 I'm Senior Fellow and Director of the Europe Program here at CSIS and I can tell all of you have come with a very important purpose because you would not come through the wind and rainstorm that you had to join us today because you are as excited as I am for the next hour and a half of conversation. We are so delighted to welcome Professor Chris Clark here with us for an incredibly important conversation as we talk about the centenary of the First World War and Professor Clark whom so many of you know is the Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and of course the much celebrated author of The Sleepwalkers How Europe Went to War in 1914. And of course new storm clouds are also gathering on the European horizon certainly today as we speak as we watch events unfold in eastern Ukraine. So we are going to invite Professor Clark to the podium, he is going to give us a presentation on some of the broader themes of The Sleepwalkers and then we are going to come up and have a bit of a conversation on some issues both of a hundred years ago but perhaps bringing more to the modern time and discuss current events today and then I am going to unleash all of you on Professor Clark so without further ado please join me in welcoming Professor Clark. Thank you. Well thank you very much and congratulations on getting here, can you hear me? They told me that Washington was lovely in the spring and I haven't been disappointed. I wanted to start just by showing you a couple of images just to put us into 1914 very briefly before we sort of pull ourselves back out again, it wasn't a very good year. There's a couple who are about to have what I think you could fairly describe as a very bad day. He is Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke and heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne. She is Zofi Khotek, his wife, the descendant of a very distinguished Czech lineage, not distinguished enough really to be regarded by the Habsburg royal house as appropriate material for Habsburg royalty but for which reason she was never allowed to travel with him for example in the open carriage, the royal open carriage in Vienna or to sit next to him at dinner. She always sat far away because she was of such supposedly lowly stock and that's one reason why on the 28th of June she insisted on sitting with him all day in the car because among other things it was a chance in this attractive, handsome and rather oriental looking city on the edge, on the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian empire to officiate together as they both imagined they would do when her husband eventually exceeded to the throne and of course the day was important, it was a very important date, the 28th of June was their wedding anniversary so for that reason too she insisted on being with him in the open car. It also happened to be the anniversary of the defeat of the Serbian armies at Kosovo Polje at the field of blackbirds by an Ottoman force, by mixed Ottoman and Slav force. An event from the year 1389 which brought the existence of an independent Serbia to an end, an event which might seem to have been very remote but which in fact to many Serb, nationally minded Serbs felt very intimate, felt like it belonged to a very close past, a past that was still remembered, a past that was still felt. So on both sides there a lot of emotion riding on that day, here we see them greeting the crowds at the Sarajevo railway station, as you can see he has ostrich feathers on his hat, I'll come back to those on his helmet, I'll come back to those feathers in a moment. Here you see a map of the Balkans in 1911 and 1914. I've just included this partly because one can never look often enough at maps of the Balkans, they're just, they never exhaust their interest but the main thing is I've just offered these two pictures, it's a little bit like the two pictures you see on a serial packet where you're asked to identify the differences between two almost identical images and you can see that in 1911 there's no Albania and suddenly with an almost inaudible plop Albania appears, Albania appears in 1913, you can see that Serbia changes shape, it acquires almost its entire territorial size again, it increases by more than 100%, Bulgaria changes its extent so does Romania and all this happens of course because of the helter-skelter retreat of Ottoman power across southeastern Europe. The other thing to bear in mind is just the intimate relationship between the Serbian polity and Austria-Hungary, Belgrade looks on that map almost as if it's inside the dual monarchy, inside Austria-Hungary, it was right on the border, it was a few minutes' drive from the Serbian capital to Austrian territory. Okay, this is the closest that the early 20th century had to Google Earth. It's an engraving from the Beideker travel guide and it shows Sarajevo and what you see there is Sarajevo like a cupped hand. It's in a situation in a river valley, the River Miljacica, there's a road running along the valley, the Apelki along which the car, the sort of cavalcade, the motorcade bearing Franz Ferdinand and his wife traveled eastwards across the city towards the Rathaus, it's marked there as Rathaus, the city hall which you can see there just next to the district and what happened next is with almost, with a sort of brutal simplicity illustrated by this diagram as they pass the Chumuria bridge, a bomb was thrown by a young man called Niedelko Chabrinovich, the bomb missed the second car and exploded under the third car causing some injuries but superficial injuries. At this point you might have thought that the visitor Sarajevo would be called off and indeed various people proposed to Franz Ferdinand that he leave the car and that they leave the city, he didn't like being told what to do, he suffered from a syndrome which the technical name is grumpy old man, it happens to a lot of us as we get older we get more and more irritated by this and less, he didn't like being told what to do and he said the man is obviously insane, have him taken to an asylum, we'll continue as planned and so the journey went on and they arrived at the Rathaus, the city hall there and the reason I've included this image is because you can see many of the gentlemen standing there wearing pheasers, that's because this was as far as the elite, the urban elite of Sarajevo was concerned, this was a very Muslim town, the mayor was a Bosnian Muslim and you can see them all there greeting the couple. Among them is Mehmet Churchic, the Bosnian mayor of Sarajevo to whom fell the unfortunate task or the unendurable task of welcoming the couple which he did with a speech he had prepared which by the time they arrived was completely inadequate to the situation because the opening words were it is with sentiments of the deepest joy that the citizens of Sarajevo welcome your highnesses to this city whereupon he was interrupted by Franz Ferdinand who said deepest joy, welcome, is this how you welcome your guests with bombs, of course he had a point but at this point his wife was seen to whisper something to him along the lines of it's not his fault dear, let him continue and so he let him go on and what happened next is shown here in this very fanciful image from the Petit Journal, a contemporary Parisian journal which is, you can see illustrations of the Petit Journal all over history books from this era because they're such attractive illustrations, beautiful color lithographs, of course this has nothing to do with what actually happened on that day, it's highly fanciful, there is young Gavrilo Princip wearing a sort of rakishly angled hat taking a shot from, and they're standing up like figures from an operetta, he's saying hi-dai, in fact nothing like this happened, they remained seated exactly as they had been, the shots were so accurate that they didn't move, in fact she was slipping into a coma by the time the car pulled back and travelled back at speed down the Appel Quay and it was then that he uttered the words which became very famous, within the next few hours of the, as the media picked this up it sort of went viral, he said to her, soffa, soffa, soffa, soffa, soffa, soffa, soffa, don't die, stay alive for our children, and this became part of the sort of media generated wave of emotion which followed the assassination of a man who actually hadn't been very popular but became as it were a figure of emotional identification after his death, partly because of the details about his private life that were revealed following his murder, and there we see the picture of the arrest of a suspect, this is often shown in history books as the arrest of Gavrilo Princip, of course it would be astonishing if someone had managed with a 1914 camera to capture the assassination just by accident, and that indeed did not happen, this photographer was pre-warned by the police that they were carrying out a drag net, they were going to arrest suspects, and he took his camera along and took this shot of the arrest of a suspect called Ferdow Baer, who was distantly connected to the network behind the assassination but in fact was completely innocent and was released shortly afterwards, but the photographer then cleverly sold this image as a picture of the arrest of Princip and it was syndicated around the world and he made a lot of money out of this picture of something which claimed to be a picture of something it wasn't. There's a picture of Gavrilo Princip, this lender young man, not a terrorist in our contemporary sense, not someone who rejoiced in suffering or death, a very rather gentle, rather finely built, he was probably suffering from skeletal tuberculosis by the time this photograph was taken, he and his comrades were not terrorists in our contemporary sense at all, they were rather high-minded idealist boys, there was not too much in the way of alcohol, no visits to brothels, very little in the way of girlfriends, they were rich in ideals and poor in experience, but perhaps partly for that reason they were excellent, the sorts of stuff that irredentist movements so often