies like Russia, had to worry about keeping support and winning the next elections.
Q.
Most refutations of the “great man theory” of history downplay individuals to focus on social forces. And while you certainly do that, there’s also a pattern in the book of leaders who make bad decisions. How much would you attribute the start of the war to poor leadership as opposed to larger trends?
A.
I would say it is both. You can’t understand the leaders without understanding their world and its ideas, values and prejudices. For example, Social Darwinist ideas, derived — wrongly, as we now know — from evolutionary biology, encouraged Europeans to assume that nations were separate species, just as in the natural world, engaged in an unending struggle for survival. If you think that, then you might well conclude, and many did, that war was both inevitable and salutary.
On the other hand, those leaders who had to make the great choices were human beings with their own characteristics and emotions. The German Chancellor had just lost his beloved wife in the summer of 1914. Did this make him more pessimistic and less likely to resist the calls for war? So I would say individuals are very important at particular moments.
Q.
You write in the introduction that your book “traces Europe’s path to 1914 and picks out those turning points when its options narrowed.” There were many of those turning points, but does one stand out to you as the most fateful?
A.
If I have to choose one decision in those fateful days after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, I think the most dangerous was Austria-Hungary’s determining it would destroy Serbia once and for all, even at the risk of bringing Russia in to defend Serbia. In Vienna they blamed the Serbian government for the assassination of their heir to the throne. Beyond that, though, the Austrian elites saw the existence of the Serbian state as a magnet for Austria-Hungary’s own Serbs and the Croats and Slovenes as well, and therefore a threat to the very survival of what was an increasingly rickety empire.
Austria-Hungary might still have paused if Germany, as it had done before, had urged caution. This time, however, the German government decided it would support its ally, come what may. So if I am allowed a second turning point, it is the so-called blank check Germany issued to Austria-Hungary on July 5. A month later Europe was at war.
Q.
Are there any historical figures that surprised you in their influence and who ended up playing a larger role in the book than you thought they would?
A.
Franz Ferdinand’s death was the trigger for the war, but I had never thought about him as a human being and what it meant that he had disappeared from the scene. He was not a particularly nice man — reactionary and anti-Semitic — but he was sensible when it came to foreign affairs. In previous crises in the Balkans he had resisted the cries for war from the generals and warned that an attempt to destroy Serbia might well lead to a wider war, which would destroy Austria-Hungary. In July 1914, the lonely old emperor had no one close to him to help him stand up to the hawks.
Q.
How would you summarize the current conventional wisdom about Germany’s role in starting the war? And how does what you write in this book differ from the conventional wisdom?
A.
There is no current conventional wisdom on Germany, which is why the debate remains so interesting and lively. Opinion has swung back and forth over the past century. At the end of the war, Allied opinion was that the war had been Germany’s fault, but doubts almost immediately began to creep in. The Germans themselves, most of whom felt the war was not their fault, selectively released documents and encouraged research which seemed to show that everyone was to blame, even that the war may have been an accident. In the late 1920s and 1930s that view came to be widely accepted as well in the English-speaking countries such as Britain and the United States.
After the Second World War, however, a younger generation of German historians led by Fritz Fischer went back into the archives and emerged with the conviction that the German leadership, including the military, had actively worked for a war of conquest. The pendulum has since swung back a bit with newer historians arguing that, while German policies were often reckless, those of the other powers had to be taken into account as well.
Today we are no closer to a consensus. Some recent studies have singled out Russia and France for forming a military alliance which threatened Germany, while others put blame on Britain for not making its position clearer when the crisis started. The arguments will go on and I don’t think they are going to end any time soon.
What I can say about my own contribution to the debate is that I ask a different sort of question: Why did the peace fail? Europe had enjoyed an unprecedented period of general peace between 1815 and 1914, and there were strong forces in favor of maintaining that. There was a big international peace movement and governments were getting increasingly used to the idea of settling disputes in peaceful ways. Of the more than 300 international arbitrations during the century, more than half occurred after 1890. I don’t think war was inevitable, even though we can look back and see many reasons why it eventually happened.
Q.
In “Paris 1919,” you wrote about the aftermath of the war, and here you’ve written about the lead-up to it. Do you have plans or a desire to write about the years of the war itself?
A.
I sometimes think about it, but my recent book is very long and took up a good deal of my life for the past few years. So at the moment my ambition is to write something very short.