It is therefore worth considering the relationship between Great War historiography and contemporary politics in this centennial year. This linkage between contemporary events and the writing of history is of course common to all historians, but those writing on the Great War were particularly attuned to this relationship, as Annika Mombauer's survey of the historiographical tradition has demonstrated. At the same time historians of the war were sensitive to the political conditions in which they lived. The July Crisis was in the minds of all politicians during the sequence of diplomatic emergencies in the late 1930s that resulted in the Second World War, and the fear of unrestrained arms races and quick-trigger alliances consumed influential political actors throughout the Cold War. As two political scientists recently observed, ‘a disproportionate number of the central research foci in international relations – security dilemmas, spiral dynamics, offensive–defensive arguments, crisis dynamics, alliances, arms races – stem to varying extents from interpretations of the onset of the First World War.’ Footnote 1 As a result, the ‘lessons' of 1914 have extended well beyond 1914 they have become a paradigm for understanding international tension and the nature of armed conflict. Even in the United States, where public commemoration of the war is extremely modest, the question of what happened in 1914 continues to be used as a crucial case study for aspiring scholars, military cadets and public officials. The debate on the origins of the Great War occupies a special place in European and North American historical consciousness.
0 kommentar(er)