find it easy to feed on and just one last thought about the background to the assassinations, there was a very oblique and indirect link to Serbia, the Serbian government as such did not endorse and did not help to plan and did not support this assassination, on the contrary the Minister Nikola Pashic, an extremely far-sighted and intelligent shrewd politician, was profoundly opposed to any activity of this kind and done what he could to repress these networks, but on the other hand this kind of irredentist activity was supported from deep within the heart of the Serbian military intelligence and in particular by the head of the Serbian military intelligence this man here, Dragutin Dimitrievich known as Arpis, so there was a link there to the Serbian state but we have to be differentiated about the character of that link, we can't say Serbia as such was responsible for these assassinations, well as you know on the morning of that day Europe was still at peace and none of the great powers was planning a war of aggression against another power and yet only 37 days later Europe was at war and the war that followed from that moment has rightly been described as the original catastrophe of modernity, the Ur-katastrofe is the term widely used in the German literature the primal catastrophe, it consumed four major empires, the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the German and the Ottoman sort of multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire, it consumed much more importantly the deaths of between 10 and 20 million soldiers and civilians depending on how you do the count, it accounted for between 15 and 21 million serious wounded, light wounds were treated in theatre, they have never been countered but you know the presence of mutilated and badly damaged veterans in all the belligerent societies after this war was part of the visual memory, an indelible part of the visual memory of this conflict and I think Fritz Stern, the German Emigre US historian, was right when he described the First World War as the disaster from which all the other disasters of the 20th century sprang because without this war it's hard to imagine the rise of Italian fascism it's hard to imagine the Bolshevik October Revolution, it's easy to imagine the February Revolution, everyone had predicted a collapse or a crisis of tsarism which would be followed by a transition to some kind of constitutional monarchy, a seizure of power by cadets, by liberals, by nationalists and possibly by the more moderate elements of the Russian left but no one had predicted the kind of coup-like seizure of power followed by the establishment of a one-party state that actually occurred in Russia following the October Revolution and of course that means we have to account the 5 million consumed the 5 million lives consumed by the Russian Civil War that followed that and everything that came out of the establishment of a Bolshevik system lastly it's hard to imagine the rise of national socialism in Germany without this war, without its profoundly disorganizing effect on German society and therefore it's hard to imagine also the Holocaust and we might be looking at a very very different 20th century without this war my former colleague at Cambridge now at the University of Yale, Adam Tews is right I think when he refers in the book, he's just written a book called The Deluge which is about the long-term impact of this war, he's right I think when he refers to the unhinging of the world system, an unhinging of the global system by this war and he goes into great detail about the various vectors of disorganization that come out of this extraordinary conflict. Now when I first encountered the story of how this war came about and in particular the events in Sarajevo and the story of the July crisis one of the most intricate and complex crises, perhaps the most complex event of all times, when I first encountered this material as a schoolboy in Sydney in the 1970s a great deal of period charm had accumulated around the story of how this war came about. There was a lot of tennis and waltzing, it was a sort of last summer scenario, it was an emergent ivory drama and our chief sort of historiographical guide to these events was the wonderful Barbara Tuckman whose books beautifully written narrative histories, still read today in loving detail on uniforms, the details of uniforms on the extravagant menus for gala dinners, on Lord Salisbury riding to the House of Commons on London's first pneumatically tired tricycle pushed by his ballet James and as one read of the ornamentalism to use David Cannadine's term as one read of the ornamentalism of this sort of last phase in European court culture one couldn't help feeling that if these people's helmets had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them then perhaps their dreams, their arguments, their ideas also had gaudy green ostrich feathers. Perhaps they were bygone people from a moribund bygone world, people who had nothing to say to us anymore, people locked in a drama which belonged to a distant past. But if we look again at these events from today's perspective the early-ish 21st century then it seems to me one can't help but be struck by the raw modernity of these events they don't begin even if we think of the events of that day the 28th of June it doesn't start with prancing horses and golden carriages it starts with a line of automobiles with a motorcade and if you run through the events on the Appel Quay on the 28th of June 1914 you can't help but have the film of November 1963 in Dallas playing at the back of your head. It starts with a squad of suicide bombers. There were seven young men who had gone to Sarajevo there were suicide bombers in a very literal sense. They were carrying potassium cyanide which they tried to take the two most active members of the squad Chavrinovich and Princip both tried to take their poison but the poison was bad and behind them was an underground organization of hazy fuzzy underground organization difficult to pin down no paper trails with a very oblique relationship to any sovereign state authority. An organization driven by I'm thinking I'm talking now about the Black Hand or Unity or Death or Union or Death as it was called an organization extra territorial or trans-territorial which operated sort of operated out of Belgrade but also had networks in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well an organization marked by a cult of death, revenge and self-sacrifice and there again we can think of sort of contemporary analogs so in many ways these events seem to speak to us more freshly and more intimately than they did in the era of the Cold War and there are other reasons why this has happened as well I think our compass has shifted in other ways as well the first there is the fact that 911 reminded us the power of an event, now it would be absurd to compare the carnage of 911 with the killing of two people on Frantziosev Street in 1914 but nevertheless what 911 did was to remind us of how an event can change the chemistry of politics and I think the events of the 28th of June certainly did that for Austria-Hungary they created an extremely militant an unanimous desire for war in Vienna which had not been there before and then there's I think the fact that we're still coming to terms we're coming to terms right now in the recent days with the end of bipolar stability we're no longer in a bipolar Cold War world where the global system is disciplined by the standoff between two superpowers we're in a world with a Titan, a weary Titan was the term that was often used of Great Britain in 1914 or the last years before the outbreak of war it's sometimes now used about Washington this is not a Titan that's actually weakening but it may be growing somewhat weary of its complex international role it's a world with rising powers that are challenging the norms of the global system and there's more than one of those we can talk about that perhaps later it's a world marked by regional crises it's a world that is increasingly less transparent more unpredictable and in many respects more dangerous and more difficult to read than the world of the Cold War for all the violence of those proxy wars of the Cold War era this is a world that is much more complex and much more difficult to read and it's getting more complex by the day and there too I think 1914 feels much it's a paradox of course that even as it slips further back into the historical past 1914 seems to speak to us more intimately than it did in a prior era and these perspectival shifts challenge us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe and this challenge doesn't mean adopting a kind of vulgar presentism where you remake the past to suit the priorities of the present that's really not if that were what we were about then we could forget the whole thing it means profiting from our changed vantage point to see aspects of the past which previously were sort of airbrushed from the scene or which previously we failed to pay attention to and in the time left to us in the interview time with the formal bit of this meeting I'd like to direct to dwell briefly on some of the aspects of the etiology of this war some of the aspects of its causation that particularly caught my attention and perhaps are particularly handy for thinking about links between then and now before going on to dwell briefly on their relevance to current developments okay so first of all there's the fact that when we think of you know it might be handy to think of 1914 as an international crisis but when you use the word international a kind of picture forms in one's mind which is a little bit like the cartoons the caricatures of the pre-war world where you see a bunch of characters each one of which represents a state so it's Marianne if it's France often an attractive young woman then it's the Kaiser with his bristling erect moustaches that's Willem he's Germany and then there's the Tsar in the case of Russia and George the fifth ring and so on what's brought into these images is that