Reading the historiography about the July 1914 crisis

Abstract

The article suggests that the motif of explaining the guilt of the war, which had prevailed in the historiography on the genesis of the First World War, had three negative consequences. First, the object of the study became the arena of the power struggle of great imperial powers. Although this angle of investigation is attractive in itself; it does not provide an opportunity to unambiguously answer the question– about the real culprit. Consequently, naming the “culprit” has become dependent on political conjuncture. Secondly, orientation towards the mutual interaction of the main actors of the pre-war system objectively led to the search of preservation of the existing European structure, with the pre-war European concert being identified with European civilization. Thirdly, the principle of self-determination of peoples, which had a fundamental impact on transforming the European system in the direction of democratization, had remained outside the scope of the research.