The War That Ended Peace

The preeminent University of Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan’s 2014 book The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 was immediately hailed as one of the best books of the year on publication. MacMillan was able to take a confusing, contentious, and frequently chaotic period in history, synthesizing the context of the onset of WWI from the point of view of those living at the time, rather than from the hindsight of the present moment. The book gives its readers both a large-scale overview of the situation in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century – a peaceful, prosperous time – and by painting precise and telling portraits of the powerful men (and they were all men) whose decisions and actions precipitated the fighting.

MacMillan’s central argument is that WWI, as it played out, was not a foregone conclusion. Unlike most standard accounts of this war, which tend to portray it as an inevitable and unavoidable domino effect, the author reminds her readers often that the men in charge were making decisions, and that their choices were exactly that: choices that they could have made differently.

The War That Ended Peace opens with a detailed description of early twentieth-century European countries. Focusing on the two decades before the war, MacMillan examines each of the major players in the conflict: France, Germany, Russia, Great Britain, and Austria-Hungary. To give appropriate context for each nation, she delves into their political systems, their international allies and enemies, and whatever cultural baggage or beliefs influenced the thinking of the time. But instead of simply treating each country as a solid and unilateral unit, MacMillan dramatizes the political and cultural fault lines and differing opinions within each country. Part of this discussion revolves around the complex attitudes towards war and peace, and the ways in which the geography of Europe led to feelings of being surrounded by enemies on all sides – a belief that led the way to militarization, nationalism, and an unchecked arms race declared to be necessary as a deterrent to open warfare.



One of the clear strengths of the book is MacMillan’s zooming in to describe the thought leaders, politicians, and military commanders who would decide policy firsthand. By humanizing these men, the book strengthens its position that the war was by no means inevitable, and that it could have, instead, been averted had these people been able to coordinate or work in concert with each other better.

With these personality studies, MacMillan explains the various incidents that led to the alliances that eventually became the two sides in WWI, and also shows that there was no one precipitating incident that made the war happen. Despite small conflicts in Morocco, Bosnia, and the Balkans – MacMillan describes politicians trying desperately to avoid a full-out war. For example, the Russian Czar Nicholas II and the British King George V were actually cousins, who up to the last minute were communicating in a bid for peace. At the same time, the German Kaiser Wilhelm II wasn’t ready for war and several times tried to back out of the fighting. And meanwhile, the British Foreign Office was trying its best to avoid having to fulfill the treaty it had signed with Russia and France to delivery military support. Any of these efforts could have worked out, MacMillan argues.

But instead, what often happened was human error-prone thinking. For instance, Germany’s military plan was so committed to fighting a war on two fronts that the military leaders who developed it refused to consider any other options – this meant that France, and then, therefore, Britain, had fewer ways to avoid getting into the war. At the same time, older army commanders did not factor into their plans the fact that weapons, warfare, and their countries’ militaries had changed. They still assumed a quick burst of fighting, rather than the interminable misery of unending trench warfare.



Ultimately, MacMillan argues, WWI started because those who wanted war were better at manipulating the politics than those who tried to keep the peace. This means that many of the myths that have grown up around WWI have little basis in reality. Germany wasn’t the main aggressor, and even the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand that everyone learned in high school led to the war did not necessarily have to light the fuse. Instead, what MacMillan blames for inciting war is the complete inability, unwillingness, and illogical refusal of the various governments involved to do the hard work of diplomacy at the moment when it was most needed. The book condemns the kind of government complacency that allowed events to disintegrate to such a point that war was the only option.

In the last chapters of the book, MacMillan traces the actual outbreak of the war, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the first engagement of the conflict. Still, even at this late hour, MacMillan stresses how many choices and decisions had to be taken in order to finally make the war the only possible alternative. She ends the book with a summary of the extraordinarily horrific losses each country sustained in the four years of the war.

The book has received universal praise along the lines of this review from The Economist, which called MacMillan’s work magnificent and added, “The War That Ended Peace will certainly rank among the best books of the centennial crop…[it] deftly navigates the roiling currents and counter-currents of the pre-war decades. . . . The Great War had a kaleidoscope of causes. Ms. MacMillan tackles them all, with [a] blend of detail and sweeping observation.”