It is the 31st of December and two-thousand-and-eighteen is coming to an end.
It has been a bit of a hectic year, and a while ago in a conversation I had, someone
asked me what the best book had been that I read this year.
I’ve been excited about this book and it honestly has been the best book I read, so
without further ado: The Sleepwalkers.
Last month 100 years ago, the First World War came to an end.
The past four years publications about topics surrounding this war have skyrocketed.
The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark, professor of history at Cambridge, manages to stand
out among these hundreds of books.
You don’t have to take my word for it though, as the book was lauded when it was released
by the vast majority of critics.
So what made this book enjoyable and fascinating to read?
Well, I’ll tell you, but I am sure that if I simply summarize in short what the topic
of each part is, the book will speak for itself.
Gavrilo Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, on 28 June
1914.
The Archduke, together with his wife, was visiting Sarajevo, capital of the Bosnia-Herzegovina
annexed by Austria in 1908.
Princip fired the shot heard round the world, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his “Concord
Hymn”.
Everywhere in Europe there were cries of horror about the attack.
A month later, the great powers of Europe were about to start the war which has gone
down in history as 'The Great War'.
The war would tear Europe apart for four years and was just the beginning of a century filled
with conflict and strife.
The debate about the causes of the First World War has kept historians occupied for the past
century.
This debate is often linked to the question of guilt: Who was responsible for the seemingly
senseless bloodshed?
After the war, the victors designated Germany as an aggressor.
Fitting are the words of Winston Churchill: History is written by the victor.
A general view of the Great War was the fact that the German Kaiser, the military high
command and politicians actively sought new opportunities to increase German power, if
necessary by force.
This is, although certainly not undisputed, the dominant view.
And perhaps I am guilty of that as well.
In my video about the Wilhelmine period, which I think is one of my better ones to date,
the silver lining is that the irrational Kaiser and the military high command were adamant
about becoming a world power, whatever the cost may be.
This brings us to Christopher Clark’s book.
Because Clark states that all European superpowers contributed to the outbreak of the war to
a certain extent.
Clark evades the question of guilt in his book, and that is precisely what makes it
… superb.
Instead of analyzing who was the main culprit, it allows Clark to focus on how Europe ended
up entangled in the war.
Clark analyzes how European politicians embarked on the path to war in 1914.
How is it possible that European monarchs and politicians, who were fully aware that
their actions were leading towards a war, could not prevent it in 1914?
The leadership of not a single country unanimously wanted to embark on the warpath, which Clark
so vividly manages to capture in his book.
Content
The First World War started with the dispute between Austro-Hungary and Serbia following
the assassination of Arch Duke Franz-Ferdinand.
The first part of the book is about these two countries.
The book begins with a description of the bloody murder of the Serbian king and his
wife in 1903.
Clark describes the secrecy of the Serbian state, in which there were strong ties between
the government and underground nationalist networks such as the Black Hand, the terrorist
cell Princip was a member of.
The second part of The Sleepwalkers describes the European political scene at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
Clark provides a very comprehensive analysis of how the European superpowers operate their
foreign policy.
It is remarkable how blurred and hazy the foreign policy of the European powers was.
There was no question of clear power structures or coherent policy.
Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary were all, at least in name, absolutist monarchies.
Although the monarchs certainly influenced politics and also corresponded with each other,
they had to share their power with chancellors, ministers, ambassadors and the military high
command.
In France and England power was in the hands of the cabinet, but in these countries too
foreign policy was determined by changing institutions and persons.
As a result, the engaged countries often misread each other’s intentions and ambitions but,
something that surprised me as I was reading this book, often there were extremely conflicting
interests, within the absolute elite.
A part of the book where Clark describes how a French diplomat managed to impose his will
on French foreign policy, simply because he had seen 8 different presidents during his
tenure, was surprising, to say the least.
This opacity made crisis management difficult.
In the third part of the book, Clark describes the international crisis that followed the
double murder in Sarajevo, and how the European politicians failed to prevent a war.
Clark’s great achievement is that he knows how to describe the European political situation
at the beginning of the twentieth century in a way that continues to engage the reader.
The Sleepwalkers is not an easy to read book.
Clark combines a broad look over the European continent with an eye for detail, which means
it has a high information density, and it is sometimes difficult to keep an overview.
Step by step the policy makers and the emotions that drive them are analyzed.
Primary sources, the communication between agencies and individuals are, where relevant,
used to expose the complex network of European diplomacy.
For the reader it is nice that Clark illustrates his argumentation with numerous fragments
from telegrams, diaries and other documents.
This makes the diplomatic communication and decision-making tangible and maintains the
attention.
In short, it is a very good book if you want to understand what the prelude to the Great
War looked like.
To finish this review I’ll add the last aspect to credit Clark: though the book has
a high information density if the content allows it Clark does not hesitate to include
a witty joke.