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Anthony D'Agostino

The Revisionist Tradition inEuropean Diplomatic

History

Historical revisionism may be an advance on previous

knowledge, a political statement, or merely a professional temp-

tation. The art of diplomatic history, including its methods and

standards of judgment, seems to impel historians to view the ori-

gins of World War I and World War II through a single lens. In

the 1920s, criticism of the Versailles case for German war guilt,

based on collections such as Die grosse Politik der europaischer

Kabinette, attained an exalted level of literary achievement. Noth-

ing less would seem to do for World War II, and criticism of the

Nuremberg verdict was based upon the diplomatic documents re-

leased in the fifties and sixties, along with memoirs and other ma-

terials. Not simply politics, but also the style and characteristic

tropes of diplomatic history, may be responsible for the apparent

kinship of the revisionist schools. Once a deviant political trend,

revisionism has proved to be the motive force of diplomatic his-

tory and the source of its attraction for generations of students

and all who have been fascinated by its debates. Even in a time

of “return to events,”1 it may be easy to underestimate the fire-

works that have been set off by the diplomatic history of earlier

The Journal of The Historical Society IV:2 Spring 2004 255

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generations, however much it has been disparaged, in G.M. Young’s

withering phrase, as “the study of what one clerk wrote to another

clerk.”

European diplomatic historians, whose works have been based

mainly upon correspondence among the permanent employees of

the various foreign ministries, have always had to weather the charge

that their doggedly empirical approach was too narrow, lacked dy-

namism, and failed to consider the bigger picture—economics, pub-

lic opinion, the class struggle, or the spirit of the time. Yet, since their

specialty began as an inquiry into the origins of the world wars, they

enjoyed a certain status outside the historical profession, thanks to

the momentous questions on which they focused and to the temp-

tation to think something could be learned from their work. The

hope is not entirely dead. The present condition of the world’s re-

maining superpower invites inquiry about the problem of primacy.

How did the last primus, Great Britain, lose her position in the first

half of the twentieth century? Did she deal skillfully with the ris-

ing powers, Russia, Germany, America, who challenged her? Was

an Anglo-German alliance possible at the turn of the century? Was

it preferable to entente with France and Russia? Would it not have

given the world a more pleasant century? Could British leaders have

handled the United States differently? Was Appeasement of Nazi

Germany a good idea, or perhaps an inevitable one? Could Hitler

have been deterred?2

During the first decade of the Cold War, a consensus formed on

the last of these questions: Appeasement of Nazi Germany had been

a bad idea. The lesson, usually expressed in Churchillian terms,

proved to be highly serviceable in waging the Cold War. But a re-

consideration of Appeasement during the last decades of the Cold

War overcame consensus, and some historians now say that revi-

sionism has become the new orthodoxy.3 In much the same way, the

official view of the origins of World War I was overturned by his-

torical revisionism—most of what is considered canonical in today’s

textbook accounts of The Great War originated in the twenties as

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

revisionist history. Do these recurrences amount to a pattern or even

a revisionist family tree?

Orthodoxies Old and New

The last unchallenged orthodoxy on the causes of World War II

reigned at the height of the Cold War, in 1961–1962. At the same

time, a series of new books on the era of the world wars appeared.

These books contradicted the accepted canon on World War I and

provided the ground work for a new revisionist history of World

War II.4 An undergraduate class of that time was likely to be as-

signed Churchill’s Gathering Storm, in which his argument against

Appeasement was a case for deterring the aggressors. The prob-

lem of the origins of World War II was a good deal simpler then

than now—or rather, there was no problem at all. The origins of

The Great War, however, had produced a decade of intense con-

troversy among scholars. The Great War had resulted in disillu-

sionment so thick that one writer of a treatise on the post-war

mood, C.E. Montague, mourned the loss of an entire generation

of the survivors. He lamented that the “young melancholiasts” who

had fought would not be able to return to their pre-war lives and

loyalties: “The plain man, so sick of the exhortations of clergy to

battle, emerges a Satanist.”5 Disenchanted public opinion came to

reject with contempt the official explanation for why the boys had

fought. Regret about the effects of the war focused attention on the

mystery that shrouded its causes, although the secret might lie in

the various collections of diplomatic documents feverishly issued by

the Soviets and the Germans, who hoped to undermine the peace

imposed by the victors.

Compared with such scholarly confusion and unrest, World War II

left behind no mystery and no regret. The verdict of the Nuremburg

trials could never be submitted to the same critique as the war guilt

clause in the Versailles peace. Or so it was thought by those who

saw the lessons of the struggle to resist Hitler as applicable to the

Cold War. Confronting Nasser at the time of the Suez crisis, French

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politicians called him a Duce of Arab nationalism. Eden told Eisen-

hower that Nasser was moving to exclude the western powers from

the Middle East just as Hitler had attempted to dominate Europe

and the world. Khrushchev was seen—correctly, in my view—as

the author of a dangerous international campaign to intimidate

the West and overthrow containment. The analogy with the thir-

ties haunted John F. Kennedy, who knew from the moment he took

office that confrontation with Khrushchev loomed. Kennedy’s 1940

Why England Slept had concluded that British capitulation at Mu-

nich might have been avoided by earlier British rearmament.6 His

unstated assumption was that Hitler could have been deterred—and

Khrushchev then stood in the place that Hitler had occupied.

Kennedy was also impressed by the unique nuclear setting of

the confrontation, which for him called up the specter of 1914,

of accidental war precipitated by military timetables and which

might portend the end of everything. In those days, historians com-

monly taught undergraduates that the Great War resulted from a

mischance, a “rut in the road,” in the famous phrase of Virginia

Woolf. Kennedy read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and

admired it so much that he gave copies to Harold Macmillan and his

Ambassador to France, James Gavin. Of course, Tuchman’s book

was not diplomatic history—she did not believe that diplomatic his-

tory was of any use in considering the causes of the war, as she ar-

gued in her luminous later volume, The Proud Tower. “The Grosse

Politik approach has been used up,” she said, “the diplomatic ori-

gins, so-called, are only the fever chart of the patient. They do not

tell us what caused the fever.”7 In the 1960s, diplomatic history was

almost considered a form of mystification—at best useful to diag-

nose the fever, which provided a direction of further inquiry for the

rest of the decade and beyond as historians tried to describe the inner

crisis of European civilization, rent by class struggle, violent racial

nationalism, and every other kind of spiritual turmoil.8 Faced with

the mortal threat to their existence from below, states opted for a

fuite en avant, an “escape forward,” to restore their national unity.9

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

The interpretation had an understandable appeal during the 1960s,

when the anti-war spirit of the Vietnam period naturally called to

mind the pre-1914 anti-war agitation of Jean Jaures. That line of

research impulse would not last, but it performed almost as adver-

tised, broadening and supplementing diplomatic history rather than

displacing it.

Taylor and Fischer

A.J.P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War shocked every de-

cent sensibility. Taylor proposed nothing less than demoting World

War II from its privileged status and treating it in the same way

as World War I, by means of what he half-jokingly called “hack

diplomatic history.” For Taylor, the British and German documents

revealed that the causes of the war had been no less accidental than

those of its predecessor. Taylor’s claims challenged the most promi-

nent existing accounts of Lewis Namier, John Wheeler-Bennett, and

Elizabeth Wiskemann in English, and Maurice Baumont in French.10

Taylor’s Hitler, despite his undeniably wicked deeds, became not a

lunatic in a helmet but a German statesman with a German pol-

icy fully in tune with what he subsequently called “the course of

Germanic history.”

Taylor’s previous work laid out his case. During World War II, he

had started a pamphlet on Germany for the Political Warfare Execu-

tive under the joint control of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of

Economic Warfare. His prior book on the Habsburg Empire, after

a few false starts, had convinced his superiors that he should write

the chapter on Weimar in the handbook on Germany to be issued to

the British occupying troops.11 Taylor’s chapter, however, claimed

that Weimar had not been a real democracy and that Nazism had

been a natural result of German history, which could not suit the

purpose of a handbook designed to stress the case for a democratic

Germany groaning under the yoke of Nazism. The chapter was re-

jected, but D.W. Brogan, then working in the French section of the

BBC, suggested to Taylor that he expand it into a book on German

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history, which became The Course of German History, his first

bestseller.12

Taylor examined the unique path of German political develop-

ment as compared to the British and French models. The book of-

fered a demonstration of the Whig interpretation of history, or per-

haps of the theories of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, but with an

important twist—as Taylor spun out the argument, Germany could

only have cut out a path to a civilized political development by means

of the revolutionary overthrow of its old regime, as the British did

in the seventeenth century and the French in the eighteenth. Taylor

was influenced by German historians such as Eckhart Kehr and

Arthur Rosenberg, who emphasized “the evil consequences of the

marriage between the Junkers and heavy industry”—evil, that is,

when judged against British constitutional and revolutionary expe-

rience. Hitler biographer Alan Bullock told Taylor “You’re the last

of the Whigs.”13

After the war ended, it became common to regard Taylor’s views

as overstated or even flippant, as my teachers did. But another

book published in 1961 seemed to reinforce them. Fritz Fischer’s

Griff nach der Weltmacht (Reach for World Power), translated

into English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War, marked

the arrival of a new generation of German historians and stirred

a controversy as intense as Taylor’s book on World War II. The

Germans, said Fischer, had similar aims in both wars—to break

into the club of great imperial powers and take a position com-

mensurate with their nation’s potential as the industrial leader of

the continent. German leaders must rally the nation and diffuse the

Social Democratic electoral threat by means of a foreign policy of

preventive war. Germany had actually plotted and welcomed war,

he concluded in Krieg der Illusionen (War of Illusions), and Ger-

man complaint about “encirclement” was really a device to unify

the nation behind a new naval policy. In terms similar to Fischer’s,

Hans-Ulrich Wehler later wrote of Germany’s regarding 1914 as an

opportunity for an “escape forward.”

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

Taylor greeted the Fischer controversy as a vindication of his

own arguments, at least for those made in The Course of German

History, noting in his memoirs that “the younger German historians

take much my line and even exaggerate it.”14 Taylor’s idea of conti-

nuity supported the thesis of “der deutsche Sonderweg,” the unique

German path to disaster in the two world wars. Fischer’s book, how-

ever, underscored the difference between “The Kaiser was as bad as

Hitler” and “Hitler was no worse than the Kaiser.” “My book can

be read two ways,” Taylor told an English interviewer: “In one way,

it may exonerate Hitler by saying the war was a mistake; in another,

by letting Hitler off, it may make all Germany responsible for the

war.”15

Taylor’s Origins moved the controversy over the origins of World

War II to center stage. Here at last was the definitive demolition of

the Nuremberg trials, or so thought nationalist and neo-Nazi ele-

ments in West Germany. Elsewhere Taylor was subjected to a storm

of censure from critics. Hugh Trevor-Roper became the point man

in a critique from general principles, which A.L. Rowse found “the

most devastating analysis that I have ever seen.” Rowse flatly ac-

cused Taylor of “scrubbing up Hitler.” Elizabeth Wiskemann noted

the comfort Taylor gave to those who continued to feel that the

Fuhrer had been misunderstood, and G.F. Hudson complained that

Taylor had manipulated the evidence and dismissed the Hossbach

Memorandum of 1937, on which so much of the Nuremburg case

for Hitler’s aggression was based. Gordon Craig called the Origins

“perverse.” Raymond Sontag professed to me his amazement that

Taylor could have distorted so much evidence “in order to write

such a dishonest book.”16

Taylor and Brailsford, Namier and Woodward

The provocative claims of Taylor’s Origins riled critics: to oppose

Hitler was a policy based on legitimacy, “the argument of Metter-

nich and the Congress of Vienna.” By contrast, Munich was the

“moral course” and a “triumph for all that was best and most

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enlightened in British life.”17 The poisoned phrase that drew the ire

of the critics—“Munich was a triumph”—was a homage to H.N.

Brailsford, one of the leading lights of the Union of Democratic Con-

trol, organized shortly after the outbreak of war in 1914. The UDC,

led by such pro-Labour and Liberal intellectuals as E. D. Morel,

G. Lowes Dickinson, G. P. Gooch, and Bertrand Russell, included

such politicians as Ramsay MacDonald, Arthur Ponsonby, and

Philip Snowden and took its cue from theories of Imperialism, partic-

ularly those J.A. Hobson had elaborated at the turn of the century.

Imperialism was held to have developed out of protectionist and

militarist tendencies in capitalism. Morel argued that the imperial-

ism of the great powers directly caused the war by promoting their

secret alliances and notions of the balance of power, and he con-

centrated fire on Grey’s pre-war policy for creating an “unwritten

bond” to France and Russia for support in an aggressive land war

against Germany.18 The Germans, said Morel, had not previously

been trying to dominate Europe. German complaints about encir-

clement were certainly as plausible as British complaints about the

violation of Belgium, which was simply, for the British leaders, a

means to an end in a general European war. The real fault lay with

“the vicious philosophy at the root of European statecraft.”19

Brailsford’s War of Steel and Gold, for the most part an eloquent

update of the arguments of Hobson with an anti-entente twist, was

the most widely read of the UDC tracts. Taylor later remarked that

many a professor of history had the works of Gooch and Fay atop

his desk and Brailsford’s volume in his first drawer. The British

anointed their victory with the holy water of the balance of power,

said Brailsford, but it was “a metaphor of venerable hypocrisy

which serves only to disguise the perennial struggle for power and

predominance.”20 British support for the Franco-Russian alliance

was a way of seeking to break up Austria-Hungary and striking a

blow to the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway scheme. By these means Grey

succeeded in crushing the German idea of Mitteleuropa.21 Brailsford

traveled in Russia in the spring of 1919. He condemned the French

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

for their activities against the Bolsheviks and deplored their influ-

ence over the British and the United States. France in 1919, he

thought, “was immensely more preponderant than was the German

military machine at the height of its power.” All Europe now groaned

under “the military hegemony of France.”22 The whole critique of

the New Imperialism, gathering force since the Boer war, was em-

ployed to explain the Great War: France was the great beneficiary

of imperialism, and Germany was its victim.

In the thirties, Brailsford argued that the rise of Hitler would

have been impossible without the injustices of Versailles. So “the

first element of a cure,” he said, “is to remove Germany’s wrongs.”

It was necessary, said Brailsford, to disarm to Germany’s level and

then to give Hitler “what we refused to Rathenau, Stresemann, and

Bruning.”23 Coercing Germany in an attempt to defend Versailles

was unthinkable. It would not be a socialist position; even if one ac-

tually succeeded in bringing Hitler down, “the spirit of outraged na-

tionalism influenced by fresh wrongs and new humiliations, would

remain.” Brailsford changed course by 1940, however. In a pamphlet

designed for a broad audience in America, he appealed for British

support in the war and called the British navy “America’s defense

against Hitler,” and even joined FDR in invoking a Latin American

threat.24 “Hitler’s New Order,” Brailsford wrote, “has turned out

to be merely an inflated and reckless version of Mitteleuropa.”25

The Brailsford line on the causes of the Great War remained rather

close to the Communist International, or Comintern, line.26 The

Bolsheviks had started the controversy over the causes of the war by

publishing the secret treaties and a stream of documents on Tsarist

foreign policy. The 1919 Manifesto of the Comintern charged that

the British and Entente imperialists were most guilty of bringing war

to Europe: “In London they wanted war. That is why they conducted

themselves in such a way as to raise hopes in Berlin and Vienna that

England would remain neutral, while Paris and Petrograd firmly

counted on England’s intervention.”27 The Manifesto first stated

the charge, later debated by scholars in a more genteel form, that

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Grey’s policy in 1914 could have prevented war either by constrain-

ing France and Russia or by deterring Germany.28

No doubt Taylor also had a copy of The War of Steel and Gold

in the first drawer of his desk, perhaps with a book by G.P. Gooch

perched on top. Gooch was the most respected and, according to

Ramsay Macdonald, “by far and away our ablest historian.”29 Be-

fore becoming associated with the UDC, Gooch was an Asquithian

Liberal as M.P., 1906–10. He criticized the anti-German tone of

Lloyd George’s famous Mansion House speech of 1912, and soon

after the war he began to argue that the Kaiser in 1914 had shown

“no will to war.” Gooch believed the German historians with whom

he was personally friendly, men like Hermann Lutz, Friedrich Mei-

necke, and Hermann Oncken, had it right: the French had been more

fervent nationalists than the Germans before the war, and there had

been a chance during the Boer War for an Anglo–German entente,

which would have been sensible, but it was missed. The British en-

tente with France, on the other hand, was “not a union of hearts but

a mariage de raison.”30 Germany had not done much to provoke

war; its hand had been forced by the Russian mobilization. These

claims grounded the revisionist case.

When Ramsay Macdonald decided to publish the British diplo-

matic documents in 1924, Gooch was a natural choice for editor.

But it was thought that Gooch’s views needed to be balanced, and

so Harold Temperley, who thought Gooch “inclined to say the best

for Germany,” was brought in as a counterweight.31 Both of the

editors wanted British policy shown in a good light, of course, but

friction soon arose between them. The most attention-getting docu-

ment was the long 1907 memo on Anglo-Franco-German relations

by Sir Eyre Crowe, warning of the German threat, with extensive

critical commentary by Lord Thomas Sanderson and a rejoinder by

Crowe. The exchange personified the alternatives on German pol-

icy. Gooch agreed with the German historians about Crowe, the

“evil spirit of the foreign office,”32 like Holstein for the Germans,

while Temperley inclined toward the Crowe school of thought. The

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

dispute remained private, and it did nothing to dampen Gooch’s

exalted standing. C.K. Webster said of Gooch’s masterly narratives

that “he so marshals his facts as to make the final decisions of the

several powers appear to be almost inevitable.”

At Manchester in the thirties, Taylor began to liberate himself

from the UDC line and to come under the spell of Lewis Namier,

himself under the spell of Robert Vansittart and the Foreign Office.

As a citizen Taylor subscribed to ideas that he identified with the

working class and the Left. As a scholar and professional historian

he followed different influences. Since it has become usual to explain

Taylor’s historical views with reference to his “English radicalism,”

his reckoning in his scholarly writings with Brailsfordism and with

World War I revisionism has been overlooked.33 In 1933–34, Taylor

ploughed through all fifty-four volumes of Grosse Politik, which,

one of his most able and lucid biographers concludes, caused the

scales to fall from his eyes about the UDC anti-Entente line.34 More

likely Hitler, combined with Namier’s tutelage and the encourage-

ment of E.L. Woodward, caused Taylor to reconsider his enthusiasm

for Brailsford and the Grosse Politik view of Imperial Germany’s

foreign policy.35

Taylor wanted to use the GP, the British documents, and other

materials to strike a blow at William L. Langer’s impressive and com-

pendious interpretation of Imperial German policy.36 Like Taylor,

Langer had been a student of Pribram’s, had been guided through

the German archives by Thimme and associates, and had ended

up, said Taylor, with a tendency “to see things through German

spectacles.”37 Taylor, for his part, was not immune to the under-

standable tendency to put a minus where Langer put a plus. He

insisted that Langer had paid too much attention to imperialism

and not enough to continental European circumstances. It was a mis-

take, said Taylor, to think, as did Sanderson in his famous exchange

with Crowe, that Bismarck had been driven by domestic forces into

his colonial ventures. Bismarck was not pressed. He was making a

complex continental maneuver.38 Taylor rejected Langer’s view of

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German policy, which he said had been “formed by Thimme.”39

The European balance, not imperialism, was the key.

Taylor abandoned the Hobson-Brailsford theory of imperialism

in favor of the Namier-Woodward theory of the German threat.

Although Taylor left his pacifist work with the Manchester Peace

Council when Hitler occupied the Rhineland in 1936, he still clung

to a pacifist position and resisted rearmament. He suspected that

the National Government was really maneuvering to inspire Hitler

to attack the Soviet Union: “I expected that Britain and France had

abandoned any idea of resisting Hitler and that when he attacked

Russia, as I expected him to do, they would either remain neu-

tral or cooperate with him.”40 Even so, British Communists talked

about keeping faith in the League, which Taylor had come to reject

with contempt. He was anti-Communist but pro-Russian—that is,

he thought it best for Britain to court Russia. Like Churchill, Duff

Cooper, and the other anti-Appeasers, Taylor lapsed into inactiv-

ity during the next two years, and he said little about the Spanish

Civil War. The period before Munich was a strange “lull,” as he

later described it in the Origins. He was “greatly cheered” to hear

of the Nazi-Soviet pact, which “ruled out a German attack on Rus-

sia and therefore in my opinion any likelihood of war.” He drew

the provocative conclusion that, because the Nazi-Soviet pact had

driven a wedge between Hitler and the Appeasers, “it was the Nazi-

Soviet pact that really finished Hitler.”41 Even after the start of the

war Taylor remained convinced that the British and French were still

angling for a way to join with Germany, and they were trying to use

the Soviet campaign in Finland to bring about the union. But the

Nazi attack on Russia produced Churchill’s immediate declaration

of solidarity with the Soviets, which Taylor later called the greatest

act of statesmanship in modern history.

After the war Taylor wrote his strongly Vansittartist Course of

German History and an essay on the later career of the Habsburg

Monarchy. At the end of the latter, he drew the sobering conclu-

sion that Communist control of East Central Europe had been the

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

only alternative to “the restoration of German hegemony, at first

economic and later military.”42 He then set himself to his greatest

work, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918, an attempt

to update the question of the deep origins of the war of 1914–1918

by improving on the work of all who had gone before on a topic

that was, even at the time, covered by a dozen or more scholarly ac-

counts. Taylor wanted most to improve on Langer and Gooch—he

wanted to use the Grosse Politik and other documents to disprove

the received revisionist opinion on the Great War, which rested, he

thought, on these materials.

The Struggle for Mastery was original by design and by strenuous

effort. Taylor did not attempt to assert that Germany and Austria

had deliberately sought war in August 1914, yet the real issue in

British entry into the war was prevention of German hegemony over

the continent—a threat regularly repeated by periodic attempts to

forge a continental league against Britain. Should the Great War

be considered a war for balance of power, a war of continental

coalition against a perceived potential hegemon? Taylor had begun

by speaking of a “perpetual quadrille of the balance of power,”

yet as his account came closer to 1914, he curiously denied the

influence of the balance of power and spoke ambiguously of its

having broken down, as if maintenance of the balance had never

required war. Taylor defended the French and discounted Poincare’s

encouragement of the Russians in 1912 and 1914. But, he insisted,

the French had urged not that the peace of Europe, but the balance be

maintained. Russian officials knew what that meant. Nevertheless,

the story of aggressive French action, said Taylor, was mythical; the

French had entertained only defensive thoughts.

Nor was Russian ambition what it had been made out to be.

Certainly not a drive for the Straits or “warm water,” as Gooch

thought. Russia feared Austria’s drive toward the Straits. She was

not guilty of forming the Balkan League that started the Balkan

wars of 1912–13.43 Russia, said Taylor, had never taken seriously

Moltke’s loose talk about an inevitable conflict between Slav and

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Teuton. Only in Germany was policy based upon the “cauchemar

of Greater Serbia,” which had prompted the general staff’s and

the Kaiser’s “blank check” to Austria.44 An authoritative statement

against the Grosse Politik line by means of the Grosse Politik. In

the celebrated bibliography, Taylor called the Grosse Politik “not

the least of the factors that made possible Hitler’s destruction of

the Versailles system.”45 It had produced a version of European his-

tory “created by seeing everything through German eyes,” and he

lamented that it would probably never be eradicated.

In some ways, Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War pre-

sented a similar view of German policy. One might even find in

Taylor’s book some continuity with the work of Fritz Fischer. Yet

the opposite is no less true. Taylor on World War I is much differ-

ent from Taylor on World War II. The Struggle for Mastery is an

argument against the revisionism of the twenties on the origins of

the Great War; the Origins argues in support of a revisionist inter-

pretation of World War II. The real continuity in the two works is

in a disposition toward the trope of “stumbling into war” rather

than one of a “war path.” The “war path” can be seen by all, per-

haps even too well, in the march of events, but only the diplomatic

historian can reveal the “stumbling” as seen in the documents. And

having revealed it, the historian cannot easily reject the temptation

to think it decisive.

In Origins, Taylor doubled back for the views he rejected in the

thirties. Why? A number of reasons have been suggested: his quar-

rels with Namier, his losing the Regius chair to Trevor-Roper, his

feeling of having been slighted in his profession. Even so, he can-

not have been immune to a desire to do for the second world war

what had already been done for the first—to elevate it to the sta-

tus of a great historical mystery. Taylor had good reason to worry

that in doing so he would be considered a convert to the school

of discredited pre-war American revisionists. “My nightmare,” he

told an interviewer, “is that Harry Elmer Barnes will write a favor-

able review of Origins.”46 “Few discoveries are more irritating,”

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

Lord Acton once said, “than those which expose the pedigree of

ideas.”

Taylor and Barnes, Fay and Schmitt

Taylor’s nightmare came true. Barnes was delighted with the

Origins. “Nothing like it,” he said, “since E.D. Morel’s attacks on

Grey.” It was “decisively Revisionist on all vital points . . . coming

from Taylor it will make Revisionism on World War II re-

spectable.”47 “Our friend, AJP Taylor, who was once, not the Verna

dot Schmitt of World War II revisionism but the Charles Downer

Hazen . . . has now brought out a book on the causes of World War II

that seems to go as far as Hoggan and much further than anything

in print.”48

Barnes was the paramount figure in Revisionism—he generally

used the upper case—in the twenties. He taught at Columbia dur-

ing the war, supported Wilson, advocated American intervention in

1916–17, and supported the League of Nations. Reading two arti-

cles published in 1920 by his Smith colleague Sidney B. Fay changed

him forever. Based upon the German policy documents Karl Kautsky

published, and the Austrian documents published by Richard Gooss,

Fay suggested that Austria, not Germany, bore most responsibility

for the war.49 Fay leaned toward Gooss’s interpretation, that the

Kaiser was “a sacrificial lamb offered on the altar of Berchtold’s

reckless perfidy and obstinacy.”50 Britain had set German nerves

on edge in 1912 by naval conventions with France and Russia, in-

advertently giving life to the German nightmare of “encirclement.”

Russian policy, or rather the policy of the Russian military, had

duped the Tsar into a partial mobilization against Austria that was

really a disguised mobilization against Germany—and Germany

answered with war against France and Russia. Thus Germany had

war forced upon her “not by England, as has been so commonly be-

lieved in Germany, but by her own ally (Austria) and by Russia.”51

German leaders were “not criminals plotting the World War, they

were simpletons putting a noose about their necks.”

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Barnes called the Fay articles “a blinding flash on the road to

Damascus.” During the next few years, in Barnes’s capacity as the

first book editor for Foreign Affairs, he followed the literature on

the war and found it inferior to Fay’s. In 1924, Herbert Croly,

editor of the New Republic, asked Barnes to write a critique of

Charles Downer Hazen’s Fifty Years of Europe. Stating the ortho-

dox case for German war guilt, Hazen had defended the Russian

mobilization in 1914 as a natural response to “the wanton attack

against Serbia.”52 Barnes denounced Hazen in a sweeping defense of

Germany, blaming France and Russia, and, to boot, attacking

American entry into the war. Barnes summed up the Revisionist

case in his 1926 book, Genesis of the World War, less a chronolog-

ical narrative than an extended essay exploring German war guilt.

For Barnes, responsibility for the war lay in general with the en-

tente, but more specifically with Poincare, Delcasse, Izvolskii, and

Sazonov.53 Barnes drew on an array of materials, including the diplo-

matic documents, colored books, memoirs, and the already vast

secondary literature, to pronounce his allegiance to the Revisionist

cause.54

Fay viewed the Russian mobilization as an act of war. Barnes

wanted to widen the case in its political implications—which in-

sulted no one and even paralleled the Soviet view of Russian

imperialism—to direct fire at the French and at those who saw

German war guilt as a rationale for the reparations regime that

was, in his view, bleeding Germany and Europe. Barnes relied upon

various authorities to make his case, including Gooch and Langer.

Gooch, Barnes felt, led the way as a guide to the Grosse Politik,

but for the special guilt of the French he relied most on Langer.

Poincare and Izvolskii, according to Langer, had begun their cam-

paign when Poincare became Premier in 1912 and the two had deter-

mined to build the entente into a military alliance against Germany

and Austria. In 1912–14 they strengthened the naval arrangements

between entente powers and presented a solid front to the central

powers.55 Barnes considered Langer a fellow revisionist, and Langer

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

supported Barnes against Hazen. Langer called the war guilt clause

“the most stupendous hoax in history.”56

Many critics toasted Barnes’s The Genesis of the World War,

but not all the hostile reviewers claimed that Barnes was wrong.57

Charles Beard, Ferdinand Schevill, and Langer all expressed ap-

proval. Barnes even won a partial victory in the eyes of the most

influential critic, Bernadotte Schmitt, who accepted the case against

Germany’s sole war guilt but rejected Barnes’s claims about the guilt

of France and Russia. Schmitt complained that Barnes relied too

much on secondary sources, which shifted the whole discussion onto

a different plane. The last round of the controversy would be fought

on the ground of narratives that pretended to be grounded only in

diplomatic documents—a departure for diplomatic historians, who

were now assuming that they could write, definitively and with ab-

solute detachment, on contemporary events entirely from foreign

office archives.58

Fay and Schmitt soon geared up for their definitive retelling using

the full-scale scholarly apparatus. In 1928 Fay published Origins of

the World War in two volumes—the first on deep origins, 1870–

1914, and the second on the immediate crisis of 1914. He built

upon his original argument that, based upon the Kautsky docu-

ments and the Austrian Red Book, one must conclude that the War

Guilt Clause was “without foundation.”59 In the new volumes, Fay

claimed that Poincare was the real culprit. His reckless behavior

had spurred the Russians into action, and the Russian mobilization

in effect “meant war”; the subsequent German attack on Belgium

and France must be seen as an unavoidable response.60 Imperialism,

doctrines of preventive war, or military timetables were not impor-

tant.61 Fay returned to the responsibility of Lord Grey—no one

wanted war, and British policy could have prevented it, either by

warning France and Russia that Britain was not on board, or by

warning Germany that she was.62

Schmitt answered in 1930 with The Coming of the War, which

earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1916, prior to the release of the ocean

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of documentary material that historians now had to digest, he had

published England and Germany, 1740–1914. As Barnes and his

friends were not slow to notice, Schmitt’s conclusions in his 1916

book substantially foreshadowed the conclusions he drew in 1930.

He had already said that Germany and Austria were resolved to

make war, and both wanted to force Russia to back down, which

explained why the Germans issued a blank check to Austria. They

both “intended to take Serbia and Europe by surprise” by issuing

the ultimatum to Serbia, all in the cause of re-arranging the Balkans

to their specifications. Schmitt had made these claims in 1916, and

The Coming of the War continued in the same vein. Germany was

“precipitate” in declaring war on Russia—the Russian mobilization

was not sufficient cause to prompt the German mobilization and at-

tack.63 Schmitt softened his earlier view by saying that Lloyd George

had been perfectly correct to say the powers had “staggered and

stumbled into war.” All the powers made terrible miscalculations—

the Germans thinking that Romania was available, the Russians

thinking they could pull Bulgaria in, the British allowing themselves

to be entirely hoodwinked in fruitless negotiations with Turkey.

The powers thought they had been drawn into a crucial “test of

strength.” As to Grey’s responsibility, Schmitt allowed that British

policy had been uncertain, and he blamed a general paralysis of in-

decision in the British cabinet. In answer to Fay’s claim that Grey fell

between two stools, Schmitt countered that, in any event, whatever

the British did, the Germans had counted them out of their plans

and could not have been deterred—a more chastened and nuanced

way of repeating the original analysis that German guilt for the war

stood out from others’ and of vindicating the existing international

order.64 Churchill called Schmitt’s work “a masterly book, which

made the anti-Versaillists sick at heart.”65

Fay and Schmitt had used the same materials to come to strikingly

different conclusions. Thirty years later, when I first studied these

works, the difference was said to indicate two facts about histori-

ans: first, they could honestly come to different conclusions from

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

the same evidence; and second, a mark of professional presentation

was that one could argue a case different from the presenter’s on

the basis of his own evidence. Evidence, apparently, did not speak

for itself. Fay’s and Schmitt’s narratives did not differ markedly, but

on the key political point of responsibility for war, they ended on

opposite sides. Even so, the confrontation between Fay and Schmitt

marked a triumph for the purest diplomatic history in the spirit of

the Grosse Politik—through this lens, imperialism, along with com-

plaints about the perfidy of the alliance system and secret diplomacy,

receded into the background.66 The Soviets themselves soon stopped

talking about imperialism and turned instead to the cause of collec-

tive security, which they advanced with all the Wilsonian naivete

they could plausibly muster.

Barnes, of course, praised Fay, complaining only that he had been

too timid in pursuing the point to which his facts had led. Fay

was a “moderate revisionist.” For Barnes, the real experts became

Fay, Langer, Linglebach, and Cochran, whose opponents—people

like Schmitt, Seymour, and Slosson—must now be considered anti-

German “salvagers.”67 It only remained for the academic world

to recognize the victory of the revisionists, which, Barnes believed,

had already been painfully won in the middle-brow press. He felt

somewhat vindicated with the appearance of Raymond Sontag’s au-

thoritative survey, European Diplomatic History, which treated the

powers before 1914 as haunted by fear of war but driven despite

everything into a storm they could not weather.68 Sontag argued

that both “encirclement” and exclusive German war guilt were mis-

conceptions, and in his glacial evenhandedness, he leaned slightly

toward the Fay-Langer position. Barnes, who was delighted to see

his Genesis of the World War commented upon favorably in Sontag’s

bibliography—Sontag called it “the most important contribution to

the ‘revisionist’ cause”—noted with satisfaction Sontag’s glowing

references to Fay and Langer and the observation that Schmitt was

“hostile to Germany.” Barnes congratulated Sontag on his “splendid

achievement,” which, he said, “contained just as much scholarship

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as Fay or Langer.” Barnes wrote to him that “Having been shabbily

treated by men who owe me a great deal, it is particularly gratifying

to be handled graciously by one who owes me nothing.”69 Barnes

was not Sontag’s sort, however. Sontag was not a fierce polemicist

for the revisionist position. He saw the diplomats of his era and the

preceding one as having been charged by heaven with the task of

saving civilization from the destructive forces let loose by science,

irreligion, class conflict, national chauvinism. The world war was

evidence of their failure, and another world war would complete the

destruction of civilization begun by the first. In the crisis of 1914,

as in the crisis of the thirties, Anglo-German relations were at the

heart of the problem. Why had accommodation between them been

impossible?

Sontag sent a plaintive letter to Harold Temperley to ask for his

opinion on the negotiations of 1898–1901, when Sontag thought

accommodation had had its best chance, although he had found no

help for his theory in the British Documents. Could it have been

that the British aroused false hopes for a military alliance, which

the Germans came to expect as a minimum?70 Temperley’s long let-

ter in reply did not satisfy Sontag, who took the matter up 1938

in a larger context in his Germany and England: Background of

Conflict, 1848–1894. Why had the “natural allies,” as Salisbury

called them, turned so passionately into “natural enemies?” Not

because of clashes of national interests; these differences were triv-

ial and easily composed. They only sharpened into war hysteria

because of ideas. Germany was driven by the idea of the nation as

a law unto itself, England by the idea of an expansionist Greater

Britain, and both passions were fed by the rise of Social Darwinism.

Curiously, Sontag found German ideas the more progressive. “The

Germany of Bismarck, like the Germany of Hitler, seemed reac-

tionary to Englishmen, and yet in the field of ideas, is it not the

Germans who have been innovators?” Sontag wrote. “In all that

concerns the relations of the individual to the state, of the state to

the world community, and, more broadly, of law to force, the world

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

of today is far closer to the ideals of the German nationalists of

Bismarck’s day than to the Gladstonian liberals.” This fact, Son-

tag felt, might have seemed more impressive “than the similarity

of the problem confronting the two Chamberlains.” At any rate,

the problem of the two Chamberlains was how to “make room

for Germany to grow in the world outside Europe” by a policy of

concessions.71

Like Barnes and Langer, Sontag was in Fay’s camp, the moderate

scholarly revisionists, and so he had to brave Schmitt’s criticism of

Diplomatic History. He nevertheless judged “the myths surrounding

the origins of the world war largely destroyed.”72 Like some other

Catholics, Sontag was stunned and puzzled by the Spanish Civil

War, although more distressed by the shooting of priests than the

travails of the republic. Germany and England was full of hope,

widely shared, for the success of Chamberlain’s policy. Sontag’s

teacher William Linglebach, to whom he had dedicated Germany

and England, thanked him warmly and mused that the lesson about

the origins of the Great War was applicable to the appeasement

of current German appetites. “Why should nearly all our colum-

nists lose their heads,” asked Linglebach, after the Munich agree-

ment, “because England did not fight over Czechoslovakia?”73 As

to American policy in the period of British Appeasement, Sontag

remained a non-interventionist, but he was not prompted to take a

pacifist view of American entry into the Great War. The most influ-

ential revisionist works of the period on American entry had their

inevitable impact on his contemporaries.74 “Millis and Tansill,”

William Bundy later wrote to Sontag, “largely obscured for a gener-

ation of susceptible readers (of whom I was one) the fact that in large

measure . . . any American President would have been hard pressed

to avoid the course Wilson took.” Sontag winced at the analysis

of public opinion and propaganda in Millis’s Road to War, but he

could not concur with its pacifism.75

When Hitler invaded Prague in March 1939 and the British

gave their guarantee to Poland, both Langer and Sontag quickly

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dropped their attitude toward Appeasement. Langer had felt that

the basic policies advocated in Mein Kampf—the liquidation of the

Jews and expansion to the east—did not originate with Hitler, and

so he viewed the first of Hitler’s measures with resignation. The

occupation of the Rhineland was a necessary counter to the Maginot

line, and the Anschluss with Austria was in line with Austrian pop-

ular sentiment, “in the countryside if not in Vienna.”76 Munich was

the last stand for accommodation, and soon confidence began to

wane. Langer’s January 1939 review of Germany and England noted

that the policy of concessions Sontag had endorsed “did not seem

to jell.” He prodded Sontag gently to write something more specific

about the present.77 With Britain seemingly committed to oppos-

ing Hitler, Sontag recognized that America would have to weigh in

eventually, and he took a more sober view of the revisionist cam-

paign against American intervention in 1917: “Then as now, ideal-

ism concealed the cold calculation that American interests would be

jeopardized by a German victory.”78 As with A.J.P. Taylor, Sontag’s

turn of mind affected his view of the origins of the Great War. He

rejected O.J. Hale’s revisionist view that England’s decision for the

entente with France in 1904 was to be regretted since this meant a

choice “for the more dangerous group.”79 “The alternative to the

entente,” said Sontag, “was what Grey prophesied and has now

come to pass, the union of the continent under Germany against

Britain.”

Barnes did not experience a similar conversion. He remained true

to his revisionist views, and he would probably have continued his

defense of Fay against Schmitt into the Hitler era, except that the

controversy lost steam in 1931 when Germany stopped paying repa-

rations. Barnes’s attention turned to the larger question of peace in

Europe. In the column he wrote for the New York World Telegram,

“The Liberal Viewpoint,” he urged an even-handed attitude toward

German claims against their neighbors. He thought Hitler, despite

his other quirks, was a traditional German statesman in foreign

policy. “Hitler’s follies, mainly in secondary matters,” he wrote,

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

“so prejudice opinion against him that the commendable elements

of his program are frowned upon.”80 Barnes warned that stories

about Hitler’s domestic atrocities, which were “trivialities,” could

not be believed, especially by anyone who remembered the menda-

cious stories spread by British propaganda in the world war about

German horrors. Many readers of his column came to believe that

Barnes was a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer, or at least “a mild partisan

of the Hitler regime,” as the author of one letter of complaint put

it.81

Barnes directed most of his efforts to the writing of his consider-

able works of history and sociology, and he maintained his friend-

ship with Montelgas and von Wegerer and occasionally wrote some-

thing on reparations to be translated for the Berliner Monatshefte,

which had replaced the Kriegsshuldfrage after the end of the repa-

rations regime. Barnes also agitated on behalf of the histories of

Millis and Tansill, which aimed to expose the process by which

the Anglophilia of Wilson and his advisors had drawn the United

States into the war. When war broke out in 1939, Barnes called it

the direct result of the peace terms that ended the first war. War

guilt and reparations had made Hitler’s career, and Barnes warned

that the United States might well end up repeating the same mistake

it had made in 1917. He urged that Americans “put the interests

of the United States ahead of those of Britain or the Dutch East

Indies”—it would not do for them to adopt for a second time the

pose of “ersatz Englishmen.” “The idealism underlying this war,”

he said, “is even more bogus than that which supported the first

war.”82 Barnes became a prominent member of the America First

Committee, and in 1941, at a Keep America Out of War Congress

at Berkeley, he spoke against Roosevelt’s policy alongside John T.

Flynn, A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, Bertram Wolfe, and others.

After the war, Barnes made a determined attempt to initiate a con-

troversy about the American entry that featured the idea of a plot

at Pearl Harbor.83 He objected to the American bombing campaign

of 1944–45 and to perceived abuses, according to JCS 1067, in the

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post-war administration of Germany. He opposed the Nuremburg

trials, whose verdict he considered a repeat of the war guilt thesis

of 1919, and he even doubted whether the Nazi extermination of

the Jews was to be believed, judging the whole thing in the light

of reparations payments, as in the past, now by Germany to Israel.

Maurice Bardeche and Paul Rassinier, who denied the Holocaust,

were, Barnes said, reviving some of the spirit and integrity shown

after the First World War by Alfred Fabre-Luce, George Demartial,

and their associates.84

Barnes greeted Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War as

one greets the return of a prodigal son, claiming that it was “too

good to be true.” Taylor, no doubt, cringed at Barnes’s words.85

Despite Barnes’s praise, he saw Taylor’s book as really “only a

primer” compared to David Hoggan’s 1961 Der erzwungene Krieg

(The Forced War). Hoggan, who had studied with Fay and Langer

at Harvard and later came under the spell of Porter Sargent and

Barnes,86 had been powerfully impressed by the case against Roo-

sevelt’s policy Tansill made in 1952 in Back Door to War. Hoggan

read deeply in German and Polish sources, and his book—a sprawl-

ing account centered around a study of German-Polish relations

in 1938–39—made the same case as von Wegerer’s and the edi-

tors of the German White Paper, and to a certain extent Taylor’s:

Hitler did not want war, even a local war with Poland, toward

which he was more moderate than Neurath or Rauschning. For

Hoggan, the real culprit was Halifax, whom Taylor found only

equivocal and inconsistent, “muddling into war.” No explosion

of British opinion occurred when Hitler invaded Prague in March

1939, Hoggan argued, but Halifax’s insistence made British policy

adamant about the guarantee to the Poles, stiffened them against

accommodation, and forced war upon poor Hitler.87 Hoggan was to

A.J.P. Taylor as Barnes was to Fay. Taylor’s nightmare was to be em-

braced by Barnes, but to be compared with Hoggan proved no less

macabre.

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The Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History

Conclusion

In the years immediately following the Second World War, it seemed

that revisionism could not stick. On the German side, it still has

not. Few historians say today that Hitler stumbled into war. On

the British side, however, Appeasement is no longer a motherless

child, and even accounts that are not particularly revisionist echo

the description of a British Empire embattled on many sides and

with no alternative but to attempt to buy off its enemies one by

one.88 The revisionist case has gathered steam with the appearance

of new material, Cabinet papers and other sources released after

relaxation in 1967 of the fifty-year restrictions on access to British

public records. But in 1965, before new sources emerged, Donald

Cameron Watt already finely argued the case. Chamberlain is now

usually considered to have been dealt a bad hand to play, and his

actions are regarded as reasonable, often realistic, and even shrewd.

Revisionist historians added greatly to knowledge of the climate

and background of British decision making. As Fay and the mod-

erate revisionists of the twenties showed, one could be educated by

revisionism even if one was not entirely convinced. Revisionism also

opened the flood gates before a greater torrent—once the nuances

of Chamberlain’s position were reconsidered, the next question to

ask was whether he, as opposed to Churchill, had not been right

all along. Perhaps it would have been prudent to seek a greater

Germany as a barrier against Soviet Russia; perhaps Churchill and

Eden had erred by their enthusiasm for a Grand Alliance.89 One

revisionist adds, if Chamberlain should have “let Hitler pursue a

Teutonic crusade against the Slavs in 1938–9,” then Stalin should

have been permitted his sphere of influence in East Central Europe

in 1945–7.90 Les revisionismes se touchent.

Is it fair, then, to say that revisionism has been the dominant

intellectual trend in European diplomatic history? Has the cause of

those who took us into the two world wars and the Cold War not

proved in the end to be meritorious in the eyes of the historians?

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The interpretation of World War I as an accident, in keeping with

the revisionism of the twenties, has not lost its hold on the non-

professional reader, and this interpretation has continued to co-exist

with a Churchillian interpretation of World War II. The two models

were sometimes set against each other as alternative warnings, as for

John F. Kennedy in 1961–62. Is it useful to compare the origins of the

two world wars? When Taylor wrote his Origins, he meant exactly

such a comparison, which may have seemed to him a vindication

of “hack diplomatic history.” Watt, whose measured defense of the

Origins did much to bring about its eventual vindication, concluded

only that the parallels were closer than are admitted by orthodoxy,

but less than the revisionists like Taylor would claim.91

Unkind critics suggest the truly horrifying possibility that his-

torians, as a kind of deformation professionelle, tend to strive

unreasonably after originality, which may result in their over-

selling their analyses. Historians may be too ready to discard work

that is “superceded.” If so, H.W. Koch is perfectly right to rec-

ommend Fay’s Origins of the World War, a book published in

1928, to today’s student.92 I would add Schmitt, Namier, Wheeler-

Bennett, and a good many others. It is useful for historians to re-

sist the pull of fashion and the allure of current “definitive” ac-

counts to try to appreciate how the story was once told. Such re-

sistance broadens perspectives and encourages sympathy for the

intelligent educated general reader, who refuses to embrace all

of the latest professional innovations. If the reading public re-

mains unconvinced about the latest trend in historical scholar-

ship, should it be taken as their fault alone? Or should historians

think again?

NOTES

My thanks to Jon Jacobson and Marc Trachtenberg for useful comments, andespecially to Gerhard Weinberg for our valuable exchanges and the suggestion thatI visit the Revisionist Archives at the American Heritage Center at the Universityof Wyoming. The Sontag papers are at the library of the University of California,Berkeley.

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1. Arthur Marwick, “All Quiet on the Postmodern Front,” Times Literary Supplement(23 February 2001).

2. Donald Cameron Watt, “Could Anyone Have Deterred Him?” Times LiterarySupplement (22 December 2000), 9.

3. Peter Bell is representative in calling Appeasement “an intelligent response to in-superable difficulties.” Chamberlain, Germany, and Japan, 1933–1934 (Londonand Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1996), ix.

4. The pillars of the new history were Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der Weltmacht andA.J.P. Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War. One might also include GeorgeKennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston and Toronto: LittleBrown, 1961); and E.H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961.)William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1960) sold perhaps ten million copies and was translated into eight lan-guages. It reinforced the current orthodoxy—its success showed that the revivalof revisionism was confined to the historical profession. Geoffrey Baraclough saidthat people like Shirer and himself were the “club bores of the sixties”: “No onewants to listen to us, and people whisper that we are obsessed, hysterical andneurotically anti-German.” See Gavriel Rosenfeld, “The Reception of William L.Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in the United States and West Ger-many,” Journal of Contemporary History (January 1994), 121. R.J.B. Bosworth,Explaining Auschwitz and Hiroshima: History Writing and the Second World War(London and New York: Routledge, 1993), on pp. 195–6, considering the effu-sion of influential books from this time, cites E.P. Thompson’s The Making of theBritish Working Class of 1961 as a pivotal force linked to the rise of a new socialhistory.

5. C.E. Montague, Disenchantment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1922), 191.6. John F. Kennedy, Why England Slept (New York: W. Funk, 1940). See also

“Cato,” (Michael Foot, Frank Owen) Guilty Men (New York: Frederick Stokes,1940).

7. Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August (New York: Dell, 1962); The Proud Tower(London: Macmillan, 1966), xvi.

8. Arno Mayer, “Domestic Causes of the First World War,” in Leonard Krieger andFritz Stern (eds.) The Responsibility of Power: Historical Essays in Honor of HajoHolborn (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1967), ch.15; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, TheGerman Empire, 1871–1918, trans. Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, Dover, NH:Berg, 1985); Fritz Fisher, World Power or Decline: The Controversy Over GermanWar Aims in the First World War, trans. Lancelot Farrar, Robert and Rita Kimber(New York: W.W. Norton, 1974); D.C.B. Lieven, Russia and the Origins of Warin 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1983); Volker Rolf Berghahn, German and theApproach of War in 1914 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973).

9. The older generation of historians had already been turning toward the idea.William L. Langer’s Lowell lectures at Harvard in 1940, “The Conflagration ofIdeas in Pre-War Europe,” focused on the growth of a new revolutionary spirit,integral nationalism, anti-Semitism, and cultural despair, developments arising ul-timately from the conflict between science and religion. William L. Langer, Inand Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson, 1977), 178–9. RaymondSontag had ended his Germany and England: Background of Conflict, 1848–1894(New York: Appleton Century, 1938), with the thought that “Greater Britain, likeWeltpolitik, was in part an escape or, as men thought, an answer to domestic dis-content.” (341–2). “We must turn,” wrote A.J.P. Taylor, “from the foreign officesto the more profound forces which shape the destinies of men.” “The Rise andFall of Diplomatic History,” Englishmen and Others (London: Hamish Hamilton,1956), 84.

10. Lewis Namier, Diplomatic Prelude, 1938–1939 (London: Macmillan, 1948); In theNazi Era (London: Macmillan, 1952); Europe in Decay: A Study in Disintegration,1936–1940 (London: Macmillan, 1961); John Wheeler-Bennett, Munich: Prologue

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to Tragedy (New York: Duell, Sloane, and Pierce, 1948); Elizabeth Wiskemann,The Rome-Berlin Axis: A History of Relations Between Hitler and Mussolini (NewYork and London: Oxford, 1949); Maurice Baumont, La faillite de la paix, 1918–1939 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946).

11. A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (New York: Atheneum, 1983), 170–1.12. A.J.P. Taylor, The Course of German History (New York: Capricorn, 1961, first

ed. 1946).13. Taylor, Personal History, 172. Eckhart Kehr, Battleship Building and Party Politics

in Germany, 1894–1901, trans. Pauline and Eugene Anderson (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1975); Arthur Rosenberg, The Birth of the German Republic,1871–1918 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931). George Hallgarten, Imperi-alismus vor 1914, 2 vols. (Munich: Beck, 1963); Hans Gatzke, Germany’s Driveto the West: A Study of Germany’s Western War Aims During the First World War(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1950). The same view pervades Barrington Moore’sclassic analysis of paths to democracy, Social Origins of Democracy and Dicta-torship: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon,1993). Adam Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994), 312–13.

14. Taylor, Personal History, 172.15. Quoted in Ved Mehta, The Fly and the Fly Bottle: Encounters with British Intel-

lectuals (New York: Columbia University Press), 1963, 171.16. Trevor-Roper, Rowse, Wiskemann, Hudson, Craig in Roger Louis (ed.), The

Origins of the Second World War: A.J.P. Taylor and His Critics (New York: JohnWiley and Sons, 1972), 4, 41, 114–16; T.W. Mason, “Some Origins of the Sec-ond World War,” Past and Present 29 (1964), 67–87. See also Esmonde Robert-son, The Origins of the Second World War: Historical Interpretations (London:Macmillan, 1971); Esmonde Robertson and Robert Boyce (eds.) Paths to War:New Essays on the Origins of the Second World War (New York: St. Martin’s,1989); Gordon Martel (ed.) The Origins of the Second World War Reconsidered:The A.J.P. Taylor Thesis After Twenty-five Years (Boston and London, 1986), and asecond edition with some different contributors, The Origins of the Second WorldWar Reconsidered: A.J.P. and the Historians (London and New York: Routledge,1990).

17. A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1961),184. Taylor also wrote, “When I say that Munich was a triumph for all that was bestin British life I mean that . . . enlightened people, men of the left—whom perhaps Iequate too easily with all that was best—that they had said that the inclusion of theSudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia was, in the words of one of them, Brailsford,was the worst crime of the peace settlement of 1919. . . I mean by that a triumph forall who had preached enlightenment, international conciliation, revision of treaties,the liberation of nationalities from foreign rule, and so on.” Quoted in Mehta, Flyand the Fly Bottle, 121–2.

18. E.D. Morel, Truth and the War (London: National Labour Press, 1916), xxiii,163–5. George Bernard Shaw argued that “This hideous war of 1914–18 was atbottom a fight between the capitalists of England, France and Italy on the one sideand of Germany on the other for the command of African markets.” Quoted inNorman Angell, After All (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Young, 1951), 141. Itwas a case, wrote Shaw, of “English Monroe-ism.” George Bernard Shaw, What IReally Wrote About the War (New York: Brentanos, 1932), v.

19. Morel, Truth and the War, 165. Hillaire Belloc, who regarded Morel as a “Prussianagent,” countered with this couplet: “Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, butRoaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.”

20. H.N. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold (London: G. Bell, 1918), 28.21. Brailsford, The War of Steel and Gold, 7. Friedrich Naumann, Central Europe,

trans. Christabel Meredith (London: King, 1916).22. H.N. Brailsford, Across the Blockade (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe,

1919), 162, 165.

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23. H.N. Brailsford, Property or Peace (New York: Covici-Friede, 1934), 299, 300.24. H.N. Brailsford, From England to America (New York and London: Whittlesey

House, 1940), 61, 85.25. H.N. Brailsford, Our Settlement With Germany (New York: Hammondsworth),

1944, 29.26. Another way of saying that international Communism, not merely a spillover from

the Russian revolution, grew from the anti-war propaganda of anarchists, paci-fists, and radical social democrats. The Comintern began at Zimmerwald. Seemy “Ambiguities of Trotsky’s Leninism,” Survey (Winter 1979); and F.L. Carsten,War Against War: British and German Radical Movements in the First World War(Berkeley and Los Angeles: U.C. Press, 1982).

27. “Manifesto of the Communist International to the Workers of the World,” in AlanAdler (ed.) Theses, Resolutions, and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of theCommunist International (London: Ink Links, 1980), 28.

28. At first the Hobson-Brailsford-Lenin interpretation of imperialism had heavily in-fluenced Taylor. He was to return to it in the fifties, when he wrote a sympa-thetic and yet sharply critical re-consideration of British foreign policy dissent, TheTroublemakers. See A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers: Dissent over Foreign Pol-icy, 1792–1939 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1957). Despite shortcomings, Taylorconcluded, “Hobson and Brailsford are our sort”—they had caused him to appre-ciate the German position and the “moral illegitimacy” of the peace of Versailles.Taylor studied further with Alfred Pribram in Vienna. He read Friedjung, vonSrbik, and Oncken on Bismarck’s diplomacy in war and peace. See Alfred Pribram,Austrian Foreign Policy, 1908–1918, (London: Allen and Unwin, 1923); Englandand the International Policy of the Great Powers, 1871–1914 (Oxford: ClarendonPress, 1931); Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Metternich (Munich: Bruckmann, 1925);H. Friedjung, The Struggle for Supremacy in Germany, 1859–1866, trans. A.J.P.Taylor and W.L. McElwee (London: Macmillan, 1934); Hermann Oncken, Dasdeutsche Reich und die Vorgeschichte des Weltkrieges, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Barth,1933); See John Boyer, “A.J.P. Taylor and the Art of Modern History,” Journal ofModern History 49 (March 1977), 40–72.

29. Frank Eyck, G.P. Gooch: A Study in History and Politics (London and Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1982) 339; G.P. Gooch, Recent Revelations of European Diplomacy(London: British Institute of International Affairs, 1923); A History of ModernEurope, 1878–1919 (London and New York: Cassel, 1923); Franco-German Rela-tions (London and New York: Longmans, 1923); Germany (London: Benn, 1925).His memoirs are Under Six Reigns (London and New York: Longmans, 1959).

30. G.P. Gooch, “British Diplomacy Before 1914 in the Light of the Archives,” inStudies in Diplomacy and Statecraft (New York: Russell and Russell, 1942),103.

31. John Fair, Harold Temperley (London and Toronto, Associated Universities Press),192.

32. Gooch, “British Diplomacy,” 90. Gooch’s friend Hermann Lutz had used thisphrase in a pamphlet. See also T.G. Otte, “Eyre Crowe and British Foreign Policy: ACognitive Map,” in T.G. Otte and A. Pagedas, Personalities, War, and Diplomacy(London: Frank Cass, 1997), 14–37.

33. For example, Gertrude Himmelfarb, “Taylor-Made History,” National Interest(Summer 1994); and Robert Cole, A.J.P. Taylor: The Enemy Within the Gates(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994).

34. Sisman, A.J.P. Taylor, 117.35. E.L. Woodward, Short Journey (New York: Oxford, 1942), passim, for criticism of

various shortcomings of the Grosse Politik; Great Britain and the German Navy(London: Oxford, 1935), 40, 287 for accord with Crowe as against Sanderson.

36. William L. Langer, The Franco-Russian Alliance (Cambridge, MA, Harvard, 1929);European Alliances and Alignments, 1871–1890 (New York: Knopf, 1931); TheDiplomacy of Imperialism, 1890–1902 (New York: Knopf, 1935).

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37. A.J.P. Taylor, review of Langer’s Diplomacy of Imperialism, International Affairs,November-December 1936, 926–7.

38. That was the point of Taylor’s short review of Bismarckian diplomacy in Germany’sFirst Bid For Colonies, 1884–1885(London: Macmillan, 1938).

39. Taylor, Germany’s First Bid For Colonies, 25.40. Taylor, Personal History, 142.41. Taylor, Personal History, 146.42. A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (London: Hamish Hamilton,

1948), 259; similar conclusions in E.H. Carr, Nationalism and After (London:Macmillan, 1945).

43. A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1954), 478–9, 484, 493. On the Straits Taylor parallels the accountof Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 2 vols. (New York and London:Scribners, 1930); and even Schmitt’s earlier account, England and Germany, 1740–1914 (New York: Fertig, 1967, first ed. 1916), 400, 417. Revisionist arguments onPoincare are discussed below. On the Balkan League, see also Raymond Sontag’sreview of the British documents on the Balkan wars, Journal of Modern History,(June 1934), 215. Taylor leaves out of account neo-Slavism in Russia. See D.C.B.Lieven, Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London and Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1983), 153.

44. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 496–7, 500, 519, 528.45. Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 573.46. Quoted in Mehta, Fly and Fly Bottle, 178.47. Barnes’s notes on the Origins, Barnes papers, box 4; Barnes to William Neumann,

9 May 1961, Neumann Papers, box 1.48. Barnes to Neumann, 25 April 1961, Neumann Papers, box 1. David Hoggan,

The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed (Costa Mesa, CA: Institute forHistorical Review, 1989, first ed. 1961). On Taylor’s links to the older revisionismand to Hoggan, see P. A. Zhilin, A. S. Lakhushevskii, and E. N. Kul’kov, Kritikaosnovnykh konseptsii burzhuaznoi istoriografii vtoroi mirovoi voiny (A Critiqueof the Fundamental Conceptions of the Bourgeois Historiography of the SecondWorld War) (Moscow: Akademii Nauka, 1983), 40–1.

49. Sidney B. Fay, “New Light on the Origins of the World War,” American HistoricalReview (July and October 1920), reference is to the July number, 619. Karl Kautskyet al. Die deutschen Dokuments zum Kriegsausbruch (Charlottenburg, 1919); KarlKautsky, Wie der Weltkrieg enstand (Berlin: Cassirer, 1919); Kautsky was assistantsecretary of state in the German Republican government and the leading theorist ofGerman Social Democracy, a critic of the Russian revolution, and much hated by theRussian Bolsheviks. He stood for the Eisenacher tradition of Bebel and Liebknechtin German Marxism, which held that Germany must be built to include Austria,or suffer terrible Prussian distortions. Kautsky sought to use the documents toimprove on the apologetic German White Book, which he called a “white-washbook,” but he also wanted to defend against the Versailles treaty by blaming thewar on the Kaiser and Prussianism while claiming that Anschluss with Austriawould end Prussian predominance in the German state. Karl Kautsky, “GermanySince the War,” Foreign Affairs (15 December 1922), 101, 105; Richard Gooss,Diplomatische Aktenstucke zur Vorgeschichte des Krieges, 1914, 3 vols. (Vienna,1919).

50. Fay, “New Light,” American Historical Review (July 1920), 618.51. Fay, “New Light,” 628.52. Charles Downer Hazen, Fifty Years of Europe, 1870–1919 (New York: Henry

Holt, 1919), 321–2, 366–8.53. Harry Elmer Barnes, The Genesis of the World War (New York and London: 1926),

xiii.54. Barnes counted himself a soldier in a growing international phalanx: Morel,

Loreborn, Dickinson, Beazley in England; Fabre-Luce, Demartial in France; von

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Wegerer, Brandenburg, Montelgas, Stieve, and Lutz in Germany; Fay and Langerin the United States. See E. D. Morel, Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy: FreshRevelations (London: ILP, 1919); Lord Robert Loreborn, How the War Came(London: Methuen, 1919); G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (New York and London: Century, 1926); R. Beazley, “Lord Grey’s Account ofThings,” Foreign Affairs (December 1925); Alfred Fabre-Luce, La Victoire (Paris:Nouvelle Revue Francais, 1924); Georges Demartial, La guerre de 1914: la mobi-lization des consciences (Paris: Rieder, 1922); Alfred von Wegerer, Der Beginn desKrieges (Berlin, 1924). Erich Brandenburg, Von Bismarck zum Weltkriege (Berlin:Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft fur Politik und Geschichte, 1925); Max Montelgas,British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (New York: Knopf, 1928); FriedrichStieve, Isvolsky and the World War (London: Allen and Unwin, 1926); HermannLutz, Lord Grey and the World War (New York: Knopf, 1928). A subsection ofthe Weimar Foreign Ministry, the Kriegsschuldreferat, directed and financed anarray of publication efforts, including the periodical Kriegsschuldfrage and its suc-cessor, Berliner Monatschefte (both edited by Von Wegerer), and Grosse Politik.Von Wegerer and Lutz were on the Foreign Ministry payroll, and much of thework on German innocence was left to them and to foreigners such as Barnesand Fay. Imanuel Geiss, “The Outbreak of the First World War and German WarAims,” Journal of Contemporary History (July 1966), 75–78; Holger Herwig,“Of Men and Myths: The Use and Abuse of History and the Great War,” in JayWinter, Geoffrey Parker, and Mary Habeck (eds.) The Great War and the TwentiethCentury (New Haven and London: Yale, 2000), 301–3.

55. William L. Langer, “Izvolski and Poincare,” The New Republic (15 April 1925);Barnes, Genesis, 99–100.

56. Langer’s letter to The New Republic (30 April 1924), 260. Langer praised Barnes asone who “has long taken his place among the leading writers on (diplomacy before1914) and waged a courageous fight against staggering odds in this country. He hasreduced many of his opponents ad absurdem and the process is highly illuminatingand instructive.” The Nation (5 December 1928), 264.

57. Barnes’s book was called “an intolerant plea for tolerance” and “Menckenizedhistory.” The Barnes Papers contain a lengthy and warm correspondence betweenH. L. Mencken and Barnes over 25 years. Mencken’s encouragement of Barnes’s Re-visionist efforts, particularly “against that idiot Hazen,” are coupled with his praiseof Genesis and his pro-German and occasionally anti-Semitic remarks. Barnes col-lected all the commentary on his book, with full citations, in In Quest of Truthand Justice: Debunking the War Guilt Myth (Chicago: National Historical Society,1928). See also Peter Novick, That Noble Dream (New York and Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1988), 207–215.

58. Taylor, “Rise and Fall of Diplomatic History,” 81.59. Sidney B. Fay, The Origins of the World War (New York: Macmillan, 1929), vol. 1,

14, citing for support Kautsky, Montelgas, and Gooch.60. Fay, The Origins of the World War, vol. 1, 25; vol. 2, 479.61. Fay’s dissuasion has failed to stick; instead, its opposite has held sway. Some

milestones of the preventive war thesis are Gerhard Ritter, The Schlieffen Plan(London: 1958); A.J.P. Taylor, War By Timetable: How the First World War Began(London: Macdonald, 1969); L.L. Farrar, The Short War Illusion (Santa Barbaraand Oxford, Clio, 1973); and a considerable political science literature. See theessays by Steven Van Evera and Jack Snyder in Steven Miller, Military Strategyand the Origins of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 1985); but seealso the critique by Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1991), ch. 2. David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War inEurope, 1904–1914, 13, casts doubt on the thesis of the land arms race leading towar.

62. Origins of the World War, vol. 2, 556. See the discussion of the Comintern line,above.

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63. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, 2 vols. (New York and London:Scribners, 1930), vol. 1, 147.

64. Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, vol 2, 409.65. Quoted in Michael Cochran, Germany: Not Guilty in 1914, Boston, Stratford,

1931, 4.66. Yet Fay noted the disadvantages of permanent foreign office secretaries determin-

ing policy. “Some, like Sir Eyre Crowe,” said Edward Mead Earle, “had preju-dices which distorted their judgements.” Earle’s lesson was that bureaucracy in theAmerican Department of State was a danger. “A Wise and Upright Story of Warand Responsibility,” The New Republic (5 December 1928), 73–5.

67. Michael Cochran, Germany Not Guilty in 1914; Charles Seymour, The DiplomaticBackground of the War, 1870–1914 (New Haven: Yale, 1916); Preston Slosson,review of Barnes, Genesis in American Historical Review (January 1927), 319–20. Seymour’s volume was considered to have popularized the allied case, goingthrough ten printings by October 1918.

68. Raymond Sontag, European Diplomatic History, 1871–1932 (New York: AppletonCentury Crofts, 1933).

69. Barnes to Sontag, 6 February 1933, Sontag Papers. Sontag must have wondered atthis and other expressions of praise for Diplomatic History. A. Whitney Griswoldsent his encomia, with the added thought: “I wish every one who shudders at thename of Hitler could read it.” Griswold to Sontag, 9 April 1935, Sontag Papers.

70. Sontag to Temperley, 17 December 1936, Sontag Papers. Salisbury’s biographerand daughter Lady Gwendolyn Cecil sent Sontag a copy of Salisbury’s famousmemorandum on relations with Germany, dated 29 May 1901, in which Salisburycasts doubt on the perils of British isolation. This is the last document in HaroldTemperley (ed.) Foundations of British Foreign Policy, 1792–1902 (Cambridge,1938), 518–520.

71. England and Germany: Background of Conflict, 1848–1894 (New York: AppletonCentury Crofts, 1938), xii. Hans Kohn, scholar of European nationalisms, objectedthat the statement gave too much credit to German nationalism. Kohn to Sontag,17 January 1939, Sontag Papers.

72. Sontag review of Langer, Diplomacy of Imperialism, Journal of Modern History(June 1936), 229.

73. Linglebach to Sontag, 28 October 1938, Sontag Papers.74. Walter Millis, The Road to War: America, 1914–1917 (New York: Houghton

Mifflin, 1935); Viewed Without Alarm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1937); CharlesCallen Tansill, America Goes to War (Boston: Little Brown, 1938); C. HartleyGrattan, Why We Fought (New York: Vanguard, 1929).

75. Bundy to Sontag, 15 February 1955, Sontag Papers. Sontag called Millis’s Roadto War a “too well disguised pacifist tract.” American Historical Review (January1936), 363. I am grateful to Marc Trachtenberg for calling my attention to thisreview.

76. William L. Langer, In and Out of the Ivory Tower (New York: Neale Watson,1977), 168–9.

77. Langer review of Germany and England, New York Herald Tribune, 15 January1939; Schmitt’s review, in American Historical Review (July 1939), compared thetalent for dissimulation of Bismarck and Hitler.

78. Sontag review of H.C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, a book he judged to be aproduct of the school of Grattan, Millis, and Tansill, Saturday Review (3 June1939), 16–17.

79. O.J. Hale, Publicity and Diplomacy (New York and London: A.C. Crofts, 1940).80. Barnes ms, August 1933, box 20, Barnes Papers.81. William Robinson to Barnes, 20 September 1933, Barnes Papers.82. Barnes to Alfred Baker Lewis, 26 February 1941, Barnes Papers.83. Harry Elmer Barnes (ed.) Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace (Cantwell, ID:

Caxton, 1953).

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84. Harry Elmer Barnes, “Revisionism and Brainwashing: A Survey of the War-GuiltQuestion in Germany After Two World Wars,” Selected Revisionist Pamphlets(New York: Arno, 1972), 12. On Bardeche and Rassinier, see Deborah Lipstadt,Denying the Holocaust (New York: Plume, 1994), 50–65. Barnes also expressedadmiration for the work of William Appleman Williams on the non-interventionisttradition.

85. Taylor usually referred to the work of the American revisionists as interesting in itsway, but “not much as scholarship,” and in his bibliography for War By Timetablehe called Fay “the most adroit” defender of Germany and Barnes “the most pre-posterous.” Nevertheless, Taylor, after publishing Origins in 1961, occasionallyacknowledged something of a debt to the revisionists, as when he referred to col-lective security in the thirties as “perpetual war for the sake of perpetual peace.”A.J.P. Taylor, The First World War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1963), 286.

86. Porter Sargent, Getting US Into War (Boston, MA: Porter Sargent, 1941).87. David Hoggan, The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed, Costa Mesa, CA,

Institute for Historical Review, 1989 (first ed. 1961). Alfred von Wegerer, TheOrigins of World War Two (New York: R.R. Smith, 1941). See the review of Dererzwungene Krieg by Gerhard Weinberg in American Historical Review (October1962), 104–5.

88. Among many possible examples, the superb text for sixth form students preparingA levels, Andrew Crozier, The Causes of the Second World War (Oxford andMalden, MA, Blackwell, 1997).

89. David Carlton, Anthony Eden (London: A. Lane, 1981), 480–2.90. John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: The Anglo-American Special Relation-

ship, 1940–1957 (New York and London: Harcourt Brace, 160–1). See the reviewby Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Visions and Revisions,” New Leader (18 December1995).

91. Donald Cameron Watt, “Appeasement: The Rise of a Revisionist School,” PoliticalQuarterly (April-June, 1965), 207.

92. H. W. Koch, introduction to The Origins of the Great War: Great Power Rivalryand German War Aims (London and Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1984), 6.

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