Endnotes
1. R. N. Lebow, "Franz Ferdinand Found Alive. World War I Unnecessary,." unpublished paper presented at the Mershon Center, Ohio State University, Feb. 4-5, 2000.
2. Philip E. Tetlock and Aaron Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), Chap. 1.
3. An illustrative analogy: an attempt to drive an old automobile with faulty brakes and steering down a steep mountain road with no guard rails will not necessarily end in an accident. If the dangers of such an attempt are ignored and all the many decisions and moves necessary to avoid an accident are not taken, however, at some point a crash becomes inevitable. This kind of practical, commonsense reasoning is frequently used by historians. Orlando Figes, for example, in his A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (New York: Penguin, 1997). repeatedly points to junctures where the revolution could have been avoided, but also shows why the necessary steps were not taken or contrary ones were, and ascribes this failure above all to the thought and actions of the conservative forces ruling Russia and to the personality, character, and beliefs of Tsar Nicholas II. These are contingent factors; so was the occasion of the revolution in March 1917-riots over bread shortages in St. Petersburg at a time when flour supplies were still available. Yet by this time a revolution had become inevitable.
4. Tetlock and Belkin, Counterfactual Thought Experiments, pp. 4, 8; "Counterfactual Outline," Mershon Center, Ohio State University, February 24, 1997. The same assumptions seem to reign in Niall Ferguson, ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals ( New York: Basic Books, 1999).
5. One such illustration comes from the War of the Second Coalition (1798-1801) in Napoleon's era. Suppose that Napoleon had been killed or captured during this war, either in battle or at sea on returning from Egypt or by conspirators after he seized power-all easily imagined variants in history. No amount of historical research and reasoning could enable us to tell what the consequences of his death would have been. But suppose that he had lost the final major battle of that war at Marengo in June 1800-again something easily imagined, for it nearly happened and was only averted by the disobedience of his orders by a subordinate general. Here one can show by concrete evidence that reversing the outcome of this battle would not have changed the main outcome of the war, overthrown Napoleon's rule, or altered the course of history much at all.
6. This argument agrees in part with Niall Ferguson's call (in his Introduction to Ferguson, ed., Virtual History, pp. 86-7) for historians to consider only plausible unrealized alternatives and to examine these rigorously on the basis of valid evidence. He goes too far, however, in insisting that "We should consider as plausible or probable only those alternatives which we can show on the basis of contemporary evidence that contemporaries actually considered " (italics in original). This is too restrictive. As the discussion of World War I later will illustrate, the historian's purview includes both those possibilities and alternatives contemporaries saw and considered, and those they failed to see at all or to consider seriously.
7. Once again this general principle can be illustrated by an example from the Napoleonic era, the object of much counterfactual speculation, the Battle of Waterloo and the possible results of a Napoleonic victory rather than defeat there. I think it can easily be shown that a French victory in this battle could not possibly have changed the fundamental balance of military forces, overwhelmingly favorable to the allies, or their willingness to prosecute the war to victory, and therefore it could not have significantly altered the ultimate outcome of the war, as many have supposed. However, a Napoleonic victory, by prolonging the war and making victory more costly for the allies, would almost certainly have destroyed the Vienna peace settlement concluded just before Waterloo and have resulted in a far harsher, less stable peace settlement like that of 1919, with many of the latter's unfortunate consequences. In other words, Wellington's victory was not critical for the ultimate outcome of the war but it was vital for saving the peace. The evidence is too extensive to discuss here, but is summarized in Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 548-58.
8. This is my reason or excuse for the paucity of footnotes and the fact that many will be expository notes rather than references to the enormous scholarly literature on this subject. Though I think I know the literature reasonably well (not exhaustively-no one does), this is not the place to prove it.
9. Some leading historians who maintain this are Martin Kitchen, A. J. P. Taylor, Volker Berghahn, and J. C. G. Rshl.
10. On the military situation, see David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); David G. Herrmann, The Arming of Europe and the Making of the First World War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Norman Stone, The Eastern Front, 1914-1917 (New York: Scribner's, 1975). For more general depictions of Austria-Hungary's critical position, see F. R. Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy Among the Great Powers, 1815-1918 (New York: Berg, 1990), and Samuel R. Williamson Jr., Austria- Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York: St. Martin's, 1991).
11. Examples of historians who argue along these lines are Solomon Wank, Vladimir Dedijer, Steven Beller, Alan Sked, and Leo Valiani.
12. This view is expressed most clearly by the authors mentioned in fn. 10 and in general by Fritz Fischer and his school; it is more nuanced but still present in Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Grossmachtstellung und Weltpolitik: die Aussenpolitik des Deutschen Reiches 1871-1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Propylaen, 1993), and Klaus Hildebrand, Das vergangene Reich: Deutsche Aussenpolitik von Bismarck zu Hitler, 1871-1945 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1995).
