Paris 1919: Centenary of the Versailles Treaty

I was reminded that yesterday was the centenary of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which of course brought the First World War to an end. But unlike other anniversaries connected to this war and others, few people seem to be marking this anniversary, largely because the Treaty has been widely thought too punitive of Germany and thus to have played an overlarge role in the Second World War.

In any event, if you are at all interested in the negotiations that led to that treaty, ending a war in which millions of Eastern Christians were slaughtered (Armenians, Pontic Greeks, Syriac and Assyrian Christians, inter alia, in 1915--to say nothing of the violence done to Greek Christians in the postwar forced migrations after 1923), then permit me again to recommend to you one of my favourite books about the entire war and its aftermath, Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. It is brilliantly written, hilariously funny in parts, and deeply revealing of the characters of such as Wilson, Lloyd George, Poincaré and others of the second tier, including the leadership of Romania and Greece. It's always an enjoyable re-read.

But the End of the Beginning: on the Centenary of the End of the Great War

More than five years ago now, I noted that the eve of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War was already occasioning a slew of new books from publishers. Without in any way pretending to be an historian of that conflict in all its complexity, I have nonetheless read a great deal for many years now, some of it connected with lectures I gave on the centenary of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides of 1915 at the hands of the Ottomans. I am convinced, as many other historians are, that the First World War shaped everything that came after it, and shapes us still. The person who has argued this most persuasively--at least among those I have read--is the Cambridge historian David Reynolds, particularly in the book, The Long Shadow, which I noted here.

In anticipation of today's anniversary of the end of the fighting, I recently finished a book that has been out for some time: Joseph Persico, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918, World War I and Its Violent Climax (Random House, 2004). It's a not bad book, though its format takes some getting used to as the author jumps back and forth, sketching individual characters or units on 11 November 1918 and then earlier in the war to see where they were, how they changed, and whether they survived to the end or not.

A just-released book also focuses on this particular day: Guy Cuthbertson, Peace at Last: A Portrait of Armistice Day 1918 (Yale UP, 2018), 304pp. I look forward to reading it.

One of the men in Persico's book, as he is of course in myriad others, is General Haig, a man for whom it is almost impossible to have any sympathy. (I have, I suppose, been influenced in my judgment by the ferocious attack on British army leaders in The Donkeys by Alan Clark--he of the uproarious diaries.) Haig is featured in a new study released this spring by Jonathan Boff, Haig's Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany's War on the Western Front (OUP, 2018).

Boff's book is featured in the history catalogue sent to me in October from Oxford University Press. In it they are featuring a number of new and forthcoming books connected to the end of the war.

Coming out early next year is Owen Davies, A Supernatural War: Magic, Divination, and Faith during the First World War (OUP, 2019), 304pp. About this book the publisher tells us the following:

It was a commonly expressed view during the First World War that the conflict had seen a major revival of "superstitious" beliefs and practices.

Churches expressed concerns about the wearing of talismans and amulets, the international press paid considerable interest to the pronouncements of astrologers and prophets, and the authorities in several countries periodically clamped down on fortune tellers and mediums due to concerns over their effect on public morale. Out on the battlefields, soldiers of all nations sought to protect themselves through magical and religious rituals, and, on the home front, people sought out psychics and occult practitioners for news of the fate of their distant loved ones or communication with their spirits. Even away from concerns about the war, suspected witches continued to be abused and people continued to resort to magic and magical practitioners for personal protection, love, and success.

Uncovering and examining beliefs, practices, and contemporary opinions regarding the role of the supernatural in the war years, Owen Davies explores the broader issues regarding early twentieth-century society in the West, the psychology of the supernatural during wartime, and the extent to which the war cast a spotlight on the widespread continuation of popular belief in magic. A Supernatural War reveals the surprising stories of extraordinary people in a world caught up with the promise of occult powers.

Davies' book immediately puts me in mind of a similar study, that of Phillip Jenkins' The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade, which was published in 2014. It is a fascinating book I have often recommended to others and returned to many times, not least for its insight that Catholics, so hysterical about some apparent happenings in some obscure Portuguese village, were far from alone in claiming divine apparitions: it was a game that everybody got in on, with French atheists in foxholes claiming visions of their dead comrades in arms; Russian Orthodox peasants claiming divine visions; staid German Lutherans and English Anglicans also had their own supposed apparitions; and even Muslims were also claiming to have had visions.

