Too good to be true? European hopes for neutrality before 1914

Abstract

As the renowned historian, C. V. Wedgwood, famously wrote in her biography of William the Silent, “history is lived forward but it is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” 2 h is is, of course, a warning to historians that any attempt at being ‘true’ to the past is a l awed exercise. It is a particularly apt warning, however, when we assess the writing of the history of nineteenth-century European neutrality, which is ot en imbued with the foreknowledge of the havoc that the First and Second World Wars would wreak. h e First World War is acknowledged as the event that witnessed the decline of the viability and relevance of neutrality and the Second World War as the conl ict that killed the traditional idea of neutrality of completely. 3