A Barometer of National Confidence' a British Assessment of the Role of Insecurity in the Formulation of German Military Policy before the First World War

IN I96I, with the publication of Fritz Fischer's groundbreaking study Griff nach der Weltmacht, a revolution took place in scholarship on the origins of the First World War. In contradistinction to the consensus that had emerged among German historians during the previous forty-seven years that the Reich leadership bore no more responsibility than that of any of the other powers for the outbreak of this terrible conflict, Fischer controversially contended that the German government had deliberately 'willed' the war as part of its hegemonic plans to transform Germany into a world power. From the outset, this thesis was vigorously contested: first, by traditional historians like Gerhard Ritter; then, after I969, by historians promoting the 'calculated risk' theory; and later, in the I98os, by historians advocating the revival of 'geopolitical' analyses that stressed that German policy was not aggressive, but the natural response of a country made vulnerable by its exposed Mittellage position in the very centre of Europe. However, in spite of such constant attempts to undermine it, the thesis advanced by Fischer and the so-called 'Hamburg school' quickly attained a dominant place in the historiography; by the 1970s, it was the 'new orthodoxy'. 1 Yet, while Fischer's work is central to the current debate on the origins of the First World War, that does not mean that this is an area in which research is static. New ideas are emerging all the time and, while many of them are destined to make no appreciable impact, at least one strand in the current literature looks as though it will necessitate some modification to our understanding of the causes of war in 1914. The strand in question relates to the part played by military considerations in promoting the outbreak of conflict in August 1914. In recent years, important new works by, among others, Niall Ferguson, Stig Forster, David Herrmann, John Maurer, Annika Mombauer, Jack Snyder and David Stevenson have made careful studies of such key determinants of military policy as the significance of the military-industrial complex, the place of competition in land armaments, the impact of enhanced military preparedness, the role played by operational planning, and the