Revisiting the Fischer Thesis: New Scholarship on the Causes of the War

The 100^th anniversary of the start of World War I has given scholars a chance to reassess the origins of the war.  Historical scholarship has been dominated by the thesis of Fritz Fischer, who argued in the 1960s in two major books that Germany was responsible for the outbreak of war and Germany’s expansionist aims propelled both World War I and World War II.  In this atmosphere analysis of the causes of World War I has not departed much from the Fischer Thesis.  However, with a spate of new books published to commemorate the 100^th anniversary and focused on the causes of the war, some scholars have begun to reassess the war in global perspective.   This paper examines the major new books written on World War I in relation to the Fischer Thesis.  One product of that examination is that new scholarship on the war, such like earlier generations, is still closely connected to their nations’ of origin, that  patriotism and nationalism in historical writing about World War I remains a significant factors despite the current trend to examine that event in global perspective.