13. Besides the historians mentioned in fn. 12, this view still dominates the nationalistic historiography of the successor states, Serbia, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and to some extent Poland, as represented in Adam Wandruszka and Peter Urbanitsch, eds., Die Habsburger- Monarchie 1848-1918, Vol. VI: Die Habsburgermonarchie im System der Internationalen Beziehungen, Part 2 (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 1993).
14. An illustrative analogy, inevitably inexact, might help indicate where the argument is going. Suppose that one intends to challenge the verdict of an inquiry into a fatal accident in which an automobile carrying a number of passengers plunged off a cliff on a steep mountain road-that verdict being that the accident was caused by two passengers who had sent the car over the cliff in their efforts to seize the wheel by force. One might challenge that verdict in several ways: by arguing that the defects in the car's brakes and steering made it unlikely that it would make the trip safely in any case; by contending that the car was already out of control and heading toward the cliff when the two intervened; or by claiming that their attempt to seize the wheel was only part of an ongoing struggle over control of the car which made a crash likely at some point anyway. None of these claims, however, even if true, would prove that an accident was inevitable or disprove that their effort to seize the wheel was the proximate cause of the accident, and that they therefore bore the prime responsibility for it. If, however, one could do the following: first, show what kind of driving conduct would have been required for this car to make this trip without accident: second, show that none of the passengers who were struggling to control and steer the car displayed this kind of driving conduct; third, show that this was because for all of them the most important goal was not finishing the journey safely, but getting control of the car and determining its final destination against the wishes of some passengers; and finally, that the actual attempt to seize the wheel came when the two were convinced this was their last chance not to be kidnapped and possibly killed by the others; then, I think, one could argue that the verdict, even if technically correct, was substantively misleading, and moreover, that under these conditions an accident was unavoidable.
15. Good evidence for this is found in Harald Rosenbach, Das Deutsche Reich, Grossbritannien und der Transvaal (1896-1902) (Goettingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993), who shows that Germany's policy toward Britain on the important issue of South Africa regularly produced British hostility and counterproductive results no matter what the Germans were trying to do or how; and Konrad Canis, Von Bismarck zur Weltpolitik: Deutsche Aussenpolitik 1890 bis 1902 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), who demonstrates the same point on a wide range of other issues. Other instances illustrate the point. German efforts to put pressure on France over Morocco or to work in partnership with France there both failed equally; so did German efforts to work with Britain in the Berlin to Bagdad railway scheme; so did Austro-Hungarian attempts either to conciliate and cooperate with Russia in the Balkans, or to put pressure on her.
16. For example, on British policy, David French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-1916 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986); Keith M. Wilson, The Policy of the Entente (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia, 1894-1917 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). For France, see, for example, J.-C. Allain, Agadir 1911: une crise imperialiste en Europe pour la conqu?te du Maroc (Paris: University of Paris, 1976); Raymond Poidevin, Les relations Zconomiques et financiers entre la France et l'Allemagne de 1898 1914 (Paris: A. Colin, 1969); Jean-Louis Mi?ge, Le Maroc et l'Europe (1830-1894)(Paris, 1961) and J. F. V. Keiger, France and the Origins of the First World War (London: MacMillan, 1983).
17. It might well be that had Germany and Austria-Hungary been less constrained by prevailing circumstances, their prewar policies would have been more aggressive and dangerous than those of their opponents, at least Britain and France. I myself am inclined to believe this, given the German and Austro-Hungarian record during World War I, when some of the prewar restraints ceased to operate, and the joint German-Austrian record in 1933-45. But this does not apply to the period before 1914, when they were so constrained.
18. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Politics and Society in Nineteenth Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1980); Marilyn S. Coetzee, The German Army League: Popular Nationalism in Wilhelmine Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
19. In Russia's case this was particularly true of its support of pro-Russian Ruthenian nationalism in East Galicia and the Bukovina and of some Russian official support and much public and press support of Czech and South Slav nationalism. On the Serbian anti-Habsburg program, see especially Wolf-Dieter Behschnitt, Nationalismus unter Serben und Kroaten, 1830-1914 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1980), and Katrin C. Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996).
20. Once again, in anticipation of a plausible objection, let me make clear that just as I am not arguing that Germany and Austria-Hungary, had they not been under severe pressures in international politics before 1914, would have pursued moderate, peaceful policies abroad (see fn 18), so also I do not claim that had there been no outside pressures on them or interference in their domestic problems, they would have solved or managed them more successfully. The opposite is more likely. But this also is irrelevant to what happened before and in 1914.
21. Richard J. Crampton, The Hollow DZtente:Anglo-German Relations in the Balkans, 1911-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).
22. Bruce Vandevort, Wars of Imperial Conquest in Africa, 1830-1914 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998); Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 (London:Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1991).
