On your thoughts on Wonder Woman, you mentioned your view that it was the alliance-system that caused WWI. Does that mean you think that the Allies and Central Powers were both equally bad? I recently read 1914-1918 by D. Stevenson and I couldn’t help but come out of it feeling that while the Allies weren’t the ‘good guys’, the Central Powers were certainly the ‘worse’ side and that it was better that the Allies won. Or do you think the conduct of Allied generals negates any moral high ground?

opinions-about-tiaras:

I am not at all Steven, but I am prepared to argue that WWI did not have good guys. It was one pack of imperialist powers and their most imperialist-y against another. The only reason the Allies look better than the Central Powers is because France and Britain were less authoritarian polities… but the third major ally was, you know, Czarist Russia.

WWI was a bunch of assholes sending a whole generation of their young people to die in trenches in order to see who would continue to retain the power to have the biggest swinging dick on the Continent and who would get to maintain and expand their overseas empires. That’s basically all it was. The Central Powers may have been worse in that they were more “old school” in this regard than the Allies, and because they were the aggressors, but that’s a thin reed.

racefortheironthrone:

If we’re talking about causes rather than conduct, I would recommend reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, which really changed my thinking on this question. 

Clark has generally been accused by many historians for being too Pro-Prussian. Hans Ulrich-Wehler called his perspective “bewilderingly one-sided”. Why does blaming Germany for starting World War I excuse or glorify that of other powers? I think one can see World War I as being pointless (the weakness and failure of creating peace) and can also take to task the motivations by many nations for the war (chiefly to dial back revolution) while still blaming Germany as the main cause.

For the sake of keeping this conversation on one track, I’m turning this reblog into an ask-answer. 

I would agree that Clark tends to lean towards revising German culpability downward and Russian culpability upward, although part of that has to do with the fact that he’s responding to a literature which had previously focused very heavily on German culpability. I found Clark more useful for bringing Austria and Serbia more into focus, and especially the ways in which Balkan politics had been rewarding hardcore nationalist brinkmanship for some decades before WWI, and how that dynamic fatally intersected with changing diplomatic and foreign policy between Germany and Russia over the Balkans and between Germany and Britain over naval policy and Turkey and colonial policy in Africa and Asia, and on and on, to produce WWI.

As for why blaming Germany tends to excuse or glorify the other powers…well, that’s sort of what happened with the Treaty of Versailles, no? If Germany was the main cause, then that de-emphasizes everything else, whether that’s Serbian irredentism, or Russian pan-Slavism, or Austria’s increasingly desperate attempts to put a lid on nationalism, or France’s desire to avenge themselves for 1871, and on and on. 

But I do want to note something that makes this debate so hard to have: look how quickly we went from a discussion of the historical causes of the conflict to a discussion of moral blame for the conduct of the war.