Who made foreign policy decisions in the July 1914 Crisis? More specifically, across the six governments engaged in the crisis, what were the decision structures that ultimately found themselves (with exception of Italy) embroiled in a continent-wide war that none of them anticipated or even desired (Levy, 1990-91). Drawing systematically upon detailed historical research on each power, this paper will argue that foreign decision making across all of the powers was politically far more complicated than conventionally portrayed in the political science literature. In most of the key powers (e.g., Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Great Britain) foreign policy decision making was so politically fragmented that their decision structures (or “units”) were, in effect, coalitions. And, in the cases in which decision making was more cohesive, this occurred in precisely those political systems in which one would have expected fragmented decision making, i.e., the fluid, multiparty parliamentary systems of Third Republic France and Liberal Italy. Furthermore, it is arguable that for all of the powers (including that of the Russian “Duma monarchy”) the dynamics of leadership decision making were considerably shaped by the fact that each of these states had, to one degree or another, parliamentary forms of government. The July 1914 case offers a historical and theoretical very interesting for understanding the coalition nature of foreign policy making. It is also a theoretically “tough” case for arguing the importance of coalition influences, given that conventional wisdom would assume that governments in crisis-indeed, “at the brink” of war-would operate in a more cohesive manner with a concern for international imperatives.
