Here is my latest article for DIPLOMAT magazine – a review of David Owen’s fine new book on the diplomatic origins of the First World War.

Thus:

Readers of Diplomat will enjoy – and be startled by – many details Lord Owen gives us about diplomacy as practised a century and more ago. London presided over a mighty global empire. Yet it had a tiny diplomatic organisation – a mere 140 full diplomats when the Great War started, mostly from the country’s social elite. It was only in 1907 that the Foreign Secretary had lost his powers of personal patronage to appoint new diplomats: until then the default position had been to bring in plenty of Etonians. Official documents were written in high mandarin style and often by hand, sometimes using abbreviations (no doubt to save time) that presage today’s text-speak: “I sd it would be much more convenient if these cd be omitted.”

It’s hard nowadays to work out what Europe’s top diplomats back in those days actually knew about the issues they were so grandly discussing. Count Bernhard von Bulow who served as German Foreign Secretary was impressed by the contradictions in the way London’s leaders looked at the world: “English politicians know little about the Continent … they are naive in their conscious egotism and in a certain blind confidence. They find it difficult to credit really bad intentions in others. They are very quiet, very phlegmatic and very optimistic.”

These days, European foreign ministers are always on the road, dropping into each other’s offices to the point where it is hard to imagine a world in which that is not happening. Sir Edward Grey served as British Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916: no one has held this high office longer. There is no evidence that he had ever visited continental Europe before taking office. In his long years as Foreign Secretary he apparently made only one visit abroad, to France in early 1914.

Worse, he had had no personal experience of military action. He did not grasp that British involvement in a land war on the European continent with modern weapons could lead to unimaginable casualties. Loftily oblivious to his own ignorance, he followed his personal and political instincts: when in doubt, London should side with Paris against Berlin. As this book describes so well, his policies had disastrous consequences…

Lord Owen focuses in on the machinations of Sir Edward Grey who almost single-handedly got us tangled up in complex miltary arangements with the French without telling the Cabinet for years. The baffling thing now is trying to work out how that might have been technically possible. Didn’t our leaders chat quietly and confidentially to each other in their imperial clubs?

The result was a disaster for the United Kingdom on a civilisational scale:

In short, London boxed itself in on multiple levels simultaneously: “British diplomacy suddenly acquired a continental rigidity that had been absent for many decades.” Errors of basic diplomatic technique led to millions of deaths.

International understandings and alliances ebb and flow. Yet core principles of diplomacy are based on commonsense truths about human nature.

Above all, if you want to understand the intentions and concerns of other people, it’s quite a good idea to talk to them: “nothing can really disguise one simple fact: to get an agreement you have to want agreement.” Then you need to get down into what David Owen describes as the frustrating mire of detail with its “hands-on, nitty-gritty, face-to-face” negotiations needed to reach tough compromises that all concerned are ready to accept then implement…

Read the whole thing. Then buy the book. It’s easy to read, with lots of fascinating documents and the sharp insider operational and policy insights that only a former Foreign Secretary can bring to bear on a subject like this.

By the way, the Foreign Office is commissioning some podcasts on the diplomatic origins of the First World War. I’ll be part of that. I’ll let you know when I appear.