been translated into English. From the 1980s, however, the Bielefeld school was increasingly challenged by proponents of the "cultural turn" for not incorporating culture in the history of society, for reducing politics to society, and for reducing individuals to structures. Historians of society inverted the traditional positions they criticized (on the model of Marx's inversion of Hegel). As a result, the problems pertaining to the positions criticized were not resolved but only turned on their heads. The traditional focus on individuals was inverted into a modern focus on structures, and traditional emphatic understanding was inverted into modern causal explanation. Champion of the Sonderweg theory Wehler specialised in research into the German Empire. He was one of the more famous proponents of the Sonderweg (Special Path) thesis that argues Germany in the 19th century underwent only partial modernization. Wehler has argued that Germany was the only nation to be created in Western Europe through a military "revolution from above", which happened to occur at the same time that the agricultural revolution was fading and the Industrial Revolution was beginning in Central Europe. As a result, the economic sphere was modernized and the social sphere partially modernized. Politically, in Wehler's opinion, the new unified Germany retained values that were aristocratic and feudal, anti-democratic and pre-modern. In Wehler's view, the efforts of the reactionary German elite to retain power led to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the failure of the Weimar Republic and the coming of Nazi Germany. Wehler has especially criticised what he terms Otto von Bismarck's strategy of "negative integration" by which Bismarck sought to create a sense of Deutschtum (Germanism) and to consolidate his power by subjecting various minority groups (such as Roman Catholics, Alsatians, Poles and Social Democrats) to discriminatory laws. Wehler is one of the foremost advocates of the "Berlin War Party" historical school, which assigns the sole and exclusive responsibility for World War I to the German government. Wehler sees the aggressive foreign policies of the German Empire, especially under Kaiser Wilhelm II, largely as part of an effort on the part of the government to distract the German people from the lack of internal democracy. The ("primacy of domestic politics") argument to explain foreign policy, for which Wehler owes much to the work of Eckart Kehr, places him against the traditional ("primacy of foreign politics") thesis championed by historians, such as Gerhard