Another book just out this month will also disabuse us of common assumptions today about the supposed origins of "fake news" under Trump. Au contraire, as Gill Bennett suggests in The Zinoviev Letter: the Conspiracy that Never Dies. About this book Oxford tells us this:

This is the story of one of the most enduring conspiracy theories in British politics, an intrigue that still has resonance nearly a century after it was written: the Zinoviev Letter of 1924. Almost certainly a forgery, no original has ever been traced, and even if genuine it was probably Soviet fake news. Despite this, the Letter still haunts British politics nearly a century after it was written, the subject of major Whitehall investigations in the 1960s and 1990s, and cropping up in the media as recently as during the Referendum campaign and the 2017 general election.

The Letter, encouraging the British proletariat to greater revolutionary fervor, was apparently sent by Grigori Zinoviev, head of the Bolshevik propaganda organization, to the British Communist Party in September 1924. Sent to London through British Secret Intelligence Service channels, it arrived during the general election campaign and was leaked to the press. The Letter's publication by the Daily Mail on October 25th 1924 just before the General Election humiliated the first ever British Labour government, headed by Ramsay MacDonald, when its political opponents used it to create a "Red Scare" in the media. Labour blamed the Letter for its defeat, insisting there had been a right-wing establishment conspiracy, and many in the Labour Party have never forgotten it. 

The Zinoviev Letter has long been a symbol of political dirty tricks and what we would now call "fake news". But it is also a gripping historical detective story of spies and secrets, fraud and forgery, international subversion and the nascent global conflict between communism and capitalism.

When the war ended, the armistice was of course signed at Versailles. That treaty is the subject of a recent Oxford UP book by Michael Neiberg, The Treaty of Versailles: A Concise History. I look forward to reading it in due course.

But Versailles was preceded by half a year of hard slogging among various powers in Paris. That process was covered by the superlative and unsurpassable book by  Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. which I have read three times with delight. It has justly won several awards.

The End of the Endless Great War

Almost five years ago now, I noted that we were gearing up for the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, which was already in 2013 occasioning a steady publication of new books, which only accelerated in the following year. For general histories, see the link at the top. For a specifically theological analysis of the war, I noted here Philip Jenkins' surprising, almost shocking, book on the war as a holy war.

And now, as this interesting photo array at The Atlantic reminds me, we are coming upon the centenary of the end of the war. 

The war may have ended nearly a century ago now, but as the always-fascinating Cambridge historian David Reynolds has shown, that war has had very long shadows. Eastern Christians are aware of that only too well, living in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and its genocides against Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Christians.

As we come to the centenary of the end of the war, and then to the abysmal legacy of the peace conference afterwards, I draw your attention once more to a splendid book by the Anglo-Canadian historian (and great grand-daughter of David Lloyd George) Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. 

This book tells a complicated story with great insight and panache. She allows the major characters--especially Clemenceau, George, and Wilson--to come alive alongside an equally fascinating set of other leaders in Paris--e.g., the Greek prime minister Venizelos, various minor Romanian royals, and others. And the sarcastic comments made by Clemenceau against George and Wilson are revealing and hilarious in about equal measure--and far from undeserved. It is a fascinating history sure to delight.

How Foreign a Country is the Past? How Can We Access it Without Abuse?

I have been having a lot of fun this summer doing a course with my students on ISIS and the Crusades. Those who read ISIS propaganda, especially their slick but tiresome magazine Dabiq, or watch their videos, as I have with studied if horrified fascination for several years now, will note how ritualistically, how constantly, and (of course) how tendentiously they invoke "the Crusades" or the "Crusaders" to justify their various atrocities--whether beheading Japanese hostages, immolating Jordanian pilots, or decapitating, drowning, or torturing many others whose background so obviously precludes them from ever having had any connection whatsoever to the Crusades as historical events rather than ciphers for current iniquities. So this has been a course in historiography as much as in studying the Crusades.

Along the way, my students have found enormously profitable the reading of two books that treat the uses and abuses of history in general, and then the uses and abuses of Crusade history in particular. In the first instance, we have Margaret MacMillan's Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History, which is short and accessible, but full of the lucid erudition that marks MacMillan's other wonderful books, especially Paris 1919 and The War that Ended Peace: the Road to 1914.

Then we have turned our attention to the doyen of Crusades scholars, Jonathan Riley-Smith, and his short but equally accessible book The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam. Re-reading this nearly a decade after it came out and before ISIS was really commanding the attention it does, is an interesting experience in itself, perhaps especially for Riley-Smith's last chapter in which he shows that a good deal of the responsibility for the problematic "re-remembering" of the "Crusades" by Muslims in the last several decades comes at the hands of Christians, especially French Catholics and German Lutherans, who wanted, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, to revive the Crusades as examples of Christian glory in conquest. So by no means do Christians have clean hands in the competition to use and abuse history.

I find it striking, however, that the language of glory and conquest which many Christians used as recently as a century ago is now regarded by almost all Christians with abject horror. This was true not just in revisionist accounts of the Crusades, but in the rhetoric leading up to, and all throughout, the First World War. Philip Jenkins, as I noted on here a while ago, is especially useful in his book  The Great and Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade in showing how profoundly bloodthirsty Christian preachers were--whether in Westminster Abbey, First Presbyterian in Boston, Trinity Lutheran in Berlin, St. Basil's in the Kremlin, Notre Dame in Paris, or a thousand other pulpits of all traditions. Everybody was invoking God to crush their enemies, and using chilling rhetoric to demonize their (fellow Christian) enemies. Find me even three preachers today in an Anglican, Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, or Orthodox pulpit who are willing to say such things even in the mildest terms--to suggest God wants them to smite their enemies. Indeed, for most Christians the language of enemies is itself reprobated and incomprehensible.

Instead, in 2016, we find discussions among Catholics and other Christians about even revising or eliminating altogether the tradition of a "just war," thereby testifying to how far Christians, in barely a century, have changed their assessments of the morality of violence, lethal force, and war. My operative assumption here is that a good deal of that re-assessment has had little if anything to do with theological considerations rationally worked out. Rather, most of it is a reaction-formation, steeped in guilt, to the horrors of the First and then the Second World Wars, and then a ritualized invocation of "War no more!" (as several popes have said at the UN in the last 50 years) which is little more than a species of wish-fulfillment.

All this leads me to mention a recently released revised edition of a book which, a quarter-century ago, became an almost instant classic: David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge UP, 2015), 676pp.

About this book we are told:

The past remains essential – and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

The Centenary of the Great War

This time next year we will, no doubt, be greeted with a barrage of stories about the centenary of the outbreak in August 1914 of what was at the time called, simply, the Great War. Some of us have been thinking about it for some time now. Amidst the inexorable tedium of graduation ceremonies in May, I did have one cheering conversation with a colleague whose ideas gave me something to think about and look forward to as we were forced to sit for hours on end on wretched little chairs mashed together while students trooped up for their diplomas and photo-ops. My colleague, the art historian Dr. Elizabeth Kuebler-Wolf, wrote her MA thesis on the propaganda posters of the Great War, and proposed to several of us a conference in Ft. Wayne late next summer or early next autumn on the centenary of the outbreak of hostilities.

I have been an avid reader of all things about the First World War for a decade and more now, and I am therefore excited that this "avocational" reading will be put to wider use. I'm already contemplating paper and presentation topics. There is, alas, no shortage of events to focus on just among Eastern Christians. Immediately one thinks, of course, of the Armenian genocide (as well as others), or the Bolshevik revolution, which ushered in more than seven decades of persecution and martyrdom of Christians in the Soviet Union. One thinks of the forced postwar shift of populations, as Greek Christians were forced out of Anatolia, and Turkish Muslims were forced in. One thinks of the creation of new countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iraq, and what happened, then and more recently, to their ancient Christian populations. In short, the events of 1914-18 ushered in a century of suffering for millions of Eastern Christians (and millions of others) which is still being felt today in too many places.

