The Sleepwalkers Quotes

“For a time, the word Weltpolitik seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations. Weltpolitik meant the quest to expand foreign markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things, Weltpolitik never acquired a stable or precise meaning. Even Bernhard von Bulow, widely credited with establishing Weltpolitik as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the "free hand" with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. "We are supposed to be pursuing Weltpolitik," the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. "If only I knew what that was supposed to be.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Here again is the tendency we can discern in the reasoning of so many of the actors in this crisis, to perceive oneself as operating under irresistible external constraints while placing the responsibility for deciding between peace and war firmly on the shoulders of the opponent.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“The war of 1914–18 was the absolute negation of everything that Clausewitz had stood”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Something broadly analogous happens when we contemplate historical events, especially catastrophic ones like the First World War. Once they occur, they impose on us (or seem to do so) a sense of their necessity. This is a process”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“deepening integration of Serbia into France’s web of alliances after 1905, which was rooted in both financial and geopolitical imperatives.”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.168”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“It is a curious feature of the July Crisis of 1914 that so many of the key actors in it had known each other for so long. Beneath the surface of many of the key transactions lurked personal antipathies and long-remembered injuries.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that began that summer mobilized 65 million”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“On both sides they imagined that ‘bluffing’ would suffice to achieve success. None of the players thought that it would be necessary to go all the way. The tragic poker game had begun.50”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“A striking feature of the interactions between the European executives was the persistent uncertainty in all quarters about the intentions of friends and potential foes alike. The flux of power across factions and office-holders remained a problem, as did worries about the possible impact of popular opinion.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“a deep and widespread readiness to accept war, conceived as a certainty imposed by the nature of international relations. The weight of this accumulated readiness would manifest itself during the July Crisis of 1914 not in the form of aggressive programmatic statements, but through the eloquent silence of those civilian leaders who, in a better world, might have been expected to point out that a war between great powers would be the very worst of things.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has made way for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers – a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“And yet what must strike any twenty-first-century reader who follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 is its raw modernity. It began with a squad of suicide bombers and a cavalcade of automobiles. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organization with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge; but this organization was extra-territorial, without a clear geographical or political location; it was scattered in cells across political borders, it was unaccountable, its links to any sovereign government were oblique, hidden and certainly very difficult to discern from outside the organization.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“In this environment, the development of modern consciousness was experienced not as an evolution from a previous way of understanding the world, but rather as a dissonant overlayering of modern attitudes on to a way of being that was still enchanted by traditional beliefs and values.77”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Orange Book produced after the outbreak of war by the Russian government to justify its actions during the crisis, the editors backdated by three days the Austrian order of general mobilization so as to make the Russian measure appear a mere reaction to developments elsewhere. A telegram dated 29 July from Ambassador Shebeko in Vienna stating that an order of general mobilization was ‘anticipated’ for the following day, was backdated to 28 July and reworded to say ‘The Order for General Mobilization has been signed’ – in fact, the order for Austrian general mobilization would not be issued until 31 July, to go into effect on the following day. The French Yellow Book played even more adventurously with the documentary record, by inserting a fictional communiqué from Paléologue dated 31 July stating that the Russian order had been issued ‘as a result of the general mobilization of Austria’ and of the ‘measures for mobilization taken secretly, but continuously, by Germany for the past six days . . .’ In reality, the Germans had remained, in military terms, an island of relative calm throughout the crisis.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“The news that war had finally been declared filled Sigmund Freud, now fifty-eight years of age, with elation: ‘For the first time in thirty years, I feel myself to be an Austrian, and feel like giving this not very hopeful empire another chance. All my libido is dedicated to Austria-Hungary.’52”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, that public opinion usually combined ‘the unbridled tongue with the unready hand’.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“The targeting of the archduke thus exemplified one abiding strand in the logic of terrorist movements, namely that reformers and moderates are more to be feared than outright enemies and hardliners.