Diplomats and bureaucrats: The first institutional responses to twentieth-century diplomacy in France and Germany (Hoover Institution publications ; 153)

The monograph is for political scientists. It dissects the diplomatic branches of the French and German governments during 1900-25. The idea is to see how they adapted, or at least the extent to which this was done, to changing circumstances. Like the Great War, of course. A motive of the book seems to be to see how the diplomats might have contributed to or exacerbated the tensions that culminated in that war. Prior to the war, the book takes us back to a vanished world, where European imperialisms dominated and where the US and Russia/Soviet Union played relatively minor roles. The reader may be struck by a perhaps very traditional nineteenth century feel of much of the prewar narrative. The book undergirds what other more well known texts have referred to as the long nineteenth century, that only really ended with the Great War.