Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I

University of London historian Watson (Enduring the Great War) makes a major contribution to the ever-growing historiography of WWI with this comprehensive analysis of the war efforts of the primary Central Powers: Germany and Austria-Hungary. Watson makes a strong case that “fear, not aggression or unrestrained militarism” impelled them to war in 1914. Fear fueled the unexpected popular consent that sustained both Hohenzollern and Habsburg empires in a “war of illusions” that devolved into a “war of defense” and finally into a war for survival. From the beginning, the Central Powers were overmatched and overextended. They answered the resulting “desperation and alienation” with failed policies of “compulsion and control,” a series of disastrously bad policy decisions such as the U-boat war, and a doubling-down on autocracy and repression at the expense of peace and reform. In 1917, both empires suffered from a deep “crisis of legitimacy”: only the possibility of “quick and total victory” sustained the foundering alliance. A series of desperate offensives produced military, political, and above all social collapse. Watson concludes that the “suffering, and the jealousies, prejudices, and violence that [the war] spawned or exacerbated” in Central Europe laid the foundations of WWII far more than anything decided at Versailles. [em](Oct.) [/em]