The American political commentator and an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson, Walter Lippmann, introduced his book on public opinion with the following story: ‘There is an island in the ocean where in 1914 a few Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans lived. No cable reaches that island and the British mail steamer comes but once in sixty days. In September it had not yet come and the islanders were still talking about the latest newspaper which told about the approaching trial of Madame Caillaux for the shooting of Gaston Calmette. It was therefore with more than usual eagerness that the whole colony gathered at the quay on a day in mid-September to hear from the captain what the verdict had been. They learned that for over six weeks now those of them who were English and those of them who were French had been fighting on behalf of the sanctity of treaties against those of them who were Germans. For six strange weeks they had acted as if they were friends, when in fact they were enemies.’ Lippmann used the story to illustrate the way in which public opinion was shaped by the flow and control of information. It also illustrates that war was not widely expected in the summer of 1914.

From the well-connected diplomat to the agricultural labourers in the field, many Europeans were confident that peace between the great powers, which had been tested by a series of severe crises between 1911 and 1913, would endure. At the beginning of 1914, Arthur Nicolson, the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, suggested that the governments of the great powers would have their hands full with domestic affairs. The Home Rule crisis in Britain, the revolving door of government in the French Third Republic, the scandal over military abuse of civilians in Zabern in Germany, and the perennial concerns about the nationalities in the multi-ethnic Habsburg empire meant governments wanted international stability so that they could deal with domestic problems. Only Russia, he thought, had no such internal distractions, but he did not consider the Tsarist regime a threat to international peace. Whereas Nicolson was writing about the immediate prospects of the international system, others believed that they lived in ‘the golden age of security’, as Stefan Zweig put it in his memoirs. Peace and stability characterised the permanent condition of life in Europe before 1914, or so many contemporaries believed.

Between 1871 and 1914, there were no wars between the acknowledged great powers. At first, this seems like an outrageous run of good fortune. After all, the international system had emerged from a series of wars in the 1850s and 1860s, there had been no general peace conference at which the great powers acknowledged the legitimacy of the system, the great powers embarked on aggressive expansionist policies by the early 1880s, and there were regular crises throughout the period. Yet peace was maintained for more than four decades, the longest period of peace between the great powers until the end of the Cold War. The maintenance of peace owed much to the development of the alliance system, the relative flexibility of great power alignments, the expansion of the great powers around the globe, and their willingness to expand at the expense of weaker states, including the ‘dying nations’, as the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, called them, the Ottoman, Chinese, and Persian empires, rather than each other. Tensions were leavened by long-standing practices and norms in European politics, including great power congresses and compensation.

The disintegration of the Ottoman and Chinese empires, however, exacerbated great power tensions. Both were managed, just about, without war between the great powers, although Russia and Japan, the latter not being considered a great power, fought in the Far East in 1904–5. The disintegration of Ottoman power, partly the outcome of great power policies, partly due to the internal problems facing the empire, accelerated from 1908, and especially from 1911 onwards. Moreover, in 1912 and 1913, the great powers lost control over the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in Europe, as smaller Balkan states – Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia – carved out their own foreign policy agendas. These wars also upset the already fragile norms that had underpinned great power since 1871. Austria-Hungary was the great power most affected by these developments, and by 1913, the stability of the international system rested on whether its perceived decline could be arrested or managed without a war.

The Development of the Alliance System, 1871–1894

Between 1854 and 1871, all the great powers had fought in a series of wars, which destroyed the remnants of the 1815 Vienna Settlement. The wars of Italian and German unification had forged two nation-states, which took their place alongside the other great powers, Britain, Russia, Austria, and France.

Much of this book has suggested that a general war was not an inevitable, or even a probable, outcome of international rivalries before 1914. Between 1871 and 1914, the international system was able to accommodate vast economic, social, and cultural changes. The maintenance of peace was a fundamental condition for many of these changes, particularly economic globalisation. Peace also facilitated cooperation on everything from agreements on scientific standards to the development of international associations to promote sport. The international system did not remain static, but evolved considerably during the forty-four years separating the Franco-Prussian War and the outbreak of the First World War. Imperial expansion and the shift in the relative power of the great powers put pressure on the international system. However, these changes were accommodated by a combination of cooperation, alliances, ententes, and armaments. There were periodic crises, particularly in the final years of peace, but these were resolved without the recourse to general war. Every political system – domestic and international – endures crises. The test of a system lies not in its ability to prevent crises, but in its ability to resolve them. The fact that crises recurred in the same areas – the Balkans, North Africa, and the Far East – is testimony to the fact that solutions were based on compromise, not a final settlement of differences. A final reckoning of these differences would have led to war.

