The Sleepwalkers

The short analysis

For most of the twentieth century, the dominant explanation for the First World War placed Germany at the heart of the catastrophe. Fritz Fischer's influential thesis, developed from the 1960s onward, held that German aggression and expansionist planning drove Europe to war. Christopher Clark's 'The Sleepwalkers,' published in 2012, challenged that consensus root and branch. Clark's argument is not that Germany was innocent but that guilt, in any meaningful sense, was distributed across the continent's capitals. Clark reconstructs the decade before 1914 as a period of compounding miscalculation rather than deliberate design. The Serbian government's relationship with nationalist networks, France and Russia's encouragement of Austro-Hungarian confrontation, and the brittleness of an alliance system that converted a regional crisis into a continental war all receive sustained attention. Leaders on every side, Clark argues, were responding to pressures they only half-understood, operating on defective intelligence, and making irreversible commitments in the belief that the situation was still manageable. The 'sleepwalkers' of the title captures this quality precisely: not cynical conspirators but men who moved with apparent confidence toward a catastrophe they could not see clearly. The book forces a rethinking of historical causation itself, asking how systemic forces and individual decisions interact when the consequences outrun anyone's intentions. It remains one of the most debated works of First World War historiography written in the early twenty-first century.