Read The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred Online
Authors: Niall Ferguson
Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #World
The trouble with geological fault lines is that, as the earth’s tectonic plates grind uneasily against one another, they are where earthquakes happen. In the years before 1914 the geopolitical tectonic plates known as empires were shifting underneath Sarajevo. Turkey’s was giving way; Austria’s was pushing forward; so, too, was Russia’s. Russian Pan-Slavists were appalled by the Austrian annexation of Bosnia. General A. A. Kireyev reacted with mortification to the news of his government’s acquiescence: ‘Shame! Shame!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It would be better to die!’ Yet the principal opponent of the Austrian takeover was not strictly speaking an empire but a nation state, albeit one with imperial ambitions. This was Serbia.
Nation states were a comparative novelty in European history. Much of the continent in 1900 was still dominated by the long-established and ethnically mixed empires of the Habsburgs, Romanovs and Osmanli. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was another such entity. Some smaller countries were also ethnically heterogeneous:
Belgium and Switzerland, for example. And there were numerous petty principalities and grand duchies, like Luxembourg or Lichtenstein, that had no distinct national identity of their own, yet resisted absorption into bigger political units. These patchwork political structures made practical sense at a time when mass migration was increasing rather than reducing ethnic intermingling. Yet in the eyes of political nationalists, they deserved to be consigned to the past; the future should belong to homogeneous nation states. France, which had nurtured in the Swiss political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau the prophet of popular sovereignty, also provided a kind of model for nation-building. A republic forged and re-forged in repeated revolutions and wars, France by 1900 seemed to have subsumed all its old regional identities in a single ‘idea of France’. Auvergnats, Bretons and Gascons alike all considered themselves to be Frenchmen, having been put through the same standardized schooling and military training.
Nationalism at first had seemed to pose a threat to Europe’s monarchies. In the 1860s, however, the kingdoms of Piedmont and Prussia had created new nation states by combining the national principle with their own instincts for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement. The results – the kingdom of Italy and the German Reich – were no doubt very far from being perfect nation states. To Sicilians, the Piedmontese were as foreign as if they had been Frenchmen; the true unification of Italy came after the triumphs of Cavour and Garibaldi, with what were in effect small wars of colonization waged against the peoples of the south. Many Germans, meanwhile, lived outside the borders of Bismarck’s new Reich; what historians called his wars of unification had in fact excluded German-speaking Austrians from a Prussian-dominated
Kleindeutschland
. Nevertheless, an imperfect nation state was, in the eyes of most nationalists, preferable to no nation state at all. In the late nineteenth century other peoples sought to follow the Italian and German example. Some – notably the Irish and the Poles, to say nothing of Bengalis and other Indians – saw nationhood as an alternative to subjugation by unsympathetic empires. A few, like the Czechs, were content to pursue greater autonomy within an existing imperial structure, keeping hold of the Habsburg nurse for fear of meeting something worse. The situation of the
Serbs was different. At the Congress of Berlin (1878), along with the Montenegrins, they had recovered their independence from Ottoman rule. By 1900 their ambitions were to follow the Piedmontese and Prussian examples by expanding in the name of South Slav (Yugoslav) national unity. But how were they to achieve this? One obvious possibility was through war, the Italian and German method. But the odds against Serbia were steep. It was one thing to win a war against the crumbling Ottoman Empire (as happened when Serbia joined forces with Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece in 1912) or against rival Balkan states (when the confederates quarrelled over the spoils of victory the following year). It was an altogether bigger challenge to take on Austria-Hungary, which was not only a more formidable military opponent, but also happened to be the principal market for Serbia’s exports.
