Cambridge historian Christopher Clark’s fascinatingly complex volume, Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, (2014), traces the chaotic processes at work in Europe that led to the outbreak of a long and unprecedentedly bloody war. He concludes that there is no smoking gun, no simple answer, no coherent logical explanation that actually responds to the often-fragmentary evidence. Courtly intrigue was not new, but entangled systems of monarchy, liberalism, capitalism and empire had evolved in suicidal tension, a gas-filled room in search of a match. The assassinations at Sarajevo were not the cause, but they were the tipping point. They set off a tragic chain reaction that, in the brave new world of advancing military technology, one that C. A. Bayly identifies as a key factor that put Europe on the cutting edge of global empire, would have disastrous consequences for all. Clark doesn’t shy away from drawing parallels with contemporary situations, most notably, the Syrian civil war, the Vietnam war and the Cuban Missile Crisis. John Kennedy is remembered for having just finished Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August in the weeks before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Political folklore suggests that the book consolidated his commitment to peace when so many of his advisors counselled getting it over with while the US still had the upper hand. Clark observes a similar logic in Austria, better war now while the enemy is weaker than he will be in three years, (417).

Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote that in 1914, the blood-dimmed tide was loosed, that anarchy had descended on the world. So many of our modern institutions, inherited from 1914, are still staffed by sleepwalkers, men (rarely women) who are, as Clark observes, watchful but unseeing and blind to the horror, (562). In the German film, Sarajevo, (2014) by director Andreas Prochaska, the protagonist is Leo Pfeffer, the Austrian prosecutor tasked with discovering who was behind the assassination, (cf. Clark, 381). When Pfeffer takes his report to the authorities, he sees that plans for war are already on the table, a foregone conclusion in search of a pretext. This viewer remembers gleeful plans for an invasion of Iraq in 2003, an “unavoidable” response to the tragic but irrelevant events of 9/11; and President Johnson sending troops to Vietnam in response to a Gulf of Tonkin Incident that never happened. Why weren’t the Vietnam and Iraq wars earth-shattering global conflicts? Maybe they were just the continuation of the same chaotic conflict that began at Sarajevo. All of the elements were there, including “heavily armed autonomous power-centres confronting different and swiftly changing threats and operating under conditions of high risk and low trust and transparency,” (557).

This futile chess game of world war, as Clark depicts it, depends on power players guessing the hidden intentions of their peers and rivals. Ideological alignment proves less important than the fact of an ideologically charged system that generates narratives of just cause and atrocity as needed. Though morally satisfying to assign blame, Clark shows that to be a gross oversimplification. He attempts to distinguish between multiple objective factors and the conceptual framework within which those were subsequently narrated, remembered and interpreted. The language of war is couched in a gendered way, an act of manly “stiffness” as opposed to cowardly “self-castration,” (359). In that same vein, Kristin L. Hoganson’s thesis in Fighting for American Manhood (2000) is that public opinion and gender politics were what made the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars inevitable. Faced with the argument that wars made men great, opposition leaders suggested with irony that war be planned on a regular basis, regardless of external provocation. Today, we have the NFL to tide us over, when peace inadvertently breaks out.

Military readiness seems to be a recurring theme, and with it, the growing influence of a well-financed military class. A recently declassified memo from the National Security Council to Latin American ambassadors dating from 1964 gave them ten questions about how they thought increased military aid to governments in the region would affect internal politics. The diplomats’ responses varied, but the questionnaire made it clear that they were planning it, regardless of what the ambassadors might respond. The growing sacrifice of public health and education to pay for weapons of war has become a global system. With it, a global class of military movers has emerged.

Another common thread that stands out, baked-in to state procedure, is the presence of what Clark calls “praetorians,” secretive cells of powerful men, impervious to facts, with narrow worldviews and categorical objectives (220, 333). First among them was Serbia’s Black Hand, (38, 41, 95…). They are diplomats, princes, soldiers, captains of industry and government ministers who habitually manipulate foreign policy without regard to constitutional procedures or royal protocol. The United States did not acquire a praetorian class until after World War II, but ours was clearly modelled on Europe’s shady figures, men with double lives, convinced of dark visions and future invasions. In a land where lone gunmen with three names regularly commit political assassinations, it is not an easy phenomenon to study. Scholars might begin by looking into what Clark calls backchannels (202, 206), and then, ask who operates those and how.  

One element in Clark’s account that stands out as markedly different from contemporary global culture is the ubiquity of explicit empire. The relative conciliatory calm with which the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy held twenty language groups together is unthinkable, today. That Britain would object to Germany carving out a slice of Africa for itself seems the epitome of hypocrisy, and yet, the twenty-first century seems to have replaced Europe’s supposed right to sovereignty over foreign lands and peoples with something more confusing and ominous. The myth of economic development hides a global monopoly on profit, violence and torture. Superpowers have habitually tasked themselves with “police action” among seemingly peripheral foreign nations. Those might become our Balkan states, one day.