Author: Kenneth Upsall

Review of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914 by Christopher Clark, 2012 Harper Collins Publishers New York, NY. 

By Kenneth Upsall, Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army Reserve

Christopher Clark does an excellent job detailing the root causes of nationalism, economic pressures and diplomacy which led to Europe’s descent into World War I. Clark cites a profusion of primary sources to dissect the pre-war social and political landscape. More than a dry academic work, Sleepwalkers is well written and fast moving, while unsparing in the details that add to the narrative. Clark believes there was a shared political culture in pre-war Europe that created a “multipolar and genuinely interactive” (p.561) environment and facilitated the most complex geopolitical event of modern times.

Clark concedes there is no theory of the war’s origins which cannot be supported from the vast amount of available history, he quickly establishes that official histories from the belligerent nations are inevitably skewed to meet political ends and individual memoirs have been egotistically twisted to deflect blame from their principals. This assertion separates Sleepwalkers  from its cousins; Catastrophe: 1914 Europe Goes to War (2013) by Max Hastings and Barbara W. Hastings seminal account of the summer of 1914 The Guns of August (1962),  both veer toward blaming German ambition for the diplomatic crisis of 1914. These two works also spend the majority of their time focused on military operations of the combatant states, while Clark keeps Sleepwalkers focused on the events leading up to 28 July.