Viewing international relations before 1914 as the prelude to war places historical research into something of a teleological tunnel. Histories privilege conflict at the expense of restraint, crises at the expense of their solutions, recklessness at the expense of compromise. Of course, these were important features of international politics in this period. Nonetheless, an awareness of the different possibilities and the open-ended, contingent nature of history enables a broader and more nuanced understanding of international politics before the First World War. The history of international relations in this period is not simply an account of the origins of the war, but also of the maintenance of peace. It is a history of achievements, as well as of ultimate failure. Both require explanation and the explanation of one enhances our understanding of the other.

There were powerful restraints on a general war between the great powers before 1914.

Since the first edition appeared in 2010, a wealth of new scholarship about the origins of the First World War has been published. These works have sparked a renewed debate about numerous issues, including the July crisis, Russian foreign policy, the significance of the Balkan Wars, the relationship between great power politics and globalisation, and the changing normative environment in which international politics was conducted. I have benefited from conversations with friends and colleagues, from reviewers who highlighted questions and problems raised by the first edition, and from readers who alerted me to the odd error.

In particular, I would like to thank Catherine Holmes for encouraging me to write a review article on the new literature that appeared in the English Historical Review in 2014 and Jack Levy and John Vasquez, who invited me to participate in a round-table debate at the International Studies Association in 2013, later the basis for an edited volume. I also had the good fortune to co-edit a volume on the Balkan Wars and international politics with Andreas Rose and Dominik Geppert. I would like to thank them and the contributors to that volume for helping me to think through old questions and encounter new ones.

Over the past few years, I have benefited from stints at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton and from a EURIAS fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Although I worked on other projects at these institutes, one project tends to seep into another. The conversations at these institutes were at once far removed from, but resonant with, the debates about the origins of the First World War. Such are the advantages of the inter-disciplinary environment. I would like to thank the staff, members, and fellows of these two institutes for sharing their thoughts.

‘The consequence of the recent war’, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Julius Andrassy told Emperor Franz Joseph in February 1872, ‘is that power trumps justice.’ Historians have identified the militarisation of great power politics as one of the major consequences of the wars between 1854 and 1871. The unification of Germany consecrated Bismarck's open embrace of power politics as the form of diplomacy to which other states should aspire. Doering-Manteuffel labelled the period between 1871 and 1945 as the era of the Machtstaat. According to Conze, the validation of the idea of the Machtstaat in the Franco-Prussian War undermined restraints within the international system and contributed to the militarisation of international political conduct. On this reading the wars of the mid-nineteenth century marked a decisive rupture with the more restrained norms that had emerged in the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15. The alternatives to power politics, such as the free trade system espoused by Britain in the 1860s, were marginalised in the new Bismarckian dispensation.

At the risk of being too reductionist, the implication of these arguments is that the likelihood of another general war between the great powers was high after 1871. In this narrative, centred on power politics, the military are said to have played a key role. They planned for offensive wars, they pressed for increases in naval and military spending, they sparked and fuelled arms races, they influenced important decisions in domestic and foreign policy, they saw war as a creative, positive force in the history of mankind, and, in general, they pushed Europe towards a general war. However, as we shall see, there were powerful restraints on war as an instrument of politics in the early twentieth century. War plans certainly made it likely that any war between two great powers would soon escalate into a general war, but this made the prospect of war so drastic that states would only choose war in the last resort. Statesmen were well aware of the potentially catastrophic consequences of a great power conflict and sought to restrain the influence of their generals on foreign policy. The militarisation of the international system and the arms race before 1914 was the result of civilian decisions and geopolitical developments rather than the impulse of the military elites.

War Planning before 1914

Planning for war was the task of the general staffs of the European powers.

The military commander of Bosnia, General Oskar Potiorek, had pressed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to make a trip to the recently annexed province. A visit would help the integration of Bosnia into the Habsburg empire. The Archduke, however, was a reluctant visitor, and even tried to cancel the trip in mid-April on account of the Emperor's fading health. ‘The thing is not particularly secret’, Franz Ferdinand allegedly told the Countess von Harrach, ‘because it would not surprise me, if a couple of Serbian bullets awaited me.’ Just after one o'clock on 28 June 1914, the Archduke and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated. Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian of Serbian descent, carried out the attack. Princip was a member of the Young Bosnia movement, an exponent of a Greater Yugoslav state, rather than a greater Serbian nationalist, but he had links with an extreme Serbian nationalist group, Unity or Death, which in turn had links to the Black Hand organisation and certain elements in the Serbian army. The most notable supporter was Colonel Dimitrijevic, nicknamed the ‘Bull’ (Apis), who supplied the group with guns and allowed them to move weapons across the Serbo-Austrian border in June 1914. The prime minister, Pasič, tried to prevent the transfer of military supplies, as he rightly feared it could end up provoking an Austro-Hungarian attack, but he was unable to impose the authority of his government on Dimitrijevic and other officers. By 28 June, Princip was in Sarajevo to assassinate the Archduke.

