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Paul W. Schroeder (February 23, 1927[1] – December 6, 2020[2]) was an American historian who was professor emeritus at the University of Illinois. He specialized in European international politics from the late 16th to the 20th centuries, Central Europe, and the theory of history. He is known for his contributions to diplomatic history and international relations.[3]
Schroeder was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Rupert H. Schroeder and Elfrieda Koch.[1] He attended Concordia Seminary (graduated 1951), Texas Christian University, and the University of Texas at Austin, where he received his doctorate in 1958.[1] He received the 1956 Beveridge Award for the best manuscript on American history submitted by a beginning historian.[4] He was an associate professor of history at Concordia Senior College from 1958 to 1963 and was later hired at the University of Illinois.
In the 1972 essay "World War I as a Galloping Gertie", against established historical opinion and Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, Schroeder 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 that described political events as escalating out of control and pulling and pushing all five Great Powers into an unwanted war.[5] Schroeder's research highlighted the fact that Britain was engaged in an “encirclement" policy directed at Austria-Hungary.[6] 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 anti-Austrian.[7] The policy created an atmosphere in which Germany was forced into a "preventive war" to maintain Austria as an allied power.[8]
Apart from his scholarship, Schroeder was a regular contributor to the magazine The American Conservative and wrote strong critiques of the foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, especially regarding the Iraq War, for its destabilizing counterproductive effects. The internationalist realist perspective of his critiques fit well with his favorable appraisals of the 19th-century Concert of Europe approach to international relations that he offered as a model in his scholarship. Perry Anderson 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."[9]