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“that? Masculinity is and was a broad category that encompassed many forms of behaviour; the manliness of these particular men was inflected by identities of class, ethnicity and profession. Yet it is striking how often the key protagonists appealed to pointedly masculine modes of comportment and how closely these were interwoven with their understanding of policy. ‘I sincerely trust we shall keep our backs very stiff in this matter,’ Arthur Nicolson wrote to his friend Charles Hardinge, recommending that London reject any appeals for rapprochement from Berlin.156 It was essential, the German ambassador in Paris, Wilhelm von Schoen wrote in March 1912, that the Berlin government maintain a posture of ‘completely cool calmness’ in its relations with France and approach ‘with cold blood’ the tasks of national defence imposed by the international situation.157 When Bertie spoke of the danger that the Germans would ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes’, he metaphorized the international system as a rural playground thronging with male adolescents. Sazonov praised the ‘uprightness’ of Poincaré’s character and ‘the unshakable firmness of his will’;158 Paul Cambon saw in him the ‘stiffness’ of the professional jurist, while the allure of the reserved and self-reliant ‘outdoorsman’ was central to Grey’s identity as a public man. To have shrunk from supporting Austria-Hungary during the crisis of 1914, Bethmann commented in his memoirs, would have been an act of ‘self-castration’.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“In his System of Subjective Public Laws, published in 1892, the Austrian public lawyer Georg Jellinek analysed what he called ‘the normative power of the factual’. By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. 1 The debate over why it happened began before the first shots were fired and has been running ever since. It has spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity. For international relations theorists the events of 1914 remain the political crisis par excellence, intricate enough to accommodate any number of hypotheses.”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Pašić dealt intelligently with this delicate situation. He made personal overtures to individual conspirators with a view to disrupting the formation of an anti-government coalition. Despite protests from Radical Party colleagues, he backed a generous funding package for the army that made up some of the ground lost since the departure of King Father Milan; he publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the coup of 1903 (a matter of great symbolic importance to the conspirators) and opposed efforts to bring the regicides to trial. At the same time, however, he worked steadily towards curtailing their presence in public life.”
― Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades,’ the German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow declared before the German parliament in March 1909, ‘have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate agitation of public opinion, which through the press and parliament has swept along the executive.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“But in the Europe of 1903–14, the reality was even more complex than the ‘international’ model would suggest. The chaotic interventions of monarchs, ambiguous relationships between civil and military, adversarial competition among key politicians in systems characterized by low levels of ministerial or cabinet solidarity, compounded by the agitations of a critical mass press against a background of intermittent crisis and heightened tension over security issues made this a period of unprecedented uncertainty in international relations. The policy oscillations and mixed signalling that resulted made it difficult, not just for historians, but for the statesmen of the last pre-war years to read the international environment. It would be a mistake to push this”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Though he was ambassador in London from 1898 until 1920, Cambon spoke not a word of English. During his meetings with Edward Grey (who spoke no French), he insisted that every utterance be translated into French, including easily recognized words such as ‘yes’.54 He firmly believed – like many members of the French elite – that French was the only language capable of articulating rational thought and he objected to the foundation of French schools in Britain on the eccentric grounds that French people raised in Britain tended to end up mentally retarded.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“The ambassadors met regularly in Paris to discuss policy and lobby key officials. They communicated with the minister through private letters, bypassing the functionaries of the Centrale.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“Such invocations of fin-de-siècle manliness are so ubiquitous in the correspondence and memoranda of these years that it is difficult to localize their impact. Yet they surely reflect a very particular moment in the history of European masculinity. Historians of gender have suggested that around the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, a relatively expansive form of patriarchal identity centred on the satisfaction of appetites (food, sex, commodities) made way for something slimmer, harder and more abstinent. At the same time, competition from subordinate and marginalized masculinities – proletarian and non-white, for example – accentuated the expression of ‘true masculinity’ within the elites. Among specifically military leadership groups, stamina, toughness, duty and unstinting service gradually displaced an older emphasis on elevated social origin, now perceived as effeminate.160 ‘To be masculine [. . .] as masculine as possible [. . .] is the true distinction in [men’s] eyes,’ wrote the Viennese feminist and freethinker Rosa Mayreder in 1905. ‘They are insensitive to the brutality of defeat or the sheer wrongness of an act if it only coincides with the traditional canon of masculinity.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

“There were a few small slips: after the first lunch on board the Tsar’s yacht Standart, the Kaiser drew Sazonov apart and spoke to him (‘at him’ might be a more appropriate locution) for over an hour in detail about his relationship with his parents, who, he claimed, had never loved him. Sazonov saw this as a shocking illustration of the German Emperor’s ‘marked tendency to overshoot the boundaries of the reserve and dignity’ that one would expect of someone in such an elevated position.”
― Christopher Munro Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914