What caused the first world war?

The centenary of August 1914 is still almost a year away, but the tsunami of first-world-war books has already begun. The government tells us that 1914 must be commemorated, not celebrated, and ministers worry about British triumphalism upsetting the Germans. But the debate about Germany’s responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914 won’t go away. Historians are divided into those who blame Germany — John Rohl, Max Hastings — and those who point the finger at someone else, such as Serbia (Christopher Clarke) or Russia (Sean McMeekin) or even Britain (Niall Ferguson). The blame game is of course conceptually flawed. The international system in 1914 was seriously dysfunctional. The alternative to searching for scapegoats is to examine the system. Why was it that political solutions no longer worked, so that conflicts could only be resolved by war? That is the question at the heart of Margaret MacMillan’s important new study.

Beginning in 1900, MacMillan shows that it was the German navy more than anything that poisoned Britain’s friendship with Germany. Tirpitz, the minister responsible, intended his navy to force Britain into friendship, but it had the opposite effect — it drove the British to compete, and compelled them to find new allies. Here, as MacMillan suggests, the decisions of individuals — Tirpitz and the Kaiser, who backed him — really did change history. When first France made the entente with Britain in 1904, and then Russia chose Britain over Germany in 1907, Europe was divided into two camps.

This is a well-known story, and MacMillan tells it well, enlivening her narrative with character sketches. Schlieffen, the man who drafted the German war plan, was a grim, work-obsessed Junker who was always at his desk by 6 a.m. The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph rose even earlier, hitting the paperwork at 4 a.m.