states are compact discrete entities which have a single and unified Will but in fact the world of 1914 wasn't remotely like this the executives that produced policy in 1914 were anything but unified and power was constantly flowing around inside them moving from one node in the system to another so for example if you'd asked a very well informed observer in St. Petersburg who runs the show, who makes foreign policy in Russia, the answer in January 1904 would have been the Tsar but after the Russo-Japanese war which is in large part a consequence of the policies of the Tsar himself if you'd asked the same question again in 1906 the answer would be now the Tsar has really disappeared from politics he's sort of licking his wounds after the war against Japan which of course the Russians lost now it's Piotr Stalipin the prime minister effectively the president of the council of ministers if you'd asked the question a few years later about the taxation crisis the answer would be it's a foreign minister he's now running the show a few years later you'd say it's Stalipin again then Stalipin's assassinated then the answer would be we don't really know who's running the show the ambassadors are all making it up as they go and so on this was Russia before 1914 but the picture elsewhere was virtually the same in France just to give you one example during the tenure in office of the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Gray and two of them came and went twice that's really quite an achievement so and even in Britain where you had a structurally very secure and powerful foreign minister in the form of foreign secretary Sir Edward Gray even there Gray cannot speak clearly his intentions in foreign policy because he has to deal with a majority within his own cabinet that does not support his view of British foreign interests and that is to be taken into account with France and by extension to the oblique relationship with St. Petersburg with Russia so in other words this is a situation where the crisis proneness of the system is greatly enhanced by confusion about how policy is being made and what direction it's going to take next unpredictabilities built into this system at every level so that's one point I think that might be worth thinking about from the point of view of looking for analogies with contemporary developments then there's the fact that and this is something that really struck me when I was writing the book because I got to the point where I was writing about the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 now this is a really important war without any provocation the Italians attacked the three villiates the three provinces of the Ottoman Empire today known as Libya in Northern Africa and this war was important because it flashed a green light to the Balkan states it's time for a free-for-all at the expense of the Ottoman Empire everyone take what they can it really was the war that started the two wars in the Balkans and in fact the Serbian the head of the Serbian political department of the Serbian Foreign Ministry after the First World War commented to a French journalist he said this war against Libya in 1911 which everybody's forgotten today he was saying this in 1921 this war 10 years ago in 1911 this was the first aggression it started the two wars in the Balkans and out of that came the Great War so this is one of the best informed Serbian statesmen commenting on the relationship between this war and the war that subsequently came and what was interesting about that was I was just writing about this war in 2011 when suddenly the very names the very place names that I was writing about Miss Rata, Zawiya and so on were all in the headlines once again because once again exactly 100 years later there were airstrikes on Libya and in fact this war of 1911 had been the first war in which airstrikes were used this is the first time that bombs were thrown from planes it wasn't very impressive technologically they were hand thrown, they had to be primed by hand where they were gripped between the knees of the pilot but nevertheless you had dirigible balloons which could throw 250 bombs from racks built in to the galleys for that purpose and so you know there was almost a sort of out of body experience as I found myself wondering whether by writing these words I was making these events happen in the present now I assure you this disillusion only lasted for a few nanoseconds and I quickly recovered but the point is that this was at one of those moments when history in an almost sort of spooky way was rhyming it wasn't repeating itself but as Mark Twain said although it doesn't repeat itself it does rhyme and this was certainly a very pronounced moment of rhyming and one which one might reflect on of course we know that just as the Libyan war was a way station towards 1914 so it's been claimed that the experience of Libyan intervention by the western powers played an important role in putting in place the narrative that's now currently motivating Vladimir Putin's policy on the Ukraine he was very vehement in his protests at the way in which the Libyan situation as he saw it got out of control and sort of drifted in the direction of regime change and it's widely believed that and certainly has been claimed by some associates of Putin that Libya was an important episode informing his current view of policy and of events finally there's one last point I want to draw your attention to and that is about something that changed in the international system in the last years before 1914 and it has to do with the nature of the alliance established between Russia and France in 1892 Russia and France formed an alliance it was basically an alliance from France's point of view it was an alliance designed to ensure that if Germany waged war on either France or Russia both states would mobilize in tandem and attack Germany on two fronts and place Germany under the threat of a war in the east and the west simultaneously that was its purpose but throughout the 1890s and the 1900s the French and the Russians constantly warned each other not to overuse this alliance so what they meant by that was the Russians said to the French don't count on us for some kind of adventure in Morocco if you go into Morocco and make the Germans annoyed and expect us to pull your chestnuts out of the fire over northern Africa forget it we're not interested in northern Africa and the French said to the Russians if you think we're going to back you over adventures in the Balkans we're not recognizing the Balkans a vital interest for Russia or for France but this changed in the last 18-24 months before the outbreak of the First World War at the end of 1911 in particular during the Balkan Wars themselves 1912 and 1913 the French leadership and particularly but also many other members of the French military started assuring the Russians they started saying that we see the importance of the Balkans for Russia now and we wish to make it known to you that if you feel at some point of a conflict in the Balkans that breaks up between Austria and a Balkan state most probably Serbia we want you to understand that France will stand by you so in other words the alliance changed in character and as a consequence of that Serbia began to become not by any wish of Serbia itself this is not by Serbia's own doing but Serbia became more and more an instrument a security salient for the entente powers and France in particular as they bought into the future scenario of a war of Balkan inception a war that would begin in the Balkans nobody really minded who was going to start this war it might be the Serbs, it might be the Austrians who knew but the point was there would be a war in the Balkans not a war which directly threatened Russia but the alliance would respond nonetheless and would view this conflict as a Khazos belly as a Khazos Federis as a trigger for the alliance so that was obviously a very important development for in the pre-war system which made the events of 1914 possible I don't want to stop there virtually and just close now with a few thoughts on analogies between now and then the question we have to ask ourselves is how deep does any kind of analogy we want to draw really go the specter of 1914 of course is useful and it becomes it's present in our minds whenever uncertainty grows a reminder of how terrible the costs can be when politics fails when conversation stops when compromise becomes impossible so in that sense it's understandably present in our thoughts and our discourses at the moment and not just because of the anniversary but in fact the alignments implicated in the Ukrainian emergency that we're looking at now bear little relation to the geopolitical constellations of 1914 at that time two central powers faced a trio of world empires on Europe's eastern and western peripheries today a broad coalition of western and central European states is united in protesting Russia's interventions in the Ukraine though not at all united on what the policy implications of that might be and the restless ambitious German Kaiser Reich of 1914 scarcely resembles the EU a sort of multi-state conglomerate focused on economic integration and the rule of law that finds it incredibly difficult to project power or to formulate a unified external policy in some ways the Crimean War of 1853 to 6 might offer a better fit here at least we can speak of a coalition of western states united in opposition to Russian imperial ventures this conflict which ultimately consumed well over half a million lives so it was not a trivial war escalated when Russia sent 80,000 troops into the Ottoman controlled Danubian principalities of Moldova and Wallachia Russia argued and had the right and obligation to act as the guardian of orthodox Christians within the Ottoman Empire much as it today claims the right to safeguard the interests of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine but here too it would be a mistake to push the analogy too far in the 1850s the western powers feared that Russian predations against the Ottomans would