Jack Beatty reviews Sean McMeekin
16 Dec 2013

Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War has been warmly reviewed by Jack Beatty, senior editor of The Atlantic, and news analyst for NPR:

“When I saw July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin in a book store, my heart sank. The “July Crisis” that followed the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo and that ended in war is the most ploughed over episode in diplomatic history. Although by no means a scholar, I had read “The World Crisis, Volume I, 1911-1914″ by Winston Churchill, the two –volume history by Sidney Fay published in the 1920s, the documentary history edited by Immanuel Geiss published in the 1960s, and the three-volume opus by Luigi Albertini published in English in the 1950’s. Of more recent works, the diplomatic dance of death in Vienna, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, and London occupies much of Hugh Strachan’s massive “The First World War Volume I: To Arms (2001)”, the first third of David Stevenson’s “Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (2005),” and nearly all of “Decisions for War, 1914-1917 (2003),” edited by Richard H. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. How, I wondered in the bookstore, could there be anything new to say about the July Crisis? And how could Sean McMeekin, called the “leading young historian of modern Europe” by Norman Stone, how could the author of original works like The Russian Origins of the First World War and The Berlin-Baghdad Express–what was this imaginative, multilingual scholar doing spending his time on this stale subject? It took only a few pages of “July 1914″ to buoy my heart. McMeekin makes this old story new. His history reads like a novel. Better, it unfolds like a play. There is no “going behind,” as Henry James termed authorial interventions in a novel’s forward flow. There is no going ahead, either. Events happen in the text as they did in life. The historical actors don’t know the consequences of their acts; neither does the reader. The footfalls of the future echo only in the foreshadowings that end chapters: “As they awoke Monday, Bethmann and Jagow would have some quick thinking to do. News was flooding in from Belgrade, Vienna, Petersburg, Paris, and London. Almost none of it was what anyone in Berlin wanted to hear.” McMeekin adds dollops of fresh savory fact on every page. More importantly, he sees the whole crisis unclouded by bias for or against his characters or their countries. He saves moral judgment for the end. “When we examine the key moral question of 1914–responsibility for the outbreak of European, then world war—it is important to keep degrees of responsibility in mind. Sins of omission are lesser ones than sins of commission: likewise, actions are not equivalent to the reactions they occasion.” That last observation is characteristic of McMeekin’s subtle turn of mind. He applies it exquisitely in assessing blame for the war. Serbia, the source of the plot to kill the Archduke, stands first “in the dock of judgment.” Next Austria-Hungary, for its reckless escalation of the crisis. Next Germany, for giving Austria the notorious “blank check” to attack Serbia. Closely behind is Serbia’s protector, Russia: “The decision for European war was made by Russia on the night of 29 July 1914, when Tsar Nicholas II, advised unanimously by his advisers, signed the order of general mobilization. General mobilization…meant war.” Next France, for goading Russia on, and for…well, enough. ”July 1914″ is superb history and compelling reading.”