Historiography

 

The exact causes of the war have been debated with some intensity since the time the war began.
Immediately after the war much academic work that blamed Germany entirely for the war was produced in Allied countries. However, academic work in the later 1920s and 1930s blamed all participants more or less equally. Starting in the mid-1920s, a number of American historians opposed to the terms of the Treaty of Versailles such as Sidney Fay and Harry Elmer Barnes produced works that claimed that Germany was not responsible for war, and as such, Article 231 of the Versailles which had seemingly assigned all responsiblity for the war to Germany and thus justified the Allied claim to Reparations was invalid. The objective of Fay and Barnes was to put an end to reparations imposed on Germany by attempting to prove what they regarded as the moral invalidity of Article 231. Both Fay and Barnes were provided with generous use of the German archives by the German government.
In the inter-war period, various factors such as the network of secret alliances, emphasis on speed of offence, rigid military planning, Darwinian ideas, and the lack of resolution mechanisms were blamed by many historians. These ideas have maintained some currency in the decades since then. Famous proponents include Joachim Remak and Paul Kennedy. At the same time, many one sided works were produced by politicians and other participants often trying to clear their own names. In Germany these tended to deflect blame, while in Allied countries they tended to blame Germany or Austria-Hungary. The debate over "German war guilt" was quite emotional and topical in the interwar years, and some lingering resentment within Germany may well have contributed to the rise of the Nazi party, which denied German war guilt.
In 1961 Fritz Fischer wrote the enormously influential Griff nach der Weltmacht in which he blamed Germany for the war. Fischer believed that many members of the German government had overtly expansionist plans, formulated in the aftermath of Social Democratic gains in the election of 1912. He alleged that they hoped to use external expansion and aggression to check internal dissent and democratization. Some of his work is based on Bethmann-Hollweg's "September Programme" which laid out Germany's war aims. Fischer's work created a whole school of analysis in a similar vein, emphasising domestic German political factors. Some prominent scholars in this school include Imanuel Geiss, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Wolfgang Mommsen, and V.R. Berghahn.

European military alliances in 1915. The Central Powers are depicted in puce, the Entente Powers in grey and neutral countries in yellow.

The "Berlin War Party" thesis and variants of it, blaming domestic German political factors became something of an orthodoxy in the years after publication. However, many authors have attacked it.
At first the idea prompted a strong response especially from German conservative historians such as Gerhard Ritter who felt the thesis was dishonest and inaccurate. Writing in the 1960s Ritter believed that Germany displayed all the same traits as other countries and could not be singled out as particularly responsible.
In the 1960s, two new rival theories emerged to explain the causes of World War One. The first one, championed by the West German historian Andreas Hillgruber argued that in 1914 a “calculated risk” on the part of Berlin had gone horribly awry. Hillgruber argued that what the Imperial German government had attempted to do in 1914 was to break the informal Triple Entente of Russia, France and Britain by encouraging Austria-Hungary to invade Serbia and thus provoke a crisis in an area that would concern only St. Petersburg. Hillgruber argued that the Germans hoped that both Paris and London would decide the crisis in Balkans did not concern them and that lack of Anglo-French support would lead the Russians to reach an understanding with Germany. In Hillgruber’s opinion, the German government had pursed a high-risk diplomatic strategy of provoking a war in the Balkans that had inadvertently caused a world war.
Another theory was A.J.P. Taylor's “Railroad Thesis”. In Taylor’s opinion, none of the great powers wanted a war, but all of the great powers wished to increase their power relative to the others. Taylor argued that by engaging in an arms race and having the general staffs develop elaborate railroad timetables for mobilization, the continental powers hoped to develop a deterrent that would lead the other powers to see the risk of war as being too dangerous. When the crisis began in the summer of 1914, Taylor argued, the need to mobilize faster than one's potential opponent made the leaders of 1914 prisoners of their own logistics – The railroad timetables forced invasion (of Belgium from Germany) as an unavoidable physical and logistical consequence of German mobilization. In this way, Taylor argued, the mobilization that was meant to serve as a threat and deterrent to war instead relentlessly caused a world war by forcing invasion. Many have argued that Taylor, who was one of the leaders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, developed his Railroad Thesis to serve as a thinly veiled admonitory allegory for the nuclear arms race.

Other authors such as Arno Mayer, in 1967, agreed with some aspects of the "Berlin War Party" theory, but felt it isolated Germany from its historical context. Mayer believes that all states acted more or less as Germany did in the years before the war. Samuel R. Williamson lays most of the blame with the Austro-Hungarian elites rather than the German in his 1990 book, Austria-Hungary and the Coming of the First World War.

Recently, American historian David Fromkin has allocated blame for the outbreak of war entirely to Germany and Austria-Hungary in his 2004 book Europe's Last Summer. He theorized that the German military leadership, in the midst of a European arms race, believed that they would be unable to further expand the German army without extending the officer corps beyond the traditional Prussian aristocracy. Rather than allowing that to happen, they manipulated Austria-Hungary into starting a war with Serbia in the expectation that Russia would intervene, giving Germany a pretext to launch what was in essence a pre-emptive strike.

Another recent work is Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War which completely rejects the Fischer thesis, laying most of the blame on diplomatic bumbling from the British.