destabilize the entire zone from the Middle East to Central Asia undermining the security of the British and French world empires since neither the Ottoman Empire nor its English or French counterparts exists today the mechanisms of trans-imperial destabilization are absent in the current crisis we're not looking at that kind of global vulnerability the current crisis rather involves the relationship between Russia and one relatively isolated former client state on its periphery or former federal member state on its periphery further into the past we can discern more distant precedents which further complicate the picture namely the Russian annexation of the eastern half of the Ukraine after 1654 it's important to remember that this relationship is older than the union between England and Scotland and the the penetration of the Russians into of Muscovy into Cossack into the Cossack areas and eventually the push south into the Crimea from the reign of Peter the Great onwards it's a long, slow story of Russian territorial expansion a process lasting centuries in which Muscovy acquired on average Richard Pipes made this calculation acquired on average every year an area equivalent in size to modern Holland so that was the rate of expansion one Holland per year but what none of these historical genealogies captures of course is the unruly dynamic and that's in a way what started the whole current situation is the unruly dynamic of revolution and civil strife in the Ukraine itself a phenomenon that evokes very different precedents and following the news last month it was difficult for historians at least not to think of the many parallels with the English Civil War there too you had a parliament locked in a standoff with an increasingly controversial head of state it was not the office of the king or of the president in the Ukraine case whose legitimacy was in question of the individuals occupying these officers the conduct of the persons and just as President Yanukovych fled from the capital to an undisclosed location after the breakdown of order in Kiev so Charles I having tried and failed to arrest the ringleaders of the parliamentary opposition in London left the capital only to return seven years later for his arrest and execution trial and execution and in both cases of uprising in support of the beleaguered sovereign Irish Catholics in the case of Charles I and Ukrainian Russians for Yanukovych in the Ukrainian case triggered a decisive escalation the difficulty of the current crisis it seems to me lies precisely in the folding together of these very different narratives these very disparate narratives civil upheaval, geopolitical tension and imperial expansion the arrangements put in place since the collapse added a further layer of complexity the EU has invested deeply in the process of democratization in the Ukraine that's the kind of thing the EU does for the best possible motives the partnership and cooperation agreement signed in 1998 exists to sustain political and economic transformation within the partner state and ratification as I'm sure you all know of a new association agreement negotiated in 2007 to 11 was made conditional upon the implementation of key domestic reform targets so the EU intervened very deeply in the domestic affairs of the Ukraine by contrast NATO as the alliance formed to protect western interests in the Cold War is focused firmly on the global balance of power just as the Crimean coalition was in the 1850s NATO and the EU are not of course co-extensive and they're not identical in their interests when the Americans, the Poles and the Baltics, Baltic states propose the extension of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine in 2008 France and Germany objected just as Prussia refused to join the anti-Russian Crimean coalition of 1854 to 5 much to the indignation of the French and the British Lastly there's the complex political demography of Ukraine itself the legacy of centuries of Russian penetration and settlement the deep ethnic divisions in the country status of the peninsula make no sense without this history so I want to come to a close now that's why I think that any solution to this problem has to take into account the very different imperatives implied by these narratives and I think it's an awareness of this dimension of complexity that accounts in part for the irresolute or hesitant response of the western powers to the recent seizure of the peninsula and to the events that have followed using the Ukraine as a proxy the Russians in would be insensitive to the history of the region and would merely lead to further instability on the other hand letting the Russians do whatever they want will merely invite Moscow to continue using the Ukraine as a proxy for pushing the west back betting the farm on the Ukrainian revolution as the EU did as risky given the unpredictability of all such tumults what's needed is a composite solution that takes account of all the interests each with its own historical background engaged with the conflict so I come to the closing question are we in danger of blundering into a major conflagration in the manner of 1914 I don't think so it seems to me that the executives engaged the executives of the states engaged in this emergency today or responding to it are far more streamlined far more transparent and far clearer about their intentions than their predecessors in 1914 there exists a day no counterpart of the Balkan inception scenario that fueled escalation in 1914 where states brought in to the affairs of a very of an unstable area without considering the possible consequences the language of the EU foreign ministers and of the Washington administration has been marked on the whole by caution and circumspection too much circumspection for some people's tastes the responses of western leaders to the provocations offered by Mr. Putin made a level of self-critical reflection I'm thinking here of Mr. Steinmeier the German foreign ministers comments on EU foreign policy and German foreign policy that really have no cannot be compared with the behavior of his 20th century of his early 20th century counterparts if anything the danger in this case may be the converse namely that in striving to avoid an escalation and possibly also to avoid the discomforts associated with a strong sanctions regime especially when sensitive energy political issues are involved western leaders risk failing to send the kind of clear signals that are required to make it clear to Mr. Putin that there are limits to their indulgence perhaps most importantly something else is absent in the current constellation this is where I'll stop that was absolutely decisive in 1914 at that time the fragile equilibrium between the two European alliance blocks encouraged both sides both on the one hand to contemplate with relative equanimity the risk of a major conflict because both sides thought they could prevail and get away as it were without suffering the consequences of the conflict or too greatly suffering them and secondly this equilibrium encouraged both to fear that the failure to take action sooner rather than later might result in the condition of permanent inferiority this is one of the amazing things about 1914 that on both sides we find paranoia and fear that if one doesn't act soon one will drift into permanent inferiority vis-a-vis the other side today the situation is quite different there is no equilibrium we're not working against the clock as so many of the decision makers of 1914 felt they were there is time to think about what needs to be done and this is not an argument for complacency because I do think that recent events in the Ukraine are the weaknesses in the crisis management of the western powers but it is on the other hand an argument for calm, considered, determined and unified action thank you Professor Clark thank you my gosh wasn't that a rich historical walk and a jog a sprint I know people in Washington are busy I didn't want to take up too much time for more and a good discussion I'm going to make a confession I'm halfway through the book I'm not the entire way through but I love it and it's dense and it's rich but you get immersed in it and it's required reading I know many in our audience have read it what I'd like to do is read you a quick quote this was actually a New York Times review of the book by Kevin who's the editor at Reuters and I want to pulse you on let me quickly read the brilliance of Clark's far-reaching history is that we are able to discern how the past was genuinely prologue the participants were coordinated to keep walking along a precipitous escarpment short of their own moral compass but unknowingly impelled by a complex interaction of deep-rooted cultures patriotism in paranoia history, folk memory, ambition and intrigue they were in Clark's terms sleepwalkers watchable but unseen, haunted by dreams yet blind to the reality of the horror that they were about to bring into the world as I've read the book quite frankly I'm not sure they were sleepwalking they had their purpose misperceptions the historical issues the perceptions of others it seemed to me that they were just they had blinders on rather than sleepwalking and some reviewers have critiqued the book and said they weren't sleepwalking some perspectives were unaware of the consequences of what they were doing is that a fair challenge? I think that is a fair challenge the sleepwalking metaphor is just a metaphor if it were 100% applicable it would be a description it only works in part what I want to evoke with the picture of the sleepwalker is the thing that I think is most uncanny about a sleepwalker which is that sleepwalkers can form a purpose they can conceive of a purpose they may not be fully conscious not all their mind is conscious I met this journalist who told me that every night he gets out of bed and packs the bags to go on holiday but there are no bags and he's just putting stuff from the night table on the floor and after a while his girlfriend wakes up and goes back to bed this is silly so he goes back to bed