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Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?

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It was with eager anticipation that I pre-ordered this volume. Dr. Fromkin's Pullitzer nominated A Peace To End All Peace is one of the best history books I have ever read. Europe's Last Summer, in stark contrast, is one of the most poorly written histories of my acquaintance.

Structurally, Fromkin divides his 305 pages into 53 chapters, many of which are merely two pages in length. The idea was to devote each one to a point by point presentation of the many steps and relevant considerations that led to the culminating conclusions about who was responsible for starting The Great War.

What became increasingly annoying was its redundancy. Frequently the reader sees the phrases "as noted earlier" and "as quoted earlier," as Fromkin keeps saying the same handful of statements over and over and over. He tells us no fewer than eight times that German General Helmuth von Moltke (the younger) wanted Germany to confront Russia in war earlier rather than later because he perceived that Russia's French funded industrialization would gradually displace Germany as the leading military power in the world. It became maddeningly tortuous to keep reading the same statements again and again.

For most of his conclusions, he refers to the analysis of other historians. By the time I finished reading, I felt that it would have been more profitable to read those historians' books instead.

He does ultimately make some important observations. His delineation of the Great War as having been in reality two wars is a valuable insight. That he carefully identifies individual views among the decision makers for each of the Great Powers illuminates the often conflicting machinations within each of their governments. Too often histories of the period treat those governments as having acted with one voice and one mind. His portrayal of Kaiser Wilhelm and those of his subordinates who contravened him as crisis evolved is especially relevant to understanding how German policy arrived at war.

On the other hand, his overall thesis is somewhat flawed. If Austria-Hungary had acted on Germany's advice to attack Serbia quickly, then those within the German decision makers such as Moltke who desired war with Russia would have been robbed of their pretext. Ultimately, his final conclusion misses the mark at least a little bit.

David Fromkin's "Europe's Last Summer" is a murder mystery writ large; Who ended the long peace Europe had known since the Napoleonic wars, and caused the great tragedy of the first world war, that seminal event of the twentieth century?

In my mind, Fromkin offers two mutually exclusive answers to this question. The largest portion of the book is a history of the background, personalities and events of the pre war world, and a day by day countdown from the serving of the Austrian ultimatum to the German invasion of Belgium and the British declaration of war.

The last section of the book is Fromkin's theoretical analysis, in which he introduces a fascinating conception of the July Crisis: that there were two wars being raged at the time, not one: Austria's War against Serbia, and Germany's War against Russia, France and Great Britain. Austria triggered the former, and Germany the latter: "It was no accident that Europe went to war at that time. It was the result of premeditated decisions by two governments" (p. 293). Allegedly, Germany found that the Sarajevo crisis was the perfect pretext for war - it was initiated by the Hapsburg Empire, and thus committed Austria-Hungary to fight along with Germany, and the assassination of Franz Ferdinand made the Serbs, and not the Austrians or the Germans, seem like the perpetrators. If one man could be said to be the criminal it is German Helmuth von Moltke, German chief of staff, the man who had wanted an all out European War all along. "To the extent that any individual did so... this rather ordinary career army officer started the Great War". (p. 305)

But Fromkin's account suggests a more complex answer; although Germany's Military leadership did plan the Great War, neither its Civilian Government nor the German Kaiser Wilhelm II wanted it, and even Moltke was ambivalent about it. The War broke out because two German-Austrian plots had failed; with the second failure, and with the Russian mobilization, moderates in Germany and Austria Hungary failed to control the events. The War was only partially premeditated; The Germans had played with matches, but they wanted a local, contained burning. The wildfire that erupted was neither planned not wished for.

I have previously read three of David Fromkin's books. His A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East is a superb description of the origin of Modern Middle East, and of its transformation during the First World War. Based on original research, it is one of the best, and best written, history books I know. Fromkin's The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-first Century and Kosovo Crossing: American Ideals Meet Reality On The Balkan Battlefields were less impressive, although every bit as well written. Not based on original research, they were less enlightening and ambitious in conception, even if not in scope (The Way of the World is literally a history of everything - from the Big Bang to the end of the Cold War and beyond).

