Az első világháború keletkezése új megközelítésben

The centenary year 2014 yielded a huge number of books on the causes of World War I, ranging from broad panoramas of the preceding decades to detailed investigation of international relations in the weeks after Sarajevo. This contribution draws briefly on some of the more rigorous and ambitious of the new English-language work, to set it in the context of existing historiography on the subject. It finds current analysis to have reverted to many of the conclusions drawn by those assessing the issues during the 1920s and 1930s, which culminated in the magisterial treatment by Luigi Albertini. Structuralist interpretations, and the thesis of well-nigh exclusive German war guilt, associated most famously with the writings of Fritz Fischer, have given way again to a stress on the personal and allround responsibility of those who determined the foreign-policy decisionmaking of the great powers in mid-1914. This is especially clear in reappraisal of the key role of Austria-Hungary in that process.