Primary category
The Sleepwalkers
How Europe Went to War in 1914
Christopher Clark reconstructs the political and diplomatic decisions that transformed the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo into a European war. Rather than treating the catastrophe as the execution of a single power’s settled plan, he follows decision-makers in Serbia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, and Britain as they responded to threats, allies, domestic pressures, incomplete information, and rapidly narrowing choices. The account reaches back beyond the July Crisis to Serbian politics, Balkan nationalism, imperial rivalry, shifting alliances, and earlier confrontations that shaped how leaders interpreted events in 1914. Its central significance lies in replacing a simple search for one guilty state with an international study of interacting agency. Clark does not present the war as automatic: he emphasizes choices, misjudgments, and calculated risks. The result is both a detailed narrative of escalation and a major intervention in the long-running…