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4.16 AVERAGE
4.16 AVERAGE
WW I laid the seeds which eventually led to the catastrophe of WW II. Not that WWI was any less calamity. The Sleepwalkers tries to make the record straight by convincing the readers that Only Germany was not the instigator. There were complex players and policies that led to Aug 1914 and all the parties were in some way responsible. The last quote of the book succinctly and beautifully puts it.
"In this sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of horror they were about to bring into the world".
A must read for anybody interested in World War.
"In this sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of horror they were about to bring into the world".
A must read for anybody interested in World War.
From BBC radio 4:
Historian Christopher Clark tells the story of the crisis that led to the First World War.
Historian Christopher Clark tells the story of the crisis that led to the First World War.
This is a difficult book to rate because it is extremely well-written and researched, but it's also PACKED with minor details that will either greatly interest the reader, or make for a challenging read. I'm in the latter camp; while I learned a lot from Clark's book, the only way I could get through it was by skimming 2/3 of it. I would recommend this to someone who is researching the events that led to WWI, but I would not recommend it to someone looking for an overview of this period in European history.
A compelling and convincing account of the origins of the First World War, and which caused me (and I suspect most readers) to re-think my received assumptions.
Clark's style is excellent, and an example to all writers of similar books. While rich with detail and anecdote, he maintains his focus, always highlighting the relevance to the War's origins. His footnotes are precisely that - meticulously referenced but not an integral part of the text. And he avoids the common trap of overly referring, positively or negatively, to rival accounts of the War's causes, whilst still tackling several, what he believes to be, key common misconceptions.
He also does his best to avoids the bias of hindsight, referring to contemporary records and accounts, which often contrast significantly with the post-War memoirs of those involved.
Clark focuses on the "how", rather than the "why". He doesn't try to apportion guilt for the hostilities, his view being that "the outbreak of war was a tragedy not a crime". And compared to most accounts, this leads him to place much less emphasis on the role of the German empire, and the Kaiser, indeed to the extent that one could use Clark's account to apportion blame, they come out relatively well.
Clark explains in detail the relevant history, the system of international alliances and the key policymakers in the run up to July 1914. For example, he shows that the Russian-French-British alliance was, particularly for the British, mainly driven by extra-European concerns, rather than strategic opposition to Germany's role in Europe (indeed Russia was regarded as a more potent threat to the British Empire, the alliance was designed to contain them). And he carefully explains how policy was made in each of the key nations/empires, explaining the relative roles of the Monarchs, elected leaders and foreign offices - the former typically being the least influential - and discussing in detail the different personalities involved.
Indeed this focus on an account "saturated with agency" is the key to Clark's style. Just as much modern finance theory focuses on the very human behaviour (often irrational in mathematical terms) of economic agents, so Clark's historical method focuses on the political agents involved and how the key historical events in the pre-War period shaped their understanding of and behaviour during the July 1914 crisis.
Clark shows how the War came from an unfortunate coincidence of this particular pattern of alliances and personalities (e.g. the assassination of Franz Ferdinand removed the most dovish of the Austro-Hungarian policymakers - which itself was no coincidence, since it was his very plans to re-balance the Empire to the other key nationalities living there, notably the Croats, that was so threatening to the pan-Serbian nationalist assassins who murdered him).
Crucially he starts his account with the regicide of the Serbian King and Queen in 1903. Bismarck famously remarked that the next major European war would likely be caused by "some damned silly thing in the Balkans". Clark restores the Balkan situation to the centre of his account and shows that the Sarajevo assassinations were much more than simply an excuse for pre-planned German-Austro-Hungarian belligerence.
Clark generally avoids present-day references, but those he does make are telling. He points out the similarities between the Black Hand, whose killing of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne triggered the war, and modern day terrorists. And when discussing the infamous Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, he observes that, whilst being very strongly worded, the demands were significantly weaker than those of the Rambouillet Agreement presented by NATO to Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.
As a penultimate, perhaps controversial, personal thought: on the 100th anniversary of war being declared, politicians (at least in my native England) have been quick to trot out pat phrases claiming the massive sacrifices by those who fought being necessary "to defend our way of life". Clark's account remind us that the War was a tragedy, and that we actually fought to defend state-sponsored terrorism, plus an alliance of pure convenience with two old enemies with very different political systems.
And as a final thought - the title: firstly, it doesn't seem to fit the rest of the book - Clark describes very carefully why the key policymakers acted as they did, so why then call them "sleepwalkers". Secondly, how can you call a book set in and around Austro-Hungary in the late 19th-early 20th Century "The Sleepwalkers" and not make a reference to Hermann Broch?
Clark's style is excellent, and an example to all writers of similar books. While rich with detail and anecdote, he maintains his focus, always highlighting the relevance to the War's origins. His footnotes are precisely that - meticulously referenced but not an integral part of the text. And he avoids the common trap of overly referring, positively or negatively, to rival accounts of the War's causes, whilst still tackling several, what he believes to be, key common misconceptions.