this happens almost every night so he's able to think holidays this is someone who obviously doesn't enjoy his job he's able to think I'm going on holidays I'm packing my bags and so on it's just that he's not aware that there aren't any bags so it's the limited quality of that consciousness that's what I wanted to capture and the juxtaposition on the one hand of purpose directed goal oriented behaviour which by people who are well educated and clever and have a lot of information to handle and the calculating risks and so on with more or less stringency depending on where we are but who seem frustratingly unaware of the larger frame in which they're operating part of the problem is simply the problem of complexity that if a system is complex then the outcome to the system cannot be reduced to the actions of any one participant in the system and that was one of the problems that they lacked a kind of sense of the relationship between individual and systemic outcomes and that's still I think a problem for politics today but it was certainly a very marked problem of 1914 and that's what I wanted to capture with sleepwalkers the question of nationalism and of course in the first portion of the book we spend an enormous amount of time looking at Serbian nationalism and its rise and as I look and we're obviously focusing on the upcoming European Parliament elections where you have an expression of growing nationalism some would even argue xenophobia rising in Europe the role of nationalism as it played in the conflict in 1914 and then fast-forwarding to its complexity in today's Europe Yes because you mentioned Serbian nationalism I'd like to make one thing clear because I've often been misunderstood on this point I'm not blaming the Serbs for the outbreak of this war the Serbian leadership was operating under extreme pressure from many different directions and was in a very unenviable position so I don't want to demonize the Serbs or their leadership but you're absolutely right nationalism is a very important part of this I think today in a very different role the problem with for nationalism with the EU is that it's a dissolving force it's a force which is dissolving the unity threatens to dissolve the unity of the union and it's deeply interlocked with anti-unionist movements so alternative for Deutschland to know the four national in France, well the names as at all they kind of drift into an increasingly nationalist rhetoric of the Hungarian political culture these are in my view profoundly regrettable developments and they do undermine the cohesion there's no question they undermine the cohesion of the EU as a shared political culture and they raise questions about the future of the EU over the next 10 or 20 years though I must say I really hope that the EU survives these pains and ills that it's going through at the moment the only reason for hope I think is that these it's no accident that these movements are so strong at a moment of economic dislocation and so it's to be hoped that as the you know if and when when the EU emerges into full scale recovery from the financial crisis and the crisis of the eurozone that these movements will lose a lot of the a lot of their oxygen and will start to sort of wither away again but nevertheless so nationalism is in play in that sense and it's weakening the sort of resolve of the EU it creates a less unified block it undermines the legitimacy of the EU's appeal as a to some extent as a sort of social and political model if the confidence in that model is visibly dwindling within the EU itself and so these are all bad things which lessen the weight of Europe in international affairs I must say I would be interested to hear what people in this room think about the place of nationalism in Vladimir Putin's politics presumably it's a factor there but how exactly it plays into his actions of the last couple of months I'm not really qualified to say yes, sorry of course, thank you always help us with our mics absolutely yes yes yes good point thank you one you talked about the power of the personalities throughout the book and you mentioned this crisis of masculinity and I just wanted to draw you out because that's also been part of the conversation around the book help us understand in the context of your writing what you perceive as the crisis of masculinity well I remember once being sort of stopped by a very wonderful female colleague who said to me are there any women in your book and I sort of suddenly thought there's a panic you know I could feel the blood draining from my face and I thought no there aren't it's true it's all about men and then I thought well I better think a bit about that what it means that these people these characters are all men now by stressing masculinity I don't mean there used to be a British comedy series called Men Behaving Badly which would be quite a good title for the sort of prequel to 1914 but you know the thing is that masculinity just you know that's the way men are men are like that they sort of you know macho and bullying and aggressive what I meant really was that masculinity was taking forms in the early 20th century which were different from the forms of masculinity taken for example by a previous generation of statesmen if you compare the statesmen of the generation the cohort of 1900 to 1914 you find their language is saturated with references to their own manliness you know Batman says to back down over the provocation to Vienna by Serbia would be an act of self-castration I mean those are his words self unmanning you know Vaikant Bharti of Tame the Britain's ambassador in Paris says these Germans are trying to push us into the water and steal our clothes now this is a picture that comes from a teenage boyhood at Eaton College where he went to school where you know you'd go swimming in the pond and then some nasty village boy would come and nick your stuff so you'd have to go back to school with no clothes very embarrassing it's a very masculine world you have a lot of talk of being hard de la fermeté is Poincaré's gospel firmness we must stay hard il faut tenir le coup we have to hold through to the bitter end there's a language of unyielding hardness not conceding an inch of territory and from the language of the cohort of the statesman of the era of Bismarck, Cavour you know Salisbury and so on in that era what the statesman wanted to do was be smarter than the opponent outsmart the enemy it was a kind of a politics of maneuver whereas in 1914 what we see is a language of unyielding determination which I think did in a way sort of down you know it doesn't exactly prescribe options it doesn't you know make one policy happen rather than another but what it does is it diminishes the moral weight of options which are about flexibility, suppleness and so on and increases the moral weight of hawkish hardline policies and so it was that that I was trying to draw attention to and of course that is still a contemporary thing there has been a kind of revival of a certain form of raw feral masculinity in European political culture I think Mr. Putin is a symbol of that many times Mr. Putin riding around with no shirt on a horse and shooting a tiger admittedly only with a tranquilizer dart but nonetheless a tiger all the same and then being photographed with it and so on these signs and Berlusconi is another example I mean Putin is not alone there's a sort of new and rather how to put it rather rancid manliness on show and you know there may be a cultural turn going on in that area as well so I think there it was important in 1914 but it's not about masculinity as a sort of trans-historical essence but about styles of male behavior in politics which are historically specific and time bound did you think one of the there was this assumption by all like the two Balkans wards that this would be short the conflict in 1914 would be short, would be home by Christmas but they really they did not understand the calamity because they honestly thought this would be short how much did that play into the psyche of all the leaders as they looked at these two equal powers fighting each other well this is one of the oddest problems of 1914 one of the hardest to unravel is that because we know that there actually you know there's plenty of expert commentary on the meaning of a mass war everybody understood what the interaction between the sort of the tactics of mass infantry shock which was still the predominant doctrine the interaction between masses of infantry and the high-tech weaponry available in 1914 with stationery machine guns but also even more importantly with fast firing artillery artillery was really the area where technological change had been very very swift and some of these you know the French fast firing artillery pieces could fire more rounds than a bolt action rifle per minute so the you know people had done the math and they realized well if you put this kind of firepower into masses of men you will have casualty lists that will be so long that no newspaper will be able to print them all it will be unforeseen carnage and there are even novels which predict this there's an extraordinary novel by a German social democratic teacher called Das Menschen Schlachthaus the human slaughterhouse which is about which describes with uncanny accuracy the sort of moonscapes of the Somme and so on so there are both there's both expert commentary and sort of literary fiction which is imagining the way in this new world this new war is going to pan out should it be allowed to happen on the other hand there's a bizarre continuing continuing belief that one can somehow circumvent this carnage by just investing enough in the assault in the in the offensive if you take the enemy's positions fast enough and with enough men and so when observers saw for example in the Russo-Japanese war saw Japanese infantrymen piling up in front of Russian machine gun nests around Port Arthur they concluded that the Japanese were not pressing the attack hard enough they must put more men into harm's way rather than rather than sort of as it