The players who let the First World War happen

The Sleepwalkers

How Europe Went to War in 1914.

nolead begins By Christopher Clark HarperCollins. 697 pp. $29.99.

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Reviewed by Scott Manning

'The First World War was the Third Balkan War before it became the First World War": By the end of Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, that statement becomes tangible. It is a lengthy journey, however, focusing predominantly on politicians, diplomats, royalty, and military figures, or as Clark calls them, decision-makers. It's a tedious road at times, but the payoff is worth it in clarity and understanding.

Anyone responsible for shaping, influencing, or making policies and decisions takes center stage in this tome, which aims to explain how the war came about instead of why. Clark argues that this way, we avoid the risk of starting with a culprit in mind. He insists "the events of July 1914 make sense only when we illuminate the journeys" these decision-makers traveled.

For the first 364 pages, Clark tells of these tortuous journeys. Backstories are lengthy, some starting 50 years before the war, before any of these men were in power. By doing so, Clark constructs the world in which these decision-makers functioned. Refreshingly, he recognizes that the main superpowers - Britain, Russia, Germany, and France - were far from the only actors.

The first third of Sleepwalkers thus focuses on Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the central players at the beginning of war.

Serbia becomes more than an obscure Balkan country that harbored terrorists responsible for assassinating Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and Austria-Hungary becomes more than an empire doomed to collapse. Serbia regularly changed regimes through violent assassinations. The Serbian people wanted to see Serbia reach the territorial glory it had enjoyed at its height, in the 14th century. Serbia thus took advantage of every opportunity to expand the nation's footprint at the expense of Austria, Turkey, Albania, and Macedonia.

Turning to the rest of Europe, Clark traces the complex network of alliances, some more fickle than others, that formed in the years leading to the July 1914 crisis.

Each country had its own complex political system, none of which is easy to decipher. Russia had a czar, and Germany its kaiser, but neither country really placed power in a single man's hands. Kaiser Wilhelm comes off as a modern-day exec with a short attention span, always pushing for some new, half-baked endeavor while the pols around him jockey for their own projects. Around him, politicians, military men, parties, and interest groups rise and fall.

The book bogs down under the weight of explanation, inundating the reader with a stream of dates and unfamiliar names. In seven pages examining the political system in France, for example, Clark introduces nearly 20 figures.

This seemingly endless stream of names can make you feel stupid at times, especially when Clark evokes names mentioned much earlier in passing, as though you should be able to recall their importance immediately. When Austria hunts down those behind the plot to assassinate the archduke, the police arrest "none other than Danilo Ilic," a man briefly mentioned 320 pages earlier.

The payoff comes with the last third of the book, after the assassination. That's where the story picks up and everything established in those first 364 pages comes to the front. Why did Austria wait more than three weeks after the assassination to deliver its ultimatum to Serbia? Because Austria's government moved glacially, paralyzed by tensions among hawks and doves, politicians and royalty, Austrians and Hungarians, all capable of blocking decisions. The czar and the kaiser initially halt full mobilization - then cede to their politicians, who persuade them to rescind their orders.

Clark overwhelmingly criticizes all of the decision-makers, along with their universal game of blame-shifting. Russians had to mobilize because Austria mobilized. Germans had to mobilize because Russia mobilized, and so forth. There was no central, culpable decision-maker, Clark argues, just a continent-wide network of constantly deferred and denied responsibility for the war. If we follow that argument, it becomes impossible to fault any individual or country for transforming the Third Balkan War into the First World War. With none appreciating the deadly conflict they wrought, these men sleepwalked into Europe's deadliest war up to that time.