July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914 by T. G. Otte (review)

Abstract

The thought of war in Europe in early 1914 was farfetched. The decades that preceded it were defined by vast growth in material and commercial wealth across the continent, unprecedented economic interconnectivity, and relative calm among the Great Powers that dictated the trajectory of Europe’s future. “Such moments of worry flew away like cobwebs in the wind,” the famous Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig reflected years later. “Although, every now and then, we thought of war, it was no different than contemplating death — as something that was possible but presumably far away.” In the past century, plenty of ink has been spilled over the causes of World War I, with a host of new literature written in the past year on the centenary of the Great War’s outbreak. To carve out new intellectual space in such overtrodden ground is immeasurably difficult. Yet T. G. Otte, in his new book July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914, combines fastidious research and hundreds of primary sources to offer a fresh take on the beginning of the war, with the detail and meticulousness of a forensic scientist performing an autopsy. Otte unveils the inner workings of the byzantine bureaucracies that dominated European foreign policy in the early twentieth century. Rather than focusing on one or two countries, Otte maps out the interplay of all major powers with one another — a Herculean task that few scholars have yet achieved with such clarity and insight. He delves into the minds of not only the leaders of Europe but also the diplomats in the trenches of European diplomacy on the eve of the war that broke the European continent. In this way, it makes a perfect companion to Barbara Tuchman’s 1962 masterpiece, The Guns