Fortunately, Europe's Last Summer is closer to the Former than to the latter two. Although it is based primarily on secondary sources, Fromkin is very well familiar with the events. The narrow focus on the breaking war adds tension, and the character portraits - particularly of Franz Ferdinand and his wife - are nothing if not spectacular. Although the writing is not as flawless as in previous efforts (the book is occasionally factious and too often repetitive), it is nonetheless a page turner, and Fromkin is capable of prose that will put any novelist to shame:

"Denizens of the revolutionary underground tend to be thought of as belonging to the political left. But terrorists often occupy a time wrap of their own: sometimes they look not forward but backward. They seek to restore kingdoms long since crumbles into dust. They rally to the banners of forgotten causes. They hearken to prophets who preached to the people of a by gone age" (p. 118)

Following the terrorist assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Germany and Austria Hungary hoped to use the crisis in order to achieve a "fait accompli" - an invasion of Serbia that would end its existence as an independent power, and end the risk to the Hapsburg Empire. But the attack had to be done, and be over quickly. This was German policy which was expressed by none other then Moltke the younger, whom Fromkin holds to be the chief perpetrator of the War: "Austria must beat the Serbs and then make peace quickly" (p. 156).

But the Austrians could not be made to move fast enough. Not Wishing to appear the aggressors, they drew up an ultimatum that was bound to be, and was, refused. But the Serbian reply was compelling enough for the Kaiser to pronounce that "every cause for war has vanished". Wilhelm decided to mediate for peace, while "safeguard[ing] Austria Hungary's honor and self esteem" (p. 218).

The great mystery of the War, and the one that Fromkin does not entirely explain, is why the events deteriorated from this to the German declaration of War against Russia on August 1. For this, there are partial explanations: Wilhelm no longer controlled German policy; The Austrians, fearing that their accomplishments were robbed from them, pursued on regardless; The Russian mobilization was misinterpreted by Wilhelm, who thought that they were ahead of the Germans - and the military plans of Germany, which forced it to fight against France BEFORE fighting Russia, had a logic of their own.

Amidst this, the German Junkers, headed by Moltke, did wish for a European War, believing that one was inevitable, and that 1914 was the right time for that war. But their desires were not unambiguous, and it is not clear that they had to triumph over other forces in Germany. Fromkin is correct in centering on Germany and Austria as the key to understanding the war's outbreak; but pointing at the culprit is much more difficult than he makes it out to be.

This is as lucid an explanation of the tangled web European diplomats and military men weaved during the seminal summer of 1914. Fromkin does a fine job of disentangling it all and assigning motivations to the key players. It was, as he explains, pure balance of power politics, either an effort to maintain supremacy if you had it, or achieve it if you didn't. He lays the confusion as to the "causes" of WWI that have been so furiously debated for so long to what he maintains were two wars rather than one. What started as an Austria-Hungary vs Serbia war was co-opted by Germany to launch its preferred war against Russia and France.
Fromkin paints a less damning potrait of Kaiser Willie than one has become accustomed to, his fault here not infantile militarism, but that he lost control of his subordinates who executed or twisted his orders to serve their own belligerent ends.
Fromkin also argues that the "lessons" of the war that so many of Barbara Tuchman's generation grew up with, that the war started because the policy-makers lost control of events and were instead controlled by them, is false. Fromkin argues convincingly that the war started because the men in control in Austria and Germany wanted it. And he "names names" of those who were most responsible.
He absolves many of those who tried to prevent the oncoming cataclysm from blame, suggesting that it was not their incompetence that led to war but rather an unsettling fact of life: It takes two to make a peace, but only one to start a war.
Agree or not, Fromkin will leave all his readers with much to mull over after concluding this concise and convincing exposition of one of history's most contentious controversies: Who started World War One?

David Fromkin is an interesting historian, if we judge by the two books of his that I've read (the other one is A Peace to End all Peace). While he does provide a narrative history of whatever events he's dealing with, he also spends a good deal of time spinning what information he presents you with in the direction that he feels is appropriate.

In this instance, the subject is the start of World War I, with the focus being not just the start of the war, but the responsibility for starting it. Fromkin dissects the events that led up to the various declarations of war very carefully, and parses each event in turn with almost machine-like precision. This does mean there's some repitition, as noted in another review, because the author describes each country's and even each person's reaction to others in terms of what *they're* doing too, so that you have each event viewed from as many as five or six angles. This makes for some very short chapters: one's a total of three paragraphs long. It also makes for some very careful analysis and interpretation of what occurred.

