1914 in Transnational Perspective

Abstract

Prior to the outbreak of the First World War, international relations exhibited systemic indicators of transnational patterns that might also be called ‘trans-imperial’. For, as Christopher Clark suggests, systems played as significant a role in the coming of war as the actions of the individual actors who fogged the national and international landscape through diplomatic subterfuge and thinly veiled media interference. His transnational approach to the events leading up to the War raise critical questions about the Fischer thesis and the adjudication of blame for the subsequent events of 1914–1918. By relocating debate over German war guilt from the national to the transnational matrix of competition, intrigue and secrecy, he identifies bureaucratic structures enabling rogue opportunists to bend national policies to their careerist advantage. In both the European and imperial theatres, he suggests, considerable systemic weaknesses were hardly limited to Germany alone and, more than any other factor, contributed to a state of heightened tension across the boundaries of all the Great Powers.