He also does his best to avoids the bias of hindsight, referring to contemporary records and accounts, which often contrast significantly with the post-War memoirs of those involved.
Clark focuses on the "how", rather than the "why". He doesn't try to apportion guilt for the hostilities, his view being that "the outbreak of war was a tragedy not a crime". And compared to most accounts, this leads him to place much less emphasis on the role of the German empire, and the Kaiser, indeed to the extent that one could use Clark's account to apportion blame, they come out relatively well.
Clark explains in detail the relevant history, the system of international alliances and the key policymakers in the run up to July 1914. For example, he shows that the Russian-French-British alliance was, particularly for the British, mainly driven by extra-European concerns, rather than strategic opposition to Germany's role in Europe (indeed Russia was regarded as a more potent threat to the British Empire, the alliance was designed to contain them). And he carefully explains how policy was made in each of the key nations/empires, explaining the relative roles of the Monarchs, elected leaders and foreign offices - the former typically being the least influential - and discussing in detail the different personalities involved.
Indeed this focus on an account "saturated with agency" is the key to Clark's style. Just as much modern finance theory focuses on the very human behaviour (often irrational in mathematical terms) of economic agents, so Clark's historical method focuses on the political agents involved and how the key historical events in the pre-War period shaped their understanding of and behaviour during the July 1914 crisis.
Clark shows how the War came from an unfortunate coincidence of this particular pattern of alliances and personalities (e.g. the assassination of Franz Ferdinand removed the most dovish of the Austro-Hungarian policymakers - which itself was no coincidence, since it was his very plans to re-balance the Empire to the other key nationalities living there, notably the Croats, that was so threatening to the pan-Serbian nationalist assassins who murdered him).
Crucially he starts his account with the regicide of the Serbian King and Queen in 1903. Bismarck famously remarked that the next major European war would likely be caused by "some damned silly thing in the Balkans". Clark restores the Balkan situation to the centre of his account and shows that the Sarajevo assassinations were much more than simply an excuse for pre-planned German-Austro-Hungarian belligerence.
Clark generally avoids present-day references, but those he does make are telling. He points out the similarities between the Black Hand, whose killing of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne triggered the war, and modern day terrorists. And when discussing the infamous Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, he observes that, whilst being very strongly worded, the demands were significantly weaker than those of the Rambouillet Agreement presented by NATO to Serbia during the 1999 Kosovo crisis.
As a penultimate, perhaps controversial, personal thought: on the 100th anniversary of war being declared, politicians (at least in my native England) have been quick to trot out pat phrases claiming the massive sacrifices by those who fought being necessary "to defend our way of life". Clark's account remind us that the War was a tragedy, and that we actually fought to defend state-sponsored terrorism, plus an alliance of pure convenience with two old enemies with very different political systems.
And as a final thought - the title: firstly, it doesn't seem to fit the rest of the book - Clark describes very carefully why the key policymakers acted as they did, so why then call them "sleepwalkers". Secondly, how can you call a book set in and around Austro-Hungary in the late 19th-early 20th Century "The Sleepwalkers" and not make a reference to Hermann Broch?
informative
slow-paced
Filled to the brim with information. Well written and fascinating.
"It was not that the Balkan inception scenario – which was in effect a Serbian inception scenario – drove Europe forwards towards the war that actually happened in 1914, but rather the other way round, that it supplied the conceptual framework within which the crisis was interpreted, once it had broken out." (Location 11475)
So I agree with the New York Times reviewer: there really needed to be a dramatis personae included with this book (there were just too many names in Serbian!).
On the whole, I really appreciated Clark's attempts to not lay blame at the feet of one power or another (although he does have some choice things to say about Serbia's instability and Russia's push towards war), and to see this not as a crime, but a tragedy, and one with no smoking gun. After June 28, ultimately all the major powers were making steady preparations towards war, all the while claiming that the other powers were the ones who could have kept the peace by not doing the exact same thing. It'd be funny if it weren't so depressing.
(By the way, anyone who claims this was a "fast read" is a big fat fibber -- at times, I had to swim through a thick green soup of detail to get to his big-picture point.)
On the whole, I really appreciated Clark's attempts to not lay blame at the feet of one power or another (although he does have some choice things to say about Serbia's instability and Russia's push towards war), and to see this not as a crime, but a tragedy, and one with no smoking gun. After June 28, ultimately all the major powers were making steady preparations towards war, all the while claiming that the other powers were the ones who could have kept the peace by not doing the exact same thing. It'd be funny if it weren't so depressing.
(By the way, anyone who claims this was a "fast read" is a big fat fibber -- at times, I had to swim through a thick green soup of detail to get to his big-picture point.)