23. The examples are almost too numerous to mention. The numerous Anglo-French contests over West and East Africa always ended in deals; even their dangerous confrontation at Fashoda led eventually to their colonial bargain of 1904. Franco-German confrontations over Morocco eventually led to a colonial bargain, though it left behind hostility on both sides. The Anglo- German contest of 1884-85 over Southwest Africa ended similarly; so did later ones over South Africa, though the Germans ended up with worthless paper concessions. The Anglo-Russian conflict over Persia and Central Asia led to their Convention of 1907, though that did not end the rivalry; the Bagdad Railway dispute eventually led to an Anglo-German agreement. Even Russia and Japan ten years after going to war over East Asia came to an agreement for coordinating their imperialist aims in China.
24. It is somewhat surprising that historians and other international relations scholars, especially of the realist persuasion, do not automatically see this and apply it to the pre-1914 scenario, considering how commonly micro-economic competition between firms is used by realist theory as an analogy for the structure and operation of international politics.
25. Fritz Fischer's well-known thesis (Griff nach der Weltmacht: die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland [3. rd ed., Duesseldorf: Droste, 1964] and Krieg der Illusionen: die deutsche Politik von 1911 bis 1914 [Dsseldorf: Droste, 1969] of a continuity between Germany's prewar drive for world power and the imperialist war aims program it developed and pursued in 1914-1918 may go too far in making Germany's wartime aims the actual motives for its prewar policy. Yet it is hard to deny that the aims Germany developed in wartime reflect what its elites were already thinking about before 1914 as to how Germany might solve its problems in case war arose. If we apply this same argument to the Allies, it tells us something important about their prewar attitudes toward Germany's economy. Prominent in the British, French, and Russian war aims programs were measures to break Germany's economic power while at the same time somehow preserving Germany as a market for their own economies. Along with the works of David French and Keith Neilson cited above (n. 17), see especially G. H. Soutou, L'Or et le Sang: les buts de guerre Zconomiques de la Premi?re Guerre Mondiale (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
26. See the Forum in the American Historical Review 94, No. 3 (October 1993), pp. 1106-42, an exchange between Carl Strikwerda and Paul W. Schroeder on the former's article, "The Troubled Origins of European Economic Integration: International Iron and Steel and Labor Migration in the Era of World War I.".
27. The problems this causes are illustrated by Niall Ferguson's recent revisionist and controversial book on World War I, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Ferguson actually makes some sound and important, if not really new, points about the origins of the war, mostly directed against the prevailing German-war-guilt thesis. The trouble is, however, that because like most other historians he virtually ignores Austria-Hungary and Eastern Europe, he not only misunderstands the origins of the war but advances an unsound counterfactual argument that a German victory would not have been so bad for Europe or the British Empire-indeed, that it might have averted later disasters--and that Britain would have done better to stay out of it. Critics have generally ignored the sound points in his case and pounced on the unsound ones in reaffirming the conventional verdict about Germany as the main architect of the war..
28. As Geoffrey Hosking notes in his Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 397, Tsarist Russia tried to solve its nationalities problems before World War I by repression and Russification; Austria-Hungary tried to solve its by concessions. Neither policy worked, and the problem may simply be insoluble.
29. A good example of this is the Entente powers' reactions to the expansion of the Austro- Hungarian navy in the Adriatic before 1914. Entente leaders knew perfectly well that the Austrians were building solely against the Italians, their nominal ally, and had no thought of challenging Russia, France, or Britain on the sea. Never mind; Austria-Hungary was Germany's ally, and therefore its navy, like its army, must be regarded as simply part of the joint enemy forces in the coming war.
30. Lest one suppose that these historical examples counted for little in 1914, Johannes Burkhardt argues convincingly that analogies with Prussia's situation in 1756, 1813, and 1870 were very prominent in German thinking in 1914. . "Kriegsgrund Geschichte? 1870, 1813, 1756- historische Argumente und Orientierungen bei Ausbruch des Ersten Weltkriegs," in Johannes Burkhardt et al., Lange und Kurze Wege in den Ersten Weltkrieg (Munich: Ernst Vsgel, 1996), pp. 9-86.
31. For example, France was held back from war over the Near East in 1840 and Russia from war with the Ottoman Empire over Greece in 1821-23 and with Austria over Bulgaria in 1885-87 by just such collective pressure.
