| Summary/Abstract |
Recent years have witnessed increasing interest amongst international historians in the impact of emotions on foreign policy decisions as part of a broader movement usually known as the ‘emotional turn’. This trend is associated with findings from the field of neuroscience that cognition and emotion—rather than operating independently—remain inextricably bound together in human decision-making. Most work thus far has concentrated on American foreign policy since 1945, but this analysis broadens the focus to consider the impact of emotions on British decision-makers, especially Cabinet ministers, as they debated whether to go to war in 1914. It shows that despite a tendency by the protagonists themselves to interpret their actions in rational terms, sufficient evidence of emotions exist in the written record to allow a fresh approach to the July Crisis. Whilst emotions must be seen as acting alongside rational mental processes, rather than regularly over-powering them, a focus on the subject helps explain different approaches taken by individual ministers, why the majority came to approve intervention in the conflict, and how Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, partly by appearing to control his feelings, minimised resignations over the fateful decision. It also allows a new view about why the Cabinet decided to go to war on 4 August in defence of Belgium, despite deciding just a few days earlier that the question of fulfilling the 1839 guarantee of Belgian neutrality was ‘one of policy than of legal obligation’.
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