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Paul Schroeder's Biography(Books)

Paul Schroeder
Paul W. Schroeder is an American historian and professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois, specializing in the late sixteenth- to twentieth-century European international politics, Central Europe, and the theory of history. His current research focuses on European international politics, 1648-1945, emphasizing systemic evolution and development.

He received his doctorate from the University of Texas at Austin in 1958.

In a 1972 essay "World War I As A Galloping Gertie", Schroeder blamed Britain for the First World War. Schroeder argued that the war was a "Galloping Gertie", in events escalated out of control, sucking in all of the Great Powers into an unwanted war Schroeder that the key factor in the European situation was what he claimed was Britain's "encirclement" policy directed at Austria-Hungary Schroeder argued that British foreign policy was fundamentally anti-German, and even more so, anti-Austrian Schroeder claimed that 1914 was a "preventive war" forced on Germany to maintain Austria as a power, which faced with a crippling British "encirclement policy" aimed at the break-up of that state

Apart from his scholarship, Schroeder recently has been a regular contributor to the paleoconservative 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.