Crtice o prvom svetskom ratu

[MayDay]

Čitaj, ali pazi da te ne ozraci ™ revizionističkim interpretacijama.

Pa to i pitam. Nisam dobro potkovana.

[Prospero]

Čitaj, uz zrno soli, ja bih rekao zbog toga što je knjiga neujednačenog kvaliteta pošto je Klark istoričar Pruske/Nemačke, pa su mu mnoge reference za druge oblasti, onako, blah.

[Dr Arslanagić]

Pročitaj prvo Andreja Mitrovića.

[MancMellow]

Pročitaj prvo Andreja Mitrovića.

 

mhm

[Dr Arslanagić]

joj manče, da vidiš kakvu sam crticu iz WWI našao u Engleskoj... sam da nadjem negde da aploudujem

[MancMellow]

preferably kod mene na mail :D

[Prospero]

Germany's Superpower Quest Caused World War I

 

 

"The major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71."

 

Michael Lind

June 30, 2014

 

 

The centenary of the beginning of World War I has revealed a deep divide between perceptions of the war held by the general public and historians, at least in the English-speaking world. Pundits and commentators and politicians routinely opine that World War I was a needless and unavoidable catastrophe, variously attributed to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian terrorist at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, runaway arms races, imperialism in general, or “sleepwalking” politicians who stumbled blindly into catastrophe. The general impression among the broader public is that nobody in particular was to blame for the greatest conflagration in world history before the Second World War. Literary and cinematic masterpieces like Remargue’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Kubrick’s Path’s of Glory have reinforced the perception that the conflict proved the absurdity of war. The lesson is that war is like catastrophic climate change—a destructive force that must be avoided and for which everyone is partly to blame.

 

In the Anglophone world, this popular interpretation of World War I has deep roots in strains of isolationism, the international peace campaigns of the early twentieth century, and, not least, Woodrow Wilson’s call for a “peace without victory.” In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities.

 

But unlike the chattering classes, most historians, ever since Fritz Fischer published Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), have tended to agree that the major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Following the Archduke’s assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia’s satellite Serbia as an excuse for a general war that would establish German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939—a government in Berlin wanted a war, though not the war it ultimately got.

 

The secret “September program” of the German government in 1914 envisioned lopping off territory from France and turning Germany’s neighbors into “vassal states” (a term used in the document for Belgium). The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, negotiated between Germany and the Soviet government that it had helped to install in Moscow, removed Russia from the war, gave Germany the Baltic states and part of Belarus and made an independent Ukraine a German satellite. Put the September program and the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk together, and you have a striking vision of a German continental empire as expansive as the one imagined by Hitler—although, unlike Hitler’s genocidal German settler empire, the Kaiser’s empire would have been a more traditional empire of German-dominated vassal states.

 

Defenders of the “everyone was at fault” interpretation of World War I point out that Germany’s enemies had expansive war aims, too, and that Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire following the war. But this misses the point. The alliance of Russia, France and Britain was defensive, provoked by Germany’s bellicose drive to become a global rather than merely regional power. There had been numerous Balkan wars in the preceding decades and the conflict between Austria and Serbia could have been confined to the Balkans, if Berlin had chosen that option. Instead, Germany’s rulers used Sarajevo as an excuse to do what it wanted to do anyway: convert itself into a “world power” by dominating Europe through war.

 

The British historian Niall Ferguson once suggested that if Britain and the U.S. had stayed out of World War I, a Mitteleuropa established by the Kaiserreich might have evolved into something like today’s European Union. Nonsense. Within Imperial Germany, victory would have strengthened the authoritarian militarists and weakened the forces of liberalism and democracy. The political culture would have been not that of today’s bourgeois Germany but that of a Latin American banana republic or today’s Thailand or Egypt, illiberal regimes in which generals and colonels pull the strings.

 

A German victory in World War I would have created a European superpower which, if less maniacal and murderous than Hitler’s aborted superstate, would have been much more formidable than the Soviet Union. Soviet Russia was a backward nation that controlled the poorest half of Europe during the Cold War. If it had prevailed in World War I, Imperial Germany would have been the most advanced nation of Europe, dominating the richest region in the world.

 

Would this new superpower, created in a bloody war of aggression by Berlin, have been a status quo power? It seems more likely that the German imperial elite, emboldened by success, would have charged recklessly on to wage cold war against the British empire and against the U.S. in the western hemisphere. In any hypothetical German-American Cold War, Imperial Germany might have mobilized superior scientific and technological resources, including areas like chemistry and rocket science in which it led the world. And unlike the Hitler regime, a triumphant Kaiserreich probably would not have allowed distinctions between “Jewish science” and “Aryan science” to get in the way of developing atomic weapons.

 

Bismarck’s Germany was a status quo power. Post-Bismarckian Germany was a rogue state. Wilhelm II did not dream of exterminating Jews and enslaving the Slavs, but in his recklessness and radicalism he was proto-Hitlerian. To achieve the goal of creating a German superpower, Wilhelm and his officers sought to cripple Britain and France, by stirring up a global Muslim jihad and to tie the U.S. down by embroiling it in border war with Mexico (the Zimmerman telegram). Last but not least, Imperial Germany successfully crippled Russia by sponsoring Lenin’s communist coup d’etat in October 1917. The Kaiser and his soldiers and diplomats were not prudent Old World statesmen playing chess. They were revisionist radicals, overturning the chess board and stomping on the pieces.

 

To what end? What was the alternative that was so terrible, so inconceivable, that the Imperial regime and later the Third Reich were willing to plunge the world into two wars that cost a total of 75 to 100 million deaths and devastated Germany in the process? The alternative, unthinkable to the Imperial German ruling class, was that a peaceful, status quo Germany, within its 1871 borders, would be nothing more than the richest country in a rich and peaceful Europe, enjoying cooperative relations with Britain and America.

 

In his book Mitteleuropa [Central Europe] (1917), Friedrich Naumann—himself a moderate German National Liberal—considered and rejected the option that Germany could be a regional European power affiliated with the Anglophone world:

 

As a matter of sentiment, and in spite of all the war “songs of hate,” it is easier for us to contemplate a permanent union with the English World-Power [than an alliance with Russia]. In this case we shall become, as one of my friends puts it, the junior partner in the English world-firm, shall supply it with confidential agents and clerks, build ships and send teachers to the colonies, furnish English emporiums with German goods, industriously made and well paid for, speak English outside our own four walls, enjoy English internationalism, and fight the future English battles against Russia…All of this would be regulated, after the English fashion, in quite reasonable and pleasant forms, but our German Imperial history would have become a history of a territory as is to-day that of Saxony or Wurttemberg. A great nation only does a thing like this when nothing else remains to it [emphasis added]. We know that most of the nations on the globe have no choice but to seek such an alliance, on one side or another, but a greater aim tempts us in virtue of our strength and experience: to become a central point ourselves!

Naumann was wrong. Like the leaders of West Germany after World War II and reunited Germany after the Cold War, Germany’s leaders a century ago should have chosen the alternative of being an honored and well-remunerated junior partner in the Anglo-American “world-firm.” Had they done so, the world would have been spared World War I, World War II, and probably Soviet communism and the Cold War, too.

 

It’s time to retire the myth that World War I was a meaningless, avoidable tragedy while World War II was a just and necessary crusade. World War I and World War II had the same cause—the desire of German elites to use aggressive war to turn Germany from a regional power into a global superpower—and the same result—the defeat of Germany by a defensive coalition of Russia, Britain, France and the United States. If it was right to prevent the German conquest of Europe by the Fuhrer, it was also right to prevent the German conquest of Europe by the Kaiser. What the world needed in 1914 and 1939 was what the world thankfully has today: a European Germany, not a German Europe.

 

 

Michael Lind, a policy director at the New America Foundation, is a contributing editor of The National Interest and author of The American Way of Strategy.

 

Zanimljiv uradak.

[MancMellow]

Pa dobro, skroz je na Fišerovoj liniji uz par začina. Usput je i ismejao Najla. Samo na jednom mestu se "otvorio" za kritiku suprotnog gledišta - mogućnost kuliranja nekog 1 - 1 rata KuK i Srbije. Taj 1 - 1 rat mislim da nije mogao da se desi. 

[Prospero]

Btw, koga zanima mladi stručni časopis "First World War Studies" ima fin broj besplatnih tekstova. Ako nekom baš treba neki nedostupan neka se javi na PM. :)


edit: nekome će ovo biti zanimljivo:
Jonathan E. Gumz, Norms of war and the Austro-Hungarian encounter with Serbia, 1914–1918
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/19475020.2012.761391

[MancMellow]

dobar/koristan spisak literature :)

Edited June 30, 2014 by MancMellow

[Prospero]

Economist, iz 1914. :)
 

The Serbs and the Hapsburgs

Jun 27th 2014, 9:54 by The Economist


Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife leaving the town hall, a few moments before they were assassinated


On July 4th 1914 The Economist published this article in response to the assassination on June 28th of Archduke Franz Ferdinand

ON TUESDAY afternoon the Prime Minister moved: "That an humble Address be presented to his Majesty to express the indignation and deep concern with which this House has learned of the assassination of his Imperial and Royal Highness the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and of his Consort, and to pray his Majesty that he will he graciously pleased to express to his Imperial and Royal Majesty the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary on the part of this House, his faithful Commons, their abhorrence of the crime and their profound sympathy with the Imperial and Royal Family and with the Governments and peoples of the Dual Monarchy." To the tribute of indignation and sympathy expressed in eloquent terms by Mr Asquith and Mr Bonar Law there was universal assent in the House of Commons. It is a dastard act, and any society which applauds it deserves to perish.

We live in an age when the very foundations of society are threatened in almost all countries by a secret conspiracy of crime, when arson and murder are employed as political weapons by the miserable and half-witted instruments of organisations which arrogate to themselves high-sounding names, and persuade youthful enthusiasts that the end justifies the means, and that the most cowardly and bloodthirsty murders are heroic exploits, worthy to be sung with the deeds of Harmodius or Brutus. Poison, the dagger, the revolver, the bomb, all these are employed with impartial ferocity against those who by birth or election are fated to preside over the destinies of nations. Sometimes no doubt these foul acts represent a frenzied protest against a statecraft which subjects whole nations to the tyrannical rule of soldiers and police. But foul play is always foul, and there is no sign of discriminating justice in this form of criminal disease. Lincoln in 1865, Garfield and Czar Alexander III in 1881, President Carnot in 1894, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley in 1901, King Carlos of Portugal in 1908, King George of Greece at Salonica in March 1913, and now the heir to the throne of the Habsburgs are but a small selection from a long list of atrocities in which only a morbid mind can trace the vindications of liberty.

It was on Sunday at Sarajevo after a visit to the Bosnian manoeuvres that the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead by an assassin. Well might the venerable Emperor Francis Joseph say, "I am spared nothing." This crime comes as a climax to the long series of terrible incidents which make up the tragic history of his house. The story is plain enough. Despite warnings of dangers the Archduke determined to attend the Bosnian military manoeuvres, and arrived in Sarajevo with his wife on Wednesday of last week. He spent two days in the mountains inspecting the troops; the Duchess meantime was fêted in the capital. On Sunday morning the Archducal pair drove through the crowded streets of Sarajevo to receive an address at the Town Hall. Before they reached it a bomb was thrown at their automobile. The Archduke warded it off with his arm; it rebounded on the road and exploded violently, injuring the four members of his suite in the second car, one of them severely, as well as some 20 persons in the crowd. The man who threw the bomb, a Servian printer named Cabrinovitch, was seized by the police, who with some difficulty saved him from the fury of the crowd. Half an hour was spent in the Town Hall, and the Royal party then drove away in the direction of the hospital to inquire after the injured aide-de-camp. On their way, at the junction of the Franz Joseph and Rudolf streets, a series of pistol shots were fired from behind a house. Two of them instantly took fatal effect; the Archduke was mortally wounded in the cheek, and the Archduchess, who had endeavoured to shield him, was shot in the body and sank unconscious in his arms. By the time the car reached the hospital both were dead.

The assassin, a Servian student of 19 years of age, Gavro Prinzip by name, denied having any accomplices, but a few yards from the scene of his crime a second unexploded bomb was found; and evidence is accumulating that a plot, deep laid, with many accomplices, had been formed to murder the Archduke. On being interrogated, Prinzip declared that as a Servian Nationalist he had long intended to kill some eminent person, while Cabrinovitch, a compositor, 21 years of age, said he had received the bomb from anarchists in Belgrade. Thus the cause of Nationalism in the Balkans has added another to the long list of horrid atrocities which have marked the struggle for Macedonia.

At first sight the political motive is hard to fathom, for the Archduke's sympathies with the Slavs, especially with the Catholic Croats, were so notorious that his accession to the throne was thought to herald a conflict with the Magyars; and such a conflict might easily have broken up the Dual Monarchy, whose present basis is found in a pact between Germans and Magyars supported by the Poles, and constantly threatened by agitation and discontent among the Czechs in the North, the Ruthenians, the Roumanians, the Southern Slavs, and the Italian Irredentists. But the idea which the Archduke Francis Ferdinand is supposed to have represented, drawn no doubt partly from the Jesuits and partly from military quarters, was the erection of a Catholic South Slav kingdom, taken mainly from Hungary, and including Croatia, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, which would have converted the dual into a "trial " monarchy. To such a solution the Servians, belonging by religion to the Greek Church, and using the Greek alphabet, are bitterly opposed. Their co-religionists are numerous in Southern Hungary, and form above one-third of the population of Bosnia. They speak the same language as the Bosnian Mussulman and Catholic Croat, and their aim is a greater Servia, which will stretch from the Adriatic littoral to the Mediterranean coast. All those fair lands of the Austrian Crown where various dialects of this language are spoken are destined, in their eyes, to form one kingdom, an orthodox Servia, ruled from Belgrade. It is this notion, no doubt, revolving in the mad brain of a criminal, which explains the tragedy of Sarajevo.

Though we would not forget that death, and especially a death like this, is a natural bar to anything like bitter criticism, it would be false and foolish to pretend that the political character of the late Archduke was one which commanded confidence or promised internal and external peace to the Habsburg monarchy. On the contrary, one of the main reasons for dreading the decease of the old Emperor was anxiety as to what might happen when the reins of power fell into the hands of his successor. It may be remembered that when the Italians were at war in Tripoli the late Archduke held menacing manoeuvres on the frontier, and was credited with the design, from which he was withheld by Count Aehrenthal and the Emperor, of marching into Italy to crush the secular monarchy and restore the Papal authority. We have already referred to the hatred and suspicion with which his clerical and Slav sympathies were regarded by Magyar statesmen. And it is to his deplorable influence that the naval and military expansion under which the financial solvency of the Dual Monarchy is rapidly disappearing must mainly be ascribed. He was no doubt in his private character brave and likeable; but those who knew him well were alarmed by an irrational obstinacy and self-will strangely streaked with weak and vacillating purposes. The sense of responsibility, drawn from long and painful experience, so marked in the venerable Emperor of Austria was absent in his heir, and it may well be that the new succession is more likely to hold together the composite and discordant elements of the Hapsburg realm.

 

[MancMellow]

Aaaahh, stari dobri Economist :D još su me i prijatno iznenadili ponečim u tekstu  ^_^

[Filipenko]

Primećujem da su Hrvatska i Dalmacija bili odvojeni entiteti. 

[MancMellow]

Evo nešto za Filipa i Hamleta  ^_^

 

http://scindeks-clanci.ceon.rs/data/pdf/0354-6497/2002/0354-64970201007P.pdf

[bradilko]

vredi ovo?

http://www.clio.rs/knjige.php?id=572