When intellectuals are clueless about the first world war

No one alive now has any adult experience of the first world war, but still it shows no sign of respectable ossification; no armistice of opposing historians seems in prospect. It maintains a terrible, vivid, constantly mutable life. Like the French Revolution, its meaning shifts from generation to generation and according to which politician happens to be speaking at the moment.

In 1989 Mrs Thatcher took the opportunity to deliver a highly tactless speech to the French on the real origins of political liberty. In recent weeks, Michael Gove, Sir Richard Evans and Tristram Hunt have embroiled themselves in an argument about the significance of the war which showed none of the abstruse nature of most discussions about history. This was a living, violent argument about facts which are intensely present to us. The Great War has never gone away, though its meaning is not quite what it was 100 ago, or for that matter 20 years ago. There is, indeed, still no end in sight.

The traditional historical debate is on the question of what caused it. In the best and most recent study of its origins, Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers made a persuasive case that, with six great powers simultaneously pursuing incompatible interests, it was beyond anyone’s capability to ‘cause’ anything in any meaningful sense. He pointed out that almost every other historian seemed to begin from the assumption that the war had to be caused by one great power or another, and to go on to make the case against Germany, Britain, Russia or any of the others. Inevitably, Clark’s sane but faintly absurdist case was greeted by some critics as a cunning ploy to let the favourite villain, Germany, off the hook.