Opinion

Why Sarajevo Is Now

The eerie relevance of ‘the first calamity of the 20th century’

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Why Sarajevo Is Now
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Short notes on the Great War

As soon as hostilities broke out in August 1914, German overseas possessions came under Allied, especially British, attack—wireless stations, bases, harbours, coaling points. Some German possessions were quickly snapped up—Togoland and the Cameroons  in West Africa, Samoa and New Guinea. Others put up a fierce struggle. German East Africa (contemporary Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi), under the resourceful Lt Col Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck, fought on till November 23, 1918, a full 12 days after the Armistice. He held back a total of 3,72,950 British empire troops, with a force that never exceeded 20,000 German and colonial troops. All in all, the campaigns against German colonies and secondary fronts (including Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, Palestine and Italy) engaged about 3.5 million soldiers of the British empire alone. To put that perspective, consider the Western Front, where the war was largely won and lost: some 5.3 million British empire troops were deployed there.

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The European continent was at peace on the morning of June 28, 1914, a Sunday, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. In its complexity and swiftness of escalation, the ‘July Crisis’ of 1914 is without parallel in world history. That morning, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were slain in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serb students acting for a shadowy Belgrade-based ultranationalist network. The Austrian government in Vienna resolved to serve an ultimatum on its Serbian neighbour. On July 5, 1914, Berlin promised support for Austria, and encouraged by Paris, Russia opted to defend its Serbian client by mobilising against Austria and Germany. Unsat­isfied by the Serbian reply to its ultimatum, Austria declared war on Serbia. Rus­sia mobilised against Austria and Germany. Germany mobilised agai­nst France and Russia. France asked Lon­don for help. On August 4, 1914, following the German breach of Belgian neu­­t­rality, Britain entered the war.

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Explaining how this war came about has never been easy. The debate over its origins is old, indeed it is older than the war itself. Even before the first shots were fired, Europe’s statesmen constr­ucted narratives depicting themselves as innocents and framing their opponents as predators and breachers of the peace. Since then, the war origins deb­ate has spawned historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral inte­nsity. In 1991, a survey by American  his­torian John W. Langdon counted 25,000 relevant books and articles in English alone. Some accounts have focu­sed on the culpability of one bad apple state (Germany has been most popular, but none of the great powers has escaped the ascription of chief responsibility); others have shared the blame around or have looked for faults in the ‘system’.

If the war origins debate is still going strong today, it’s mainly for three reasons. This war unleashed the demons of political disorder, extremism and cruelty that disfigured the 20th century. It destroyed four multi-ethnic empires (the Russian, the German, the Austro-Hung­arian and the Ottoman) with con­seq­uences that are still being felt today. It consumed the lives of at least 10 million young men and wounded at least 20 million more. It disorganised the international system in destructive ways. Wit­h­out this conflict, it is difficult to imagine the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent rise of Stal­inism, the ascendancy of Italian Fascism, the Nazi seizure of power or the Holo­caust. The victory of the western Ente­nte powers opened the Middle East to a phase of last-ditch Anglo-French impe­rial expansion whose dire consequences are still being felt today. It thrust global financial hegemony upon the United States, long before Washington was ready to wield it.  It deepened Sino-Japanese tensions. It was, as the historian Fritz Stern has put it, “the first calamity of the 20th century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang”. One can scarcely imagine a worse initial condition for the modern era of which we are the inheritors.

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A second reason is the exceptionally intricate character of the crisis that brought war to Europe in 1914. The story of how World War I came about has to make sense of the multilateral interactions among five autonomous players of equal importance—Germany, Austria-Hungary, Fra­­nce, Russia and Britain—six, if we add Italy, plus various other strategically significant and equally autonomous sovereign actors, such as the Ottoman Empire and the states of the Balkan peninsula, a region of high political tension and instability in the years before the outbreak of war. To make matters worse, the executives of these states were anything but unified. There was uncertainty (and has been ever since among historians) about where exactly the power to shape policy was located within the respective government. The resulting chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the last pre-war years. And this complexity helps in turn to explain why we are still arguing over the origns of this war: there was always enough complexity to keep the argument going.

