Nothing fails like success : the London Ambassadors’ Conference and the coming of the First World War

Abstract

During the July Crisis Britain’s foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, focused on organising a conference through which differences could be reconciled. After the war, he maintained that Germany’s unwillingness to join this conference was one of the immediate causes of war. This essay disputes Grey’s contention, arguing that his plans for a conference, based on a misleading analogy to the previous Balkan Crises, actually helped facilitate the outbreak of war in 1914 by sanctioning inaction in the first phase of the crisis (28 June–22 July) and by tacitly encouraging Russian mobilisation in the second phase (23 July–4 August).