The Balkan Wars had revealed both the strengths and the limits of Balkan nationalism. Its strength lay in its ferocity. Its weakness was its disunity. The violence of the fighting much impressed the young Trotsky, who witnessed it as a correspondent for the newspaper
Kievskaia mysl
. Even the peace that followed the Balkan Wars was cruel, in a novel manner that would become a recurrent feature of the twentieth century. It no longer sufficed, in the eyes of nationalists, to acquire foreign territory. Now it was peoples as well as borders that had to move. Sometimes these movements were spontaneous. Muslims fled in the direction of Salonika as the Greeks, Serbs and Bulgarians advanced in 1912; Bulgarians fled Macedonia to escape from invading Greek troops in 1913; Greeks chose to leave the Macedonian districts ceded to Bulgaria and Serbia by the Treaty of Bucharest. Sometimes populations were deliberately expelled, as the Greeks were from Western Thrace in 1913 and from parts of Eastern Thrace and Anatolia in 1914. In the wake of the Turkish defeat, there was an agreed population exchange: 48,570 Turks moved one way and 46,764 Bulgarians the other across the new Turkish-Bulgarian border. Such exchanges were designed to transform regions of ethnically mixed settlement into the homogeneous societies that so appealed to the nationalist imagination. The effects on some regions were dramatic. Between 1912 and 1915, the Greek population of (Greek) Macedonia increased by around a third; the Muslim and Bulgarian population
declined by 26 and 13 per cent respectively. The Greek population of Western Thrace fell by 80 per cent; the Muslim population of Eastern Thrace rose by a third. The implications were distinctly ominous for the many multi-ethnic communities elsewhere in Europe.
The alternative to outright war was to create a new South Slav state through terrorism. In the wake of the annexation of Bosnia, a rash of new organizations sprang up, pledged to resisting Austrian imperialism in the Balkans and to liberate Bosnia by fair means or foul. In Belgrade there was
Narodna Odbrana
(National Defence); in Sarajevo
Mlada Bosna
(Young Bosnia). In 1911 a more extreme and highly secret group was formed:
Ujedinjenje ili Smrt
(Unification or Death), also known as
Crna Ruka
(The Black Hand). Its declared aim was to make Serbia ‘the Piedmont of… the Unification of… Serbdom’. Its seal depicted:
a powerful arm holding in its hand an unfurled flag on which – as a coat of arms – there is a skull with crossed bones; by the side of the flag, a knife, a bomb and a phial of poison. Around, in a circle, there is the following inscription, reading from left to right: ‘Unification or Death’.
The Black Hand’s leader was Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic, nicknamed ‘Apis’ (Bee), one of seven officers in the Serbian army who were among its founders. It was Dimitrijevic who trained three young terrorists for what was from the outset intended to be a suicide mission: to murder the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne when he visited Sarajevo. The assassins – Nedjilko Cabrinovic, Trifko Grabez and Gavrilo Princip – were sent across the border with four Browning M 1910 revolvers, six bombs and cyanide tablets. As if to entice them, the Archduke chose to visit Sarajevo on the anniversary of the fourteenth-century Battle of Kosovo – the holiest day in the calendar of Serbian nationalism, St Vitus’ Day (
Vidovdan
).
Born and raised in the impoverished village of Bosansko Grahovo in the Krajina, in north-western Bosnia, Gavrilo Princip was in many ways the archetypal suicide bomber: enough of a student to believe fervently in the cause of Serbian nationalism, enough of a peasant to be shocked by the Austrian occupiers as they quaffed their schnapps and disported themselves in the Sarajevo bordellos. The more he saw of their antics, the more attracted he was by the idea of kicking the
Austrians out of Bosnia and making it part of a new South Slav state, along with neighbouring Serbia. He was, as he later explained at his trial, ‘a Yugoslav nationalist, aiming for the unification of all Yugoslavs, and I do not care what form of state, but it must be free from Austria… We thought: unification by whatever means… by means of terror.’ His aim, he said, had been ‘to do away with those who obstruct and do evil, who stand in the way of unification.’ He might have preferred to achieve that aim by means of conventional warfare; alas, he had been rejected by the Serbian army in 1912 as ‘too small and too weak’.
