Adam Gopnik's New Yorker review of a handful of recent books on World War I is disturbingly timely.
We were all taught in school that World War I began when the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo and the Austrians went after the Serbs, then the Germans, Russians, French and British all jumped in, etc., etc.
But the infamous web of European treaties was only the ticket to war, it can't explain why so many nations wanted to see the show. Talk of those treaties as the "cause" of the war is as beside the point as the idea that the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq was "caused" by U.N. Resolution 1441. The treaties provided the means of going to war, but what was the motive?
Gopnik concludes it wasn't something noble:
Above all, the tragedy was that their goal was not to look weak.
Even in Strachan’s dry and unemotional narrative, one wet and emotive word rings out again and again, and that word is "humiliation." … There are, in the recorded words, few references to rational war aims, even of the debased, acquisitive kind; instead, you find a relentless emphasis on shame and face, position and credibility, perception of weakness and fear of ridicule.
"This time I shall not give in," Kaiser Wilhelm repeated robotically (to the arms manufacturer Krupp) in July of 1914. Lloyd George, on the British side, a key actor in favor of war, called for the mobilization of a million men lest Britain not be "taken seriously" in the councils of Europe. It was not runaway trains but a fear of being humbled, "reduced to a second-rate power," that drove the war forward.
The keynote is insecurity, an insecurity that arose, above all, from the German paranoia about encirclement, matched by Britain's insecurity about its naval power.
How a great power at the apex of its influence, with no obvious rivals in sight … grew convinced that it was beset by an overwhelming existential danger is difficult for a contemporary American to understand, of course, but somehow that is what happened.
Somehow, that is what happened. And so there was a war.
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