Britain Should Not Have Fought in the First World War
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Connor Boyle. For this week's Sunday debate, we're dipping back into the archive to 2014, when we gathered a panel of expert historians to debate whether Britain was right to fight in the First World War, a tragedy that laid the foundations for decades of destructive upheaval and violence across Europe. Britain's involvement in the First World War, a conflict that cost the lives of over 886,000 British military personnel, has been questioned throughout the 20th and 21st century by academics. Back in 2014, it was a timely topic once again, with that year marking 100 years since the conflict first began in 1914.
To debate the issue, we invited leading historians Margaret Macmillan, Max Hastings, John Charmley and Dominic Sandbrook to an event hosted by journalist, columnist and national security expert Edward Lucas. Here's Edward with more. Well, thanks very much indeed, and thank you all for coming. I think this is one of the most sold-out events that we we we've had. I don't think there's a single spare seat in the House.
And it's a very topical subject. This combination of militarism and miscalculation which we see now unfolding in Ukraine and other parts of the former Soviet Union have awful echoes of gunshots in in in Sarajevo and the cataclysm that they brought about. But we're not here to talk about the origins of the First World War, and we're not also not going to talk about who's to blame, we're not going to talk about whether you should have hung the Kaiser or whether the Versailles Treaty laid the foundations of the Second World War.
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