On the fateful morning, he and his fellow conspirators took up their positions on the procession route along the Appel Quay, the city’s central riverside avenue. Initially, it seemed that the job had been botched. Cabrinovic threw a bomb at the Archduke’s open-top car, but it bounced off the folded roof, injuring two people in the vehicle behind and about twenty bystanders. The archducal chauffeur was understandably ready to speed off to safety, but Francis Ferdinand insisted on turning back to see how the injured were faring, and then proceeded as scheduled to the town hall. After that, he decided he should visit the casualties. When the nervous chauffeur took a wrong turning on the way to the hospital, turning right into Franz-Josef Strasse, Princip, who was in the process of buying himself some lunch, suddenly found himself face to face with his intended targets. His vision blurred and, ‘filled with a peculiar feeling’ of ‘excitement’, he aimed his gun and fired. He fatally wounded both the Archduke, whom he shot through the throat, and his pregnant wife, the Duchess Sophie, whom he hit in the stomach by accident (he was in fact aiming for the military governor, General Oskar Potiorek). It was the royal couple’s fourteenth wedding anniversary.
Their mission achieved, Princip and Cabrinovic both tried to commit suicide, but the cyanide in the capsules they carried had oxidized and failed to kill them. Princip also tried to shoot himself but was prevented from doing so. At his trial, Princip was asked about the intended consequences of his actions. He replied: ‘I never thought that after the assassination there would be a war.’ Was this ingenuous or disingenuous? Historians have tended to assume that it was one or the other. It seems scarcely credible that Princip could have acted as he did without some sense of the earthquake that was to follow. Yet
we should bear in mind that earthquakes are not easily predictable events. Nor was the First World War. Though the Archduke’s assassination proved to be the tipping point – the fatal stimulus that caused the tectonic plates of empire to move convulsively right across Europe – that was not immediately obvious at the time. Over-determined though the war now seems as an event, we cannot truly understand it until we have grasped its apparently low probability in the eyes of contemporaries.
Historians have, on the whole, tended to portray the years before the outbreak of the First World War as a time of mounting tension and escalating crises. War, they have claimed, did not burst onto the scene in the summer of 1914; rather, it approached over a period of years, even decades. A not untypical example of the way they have retrospectively ordered events is the structure of the eleven-volume official history,
The British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898– 1914
, published between 1926 and 1938. The titles of the individual volumes offer a clear narrative framework of the war’s origins, extending over seventeen years:
Nearly all books about the origins of the war are variations on this narrative. Some authors go back further in time. One recent German history portrayed the outbreak of war as the last of a succession of nine diplomatic crises: the 1875 Franco-German ‘War in Sight’ crisis, the 1875–8 Eastern crisis, the 1885–8 Bulgarian crisis, the 1886–9 Boulanger crisis, the 1905–6 Moroccan crisis, the 1908 Bosnian crisis, the 1911 Agadir crisis and the 1912–13 Balkan crisis. The first volume of a monumental new British history of the war also traces its origins back to the foundation of the German Reich in 1871, emphasizing in particular Anglo-German naval competition after 1897. Studies of the pre-war arms race on land have tended to concentrate rather more on the immediate pre-war decade. Some writers who centre their accounts on the policy of Austria-Hungary tend to start the countdown to war even later. But few people today would seriously claim that the war was a bolt from the blue in the summer of 1914.
The idea of a gradually approaching conflict accords well with the idea that people had been prophesying war for years before the summer of 1914; in this view, the actual outbreak of hostilities came more as a relief than a surprise. The Left had predicted for decades that militarism and imperialism would eventually produce an almighty crisis; the Right had been almost as consistent in portraying war as a salutary consequence of Darwinian struggle. European societies, it is now widely agreed, were ready for war long before war came. Imperialism, nationalism, Social Darwinism, militarism – the libraries overflow with causes of the First World War. Some emphasize domestic political crises, others the instability of the international system; all are agreed that it had deep roots. The question, however, is how far the many narratives of escalating crisis have been constructed by historians not to capture the past as it actually was in 1914, but to create an explanation of the war’s origins commensurate with the vast dimensions of what happened in the succeeding four years. One way of addressing this question is to look more closely at the attitudes of other contemporaries to the diplomatic crises so familiar to historians. Doing so reveals just how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight. For the reality is that the First World War was a shock, not a long-anticipated crisis. Only retrospectively did men
decide they had seen it coming all along. Precisely for that reason the consequences of the war were so world-shaking. It is the unforeseen that causes the greatest disturbance, not the expected.