The war that ended peace: how Europe abandoned peace for the First World War.

The recent crop of books on the origins of the First World War dispenses with the notion of inevitability in the outbreak of war, and stresses the maturity of European civilization in 1914. They are in danger of prioritizing urban life over rural, civilization and culture over backwardness and superstition. They also say less than they might about the enduring place of war in international relations. The stress on contingency is to be welcomed for getting history away from the determinism of long-term trends, and for reopening the uncertainty of the outcomes still open to the Great Powers in 1914. However, the overall effect is cyclical. The prevailing wisdom on the reasons for war has reverted to the argument that Europe slithered over the brink', which dominated from the 1930s until the publications of Fritz Fischer in the 1960s. This does not mean that Fischerism', with its belief in German war guilt, is extinct. The challenge which now confronts historians, as they approach a four-year centenary, is to break this circularity and to explore new paths.