For my generation, of all the disasters of the 20th century, the one many of us consider to be the source of all evils, is the war that started, in Western and central Europe, in 1914. Needless to list all that followed, from the fraught peace, the economic disasters, the surge of unbridled US preponderance, and the general loss of humanity, to this day.
One aspect of this that the historian Christopher Clarke noted, in “The Sleepwalkers, How Europe went to war in 1914”, is the role of the monarchies:
“Whether or not they intervened aggressively in the political process, the continental monarchs nonetheless remained, by virtue of their very existence, an unsettling factor in international relations. The presence in only partially democratised systems of sovereigns who were the putative focal points of their respective executives with access to all state papers and personnel and with ultimate responsibility for every executive decision created ambiguity. A purely dynastic foreign policy, in which monarchs met each other to resolve great affairs of state, was no longer apposite… Yet the temptation to view the monarch as the helmsman and personnification of the executive remained strong among diplomats, statesmen and especially the monarchs themselves. Their presence created a persistent uncertainty about where exactly the pivot of the decision -making process rested… The resulting lack of clarity dogged efforts to establish secure and transparent relations between states.”
Any views?
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