were changing their approach to the assault entirely so in other words there's a kind of sense in which the fear that the war will really be an endless carnage and on the other hand the hope that one will circumvent this outcome through swift action and determined action they held each other in balance in a way that as we now know was very dangerous it's not that people believed there would be I mean there was talk of getting home by Christmas and there was hope that that might be possible but you know we also find many of the military leaders Maltica for example, oscillating between extreme confidence a breakdown like collapses of confidence where he thinks it's not going to work it's all going to collapse and so on there are moments when they see the future quite clearly so it's not people used to talk about the illusion of the short war being a crucial factor in the outbreak of war in 1914 it's there but it doesn't have that kind of absolute traction it's more about a mix of fear and hope my final question before I open this conversation up to the audience you know there's been a bit of political sensitivity about how to commemorate this conflict certainly in Britain but as well as in Germany how does history reflect on this and as you're watching this debate what has struck you about how the governments themselves are planning to commemorate this enormous role in well again historical narratives do play an enormous role in our own exceptionalism as a country your reflections on this both from the British side but also from the German side well I think that the most for me the most surprising and striking insight that's been generated by the various memorial programs that have unfolded in the different states has been the degree to which Europe remains incapable of remembering this European war in a European way so the war is still being remembered almost entirely through a nation state frame and in Britain there's been a surprising revival of a kind of jingoistic language this was a just war it's become quite common to claim that the first and the second world wars were no different in their moral dimension which I think is an extraordinary claim but it's made in one best-selling book on Britain's war in 1914 by Max Hastings that's one sort of direction things have taken members of the government Michael Gove the secretary of education very intelligent and well read man but he's intervened in the debate saying that Britain should be proud of its role in the first world war it was a just war a war fought for good ends to defeat tyranny in the name of democracy and so on Boris Johnson the quirky and popular mayor of London has weighed in along much the same lines the Kaiser Reich the German Empire has been described as fascist I mean it's a there's a lot of sort of mixing around and sort of rehabilitating this war as a war fought for the every right possible reason now things are different elsewhere in France there is not this kind of triumphalism not at all France has always remembered this war as a trauma among other things is a profound demographic injury to the nation with the massive mortalities involved it's not a chauvinist mood at all it's a mood of reflection and meditation and not exactly mourning it's too distant for that but a sort of serious reflection on what this immense toll in lives means for the present in Germany it's been dominated by the question of whether the Germans should still regard themselves as primarily culpable but also by a similar kind of mood to the French one in fact really the Germans also regard this well the odd thing about the German memory of the First World War is that it was widely believed the Germans didn't remember this war that the First World War had been buried by the trauma of the second the second is such an the trauma of both of the acknowledgement of German criminality in the Second World War and genocide on the one hand and also the extraordinary physical effects of the war on Germany as a place had sort of buried the memory of this more distant conflict but what turns out to be the case and this has been one of the most interesting developments I think is that there's a lot of privately archived memory of the First World War in the German population everybody has grandparents whose letters survive whose diaries survive everyone has stories about the First World War they just didn't ever until now correspond to the public culture of memory and now the connection has been started to be forged and the war is being articulated, memories of the war being articulated in a new way on a new public plane so it's all been very very interesting but I think it's depressing that the memory is so un-European and there hasn't been any cooperation between the French and the Germans it's not the French fault the French wanted to collaborate with Berlin but Berlin announced in 2013 they said we don't have any plans so you'll have to do this on your own you know we just so even joint ventures that could have worked haven't really come to pass and I think that is a pity and tells us something about the continuing weakness of European identity it's interesting that in Brussels they want to open a museum of European history of European places of memory but the problem they have is they can't think of what to put in the museum and that is extraordinary I mean it's not like Europe is undersupplied with history Pindy thank you so much please colleagues if you could raise your hand and offer your name and your affiliation we have microphones just give us a second to get to David Ignatius I'll start with you Luis Simons David Ignatius journalist from the Washington Post fascinating wonderful lecture I want to ask you to think with us about the counterfactual about the counterfactual that is to say suppose Franz Ferdinand hadn't been assassinated suppose this sleep walking Europe the summer of 1914 hadn't had that catastrophic event that then set things in motion what was the system underlying stable and capable of continuity or was it headed for some other catastrophe and then if you would think similarly about the current situation with Putin's Russia and whether had there not been the Euro Maidan protests suddenly changing the role in the in-betweenness of Ukraine was there something else that was going to happen that Putin would have seized on in what was a much less stable situation than it may have appeared Thank you very much for that very interesting question staying with 1914 to start with you remind me of a headline I think it was the San Francisco Chronicles sometime in the early 1920s which went like this Archduke found alive World War a mistake and I think it is actually true but it may seem that if Franz Ferdinand had survived that visit to Sarajevo and got back home we know several things we can unfold the counterfactual the first few steps are on fairly solid ground because we know that Franz Ferdinand was first of all had pleaded for peace at every opportunity and always argued against any kind of adventurism especially in the Balkans secondly we know that he was planning after the Bosnian summer maneuvers he was very keen on the war with Serbia he was going to be sacked because Franz Ferdinand just had enough of him and so that relationship would probably have continued to improve which it was actually in the spring of 1914 oddly enough relations between Serbia and Vienna were just beginning to show the first signs that they could collaborate as neighbors I won't go into the details but various things have been done in collaboration which argued for a better future what would have happened then well you know the key point I would make is that the system was actually much more openly textured than it appears in retrospect and just to give you one example in the summer of 1914 the London leadership is pondering dropping altogether the relationship with Russia because they're tired of they had this convention signed with Russia in 1907 and it was basically a power sharing agreement to keep the Russians out of northern India away from northern India by dividing Central Asia in half and saying you can have the north without the south and the Russians had so frequently and repeatedly breached the terms of this agreement that the British were planning to break, to drop the agreement, not to renew it and to seek instead an understanding with Berlin so the personal secretary of Sir Edward Gray was briefed for this mission in the summer of 1914 then came the assassinations that is like crisis and the world war so that tells us something about other futures that were never realized but with which this era was pregnant I mean the thing is that it's very hard to take seriously the fact that the past was as open as the present it's only one future of any given past is ever realized because we're not living in parallel universes but every past has different futures in it, the seeds of many different futures just as ours does coming then back to the story about how that question might relate to recent events in the Ukraine yes I mean I don't really think the Ukraine is a complete bolt out of the blue is it, I mean if you think about the Georgian events of 2008 Ossetia and so on clearly there is something going on there is an instability about the former Soviet periphery and what we really need to establish in the longer term is some kind of set of agreed protocols about how that area should be managed and through a process of communication with Russia it's clearly not a debate with Russia can be excluded from on the other hand it's not an area in which Russia can be allowed to dictate one side of the unilaterally dictate outcomes so some kind of some kind of composite solution will have to be found for that entire peripheral area where there are lots of spots with the potential for instability so in that sense I suppose the Ukraine looks like a further iteration of the set of issues raised in Georgia of course there are lots of differences as well there was actually an attack on Russian outposts at the time of Sakashvili his tenure in office in Georgia