My interest in the First World War was a consequence of interest in the Second; I read about the latter first and worked my way backwards. My interest in the Second was germinated in part by listening to my Glaswegian grandmother when I was a boy. She told me what it was like to live through the Battle of Britain and later blitzes which not only hit well-known places like London and Coventry, but parts of west-central Scotland along the River Clyde, which was then the scene of the largest shipbuilding works in the British Empire and therefore a natural target for the Luftwaffe. My grandmother lived along the Clyde as a girl, and regaled me with stories of how close they came to being bombed, and how often bombs landed in the river rather than on any property, and failed to go off, especially if the river was running low and rather muddy. She also told me what it was like listening to Churchill live on the wireless, and how his oratory was able to rally and unite a country, if only for a brief time.

I make no pretense to any kind of systematic reading here, and I defer to professional historians, but for those interested, here are a few books I have found both profitable and enjoyable:

General Histories:

Perhaps one of the most well-known books on the background of the war remains Barbara Tuchman's  The Guns of August: The Pulitzer Prize-Winning Classic About the Outbreak of World War I. Originally published in 1962, it offers a compelling background to the war, but I am unclear how well it has stood up in light of a half-century of further scholarship. Her other book is also interesting: The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914.

John Keegan, before his recent death, was widely respected as one of Britain's foremost military historians. I read his The First World War (Knopf, 1999) many years ago, and earlier this spring, on a long drive, I listened to it on CD. The book is very smartly written.

The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson's The Pity Of War: Explaining World War I (Basic Books, 2000) does a very good job at capturing the widespread bewilderment that is still felt by many who ask why the war ever had to begin in the first place. It is still a mystery to me in some ways, through the next book goes some way towards solving the hugely vexing question of why the war started in the first place.

If I had to pick two books that, more than anything else I've read, help one grasp the enormous complexity surrounding the "causes" of the Great War, and the massively complicated and destructive mess it left, then I would turn to David Fromkin. His Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914? (Vintage, 2005), though written in a curious style I'm not entirely enamored of, is nonetheless a very skillful untangling of the myriad of factors and actors leading up to the outbreak of what he says started off as two wars: Austria's punitive war against Serbia (for which it had plans in place, and a deep desire to execute, well before the infamous archducal assassination, which conveniently provided the perfect pretext); and then the general war in which, thanks to bungling in both Vienna and Berlin, the Germans dragged the Russians in, and as a result the French were involved, and lastly the British. The former war was not supposed to give way to the latter but for a variety of reasons, as we all know, it did.

Fromkin's other book is even more splendid, and looks at the aftermath in the Middle East: A Peace to End All Peace, 20th Anniversary Edition: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. Originally published to great acclaim in 1989, and updated in 2009, this book contains a wealth of scholarship carefully sifted and judiciously arrayed. For anyone trying, even today, to understand the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, problems in the Arab world and much else besides, this is a good place to being.

One of the legacies in the Middle East, of course, was not only the collapse of the Ottoman empire, but the creation, particularly by the British and French, of new countries and new zones of influence. The borders shifted dramatically and maps were redrawn. I am forever telling my students in introductory courses on Eastern Christianity that our first task is to understand what is meant by Eastern, and so we must spend time forgetting our reliance on GPS units and instead break out maps to see the geography of the ancient East, and how the borders have changed, and what consequences those shifting borders have had for Eastern Christians. I therefore find atlases invaluable, and this one, from one of Britain's most widely respected historians--and official authorized biographer of Winston Churchill--is very good: Martin Gilbert, Atlas of World War I.

While Gilbert's focus has been on both Churchill and the Second World War, he has also authored a solid volume on the First: The First World War, Second Edition: A Complete History. It is well done, as is Kegan's, though I did not find much between those two books that was noticeably different--both cover the same territory in similar ways as I recall.

Churchill himself was of course in the War Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of hostilities in 1914. He authored one of the first multi-volumed histories of the war. When I began reading about the war more than a decade ago, I was intimidated by the prospect--since remedied--of reading his six volumes, so I began with the much abridged The World Crisis, 1911-1918. I later read all six volumes.

Particular Battles:

Gilbert also authored a volume about the single-worst single-day battle in the history of the British Expeditionary Force: The Somme: Heroism and Horror in the First World War. The July 1916 battle of the Somme saw more men slaughtered in a 24-hour period than ever before. From a very different perspective, Christopher Duffy also covered the Somme in his hugely interesting and entertaining Through German Eyes: The British & The Somme 1916. Duffy had access to Bavarian and other German military archives and unearthed insights into what the German "Jerrys" thought about the British "Tommies" whom they were fighting. Many Germans held their British counterparts in condescending contempt as the "poor little men of a diseased civilization." Time and again, in the amusing records Duffy found, the German interrogators, confronted with British prisoners of war, could not believe that the former might lose the war to the latter's army of men of "crooked legs, rickety, alcoholic, degnerate, ill-bred, and poor to the last degree."

It is hard, in reading of the Somme, not to think that Alan Clark's famously controverted description of the generals, at the Somme and elsewhere, was correct: they were a bunch of donkeys--unthinking, unfeeling generals who unimaginatively and callously threw millions of men into a mass slaughter--cannon fodder--for mere yards of ground gained, lost, and re-gained over four years.

Frustration with such lack of progress in trench warfare gave rise, of course, to the infamous Dardanelles campaign for which Churchilll has often been blamed, as he certainly was at the time. But most historians now recognize that Churchill was one important, but by no means solitary or singular, figure in this campaign. The First Sea Lord John Fisher and the Secretary of War Lord Kitchener were also heavily involved. This infamous Gallipoli campaign sought to force passage through the Dardanelles, capture Constantiople, open the Black Sea to the Russians, drive Turkey out of the war, and then sail up the Danube to outwit the Germans on their own turf when they could not be defeated on land in France--and doing all this, of course, with the Royal Navy, then the world's strongest, and thus outwitting the formidable German Army. For complicated reasons, that battle failed though it was in some respects a close-run thing--though the Western powers did not know it at the time. One recent, though not entirely satisfactory, treatment of this failed campaign is Graham Clews's Churchill's Dilemma: The Real Story Behind the Origins of the 1915 Dardanelles Campaign.

Genocides:
Sadly, as we all know and can admit--unless you live in Turkey--the war was one atrocity piled on another, and for Eastern Christians the worst of these occurred in Armenia in 1915 (though hundreds of thousands of Armenians had suffered and been killed at Muslim hands for many centuries before that). About that country's genocide we have had many books over the last decade or so. Of these, several are very good, including Peter Balakian's The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response.

Other solid studies include Armenian Golgotha by Grigoris Balakian; and A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility by Taner Akcam, who has also authored  The Young Turks' Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire. Akcam was actually born in Turkey, and this second book is important for its access to, and publishing of, hitherto unknown archival documents from the Ottomans.

One other person to mention: Donald Bloxham is a leading scholar of genocide, and in 2007 published The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism, and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.
 
Finally, for those interested in audiovisual presentations, useful in the classroom, we have The Armenian Genocide - The Critically Acclaimed PBS Documentary by Andrew Goldberg.

Finally, for recent books in the new discipline of genocide studies, see the many books published by Routledge Press.

New and Forthcoming Works of Interest:

I am greatly looking forward to reading each of the following books and to seeing this first book in particular expertly reviewed as it sounds like it will generate some controversy. The author, Bülent Özdemir, has written Assyrian Identity and the Great War (Whittles Publishing, 2013), 192pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

Until the beginning of the 19th century, Nestorians, Chaldeans and Syrian Christians, belonging to various different branches of Eastern Christianity,  lived as small, little-known communities within the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire. This book examines the situation of these Eastern Christians during the First World War using a wide range of Western and Ottoman archival sources.

At the outbreak of the First World War, the Nestorians, Chaldeans, and Syrian Christians found themselves trapped in the middle of the struggle between the Ottoman Empire and the Entente powers. The Syrian Christians and Chaldeans remained faithful to Ottoman rule and were generally quiescent during the war, while the Nestorians, encouraged by Russia, entered the war as the Entente powers’ ‘smallest ally’.

The Eastern Christian communities appeared on the stage at the most critical period of the First World War, and left a tragic story behind them. Owing to modern claims that a mass murder or ‘genocide’ of the Nestorians and Syrian Christians was committed during 1915, the issue is no longer obscure and has become an international historical and political problem.

This book presents interesting new historical material and provides a fascinating perspective on this issue for all scholars and students of Middle Eastern history and geopolitics that is relevant to the regional situation today.

Returning to the question of causes, territory that continues to be long worked over, there was a book published in March of this year by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.

About this book we are told:

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark’s riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I.
Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict.
Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

Published a month later, in April of this year, was Sean McMeekin's July 1914: Countdown to War.

 About this book we are told:

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand’s own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, “It is God’s will.” Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict—much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events.

As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand’s murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war’s outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable.

Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved—from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré—sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand’s murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen.

A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe’s countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain’s final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month—and a handful of men—changed the course of the twentieth century.

Finally, set for release in October of this year is Margaret Macmillan's The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, 880pp. If this book is as good as her wonderful Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, it will be very good indeed. Her book on the Paris peace conference was history writing at its best: detailed but with a taut narrative that never loses its way or the reader; microcosmic and macrocosmic at the same time; serious but deftly weaving in amusing anecdotes and character sketches, and other telling details.

About this forthcoming book we are told:

From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I. With a sweeping story, vivid characters, and sharp insight, Margaret MacMillan powerfully explores the decisions made and the economic, social, political, and human tensions that determined the outbreak of a war that transformed Europe and the world.

The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden, happy, and prosperous future. But instead, complex personalities and rivalries, colonialism and ethnic nationalism, Germany’s rise to power, and shifting and secret alliances all exerted influence and helped to bring about the failure of the long peace and the outbreak of war. MacMillan creates indelible portraits of people and identifies critical turning points when options narrowed and conflicts escalated so as to make avoiding war more difficult.

The War That Ended Peace brings vividly to life the military leaders, politicians, diplomats, bankers, and the extended, interrelated family of crowned heads across Europe who failed to stop the descent into war: in Germany, the mercurial Kaiser Wilhelm II and the chief of the German general staff, Von Moltke the Younger, nephew and namesake of the great Prussian officer Von Moltke the Elder; in Austria-Hungary, Emperor Franz Joseph, a man who tried, through sheer hard work, to stave off the coming chaos in his empire; in Russia, Tsar Nicholas II and his wife; in Britain, King Edward VII, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and British admiral Jacky Fisher, the fierce advocate of naval reform who entered into the arms race with Germany that pushed the continent toward confrontation on land and sea.

There are the would-be peacemakers as well, among them prophets of the horrors of future wars whose warnings went unheeded: Alfred Nobel, the wealthy dynamite manufacturer who donated his fortune to the cause of international understanding; and Bertha von Suttner, a writer and activist who was the first woman awarded Nobel’s new Peace Prize. Here too we meet Count Harry Kessler, an urbane and cosmopolitan German who, in his wide-ranging diaries, recorded many of the early signs that something was stirring in Europe; the young Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty and a rising figure in British politics; Madame Caillaux, who shot a man who might have been a force for peace; and more. Among other things, this book shows how the fateful decisions of a few powerful people changed the course of history.

Taut, suspenseful, and impossible to put down, The War That Ended Peace is also a wise cautionary reminder of how wars happen in spite of the near-universal desire to keep the peace. Destined to become a classic in the tradition of Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, The War That Ended Peace enriches our understanding of one of the defining periods and events of the twentieth century.

The Problem of History in Ecclesiology: Further Thoughts on Congar

In my initial discussion of Yves Congar's wonderful My Journal of the Council, I noted that anyone with an interest in so many events and personages in twentieth-century Catholicism, and Christianity writ large, would find these diaries fascinating. I am pleased that an historian of the stature of John O'Malley has recently come out calling Congar "the council’s single most important theologian." Congar's journal (also available in a Kindle edition), which I continue to savor, records several themes, but perhaps none is so clear in this book, as in Congar's larger oeuvre, of the problem of history in ecclesiology and the lack of real, wide-spread awareness of what actually happened in Christian history in general, and in East-West relations in particular. The Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart is absolutely right when he says that too much of Christian division, East-West division above all, is the result of bad history. 

