Conservative revisionism of WW1

Dachs said:

It's a shame that the incredible amount of attention given to the subject in Britain hasn't translated over to the US very well. The Great War is kind of my pet topic, and I'd love to have an opportunity to talk about it at more length.

On one level, the Furedi piece that Glassfan put up is correct: the debate really didn't start as a historical debate at all. Gove and the other members of the Conservative establishment are openly using the war's outbreak to try to score political points, and their critics are more or less staying within that already-framed debate. Does anybody seriously think that Gove is conversant in, say, the Sonderweg argument, or that he's looked at any of the scholarship on the actions of Sir Edward Grey? Of course not. One might seriously doubt his ability to be conversant in any scholarly discussion at all.

It's not wrong to say, as Furedi does, that the matter of the outbreak of the war is still under serious debate. Broadly speaking, there are two main camps into which historians might fall. The first is a sort of neo-Fischerite group, which clings to the thesis that Fritz Fischer advanced back in the 1960s: that the war was the product of German aggression, a sort of "grab for world power" (Griff nach der Weltmacht), and that other concerns were secondary. The other is decidedly more inchoate, but the historians in it tend to emphasize the roles of other powers in starting the war as no less culpable than Germany, to point out the flaws in Fischer's argument, and to shift the terms of the debate from seeking blame to showing how and why the war happened.

Both schools are represented in recent publications, as well. Max Hastings, a British historian of the Second World War, recently published Catastrophe 1914, which follows Fischer in laying the blame entirely at Germany's feet. On the other side of the discussion, we have historians like Christopher Clark (The Sleepwalkers), Sean McMeekin (The Russian Origins of the First World War; July 1914), and Hew Strachan (The First World War Part I: To Arms) who bring up alternative interpretations.

The problem is that scholarship isn't just about how many people publish in favor of a given interpretation. It's also about whether those interpretations logically follow from the evidence, and whether they make use of all the evidence at a historian's fingertips. Signally, the neo-Fischerite school tends to ignore either the former point or the latter one. Fritz Fischer's studies delved to considerable depth into German politics and policy; his goal was to show that the exigencies of domestic politics brought Germany's leaders to a point at which they considered a war of world conquest a legitimate option. What Fischer, and his epigones, failed and fail to demonstrate is a causative link between German domestic policy and German foreign policy. And what they failed to notice are the far more plausible and demonstrable connections between domestic and foreign policy in Austria-Hungary, Russia, Britain, Serbia, and even France.

People like Gove and even Furedi can plausibly point out that a debate exists. There are certainly historians in this day and age who are willing to focus blame on Germany as the primary, be-all end-all cause of the First World War. But even though these people aren't exactly the Holocaust deniers of the profession (or even the Daniel Goldhagens) their argument still rests on academically unsupportable grounds. This doesn't really matter to the average politician, news reader, or voter. They don't care about things like pre-mobilizations, blank checks, Zustand der drohenden Kriegsgefahr, or the Period Preparatory to War. Those are issues of grave importance to the historical topic, but nobody who hasn't spent a big chunk of her life studying the July Crisis would or should know about them.

Another key reason is the usual lag between scholarship and public perception. Back in the 1960s, all the big-time books that were published were about how Germany started the war, as a sort of push-back against the "flaccid" notion that the whole war was an accident. Barbara Tuchman won a Pulitzer Prize for it; she combined an insistence that statesmen retain control of a given crisis with a clear effort to lay the onus of beginning the war on Germany and Germany (virtually) alone. The Guns of August remains a perennially well-read book. Hell, it was famously recommended by JFK. At the same time, in West Germany, Fischer and his disciples kicked off one of the biggest and most contentious historical debates in history, armed with the rather unfair advantage of claiming that anybody who denied German culpability in the war was basically justifying Hitler - as though 1939 had caused 1914, instead of the other way around. They obviously won the argument. It takes time for scholarship to leak out into everyday discourse like that. You'll still find people defending Tuchman's book as history on this very forum.

"Revisionism" is an awfully loaded word to throw around in popular discourse. When applied to history, it often has extremely negative connotations: we already figured out what this thing meant, and now these historians are trying to change it around and make a new story out of it. That complaint doesn't even make sense, for one thing. As people discover new information, or come up with new ways of looking at the evidence, of course a given "story" should change. You change theories to suit facts, not facts to suit theories. Not every new historical interpretation is a nefarious conspiracy to change the past. This isn't to say that such "conspiracies" don't exist - again, look at the Holocaust deniers. But Holocaust deniers are wrong because they ignore facts and rely on implausible explanations for the ones they don't ignore, not because their interpretation lends itself to uncomfortable implications.

And it's not really like you can claim that the, uh, "anti-Fischerites" have invented some new history that nobody back in the day saw. One of the works most consistently praised by the likes of Clark or McMeekin is Luigi Albertini's three-volume history of the July Crisis. Albertini had barely finished the books when he died in 1941, and they were published in 1943. The series was based on an exhaustive search of the evidence at hand, combined with personal interviews of many of the participants. Although Albertini didn't exactly anticipate something like the aforementioned "Period Preparatory to War", he amassed a vast collection of facts, discarded most of the ones that were obviously misinformation from national archivists, and then explained those facts in a coherent and consistent way without emphasizing blame for any particular party. Even though the book was published during the war in an Axis country, you can't really say that Albertini was trying to exculpate Italy's ally Germany, because Albertini was an ardent anti-fascist who left politics when Mussolini came to power. Of course, Albertini has never been a household name; his book is massive, for Chrissakes, and his English translators certainly didn't do him any favors.

Gove's goal, obviously, is to draw a pat lesson from the war and make a play for British national sentiment by remembering a time when the country came together to defend itself against a menace to civilization. If the war's causes were highly complex and difficult to explain, then that all gets much murkier, obviously. The likes of Hastings offer an easy way out: it was Germany's fault, and since they wanted to rule the world any number of casualties would be justifiable in trying to stop them.

The whole "donkeys leading lions" thing is a separate, albeit related, issue. I think that the scholarship there is, if anything, even more unequivocal than it is over the causes of the war. But it also has a significantly smaller footprint in popular perception. And this post is way too long and meandering already.

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