News travelled fast in the era of the telegraph and the radio. The assassination was framed in different ways across Europe, starting a process whereby initially Serbia and Austria-Hungary, but later all belligerents sought to establish the legitimacy of their actions. Josef Redlich, the Austrian scholar and liberal, immediately called the assassination a ‘world historical event’, which demonstrated that peaceful coexistence between the Habsburg empire and aggressive Serbian nationalism was impossible. When the French president, Poincaré, heard of the assassination, he simply stayed at the Longchamps racecourse outside Paris. From this perspective, the assassination was a tragedy, but hardly an event that justified war. Assassinations of leading politicians were quite common in Europe before 1914.

‘In recent times,’ Otto Neurath, one of Austria's leading economists, wrote in 1910, ‘great wars are not as damaging as might have been expected either to the defeated or to the victorious side and, that on the contrary, something like an economic boom can be observed during or shortly after the war…the economic risk of war is relatively small under the present humane system of waging wars.’ The financier-turned-politician, Paul Rouvier, offered a very different view at the height of the Moroccan crisis in August 1905: ‘As long as there was money, one fought, when the coffers had been emptied, one made peace. Now, everything revolves around credit. Nations are closely bound to each other by the links of credit. A war in Europe would bring about a general disaster.’ Where Neurath claimed that economic factors were not a restraint on war, Rouvier saw the complex web of relations in the world economy as a bond of peace. In general, the Frenchman's assessment was more accurate. Merchants, bankers, and industrialists saw the maintenance of peace as an important foundation for business. Profit, not peace, motivated them, but profit required a stable international system. They were willing to cooperate, regardless of nationality, and chafed at the restrictions imposed by governments on commercial transactions. However, the growing interdependence of the world economy brought in its wake frictions, tensions, and rivalries. Trade wars were a regular feature of international politics. Governments used finance as an instrument to advance their interests. Clashes over economic spheres of influence provided the grit of many diplomatic crises. Global interdependence created new vulnerabilities for states and societies, which naval and military planners targeted.

The term ‘globalisation’ has been used to describe the emergence of an interconnected world economy in the late nineteenth century. While the term itself was not used before the First World War, contemporaries were acutely conscious of the ways in which societies and economies were connected. Statistics also support the claim that national economies were integrating into regional, imperial, and global economies. In 1913 prices, global trade had increased from $1.7 billion in 1850 to $18.7 billion in 1913. This growth occurred in three unequal phases. In the heyday of free trade, between 1850 and 1872, world trade increased at an average of 4.8 per cent per annum.

In 1881, a rising star in the British diplomatic establishment, Francis Ottiwell Adams, wrote from Paris to the foreign secretary, Lord Granville: ‘Up to that time [the political crisis of 1877] it may be said that there was no public opinion at all throughout the country…From that time forward, a public opinion has been gradually growing. Journalism has become comparatively free, & the Government could no longer fetter that freedom nor control the whole press as of yore…The very idea of a war with a neighbour raises a scare, & if I may say so, they are like boys at school, who having been severely chastised by their master, are still smarting from the pain, & will do almost anything to avoid the chance of another such punishment.’

Adams was entirely wrong that there had been no public opinion in France before the 1877 crisis, but his letter contained four astute insights. First, it identified the importance of the changing structures of the public sphere, in which public opinion could be expressed. Second, he examined the range of popular attitudes, which in this case wanted to preserve peace. Third, it was significant that he was only interested in public opinion in terms of its impact on government policy. For him, public opinion only existed if the governing elites were influenced by it. Finally, it was also significant that he felt it necessary to write a lengthy analysis for the British Foreign Secretary. Public opinion could influence the government of the state in which it was expressed – for example, French public opinion influenced the French government – but it could also influence the perceptions and attitudes of other governments; for example, French public opinion could influence the formulation of German foreign policy. National public opinions could also interact with each other across borders, either escalating tensions in press wars or cooperating with each other to improve relations.

Historians have differed widely about the significance and role of public opinion in international politics before the First World War. For some, public opinion was largely irrelevant to foreign policy, which was formulated by a small number of politicians and officials. These elites may have been aware of public attitudes about international affairs, but they never took them into account when developing policy. Others, such as E. D. Morel, argued that the war was the result of secret diplomacy.