The Off Topic Topic

[Valmy]

The counter argument is political leaders knew what they were doing and plunged headlong into war to achieve their own objectives.

Yes. Every action taken by the French government was designed to achieve war in precisely the form that ended up occurring. Russian and the UK allies with France against Germany. They even got a neutral and eventually allied Italy, a nice bonus. Belgium even decided to resist, that wasn't guaranteed either. France worked for, and got, precisely the war it wanted. Be careful what you wish for.

Now if Germany and Austria-Hungary had backed down from attacking Serbia and peace had prevailed the French government would have been fine with it, as they believed that time was one their side as their investments in Russia were still bearing fruit, but they would have been a little disappointed.

At least that is my view.

[Sheilbh]

I recommend you read some of the critiques of his work.  He is heavily drawing in the that tries its best not to assign blame but characterizes all actions as terrible mistakes and misunderstandings.

The counter argument is political leaders knew what they were doing and plunged headlong into war to achieve their own objectives.

I'd be interested to read those reviews. It sounds very different from how he is characterising his argument, in the introduction:

It is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at the sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideals of national honour, the mechanics of mobilisation. The why approach brings a certain analytical clarity, but it also has a distorting effect, because it creates the illusion of a steadily building causal pressure; the factors pile up on top each other pushing down on the events; political actors become mere executors of forces long established and beyond their control.
The story this book tells is, by contrast, saturated with agency. The key decision-makers - kings, emperors, foreign ministers, ambassadors, military commanders, and a host of lesser officials - walked towards danger in watchful, calculated steps. The outbreak of war was the culmination of chains of decisions made by political actors with conscious objectives, who were capable of a degree of self-reflection, acknowledged a range of options and formed the best judgements they could on the basis of the best information they had to hand. Nationalism, armaments, alliances and finance were all part of the story, but they can be made to carry real explanatory weight only if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that - in combination - made war break out.

I'm just over half-way through and it has shifted my view in particular on the role of Serbia and Serbia's agency (of course, the world as it is now may just be making more receptive to an argument about the agency of a smaller state). It is there for other decision makers too, though it has also made me reconsider the role I'd understood the Kaiser as playing.

But in part I did the origins of WW1 in school - I think for someone of my age it's probably up there with the rise of the Nazis as the most studied topic in history class And I left that with a very structural understanding - imperialism, nationalism, the sick man of Europe, arms races and alliances, mobilisation schedules and railway timetables. So it's probably a corrective I needed

I've had this book on my shelf for years and was prompted to read it by a bit of criticism with Perry Anderson looking at this and Clark's book on 1848 (which I need to get): https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii146/articles/perry-anderson-pathbreakers-high-and-low

And despite the first half shifting my understanding and making me look at some things a little differently, I do still find myself coming to that structural explanation I first got in GCSE (although I'm broadly on the left, so I lean to a structural explanation of what I had for lunch). It's a point Anderson makes, but I still think that all of those structural factors meant that when a crisis escalated you would end up with a Great War and at some point or other a crisis would escalate. I do not see - absent the voluntary dismantling of imperialism in particular - a way that a Great War could have been avoided. And I do not think it is plausible to see those states somehow evolving or transitioning into peaceful co-existence. But certainly on my reading (and I think his own explanation in the introduction) that is the tradition Clark is writing against.

[Josquius]

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx82407j1v3o.amp

Japan has won the war on floppy disks.
Next their digital minister has a far more challenging target - the fax machine.

[The Brain]

Up until last month, people were still asked to submit documents to the government using the outdated storage devices, with more than 1,000 regulations requiring their use.

Weird and inefficient to have regulations naming specific technologies instead of a function.