The Sleepwalkers

1) "The First World War was the Third Balkan War before it became the First World War. How was this possible? Conflicts and crises on the south-eastern periphery, where the Ottoman Empire abutted Christian Europe, were nothing new. The European system had always accommodated them without endangering the peace of the continent as a whole. But the last years before 1914 saw fundamental change. In the autumn of 1911, Italy launched a war of conquest on an African province of the Ottoman Empire, triggering a chain of opportunist assaults on Ottoman territories across the Balkans. The system of geopolitical balances that had enabled local conflicts to be contained was swept away. In the aftermath of the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Austria-Hungary faced a new and threatening situation on its south-eastern periphery, while the retreat of Ottoman power raised strategic questions that Russian diplomats and policy-makers found it impossible to ignore. The two continental alliance blocs were drawn deeper into the antipathies of a region that was entering a period of unprecedented volatility. In the process, the conflicts of the Balkan theatre became tightly intertwined with the geopolitics of the European system, creating a set of escalatory mechanisms that would enable a conflict of Balkan inception to engulf the continent within five weeks in the summer of 1914."

2) "In his memoirs, Sazonov later recalled that the German military mission on the Bosphorus had 'forced' Russia to seek a 'concrete agreement' with Britain 'in consciousness of the shared danger' posed by Berlin -- and this of course fits with our retrospective view, which is oriented towards the outbreak of war in 1914. But while there is no doubt that Sazonov dreamt of confronting and containing Germany with the 'greatest alliance known in human history', it is also clear (though this not a matter on wwhich the foreign minister could afford to be forthcoming) that a naval agreement with England held the promise of tethering the world's greatest naval power and holding it back from unwelcome initiatives on the Straits. This inference is reinforced by the Russian protest formally submitted to London in May 1914 at the role British officers were playing in the development of the Turkish navy. For Russia, as for Britain, this was still a world in which there was more than one potential enemy. Beneath the scaffolding of the alliances lurked older imperial rivalries."

3) "This was a play with only male characters -- how important was that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. [...] Such invocations of fin-de-siècle manliness are so ubiquitous in the correspondence and memoranda of these years that it is difficult to localize their impact. Yet they surely reflect a very particular moment in the history of European masculinity. Historians of gender have suggested that around the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, a relatively expansive form of patriarchal identity centred on the satisfaction of appetites (food, sex, commodities) made way for something slimmer, harder and more abstinent. At the same time, competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities -- proletarian and non-white, for example -- accentuated the expression of 'true masculinity' within the elites."

4) "Mobilization schedules, political dissension, the progress of the Sarajevo police enquiry, the need to secure German support -- these were excellent reasons for delaying a military action against Serbia. Not even Conrad was able to offer a credible alternative to his civilian colleagues. And yet, throughout the July Crisis the Austrians would be haunted by the suspicion that it might actually have been better simply to strike at Belgrade without full mobilization and without a declaration of war, in what would universally have been seen as a reflex response to a grave provocation. Why didn't Austria-Hungary simply attack Serbia straight away and be done with it, asked Prime Minister Ion Bratianu of Romania on 24 July, as the crisis entered its critical phase."

5) "Public reactions to the news of war gave the lie to the claim, so often voiced by statesmen, that the hands of the decision-makers were forced by popular opinion. There was, to be sure, no resistance against the call to arms. Almost everywhere men went more or less willingly to their assembly points. Underlying this readiness to serve was not enthusiasm for war as such, but a defensive patriotism, for the aetiology of this conflict was so complex and strange that it allowed soldiers and civilians in all the belligerent states to be confident that theirs was a war of defence, that their countries had been attacked or provoked by a determined enemy, that their respective governments had made every effort to preserve the peace. As the great alliance blocs prepared for war, the intricate chain of events that had sparked the conflagration was swiftly lost from view. 'Nobody seems to remember,' an American diplomat in Brussels noted in his diary on 2 August, 'that a few days ago Serbia was playing a star rôle in this affair. She seems to have faded away behind the scenes.'"