Though there were holdouts, after a few years a general consensus emerged that all of the powers shared responsibility, in varying proportions according to the various historians. This action led the other major nations to publish selective parts of their own archives in self-defense, and the game was afoot. The happy Entente fantasy was brutally challenged when the triumphant Bolsheviks, with evident Schadenfreude, began publishing the Tsarist archives revealing the secret machinations of the imperialist “capitalist” powers leading to 1914. Article 231 of that treaty laid sole responsibility for the war’s outbreak on Germany and its allies, thus supposedly settling the issue once and for all. The question of the causes of the outbreak of the First World War-known for many years during and afterwards as the Great War-is probably the most hotly contested in the whole history of historical writing.Īt the Paris Peace Conference, the victors compelled the vanquished to accede to the Versailles Treaty. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, HarperCollins, New York 2013, 697pp.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |