"A New Look at the Old Revisionism:" A Review of Anthony D’Agostino’s "The
Revisionist Tradition in European Diplomatic History," _Journal of the
Historical Society_, June 2004, Vol. 4 Issue 2.

Commentary by:
William R. Keylor
Boston University

Confronted with the term “revisionism,” most diplomatic historians will
probably think first of the body of scholarship challenging the orthodox view
that the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for the breakup of the Grand
Alliance and the advent of the Cold War.  My first reaction to Anthony
D’Agostino’s stimulating review of an earlier tradition of historical
revisionism addressing the origins of the two world wars of the twentieth
century was gratitude to the author for having devoted a great deal of
intellectual effort on a historical period from which most of our colleagues
have increasingly turned away.  Our profession’s preoccupation with the
causes the Cold War has generated an extraordinary outpouring of excellent
historical work. But fewer and fewer journal articles, conference papers, and
doctoral dissertations reach back to the history of international relations
before 1945. I suspect that a major explanation of this disparity is that,
with a few notable exceptions, all of the important diplomatic archives and
collections of the private papers of decision-makers in the 1914-1945 period
have been available to scholars for many decades. In recent years, as more
and more primary sources dealing with the Cold War are declassified and
placed in the public domain, enterprising scholars and graduate students
eagerly engage in the exhilarating pursuit of the “smoking gun” that
disproves the conventional wisdom about this or that event and forces us to
revise our understanding of the East-West conflict.  The opening of
government archives in the former Warsaw Pact states of Eastern Europe[1],
together with the partial availability of records from the former Soviet
Union and the Peoples Republic of China[2], have yielded fascinating
revelations that have prompted a fundamental reevaluation of the origins of
the Korean War, the Soviet-American showdown over Iran in 1945-46, the Cuban
missile crisis, and other key developments the Cold War.

By contrast, the once contentious debates over the origins of the two world
wars, which Professor D’Agostino reviews with admirable clarity and
sensitivity, have faded into relative obscurity. All of the relevant records
have long been available, legions of historians have pored over them, and
hundreds of articles and books have conveyed the results of this monographic
research. The sheer magnitude of the secondary literature on these subjects
has led some to pose the rhetorical question: is there anything worthwhile
left to say about these dry-as-dust events? Book proposals to publishers and
articles submitted to all but the most specialized journals that address
topics of diplomatic history in the distant past are often met with the
response “Hasn’t that already been done?” or “Isn’t this well plowed
ground?”  Such an attitude betrays the positivist assumption of an objective
truth that, once discovered, will put all scholarly disputes to rest. What
could one possibly learn from an intensive reexamination of the origins of
the First and Second World Wars that is not already well known? Professor
D’Agostino argues persuasively that there is much to be learned, not only
from recent works on the subjects at hand, but from earlier scholarly
inquiries as well.

Before addressing some of the major issues that he raises, I would like to
take up a point that he touches only in passing but which has long intrigued
me. That is the yawning gap between the consensus of scholarly specialists
about a particular historical subject and the popular perception of the
educated public.  Let us take as examples of this phenomenon the two general
topics of Professor D’Agostino’s lucid essay. If one were to question the
historically knowledgeable person today about the origins of the Great War,
one would probably receive a reply something like the following: the great
powers of Europe blundered into a war in the summer of 1914 that none of them
wanted to fight, because their leaders failed to negotiate a peaceful
resolution of an arcane dispute in the Balkans. All of the belligerent states
therefore deserve equal blame for permitting, through the blindness,
miscalculation, and inaction of their leaders, the outbreak of the most
deadly conflict in human history up to that time.  That is what President
Kennedy gleaned from his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s _The Guns of August_ as
he sought to avoid an even more lethal outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
There is an abundant scholarship that has definitively demonstrated that
Imperial Germany used the Sarajevo assassination as a pretext to wage a
carefully planned preventive war and sabotaged all efforts to reach a
peaceful solution of the crisis. But this interpretation has never advanced
beyond the professional journals and scholarly monographs to challenge
the “blundering into Armageddon, all were guilty” thesis, which continues to
hold pride of place in the public imagination.[3]  Similarly, if one posed
the question why Hitler was able to take power legally in a democratic
Germany and then successfully mobilize its population to launch the Second
World War, the historically attuned person on the street might reply
something like this:  The Treaty of Versailles was a monstrous act of
injustice reflecting the vindictive Germanophobia of France, which saddled
the Weimar Republic with horrendous territorial losses and a crushing
reparations burden that foreordained the collapse of the new international
system and the revival of a revisionist, aggressive Germany. That became the
standard interpretation of the postwar settlement in Great Britain and the
United States and continues to retain its hold on educated public opinion
despite the appearance of a substantial body of monographic scholarship and
one recent best-seller that refutes it.[4]

Professor D’Agostino’s article represents a useful reminder that in earlier
days the scholarly debate about the origins of the two world wars was just as
heated as the more recent arguments over the origins of the Cold War. Based
on a careful reading of the relevant historiographical literature, it
demonstrates how the “orthodox” explanation of the origins of the Great War
advanced by the governments of the victorious allies -— that Imperial Germany
had waged a premeditated war of aggression that compelled France, Russia, and
Great Britain to oppose it -— rapidly collapsed after the peace conference
broke up. Relying heavily on the German diplomatic documents rushed into
print by the Weimar Republic, _Die grosse Politik der europäischer
Kabinette_, the revisionist historical literature of the 1920s and 1930s both
expressed and nourished the growing disillusionment with the recent war and
the peace settlement in the English-speaking world.  By attributing blame to
every other power but Imperial Germany for the outbreak of the conflict,
these works challenged the so-called “war guilt” clause of the peace treaty
and therefore undermined the requirement that Germany pay for the damage its
forces has caused.[5]   Sidney Fay’s _Origins of the World War_ (1928)
denounced the war guilt clause and held France responsible for spurring
Russia into mobilizing its army, which made Germany’s offensive against
Belgium and France unavoidable.[6]  The ultimate revisionist work in the
United States that D’Agostino examines was Harry Elmer Barnes’s _Genesis of
the World War_ (1926), which also blamed France and Russia for goading
Germany into war. On the British side the revisionist cause was most
effectively advanced in the writings of H.N. Brailsford and other pro-Labour
and Liberal intellectuals associated with the Union of Democratic Control
(UDC), such as E.D. Morel, G. P. Gooch, and Bertrand Russell. Influenced by
the pre-war economic analyses of J.A. Hobson, they saw the war as the result
of the two major imperial powers ganging up on Germany to prevent it from
threatening their global dominance.[7]

It is remarkable that, so soon after a conflict in which the Germans were
portrayed by allied propaganda as inhuman brutes and the Kaiser as a beast
who deserved execution as a war criminal, the former enemy was exonerated and
forgiven while the entente powers were depicted as the initiators of the war.
With the emergence of the Nazi regime, the revisionist school was faced with
a challenge to its formidable campaign to get Germany off the hook for the
launching of the last war. One of the most fascinating parts of D’Agostino’s
article is its treatment of the political evolution of A.J.P. Taylor. The
young Manchester historian’s careful reading of the diplomatic documents in
the mid-thirties led him to abandon the Brailsford UDC line, which emphasized
the overwhelming importance of European imperial rivalries and blamed the
entente imperial powers for dragging Germany into war. Like many (though not
all) of his contemporaries on the left in Britain, he had come to appreciate
the critical importance of the German threat to the balance of power on the
continent.[8]  D’Agostino handles with great finesse the nuances of Taylor’s
_Origins of the Second World War_, which has been unjustly accused
of “scrubbing up Hitler” by linking Nazi foreign policy goals to those of the
Imperial regime. As D’Agostino makes plain, Taylor’s emphasis on the
continuity of Germany policy (which supported the thesis of _der deutsche
Sonderweg_) did not so much exonerate Hitler as spread the blame more widely
throughout German society.

In the end, this well written, amply documented essay demonstrates that
scholarly disputes of long ago should not be consigned to the library
shelves. They ought to receive the serious attention of historians interested
in learning how their professional forebears grappled with interpretive
questions that were once as contentious as those that fill the pages of
journals and doctoral dissertations today. At the conclusion of his essay
Professor D’Agostino offers a sensible observation that nicely summarizes the
point he has made:  “It is useful for historians to resist the pull of
fashion and the allure of current “definitive” accounts to try to appreciate
how the story was once told.”[9]

Notes:

[1] See Vojtech Mastny’s ambitious Parallel History Project at
http://www.isn.ethz.ch/php/.

[2] See the many illuminating publications of the Cold War International
History Project at http://www.wilsoncenter.org/cwihp/

[3] Fritz Fischer unearthed the evidence of the German plan long ago, but
while his path-breaking Graff nach der Weltmacht generated a lively debate in
Germany and among academic historians in the English-speaking world, its
findings never found their way into popular histories of the war. David
Fromkin’s recent work _Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in
1914?_ (New York, 2004) brilliantly confirms the Fischer thesis and
summarizes the evidence from recent scholarship of the German preventive war
scheme.

[4] See William R. Keylor, “Versailles and International Diplomacy,” in
Manfred Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., _The Treaty
of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years_ (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 469-505.
The scholarly literature that had undermined the old Keynesian verdict on the
peace settlement is admirably summarized  in Margaret MacMillan’s _Paris
1919: Six Months that Changed the World_ (New York, 2003).

[5] The myth of the “war guilt clause” is probably the most impressive
example of a lie repeated so often that it acquires almost universal
acceptance.  Coined by officials in the Weimar Republic shortly after the
signing of the peace treaty, popularized by Hitler in the 1930s, it continues
to crop up in textbooks and works of general history as evidence of
the “unjust treatment” of Germany at Versailles. For explanations of the
origins of article 231 of the Versailles Treaty, see Sally Marks, “Smoke and
Mirrors: Smoke-Filled Rooms and the Galerie des Glaces,” in Boemeke, Feldman,
and Glaser, pp. 342-343, and Keylor, op. cit., pp. 500-501.

[6] D’Agostino, p. 271.

[7] Ibid, pp. 262-263.

[8] Ibid., p. 266.

[9] Ibid., p. 280.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright 2005 by H-Diplo, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational
purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web
location,date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities &
Social Sciences Online
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS