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About Paul W. Schroeder
- Paul W.
- Schroeder (born February 23, 1927) is an American historian, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, and professor at Case Western Reserve University.
- He specializes in late-sixteenth- to twentieth-century European international politics, Central Europe, and the theory of history. Schroeder was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Rupert H.
- Schroeder and Elfrieda Koch.
- He attended Concordia Seminary (graduated 1951), Texas Christian University, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his doctorate in 1958.
- He received the 1956 Beveridge Award for the best manuscript on American history submitted by a beginning historian.
- He was an associate professor of history at Concordia Senior College from 1958 to 1963, after which he was hired at the University of Illinois. In a 1972 essay entitled, "World War I as a Galloping Gertie", Schroeder contrary to established historical opinion and Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles laid the blame for the First World War on Britain's doorstep.
- Schroeder characterized the political events leading up to the war as a "Galloping Gertie," a metaphor which described political events as escalating out of control, pulling and pushing all five Great Powers into an unwanted war.
- Schroeder's research highlighted the fact that Britain was engaged in an “encirclement" policy directed at the Austria-Hungary empire.
- The British policy was not in keeping with the Congress System which had developed after the Napoleonic wars and was fundamentally anti-German, and even more so, anti-Austrian.
- Britain's policy created an atmosphere in which Germany was forced into a "preventive war" to maintain Austria as an allied power.Apart from his scholarship, Schroeder has been a regular contributor to the magazine The American Conservative, writing strong critiques of the Bush administration's foreign policy (especially regarding the Iraq War) for its destabilizing, counterproductive effects.
- The internationalist, realist perspective of his critiques fits well with his favorable appraisals of the 19th-century Concert-of-Europe approach to international relations that Schroeder has offered as a model in his scholarship.
- Perry Anderson has called him "arguably the greatest living American historian" and said that his The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 "revolutionised one of the most disgraced of all fields in the discipline, ...
- diplomatic history."
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