Le Monde editor Sylvie Kauffmann has a fascinating op-ed in the NY Times on Europe's varied, nationalistic reactions to World War I's centennial. "While our German and British neighbors have been passionately debating theories about the origins of the war or its utility, all is quiet on the French front," she observes. "We don’t feel like looking beyond our attics"--family histories, forebears' memoirs, computerized death tolls, that sort of thing. It's a centennial of global destruction as a deeply personal experience--memories of a great war removed from grand theories of responsibility. "This is a very consensual centennial," she writes. As far as France goes, that is.
Kauffmann attributes Cambridge historian Christopher Clark's absolutely magnificent 2012 work, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, to Germany's "reopen[ing of] an old debate about the country’s guilt." Yet the "debate" has rendered less a contestation than a landslide. "Only 19 percent of Germans [now believe] their country bore chief responsibility for the outbreak of the war," notes Kauffmann, since Clark deftly presents a history of "shared aggression, paranoia and a reckless game of brinkmanship on all sides, not just in Berlin." Indeed, in The Sleepwalkers' conclusion, Clark keenly alleges that the Great War's origins are "not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over the corpse.... There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character."
In Britain, wouldn't you know it, traditionalist Tories are still fighting the upstart, Anglo-critical leftie rabble, "with Conservatives criticizing 'revisionist' views of the Great War as a futile, insane loss of life orchestrated by criminal generals." Yet it is scarcely revisionist to recall, as Adam Hochschild brilliantly does in To End All Wars, that throughout the war's mechanized slaughter much of the British brass clung to the insane belief that its cavalry could soon come to the rescue. And when I say cavalry, I mean the 19th-century variety: we're talking horses.
Few of the Great War's actors seemed to appreciate how modern technology--tanks, planes, machine guns, massive artillery--had forever altered the grim face of war. Had they done so, they would have also appreciated that Clausewitz's maxim--"moderation in war is an absurdity"--would manifest itself in exponentially immoderate carnage. One theory among those on the origins of World War I holds that military minds were eager to test their new toys--having no real idea of their destructive power--thus they welcomed if not encouraged the war's onset.
Far more dangerous than the insane lure of technology's potential, however, is the madness of nationalism unbound and "honor" defended and "credibility" maintained. God knows one needn't read history to see its destructive power. Just read the papers. And if you reside, say, in Arizona or South Carolina, you can just ring up your honorable, incredibly nationalistic senator and ask how him how his "III" project is going.