there's no analog for that instead we have as you say civil unrest creating unforeseen constellations in the country itself but nevertheless you can see a link there in terms of the geopolitical specificity of that area wonderful thing my name is Richard Ranger I work for the America Petroleum Institute but really I'm here as a tourist who's become a student of World War I and like many Americans starting out behind because what we remember is high school history where we were taught Wilson wanted and then we move on to the roaring 20s my question back to your last statement where you were concluding the dialogue about this odd new approach to the war kind of going nationalist again almost in terms of taking sides and I wonder if having read Paul Fassell among one is that possibly the response I hate to use the word elites but we'll say leaderships the response of elites starting to overcome what had been the shared memory of the soldiers and the sufferers the Poulous as it were that the dominant cultural memory of World War I for much of the 20th century was of the experience of those who served in the trenches and now we're starting to see 100 years later a reassertion of quote-unquote purpose by those in leadership I wonder if you could comment on that that makes any sense that's a fascinating observation I think that's absolutely right because we've seen a reawakening of geopolitics effectively you know geopolitics you might think that the Cold War was all about geopolitics it wasn't geopolitics in the same sense now you've got this multipolar geopolitics which is much more complex this complex geometry of different powers engaged in a sort of not exactly random interaction but in rather unpredictable interactions and they're reading international context and formulating policy and so on suddenly the premium the focus is on that in a way that it wasn't and certainly as you say the literature of the First World War has been completely dominated by the Tommy Atkins the trenches and the Pouallu and all this kind of thing and the men who for all their differences were all basically the same young men dying in these horrible places and returned to the idea of political purpose and I think that's absolutely right and that's why we're re-reading this war now because we're because of the affinity between that moment and this one and that of course it also revealed something paradoxical and slightly self-defeating about the whole business of building historical analogies which is that we can't escape from the fact that the history we see is filtered through our present preoccupations and we just have to acknowledge that and be honest about it and be extra careful not to project into that past scenario something that isn't actually there and for which we can't find contemporary evidence but the fact is that that's how these conflicts in a geopolitical way and they focus very much on these issues of purpose and the resolution of interests resolution of interest conflicts in a way that once again seems to make a lot of sense whereas diplomatic history as you probably anybody who has worked in the history department in the states or studied history will know that diplomatic history fell profoundly out of fashion for a very long period and I think it may be once again back on the up Thank you for a fascinating discussion. My name is Bob Pollard from CSAS and I'm a former Cold War historian so everything you're saying is just reawakening some wonderful memories of historiography in graduate school. You know two things. First of all I think the reason it's so fascinating this topic and you've covered it so well is that there's still a lot of mysteries. I mean on one hand I think I agree with you what people would that there's a lot as a series of unforeseen consequences to a series of accidents. On the other hand you think there's always a counter to that argument this was the age of globalization. This was a time of tremendous international communication and trade. A gold standard. Borders were fairly open. Europe was unified in the sense that you had minorities of populations scattered in all these countries. It was the European Union of its day and it's still hard to believe that it happened but my question is it gets back to the historiography you know I think for many Americans the question is the consequences of the peace that's the part that we most of us remember particularly in the context of the Cold War. I was wondering where do you come out on that I mean there's the one argument John Maynard Keynes that the reparations the territorial dismemberment of Germany was so harsh that that set the seeds for Great Depression fascism in the World War II and there's a Fritz Fischer war of illusions argument that if you look at what the Germans were doing to the Russians during their occupation and their plans for Europe if they had won the war then in fact Germany got off rather lightly so I'd just be interested to hear your views thank you very much. Yes that's a really difficult question I think that you know yeah I think that the Versailles Treaty what the situation with Germany is that we have to remember that several things happen in Germany at once and it's hard to quantify exactly the impact of the individual strands of what takes place in Germany at the end of the First World War. First there's the fact that you know they've been through the war so like all belligerents they're dealing with mass death and all the consequences and the dislocation caused by the war and also by the blockade and so on especially in the last 18 months of the war. Add to that the fact that then they're one of the defeated parties so it doesn't end in victory so there's no way of bestowing meaning on all of this sacrifice and loss but they're not alone there I mean other states have also lost Austria and so on though you know and Hungary and then add to that the fact that the end of the war is followed by a period of extreme political instability I mean you know a Soviet Republic in Bavaria in a widespread fear of a sort of Sovietization of Germany now these fears of course became you know huge mythical monsters in the minds of in particular of the extreme right but there's no question about the dislocating effect of and so you've got to see the tandem relation between Otto Braun the Social Democratic Minister President of Prussia was sort of one of the big machine politicians of Social Democracy in Germany between the wars he wrote in his memoirs he said two things explain the collapse of the Weimar Republic Versailles and Moscow so it was the two things the fact that you had the Russian Revolution which of course the Germans helped to bring about the Bolshevik Revolution that is the creation of a Bolshevik order in the east a Soviet order in the east fear of Sovietization in Germany on the one hand on the other hand what was regarded as the Schmach the stain of war guilt which is although the word guilt is not oops cell phone I hope that's not something being patched in from the Ukraine check that exactly so yeah so it's all sort of interwoven of course you know I don't think I'm often asked in Germany surely then the Versailles Treaty was utterly wrong and so on and so forth well you know the demand for the Versailles peace is unusual in the sense that it doesn't carry with it the kind of forgetfulness clauses that have been a characteristic of many earlier peace treaties you know the European peace treaty tradition always included the traditional documents always included a treaty saying you know we will forget the harms caused and we'll try and create a post war order because you have to forget the harms in order to move on Versailles doesn't do that it says there's a guilty party and on the basis of that reparations will be extracted of course reparations are nothing new but attaching them to guilt to responsibility was new and the Germans felt that very keenly on the other hand I think that you know there's nothing it's completely understandable that the Allies did that it also has to do with the fact that the German war effort was not free of atrocities I mean you have the atrocities in Belgium the Austrian atrocities in Serbia of course the Entente has its own atrocities the Russians carried out very extensive pogroms and killings in Galicia and there are killings in East Prussia and so on but the one thing doesn't weigh up the other it doesn't outweigh as it will neutralize the other cancel out the other but I can understand why something like the Versailles treaty was regarded as unavoidable in the situation of 1919 so I don't want to really buy into a kind of revisionist rejection of Versailles it was just an expression of the post war order that established itself in the aftermath of the German defeat so yeah I suppose what I would say about the Fritz Fischer argument Fritz Fischer is very interesting if we come back to this question that you asked about you know how we're returning to a geopolitical reading of what was happening in 1914 or thinking more about what statesmen were doing and how they calculated each other's intentions and so on or tried to predict each other's acts if we could say in that respect we're being sensitized to aspects of the past through new dimensions of our present then that was true of Fritz Fischer I think as well Fritz Fischer was sensitized to German culpability by his own you know very pained sense of compromise as a result of his relationship with national socialism and it's that whole movement or attempt to decontaminate the German present by inculpating the German past and there's an extent to which I think he has issues of culpability a sense of contamination which really has to do with a period 33 to 45 he backdates that or it frames his view of the actions of the German leadership before 1914 that doesn't mean that Fischer made up his sources he made very important discoveries and it's a very powerful books but the thing about Fischer is he was interested in Germany he wasn't interested in what anybody else was doing it was a very domestic very German focused