I love reading about history, and the early 20th century is especially interesting to me. I’ve always wondered how Europe could commit itself to the extraordinarily destructive first world war, the “Great War”. Christopher Clark’s book, The Sleepwalkers is an excellent explanation of how France, Britain, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Russia, delicately balanced in various alliances, “sleepwalked” into armed conflict.

As Clark states in his Introduction,

This book thus strives to understand the July Crisis of 1914 as a modern event, the most complex of modern times, perhaps of any time so far. It is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilization. The why approach brings a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure; the factors pile up on top of each other pushing down on the events; political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control.

By focusing primarily on the actual events (and taking advantage of a huge number of original documents and memoirs), Clark presents a dispassionate account of how Europe found itself at the end of diplomatic options and mired in the deadliest war in human history. In his telling, the causes of WWI don’t involve easily identifiable “villains” and “good guys”, but mere humans, prone to making errors in judgment and trying to adjust to quickly shifting events. In Clark’s telling, Germany and Austria aren’t militaristic aggressors, but countries competing for security with equally, if not more, powerful nations, each pursuing its own interests.

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