The Pendulum Swings Back

Here's a question most textbooks dodge: did the war that ended in 1918 have the same "cause" as the one that started in 1914? A new wave of independent video essays—part of a broader shift toward high-quality historiography on YouTube—argues convincingly that it did not.

The documentary 1917: Turning Point of WW1 makes the case that this single year fundamentally rewrote the war's meaning. Before 1917, the conflict was recognizable as a 19th-century imperial struggle: Habsburgs versus Romanovs, colonial rivalries, naval arms races. After 1917? Woodrow Wilson entered with his Fourteen Points and crusade for democracy. Lenin countered with world revolution. Suddenly the war became ideological—a template for the rest of the 20th century.

This matters because it suggests that asking "what caused WWI?" may be the wrong question. Perhaps the more honest framing is: which WWI? The one that generals started for reasons of honor and alliance obligations, or the one that ideologues finished for utopian dreams? Younger audiences, raised on video essays rather than cable documentaries, increasingly see causation as something that evolves during events—not a static moment frozen in the summer of 1914.

For a decade, Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers has been the go-to explanation at dinner parties: the Great Powers stumbled into war like somnambulists, each acting rationally within their own limited vision, none truly wanting the catastrophe that followed. It was seductive because it absolved everyone a little bit. No villains, just tragedy.

That consensus is cracking. A "new revisionism" solidified in 2025 seminars is pushing back hard against what critics call the "problematic relativization of responsibility." The charge? That by spreading blame so evenly, Clark's framework obscures the deliberate decisions made by specific actors—particularly in Berlin and Vienna.

The revisionists point to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia—designed to be rejected—and Germany's "blank check" that enabled it. They emphasize intent over accident. The pendulum of blame, having swung toward collective tragedy in 2014's centenary mood, is swinging back toward specific national agency. History, it seems, still demands villains.

Jürgen Kocka's Germany's Struggle for Modernity, 1789–1918 represents something unexpected: a return to structural explanations for the war. For years, the Sonderweg thesis—the idea that Germany's "special path" to modernity was uniquely flawed and war-prone—had fallen out of fashion. Too deterministic, critics said. Too convenient for Cold War politics.

But Kocka, one of Germany's most respected social historians, is reviving the argument with fresh archival evidence. His focus isn't on diplomatic cables or assassination plots but on the internal pressures of the Kaiserreich: rapid industrialization without corresponding political reform, a feudal aristocracy clinging to power through military prestige, economic interests that saw external expansion as the release valve for domestic tensions.

The implication is uncomfortable: the war wasn't an accident of diplomacy but an inevitable product of a society that had modernized its economy without modernizing its politics. That's a harder story to tell because it doesn't offer clear decision-makers to blame—just a system grinding toward catastrophe. Yet it may be the more honest one.

Here's where the historiography gets genuinely unsettling: it's no longer confined to history departments. Political scientists and defense analysts are aggressively applying Clark's "sleepwalkers" framework to current events—Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan—and the parallels are too neat for comfort.

The argument runs like this: "entangling alliances" (NATO's Article 5, mutual defense pacts with Israel) mirror the pre-1914 web of obligations. "Proxy struggles" in the Balkans find their echo in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Most troubling: the danger of "rational" actors making calculated risks—each move defensible in isolation—that spiral out of control because red lines are opaque until they're crossed.

This isn't idle academic speculation—it's shaping policy. Memos citing 1914 precedents circulate in foreign ministries. The metaphor of "sleepwalking" has moved from history books to situation rooms. Whether that's wisdom or dangerous analogy-mongering depends on whether you think history rhymes or merely echoes.

The new edited volume The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 makes a provocative argument: you can't understand why the peace failed without understanding how the war's causes were contested even at the negotiating table.

Article 231—the infamous "War Guilt Clause"—wasn't just punitive economics. It was an attempt to settle the causation question by fiat. Germany bore sole responsibility; therefore Germany would pay. But the Germans never accepted that verdict, and the resentment it generated poisoned everything that followed.

The editors argue that the peacemakers of 1919 were also attempting something unprecedented: building a "New World Order" based on collective security and international law. But that project required a shared understanding of what had gone wrong—and no such consensus existed. The inability to agree on the war's causes doomed the peace that followed. That's a lesson worth remembering as we debate how current conflicts should end.

Annika Mombauer's updated The Causes of the First World War: The Long Blame Game is perhaps the single most useful volume for anyone trying to understand why, 110 years later, we're still arguing about this.

Mombauer's contribution isn't to take a side—it's to map the entire battlefield. She traces how the "war guilt question" has been weaponized by each generation: by Weimar revisionists seeking to escape reparations, by Fritz Fischer in the 1960s indicting his own nation's militarism, by Cold War historians finding the conflict's roots in German-Russian rivalry, by post-Cold War scholars spreading responsibility more evenly.

Her conclusion? The debate on WWI causation has been described as "the history of a history," and it remains "as emotive and controversial as ever." That's not a bug—it's a feature. The war was so catastrophic, so foundational to everything that followed, that settling its causes would mean settling the moral ledger of the 20th century. And that, perhaps, is more than historians can be expected to do.