investigation but you can do a Fischer if you wanted to you can do a Fischer for the Russians and say look here's a nasty statement here's an aggressive belligerent letter from a minister and so on and so forth you could put together a kind of a carpet of sound bites to create a psychogram of the Russian elite and you'd find plenty of belligerents paranoia and aggression there just as you do in Berlin in Vienna and indeed even in Paris so that's I suppose how I would respond to the reference you made to Fischer Great, we have a question in the back and then a question there Britt Mitchell, Renaissance Institute, Baltimore we do travel down here sometimes I sat in this very room about three weeks ago largest crowd that's ever been here at CSIS was reported 688 people great event well opened up they all opened up and the balcony out here was just loaded with people as well are you trying to make me feel bad about this? No, no, you're a rock star I've done what you've done many times but I sat in the room and Bob Schaefer was the panel leader and he called on Brent Scowcroft to deliver his 10 minute perspective of what's going on and I'm a social psychologist so sitting in with that crowd of people some of which are here right now it was interesting the tension in the room until Brent Scowcroft went all the way back to when the Swedes moved down into the Asia line to the east and he went and explained it the situation in terms of historical significance and social significance and when he finally got to the end where he said this problem is not a here and now problem he said it wasn't a here and now problem at World War I and it wasn't back in 1735 it's a continual thing my question then is and by the way within 15 seconds I looked around and the entire room just sat back in their seats you could literally hear the war fever leave the room when they were faced with factual information now my question is we're going to keep on doing this and it's never going to stop until we get to the point where we begin to tackle that flaw in human socialization do you know of any group of people that are trying to do that to realize that where two tectonic plates come together you are always going to have war and violence until you understand it and stop it if I may just because we're getting closer it is microphone right there yeah I'm Michael Barone with American Enterprise Institute in your talk you talked about the danger today that you think me Western leaders maybe maybe take facing in trying to avoid a confrontation by failing to provide clear signals to Putin and as I read the sleepwalkers one of the things that I remember is Sir Edward Gray with his wonderful ambiguity to his uninterested cabinet colleagues into the rest of the world which contributed to the result in some significant way I mean I worry about a danger that the red lines that we have supposedly created by the accession to the NATO alliance of Poland and the Baltic states maybe transgressed by Putin and that we find ourselves not in Serbia but in Estonia or something in a possible war situation how serious do you think that is and I'm going to add one last one to this wonderful menu it feels as if we're witnessing the second collapse of the Soviet Union in some ways through this experience whether it's the reformulation of a Eurasia Union as we saw 100 years ago as empires collapse there's still aftershocks and after-effects I could argue and witness in watching the Hungarian elections that they're still talking about the treaty of Trianon and empire these expressions have not left Europe and they're still formulating political narratives today I just wonder if you could reflect on the continuation of empire collapses and what they need in a modern context well three of the rich and challenging questions to begin with the toughest one I wonder is there an answer to this problem of social psychology when you were saying that I was thinking the Quakers the peace movements they probably aren't the answer or they don't have answers it's one of those questions where I feel like I wouldn't be sitting here or something like that but it's I think you're quite right there are fundamental flaws in the and there's of course I'm actually not an expert I'm intuiting that you know much more about this than I do but there's a fascinating literature which I looked at briefly but never found a way of actually integrating it to my analysis on questions like why hawks so often win arguments why is it that when hawks and doves go into the lists against each other in situations where people are having an argument why do the hawks so often prevail and there are all sorts of psychological reasons why you know hawkish arguments often work better psychologically they tap people's emotional energies more effectively than dovish arguments do because they work with anxiety and anxieties which may be you know related to real threats that actually exist so you know that's as good as far as I can go in the direction of a good answer to your question I don't really have one but I think you're absolutely right the fundamental assumption is right that there's a very deep flaw in how we manage conflicts I think that structures can be part of the answer the EU is a structure which would not have been possible if the lessons of both world wars hadn't been learnt at least for the continent itself and I think it's one of the greatest achievements in human history the European Union is anxious about its future but you know I think in the end we have to find ways of solving these problems that don't depend on these social psychology the psychology of individuals and the process of socialization humans are always going to let us down you know but robust structures can help humans to be can make their failures less disastrous yes the ambiguity of grey, the red lines this is also my anxiety because I do think there have to be real red lines and you know Poland is one where I think we simply cannot give an inch on that the Baltics are another despite the presence of Russians in a country like Latvia that has to be the West obviously is going to have to it would be a very serious diminution of our commitment to the order established in the aftermath of the Cold War that would relax the vigilance on any of those red lines so I think you're absolutely right that could be a problem but the key there is very very clear signalling about what is up for negotiation and what's not and at the moment I think probably that signalling is sort of working I mean over flights by you know the reinforcement of border facilities of boundary defense facilities over flights by American planes clear signals you know I just very much hope that we won't be tested on that because that could be very dangerous but then the question comes to a question about the kind of politician and the kind of man Vladimir Putin is, I don't think he's insane I don't think he's a psychopath I think comparisons between Putin and Hitler are completely barking up the wrong tree he doesn't have a vision of politics which is grossly and radically at odds with everybody else is the way Hitler did I think he's acting rationally he's acting aggressively and provocatively but rationally and we have to assume that he'll continue to do that at least that he'll continue to act rationally and hope that he doesn't continue to act aggressively so not a very good answer to that question either a very difficult question but I think that firmness and clarity about the resolution of the West in defending the real red lines on behalf of NATO members is crucial I'm as astonished by you as you are by the kind of the ability it's like these viruses or these tardigrades these tiny living creatures which can sort of go to sleep on an asteroid for several thousand years and then wake up again when they encounter moisture and warmth there's something about these imperial discourses which seems to be able to reawaken into rude life it's like mummies suddenly climbing out of their boxes and the extraordinary reawakening of sensitivity around Trianon is very striking in Hungary of course it's fed in part by ongoing grievances about Hungarians in Romania and Hungarian diasporas in other countries but it is extraordinary and it's why it's happening to say it's clearly linked to the end of the Cold War in some way and to the revival of nationalism which seems not to be able to find any it seems to be reaching back into the past rather than adopting nationalism was once a vision of the future it was once a vision about a coherent modern enterprise with infrastructures and a national press and this kind of thing it was driven by the wealthiest by the elites not from below and this nationalism seems to be feeding on a kind of archive of partly remembered historical myths and partly remembered historical half truths and that's a very worrying development but it's an important one another feature of the contemporary landscape that we need to be vigilant about and that's of course why historians matter that's why historians are not just appoint this decoration they're actually there because history is the best they have against myth historians don't always get it right and they don't agree with each other but at least they're committed to an honest conversation based on the best information we have to hand about the past which is of course what the myth mongers and the nationalists and the imperialists are not committed to Well, Professor Clark that's why you are so important why sleepwalkers is so important and this has been a fantastic conversation and the rain would not stop us and prevent us from hearing we haven't stopped the rain either this morning I was reading Prime Minister Medvedev had a Facebook and I was reading and I thought preparing for this I thought you know what if Twitter was around what would Kaiser Wilhelm have tweeted out I dread to think I cannot even imagine but again thank you this has been just extraordinary I thank you all for joining us and coming back again but please join me in thanking Professor Clark Thank you very much