Sarajevo 1914. A Century of Debate About the Guilt for the First World War

Abstract

It appears that the issue of who bears the guilt for the war, which previously dominated academic and public debate surrounding the origins of the First World War, has almost entirely disappeared from most new academic studies about the war that have been published to mark the 100th anniversary of the assassination in Sarajevo and the beginning of the war. These studies no longer wish to present themselves as judges in a legal or moral sense and at most speak of the responsibility for sparking the war. The book by Christopher Clark, “The Sleepwalkers”, which has sold extraordinarily well in Germany, goes one step further and underpins the old thesis by David Lloyd George that the leaders of the states unwillingly slithered into the war, and in so doing absolves them from any guilt or at most accuses them of negligence and incompetence.

Any serious debate about who bears the guilt must first clarify the norms the violation of which constitutes guilt. It only makes sense to regard guilt as being individual misconduct if one takes as a prerequisite the norm that is generally recognised today that an aggressive war is illegitimate, while a defensive war is legitimate. This norm further assumes that one can speak of guilt only when the perpetrators have no sense of guilt themselves. In international law, in 1914, the state leaders most certainly did still have the right to wage wars of aggression. It was only later, when the extent of the horrors of the First World War became evident, that the moral delegitimisation of wars of aggression that had already reached an advanced stage during the nineteenth century gained the upper hand and on the initiative of the USA led to the “War Guilt Clause” in the Paris peace accords that was to have such a devastating impact. However, at the same time, this delegitimisation also led to the founding of the League of Nations and later also to the ban on wars of aggression in international law. The findings made by historians show that the key political figures in the warring countries consciously made a decision, after full and long consideration, to unleash bilateral wars. To this extent, the slogan “sleepwalkers”, which implies that those in positions of responsibility were somehow of unsound mind, deserves to be declared the non-word of 2014.

The First World War is a combination of numerous individual wars that were begun by identifiable people and which could also have been avoided in most cases, as can be demonstrated by a realistic counterfactual scenario of events. Belgium was the only country to unambiguously wage a war of defence. The main significance of a debate surrounding the guilt, which has been assigned many times in the past, for the wars that together made up a world war, is to raise awareness among today’s decision-makers and their electorate that in situations where there is a risk of war, all possibilities for finding a peaceful solution to the conflict must be fully exploited.