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A muddy war The flow of troops overwhelms a track in Fricourt, France, 1917. (Photograph by Getty Images, From Outlook 31 March 2014)

Lastly, if the debate is old, the issues it raises are still fresh. One might even say the political crisis of July 1914 is less remote from us—less illegible—now than it was 30 or 40 years ago. When I first encountered this subject as a scho­olboy in Sydney, a kind of period charm had accumulated in popular awa­reness around the events of 1914. It was easy to imagine the disaster of Eur­ope’s ‘last sum­mer’ as an Edwardian costume drama. The effete rituals and gaudy uni­f­­orms, the ornamentalism of a world still largely organised around here­ditary monarchy had a distancing effect on present-day recollection. They seemed to signal that the protagonists were peo­ple from another, vanished world. The presumption stealthily asserted itself that if the actors’ hats had gaudy green ostrich feathers on them, then their thoughts and dreams probably did too.

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Yet, what must strike any 21st century reader who follows the course of the summer crisis of 1914 is its raw modernity. It began with a cavalcade of automobiles and a squad of suicide bombers—the young men who gathered in Sarajevo with bombs on June 28, 1914, had been told by their handlers to take their own lives after carrying out their mission, and received phials of potassium cyanide to do it with. Behind the outrage at Sarajevo was an avowedly terrorist organisation with a cult of sacrifice, death and revenge, extra-territorial, secretive, scattered in cells across political borders; its links to any sovereign government were oblique.

Since the end of the Cold War, a system of global bipolar stability has made way for a more complex and unpredictable array of forces, including declining empires and rising powers—a state of affairs that invites comparison with the Europe of 1914. It is perhaps less obvious now that we should dismiss the two killings at Sarajevo as a mere mishap incapable of carrying real causal weight. The attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001 exemplified the way in which a single, symbolic event—however deeply it may be enmeshed in larger historical processes—can change politics irrevocably, rendering old options obsolete and endowing new ones with an unforeseen urgency.

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The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s reminded us of the potential lethality of Balkan nationalism. These shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914. Accepting this challenge does not mean embracing a vulgar presentism that remakes the past to meet the needs of the present. Rather, it means acknowledging those features of the past of which our changed vantage point can afford us a clearer view. The impact of these changes can be discerned in recent writing on the origins of the war. There has been a globalisation of the field of vision. The pre-war polarisation of Europe into opposed alliance blocs now looks less like a purely continental European story and more like the European consequence of world-historical realignments, driven by conflicts along a range of imperial peripheries in China, Africa and Central and South Asia. The ‘China Question’ of the 1890s, which was driven in part by indigenous Chinese resistance to the imperialism of the western powers, heightened tension between the European states. The vulnerability of India to the growing military might of Russia’s Central Asian empire encouraged British policymakers first to oppose and later to appease St Petersburg, at the cost of seeking better relations with Berlin.

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Perhaps the strangest thing about the crisis that brought war in 1914 is the geography of its inception. World War I was the Third Balkan War before it became World War I. How was this possible? Conflicts and crises on the south-eastern periphery, where the Ottoman Empire abutted Christian Eur­ope, were nothing new. The European system had always accommodated them without endangering the peace of the continent as a whole. But the last years before 1914 saw fundamental change. In the autumn of 1911, Italy launched a war of conquest on Tripolitania (present­-day Libya), an African province of the Otto­man Empire, triggering a chain of oppo­rtunist assaults on Ottoman territories across the Balkans. The system of geopolitical balances that had enabled local conf­licts to be contained was swept away. In the aftermath of the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Austria-Hungary realised it faced a new and threatening constellation on its south-eastern periphery, while the retreat of Ottoman power rai­sed strategic questions that Russian diplo­mats and policymakers found it impossible to ignore. The two continental alliance blocs were drawn deeper into the antipathies of a region that was entering a period of unprecedented volatility. In the process, the conflicts of the Balkan theatre became tightly intertwined with the geopolitics of the European system, creating a set of escalatory mechanisms that would enable a conflict of Balkan inception to engulf the continent within five weeks in the summer of 1914.

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It is in this entanglement of regional strife with Great Power relations that 1914 offers the darkest warnings for the present. When competing interests seek to control contested regions by coopting local clients, they too easily forget that even the most enthusiastic proxies are rarely entirely obedient to the will of their self-appointed sponsors. Local instability rocked the Balkans in 1914 as it rocks the Ukraine today. Does this mean we are in danger of ‘sleepwalking’ into another major conflagration? I don’t think so. There exists today no counterpart in the current crisis (yet!) for the commitments to fight over the Balkans that took Europe to war in 1914. But the spectre of the crisis of 1914 remains the ultimate reminder of how terrible the costs can be when politics fails, conversation stops and compromise becomes impossible.

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Christopher Clark is professor of modern European history at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College

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