Book Review: Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914. (2013)

I read MacMillan's earlier work, Paris 1919: Six Months That Ended the World, with interest and found it a valuable account of the negotiations that led to the Versailles Peace Treaty ending World War I.  The War That Ended Peace? Not really worth the time to read. MacMillan really adds nothing to either the analysis or narrative of the first years of the 20th Century in Europe. I must admit, she warns her readers that the book was not her idea.  She viewed "the path too well-trodden" and so she "resisted" the suggestion to write War.  (p 648).

She views the events through an Anglocentric lens; often the thoughts of foreign decision-makers (and that is her focus, the Great Men of History) are depicted as  "How will the UK react if I do this?"  This is especially true for Austria-Hungary, Germany and most of all Russia, which she paints as near dictatorships under the thumb of their hereditary emperors. Oh, except of course when new-fangled public opinion forces their  hand, that, and "honor." 

 I am writing this on Montenegro's eighth anniversary of renewed independence (May 21, 2008), an independence lost to Serb military occupation and French connivance as WWI ended. MacMillan is not kind to Montenegro's King Nikola,  (whose name she insists on spelling as Nicholas, even as she uses the local spelling for Serbian PM Nikola Pasic), viewing his well-married daughters (to the future King of Italy and to the Russian imperial family) as impediments to peace. And in her brief summary of the war and the aftermath itself, she merely ellipses Serbia's forceful annexation of its ally. Perhaps because it does not fit her thesis.

Again, we are warned of her thesis. "Some ... were more culpable than others. Austria-Hungary's mad determination to destroy Serbia in 1914, Germany's decision to back it to the hilt, Russia's impatience to mobilize, ...." (p. xxxv) The old standbys on the origins of the Great War.  MacMillan also subscribes to the hoary view that Austria's ultimatum to Serbia after the death of the Emperor's heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, assassinated in Sarajevo June 28, 1914, was an intolerable affront to Serbia's "sovereignty", a pretext for war. She neatly glosses over the clear evidence that the Archduke's death was planned in Belgrade, by Serbian Military Intelligence, which trained, armed, and conveyed the terrorists to Sarajevo. The "intolerable" clauses, that Austria participate in the investigation in Serbia, and that the accused be extradited to Austria to stand trial, are surely a lesser affront to sovereignty than killing the heir to a dynastic throne.  But of course the head of Serbian Military Intelligence had already tried that before: twice, unsuccessfully, against Montenegro, and once against his own King and Queen.

Unfortunately, MacMillan's Anglocentric lens does not give us any insight into the UK's decisions.   It is reduced down to the "balance of power" and an unexplained if repeated assertion that German domination over France or Belgium would be intolerable to British interests.  We are never told why - and this after all was the Germany of the Kaiser, the grandson of Queen Victoria who held the rank of Admiral in the Royal Navy - not the Germany of Hitler.

The all-too brief chapter entitled "Dreaming of Peace" whetted my appetite to read more of the efforts of the Socialists and advocates for disarmament in the twenty or thirty years before the War.  For that, I will have to turn to her sources. (Reviews forthcoming once I have received and read a few key books in her bibliography.)

As others have noted, I too wearied of MacMillan's overly facile comparisons of the challenges faced by modern leaders to those faced in The Road to 1914.  Those similes will rapidly yellow and age - perhaps not an ill effect, if it removes this work from the standard literature on the outbreak of WWI.