Document created: 1 June 06
Air & Space Power Journal - Summer 2006

Decisions for War, 1914–1917 by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge University Press (http://us.cambridge.org), 40 West 20th Street, New York, New York 10011-4221, 2004, 282 pages, $60.00 (hardcover), $17.99 (softcover).

Soon after World War I ended, historians began writing about its causes. The outpouring of books and articles on this controversial issue has focused either on underlying (long-term) causes—nationalism, economic and colonial rivalries, Social Darwinism, militarism, and/or the prewar alliance systems—or immediate causes, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia, the flurry of diplomatic notes among European capitals, and the troop mobilizations of late July 1914. Regardless of the approach and despite the outpouring on this subject, Decisions for War proves that there are still fresh and compelling interpretations of the causes of the Great War.

A pared-down version of a more extensive work published in 2003, this book falls into the “immediate causes” genre but with a significant difference. Instead of rehashing or reinterpreting the events between 28 June and 1 August 1914, Hamilton and Herwig, both well-known historians of modern Europe and modern military history, look at how the leaders of the belligerents, including those who joined the fighting after August 1914, arrived at their declarations of war. The authors thoroughly, concisely, and authoritatively analyze the actual decision-making process of the leaders and conclude that, generally, in each state, a small group of men at the center of their governments made the decision to go to war.

The book begins by rejecting the traditional underlying causes of the war. Instead, the authors argue that it is impossible to determine the weight, extent, and intensity of these factors, prevalent in many other works, because of the lack of real data on how these factors influenced the leaders. Additionally, they maintain that those leaders remained unaffected by the mass media and economic, religious, and any other “outside” pressure. They also spend little space discussing the various military plans developed by 1914 in case of war. Hamilton and Herwig conclude that the decision makers of 1914–17 considered only their country’s strategic interests and prestige in their deliberations on whether or not to go to war.

The remaining chapters examine prewar deliberations of the leaders of each of the belligerents. The authors place primary “blame” on Austrian leaders who wanted a limited third Balkan war to “definitively eliminate a troublesome Serbia” (p. 68) but were willing to risk a continental war. German leaders felt they had to support their Austrian ally, turning the conflict into a European war, but were beset with internal confusion and bickering. Although neither French nor Russian leaders wanted war, the former wished to make their ties lasting and credible and the latter were not sure what their mobilization meant. In other words, according to Hamilton and Herwig, the leaders of each country arrived at a decision to declare war based on their calculated view of their states’ interests in going to war.

Most people generally view foreign-policy decisions as the products of states acting as unitary actors, not as the result of a process involving “real people.” In that respect, Decisions for War provides a rarely seen view—how a small group of governmental leaders, including monarchs, ministers, military officers, party leaders, ambassadors, and others, decided on war rather than peace in the period 1914–17. Their decisions ultimately left nearly 16 million dead and 22 million wounded, destroyed four empires, led to another even more destructive war, and irrevocably changed the course of history.

This volume is a welcome addition to an already extensive literature on this controversial subject. Although it provides an invaluable look into the process that led the major belligerents in World War I to declare war, one cannot completely dismiss the influences of the war’s underlying causes. For example, in October 1915, the Central Powers offered Macedonia to Bulgaria in exchange for Bulgaria’s joining them. Bulgarian prime minister Vasil Radoslavov declared that “Bulgaria ‘cannot and will not be denied its historical and ethnographic rights. It cannot be without Macedonia, for which it has shed so much blood’ “ (p. 174). Was he not appealing to Bulgarian nationalism to justify Bulgaria’s entry into the war? If these traditional factors did not lead directly to war in the late summer of 1914 and later, they certainly framed the minds of leaders who made the decisions for war and cannot be dismissed as having no influence on those individuals, as the authors of Decisions for War have done.

Dr. Robert B. Kane
Eglin AFB, Florida

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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