I won't give away the ending, but frankly the opinions of the author aren't that surprising to those who've been studying World War II for the last decade or three. The author seems to make use of every source that's significant from then til now, and provides a useful survey of what's been written about the war in the interim, especially in terms of how our view of things have changed in the intervening years. This helps greatly in terms of our understanding of the conflict and its causes.

I enjoyed this book, and think it a worthy addition to the World War I library of any scholar of that era, and to the library of anyone interested in military history or diplomacy.
While it's probably not the last word on the subject, the author has clear opinions, states them cogently, and defends them quite skillfully.

As someone who was always perplexed as to how a World War could start over the assassination of an Archduke, I found this book to be informative, well-researched, and enjoyable to read.

The author fills in the details about important events preceding the war -- the struggle for world dominance among the European powers, and Germany's paranoia. His overiding thesis is that it was really all about TWO wars -- Austria-Hungary wanted a war with Serbia, and Germany wanted a war with Russia. Germany badgered Austria into punishing Serbia for the Duke's assassination, and the rest is history.

Glancing briefly at the other reviews here, I gather not everyone agrees that this is a useful book. But as someone without a lot of background on the topic, I found this a well-written, captivating treatment about the context and events resulting in World War I.

Having just recently read Fromkin's "A Peace to End All Peace," I was chomping at the bit to read this book. As I got farther into it I became more and more puzzled. Maybe that's because like WWI, which Fromkin contends started as two wars, this book is really two books.

The first book, which I have no trouble recommending, is one of popular history. It does presuppose a knowledge of late 19th and early 20th century history, but presumably the interested reader has that. Some reviewers prefer Tuchman's "Guns of August" here, but Fromkin's book shows that her analysis is now dated. This is a revisionist text.

The second book, coexisting uneasily with the first, is a work by a major historian. This is the problem, at least for someone trained as an historian. Fromkin's documentation is skeletal at the best. Granted that many of his chapters are extremely short, but even his longer ones rate only three or four end notes. These are a strange adaption of the Modern Language Association's rules (which I hate anyway); the end note cites the page number, the year of the publication, and the author's name. But to find the title of the publication one must look back still farther to the Bibliography. Talk about cumbersome!

Beyond this, the end notes and the Bibliography are incomplete: on p. 138 Fromkin refers to a writing of Rebecca West "...whose account of Balkan affairs is still considered classic...", but he doesn't cite this "classic" work in the endnotes, let alone in the Bibliography. Furthermore, on pp. 267 and 273 Fromkin cites two different German historians. Once again he does not include these citations in the end notes nor the Bibliography. The only reason I can imagine for this oversight is that their works have not been translated, but I don't know this for sure. Certainly the citations and the Bibliography are only to books (few articles) available in English. At any rate, these omissions (and there may be others I didn't catch), are unacceptable in an historian of Fromkin's stature.

Forget or at least set aside much of what you think you know about the onset of the First World War. David Fromkin has some `new' ideas. And three hundred dense if not overwhelming pages of analysis of old and new records, makes for a pretty compelling case. He uses new studies and records, some previously unavailable or hidden, to make his case.

Prior to the start of the war, the seemingly quiet period among the great powers of Europe was mostly a charade, a shadow dance, while behind the scenes most of those great powers were trying to determine when - not if - the next war would commence. Better, each thought, that they commence it, less they be caught unawares.

Those twenty-five years before the war were also a period of almost regular assassinations. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Serbia, while often singled out as the event that precipitated the war, was not a singular event and, as Fromkin shows, did not really bring about the war. At least not the "great" war.

As Fromkin notes, "It takes at least two to keep the peace, but it only takes one to start a war. (282-3) Germany especially, fearing the development of Russia and the Slavs, with industrialization financed by France, saw war with Russia to be inevitable. This was a racial struggle, the Teutonic race against the Slavic. Germany even imagined England as an ally in this crusade; some of this assumption was reasonable, based on blood ties. Germany had plans for war before Sarajevo. But after Sarajevo, Germany also thought that Austria-Hungary could quickly declare war on Serbia, wipe out resistance, and immobilize the Russian forces before they moved against Germany or Austria-Hungary. And all the while, Austria-Hungary saw Germany as their insurance against a Russian attack. Both sides counted on the other to thwart Russian intentions. It is almost ironic that Germany invaded France, through Belgium, to stop Russia. And that Britain, facing civil war at home in Ireland and looking for peace on the continent, turned almost overnight when Germany violated Belgian neutrality. Fromkin notes that Britain would not have been so upset had France done this to Belgium; Britain's concerns were with balance, including keeping French power, not Belgian sovereignty or neutrality.