32. To be sure, there are historians, not merely Serb nationalists but others as well, who deny any Serbian responsibility for the assassination, arguing inter alia that Austria-Hungary had brought it on by the provocative character of the state visit to Sarajevo. Niall Ferguson (Pity of War, p. 146, n. 3) quotes A. J. P. Taylor's remark that if British royalty had chosen to visit Dublin on St. Patrick's Day during the Troubles, they could also have expected to be shot at. Let me amend Taylor's analogy to make it conform better to Austria-Hungary's position: Suppose that the United Kingdom in 1914 was not separated from the continent by the English Channel, but had as its direct neighbor in the southeast, where the Low Countries are, an independent Kingdom of Ireland. This Kingdom of Ireland, though small and backward, was fiercely combative, violent and conspiratorial in its politics, and committed to an ethnic integral- nationalist hegemonic state ideology calling for it to unite all Irishmen under its rule. Its definition of "Irish" included other Celts in the UK (Scots, Welshmen) on the grounds that they were really Irish corrupted by an alien regime and religion, and it taught its children in school that large parts of the UK really belonged to the Kingdom of Ireland and should be liberated. To this end its nationalist press waged a propaganda war against the UK calling for its overthrow and dissolution, and its military intelligence arm, operating secretly and without control of the government, supported dissidents and revolutionary organizations in the UK, and trained and armed terrorists to operate there. This Kingdom of Ireland was allied with and supported by Germany. When the decision to send the Prince of Wales on a state visit to UK Ireland was made in London, the Irish royal government, knowing that some form of Irish terrorist action was being planned and being unready for a war but not daring for internal reasons to act decisively to prevent one, gave a vague warning to London that the visit might have bad results. But London also knew that a cancellation of the planned state visit, designed as a measure to support and encourage UK loyalists in British-ruled Ireland, would be exploited by the royal Irish press and nationalist organizations as more proof of British cowardice and weakness and a further spur to Irish rebellion. Would the UK government under these circumstances have cancelled the visit? Or, when the Prince was assassinated by a UK Irishman who had contacts with the royal Irish military intelligence and when the entire royal Irish press and public hailed this act as a glorious patriotic deed, would British leaders have shrugged their shoulders and said, "Well, we asked for it"? One need not know the actual British response to Irish acts of rebellion like the Phoenix Park murders or the Easter Rising to guess the answer.
33. See J. F. V. Keiger, France and the Origins of the First World War, and Keiger, Raymond Poincare (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
34. See the works cited above, fn 17, and also David French, The Strategy of the Lloyd George Coalition, 1916-1918 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995).
35. The history of the politics of World War I illustrates this dramatically. Imperial Germany was the great threat and object of hatred for the Allies, especially in the West; Austria-Hungary was taken much less seriously. Yet these same Allies never intended to eliminate Germany as a state, or even take away enough territory to cripple it as a major power. All, in fact, hoped to have Germany as a junior political and economic partner in the postwar era. In contrast, the territorial aims of the Allies were directed overwhelmingly against Austria-Hungary in the interest of gaining and keeping lesser allies-Serbia, Italy, Rumania, and ultimately the Czechs and the Poles. This went on until, in a marvelous instance of the irony of history, the western Allies decided in 1916-17, when faced with Russia's defeat and the possibility of a German victory, that it would be nice to get Austria-Hungary, by this time on its last legs and totally dependent on Germany, to defect, help defeat Germany now, and balance against Germany in the future. The only thing more astonishing than the notion that this absurd 18. th century-style volte-de-face was possible is the fact that some able historians take it seriously as evidence that Britain and France never meant real harm to Austria-Hungary and always wanted to preserve it. John Grigg, Lloyd George, from Peace to War, 1912-1916 (London: Methuen, 1983); French, Strategy of Lloyd George Coalition; Harry Hanak, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962).
36. The Matscheko memorandum of June 1914, changed after the assassination to be used against Serbia, called for joint Austro-German pressure on Rumania to commit itself publicly to the Austro-German alliance from which it had just defected. It has been interpreted by some, including F. R. Bridge, as showing that Austria-Hungary contemplated a political rather than military solution to its problems until after June 28 (see his Habsburg Monarchy, 334-35). My view is that the original plan, a proposal to force Rumania, now independent, to do what it was never willing to do even when it was a secret ally, would certainly not have solved Austria- Hungary's problem and was almost as likely to escalate into a general crisis as the actual Austro- German initiative did. Paul W. Schroeder, "Romania and the Great Powers before 1914," Revue Roumaine d'Histoire XIV, 1 (1975), 39-53.
37. John Lloyd, "sterreich-Ungarn vor dem Kriegsausbruch," in Rupert Melville et al., eds, Deutschland und Europa (2 vols., Munich, R. Oldenbourg, 1993), II, pp. 661-83; Gnther Kronenbitter, " `Nur los lassen'. sterreich-Ungarn und der Wille zum Krieg," in Burkhardt et al., Lange und kurze Wege in den Ersten Weltkrieg, pp. 159-87.
38. For a convincing argument that Russia had never had the kind of vital interest in the Balkans that its Orthodox and Pan-Slav publicists claimed, and that throughout the 19th century it had repeatedly become involved in costly complications there against its best interests, see Barbara Jelavich, Russia's Balkan Entanglements 1806-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).