Volume 32, Number 4 · March 14, 1985
The Reasons Why
By Paul Kennedy
The Origins of the First World War
by James Joll
Longman, 228 pp., $14.95 (paper)
It is over seventy years since Gavrilo Princip's shots plunged Europe into the 'Great War,' and only a dwindling number of people alive today can be old enough to have been called to the colors, or to have joined the mass demonstrations which took place in the capitals of Europe in the late summer of 1914. Yet our fascination with those events seems as strong as ever—far stronger, for example, than our interest in the outbreak of the Second World War—and manifests itself in a ceaseless flow of films, novels, television documentaries, and books beyond all counting. No doubt this is so partly because the 1914–1918 war has been regarded as a watershed in world history, leading to the collapse of old empires, the decline of a Eurocentric global order, the creation of the Soviet Union, and the shattering of so many traditional political and social assumptions, all of which have cast shadows across the remainder of this century.
Review, 2224 words
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