And it was not a German appetite for colonies that drove the war. Fromkin notes, "[I]t was not imperialism that caused the war; it was the war that produced a new wave of imperialism." (278) This was a period when wealth meant taking it by conquest. But much of that grwoth in colonial imperialism had run its course. Nearby, European lands offered more tempting targets and insurance against invasion. 'Invade or be invaded' seemed to be a prevailing credo of the time, and no colonies were likely to be doing the invading.

Besides, there were two wars. Fromkin writes: "Two wars, not one; that is the key." (274) Adding, "Germany instigated the war against Russia on its own account." Serbia was almost an afterthought, a diversion. Expected to be quickly crushed by Austria-Hungary, it offered Germany an excuse for a initiatives against enemies, real or imagined, current or future.

War, in the time before the "great" war, came to be accepted as the natural course of human and national events. Some of these problems of war remain with us today: Pre-emptive attack, misguided assumptions, bad intelligence on the enemy, subterfuge, distrust, racism, greed, paranoia. It may be both comforting and disconcerting to realize that our problems are not recent. Perhaps they are timeless, inevitable. Let's hope not.

David Fromkin has produced a convenient summary of the events of the summer of 1914. If you want to know what happened on one particular day during those fateful July and August weeks, this book is particularly suitable in that it covers events day by day and almost hour by hour. The short, choppy chapters tend to be repetitive at times, and Fromkin's tendency to refer to other authors' ideas can be annoying if, like most of us, one is not familiar with their writings.

Fromkin's most interesting point is that the war was actually two conflicts: one a local Austrian-Serbian conflict that was quickly forgotten by everyone else, and the second a long planned move by the Germans to prevent what they saw as their inevitable decline in Europe. In light of recent events in Iraq, Fromkin also does a good job of explaining how carefully laid plans can spin out of control and turn what was planned to be a short war into a long drawn out quagmire.

This is a short summary of a very complex subject. It will be satisfactory for those who want or need a quick look at the beginning of the Great War. Those who desire a more indepth study should refer to the classic: Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August.

Fans of the "slippery slope" view of the origins of the Great War, which has run rampant in this country since Sidney Fay made it popular in the 1920s, will not like his book, which places the responsibility for the war as it happened squarely on the shoulders of Germans and Austrians. However, not necessarily for the war as such, which, according to Fromkin, could have resulted from any of a number of crises and might have resulted from another one later anyway, but the specific circumstances in which it broke out and the form it took. His description of two wars, although unlikely to have been as clear to the participants as in hindsight, makes eminent sense as an analytical tool.
Many historians fall into the habit of talking about "the Germans" as if they were one homogeneous group; one of Fromkin's merits is to clearly point out the policy differences and rivalries within the German government. Most surprising is his convincing rehabilitation of Kaiser Wilhelm, who, far from being the imperialist martinet as whom he was portrayed in the Allied propaganda and in many later histories, emerges as the one factor consistently wanting peace, and is outmaneuvered by his general staff and sabotaged by his own appointed chancellor and foreign minister in a period of grief and outrage over the murder of his friend Franz-Ferdinand.

The origins of World War I are difficult for modern students to fully comprehend. David Fromkin is to be commended for writing a complete investigation of such a difficult topic that is both scholarly and accessible. Unfortunately, I think his conclusion - that Germany and Austria intentionally provoked the war - is highly dubious.

Fromkin succeeds in building a case that the militarism of the German general staff created a situation ripe for war, and demonstrates that the assassination in Sarajevo was an excuse rather than a reason for war. Nevertheless, his conclusion seems to absolve the allied powers of any guilt. Interested parties should read Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War for another angle - Ferguson argues (far more convincingly, in my opinion) that it is the British and not the Germans who bear the greatest responsibility for the great war.