There are elephantine holes in the theory, not least the playing down of France's central role in the geopolitics of the day, presumably because, as a republic, France doesn't fit the competitive cousins storyline.
But it all too often falls for the "if only" myth, whereby peace could have been kept if only wiser men had been in charge of their countries instead of these intellectually limited royal relatives. Miranda Carter's "George, Nicholas and Wilhelm," about the interaction between three imperial cousins of 1914-Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Czar Nicholas II of Russia and King George V of Britain-is entertaining and well-researched, with acute pen portraits of the major players. About a decade ago, I published George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I, a book that was, in part, about Kaiser Wilhelm, who is probably best. According to this analysis, "the guns of August" were always likely to go off, unless power could be wrested in time from the crowned heads who so ill-deserved it.Īs so often in history, the myth contains just enough truth to make it plausible, but it is fundamentally wrong. According to popular mythology, World War I broke out largely because of a decadent, inbred cousinhood that ruled over the Old World's dynastic empires in a way that was undemocratic but also competitive, promoting an arms race that their pacific European subjects could not prevent and that could only end in war.
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