Much of what gives an Eastern Christian pause in reading Congar has to do with the attitude he records on the part of many Latins who seemed to regard their own tradition as the only valid one. This "soteriological exclusivism," as it has been called, was, of course, by no means limited to the Latin Church: some Orthodox apologists also adopted it, as did not a few Protestants. But none seemed so convinced of it as certain Roman Catholics, often viewed as the "minority" at Vatican II: people who argued for an "ecumenism of return," who exalted the pope in absurdly ultramontane terms, and who, in general, wanted the council to do nothing so much as flatly restate, in baldly propositional terms, dogmatic claims to which all the world would be summoned, under pain of eternal damnation, to make their simple and unquestioning submission. 

I am not running down this minority. In some respects, I side very closely with them, especially in the views of some of them on what happened to the Latin liturgy in the aftermath of the council. I also think they are correct in recognizing--in a way that few others want to do--the uncomfortable and disconcerting hermeneutical and historical problems raised by a council that accepted and praised (often, we now realize, with undue enthusiasm) what popes, scarcely a century before, had condemned in the most hair-raising terms: relations between Church and state (including the question of "religious freedom"), relations with non-Catholics, and the vexed questions of relations with Jews and Muslims, inter alia. Anyone who wants to be taken seriously today simply must admit that there are very serious, real, and obvious hermeneutical problems in reconciling past Catholic teaching with what the council condoned: the famous problem of a "hermeneutic of continuity" vs. a "hermeneutic of rupture." Apologists for the council insist on the former, but have, in my estimation, done an extremely poor job of demonstrating that continuity in ways that do not do violence to history. I also think that such apologists paint themselves unnecessarily into a corner by trying to demonstrate continuity when, on its face, none exists. Why not adopt the vastly simpler and certainly more honest course of frankly admitting that on certain questions, the Church (or at least the papacy, which is not the same thing) has simply changed her mind? This is not suggesting a change in major dogma, but instead a recognition that on more practical and political questions (e.g., democracy, human rights, relations with Jews and Muslims), views have changed, and there is nothing wrong with that. The skandalon consists not in doing this, but precisely in refusing to do so.

Congar had no problem in admitting when his confreres got it wrong, or adopted positions demonstrably unsupported by the facts of history. Time and again he skewers those guilty of what another great historian, Robert Taft, would call the substitution of "confessional propaganda" for real history. Congar knew too much to let a lot of this nonsense pass by without comment. But it seems to me, fifty years after the beginning of the council, the problem remains with us, and we have work ahead of us. Still today history is used and abused for present felt purposes--as Congar and Taft, and more recently Bernard Lewis and Margaret MacMillan, have shown. We are, then, once more indebted to Congar for raising these difficult questions, and for refusing to allow us to get away with facile sloganeering in the place of deep understanding not only of the bare "facts" of history, but also of the difficult relationship between changing and contingent historical forms, and the eternal and changeless truths they are supposed to convey. 

Notes on Notes on a Century

I recently finished the very enjoyable memoirs of the Princeton historian Bernard Lewis: Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian (Viking, 2012), 400pp. About this book the publisher tells us: 

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Went Wrong? tells the story of his extraordinary life. After September 11, Americans who had never given much thought to the Middle East turned to Bernard Lewis for an explanation, catapulting What Went Wrong? and later Crisis of Islam to become number one bestsellers. He was the first to warn of a coming "clash of civilizations," a term he coined in 1957, and has led an amazing life, as much a political actor as a scholar of the Middle East. In this witty memoir he reflects on the events that have transformed the region since World War II, up through the Arab Spring.

 A pathbreaking scholar with command of a dozen languages, Lewis has advised American presidents and dined with politicians from the shah of Iran to the pope. Over the years, he had tea at Buckingham Palace, befriended Golda Meir, and briefed politicians from Ted Kennedy to Dick Cheney. No stranger to controversy, he pulls no punches in his blunt criticism of those who see him as the intellectual progenitor of the Iraq war. Like America’s other great historian-statesmen Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, he is a figure of towering intellect and a world-class raconteur, which makes Notes on a Century essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Middle East.

Lewis is a prolific and elegant author and an incredible polyglot. He has done so much to advance our understanding of Islamic history, especially Ottoman history, not excluding relations between Christians, Jewis, and Muslims (though one does wish he had treated these relations more). One of the things I especially enjoyed about this book--which I do not think the author really intended--were his ad hoc reflections (especially in chapters 5 and 12) on historiography and historical methods. In reading Lewis, I was put in mind of another towering historian of his generation, the great Robert Taft, especially in his "methodological" article “Ecumenical Scholarship and the Catholic-Orthodox Epiclesis Dispute,” Ostkirchlische Studien 45 (1996): 201-226.

