Introduction
Stephen Van Evera’s description of the ‘cult of the offensive’ among general staffs in the First World War has been a regular part of discourse about the war since his article’s publication in 1984. Popular accounts of the war depict bloody and foolish generals pushing their states toward war without realizing the costs and dangers of the conflict; many of these portrayals rely to an extent on Van Evera’s descriptions of German, Russian, and French illusions about the balance of offense and defense. However persuasive Van Evera’s view of deluded general staffs may be, his defensive realist theory fails to successfully identify both the long-run and short-run causes of the war. In its place, I propose using Michelle Murray’s Social …show more content…
Then, I describe Murray’s Social Theory of Great Power Politics as a strong example of constructivist insight into the shortcomings of Van Evera’s defensive realist explanation. I next use Murray’s thesis to question Van Evera’s arguments about the war’s long-run and then the short-run causes. Finally, I answer Van Evera’s counterfactual argument, in which he imagines that European leaders had recognized the power of the defense in the years before …show more content…
In the long-run, Van Evera claims that the war was inevitable due to “the political collision between expansionist Germany and a resistant Europe.” This German expansion was a result of the belief that conquest could provide the new empire with security, a belief steeped in the assumption of offensive-dominance. Van Evera also claims that this misinterpretation of offense-dominance created, or at least aggravated, the proximate causes of the war, including “the belief that the side which mobilized or struck first would have the advantage; the German and Austrian belief that they faced ‘windows of vulnerability’; the nature and inflexibility of the Russian and German war plans and the tight nature of the European alliance system.” Because the marginal utility of information, early mobilizations, and alliances is stronger when offense is dominant, European states avoided any concessions to others that could have slowed the march to war; this encouraged states to use aggressive diplomacy and secret mobilizations to gain tiny comparative advantages, while inadvertently signaling aggressive behavior to their