It is clear that both Lewis and Taft are historians of the "old school," which means that questions of "theory" and "identity" take a back-seat to what the evidence actually says. Both Lewis and Taft greatly embody what the latter calls "serene objectivity" in treating historical evidence, no matter how politically incorrect it may be today. How refreshing that is today when history--as Eastern Christians know only too well because we do it too often ourselves--is often used and abused for present felt purposes. In this regard, I am reminded of Margaret MacMillan's important cautionary tale, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library, 2010), 208pp. 

MacMillan is also the author of the wonderful book Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (Random House, 2003).

This is a study of the Paris Peace Conference that led to the disastrous Versailles treaty ending World War I. I have had a longstanding interest in the so-called Great War and found this book un-put-downable. She writes with verve and elegance and tells stories--enlightening, often humorous and entertaining, sometimes shocking--about, inter alia, Woodrow Wilson, David Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau. The book won a number of awards, and rightly so.

Late Antique Historiography

Ever since I began reading the greatest Byzantine liturgical historian Robert Taft, especially his article "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal," I have been increasingly fascinated with historiographical questions. Too often today many in the Christian East have "invented" a version of history that bears little relation to reality, and the process of how they do that, and even more the reasons why, are fascinating indeed. As Taft says in his article, he has often been tempted to write a book called "Inventing Eastern Orthodoxy," one chapter of which would be "Inventing Eastern Liturgy."

Other scholars who have recently treated such question include the Anglo-Canadian Margaret MacMillan (author of the wonderfully thrilling Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World) in her short but important book Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library Chronicles). Such questions are inescapable in the Christian East and have profound bearing on many matters of great importance, not least the search for East-West unity, as David Bentley Hart, inter alia, has argued with great persuasiveness, or the search for Oriental-Byzantine Orthodox unity, as Kenneth Yossa has cogently demonstrated. Questions of historical method and hermeneutics are front and centre in the on-going struggle to describe and understand relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims.

Now a recently published  book has emerged to look at just these sorts of questions:  Arietta Papaconstantinou, Muriel Debie, Hugh Kennedy, eds.,  Writing 'True Stories': Historians and Hagiographers in the Late-Antique and Medieval Near East (Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages) (Brepols, 2010), 240pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

The papers in this volume examine the interaction between history and hagiography in the late-antique and medieval Middle East, exploring the various ways in which the two genres were used and combined to analyse, interpret, and recreate the past. The contributors focus on the circulation of motifs between the two forms of writing and the modifications and adaptations of the initial story that such re-use entailed. Beyond this purely literary question, the retold stories are shown to have been at the centre of a number of cultural, political, and religious strategies, as they were appropriated by different groups, not least by the nascent Muslim community. Writing 'True Stories' also foregrounds the importance of some Christian hagiographical motifs in Muslim historiography, where they were creatively adapted and subverted to define early Islamic ideals of piety and charisma.

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Inventing a Russian Past

The great historian Robert Taft, in many places, has talked about the uses and abuses of the past, noting that few people read the past on its own terms, but instead plunder it for present felt purposes--or invent a past that never was, again for present purposes. (As he's said, he's often tempted to write a book "Inventing Eastern Orthodoxy," one chapter of which would be "inventing Eastern liturgy." See, inter alia, his "Eastern Presuppositions and Western Liturgical Renewal" in Antiphon 5 [2000].) The past is very convenient to justify a new course of action in the present on which one has already decided, and history is therefore often subject to all kinds of tendentious abuse today--the Crusades being a prime example of this. Margaret Macmillan has recently denounced these abuses of history and historiography in her Dangerous Games: the Uses and Abuses of History (Modern Library, 2010), 208pp. 

Brill has just alerted me to a new book they are publishing on these themes:

Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, Visualizing Russia: Fedor Solntsev and Crafting a National Past (Brill, 2010), 184pp.


This approach to history is increasingly common today. The Wolff book on Galicia, noted yesterday, is one species. I have seen many others about Armenian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and other histories.