The causes of the First World War are as hazy as they have been studied by hundreds of historians over the past century. Everything seems to start with the interweaving of different alliances which represents the climax of the Peace of Westphalia system initiated in 1648. The doctrine of non-intervention, clarified borders between Empires, alliances to weaken geopolitical enemies, all this would have led to an arms race and a rise in long-lasting tensions at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The various conflicts that today we see as preludes to the First World War such as the Moroccan crisis of 1911, the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 or the Italo-Turkish war between 1911 and 1913 would have been only demonstrations of this fine balance found in Westphalia and which would have come out of breath. Empires could no longer spread without provoking a globalized conflict, the technology of armaments kept improving and the various internal nationalisms only grew, first little by little and then more and more intensely, for the quartering of the multinational Empires. Thus, the alliances well known to all, the Triple Alliance, and the Triple Entente, are formed at this time and, while balancing each other, become strained as never before, inevitably leading to conflict. Moreover, the recent creation of Serbia and Bulgaria, with their respective irredentismus, causes a dispute of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman authorities in favor of the Nation-State which, for the first time, takes place from countries directly borders and former possessions of these two Empires, especially Serbia, which aspires to dominate all the Western Balkans at the expenses of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. If we look at this general geopolitical framework, the escalation of the conflict seems inevitable, as if driven by a fatal fate to which the continent would have surrendered a long time ago and which would have erupted with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a simple pretext for a war that was going to happen anyway. This vision is not exempt from truth; however, it seems incomplete to us. Were there not key events, starting with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and continuing with various fatal diplomatic decisions that precipitated a conflict that almost none of the players really wanted, or, in any case, did not want with this magnitude? This is what we propose to analyze, thanks to the work of Professor Christopher Clark and his book “The Sleepwalkers: how Europe went to war in 1914”.
First, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary is a good illustration of all these elements that had to line up and fit together for the event to happen. When we abandon a strictly interstate vision and analyze the conflict from a human point of view and from the geopolitics that the various people involved in the decision-making that led to the war were thinking about, we see that it is much less a system armed with its own engines than a series of causes which led to their respective effects and which, like any cause, could have been modified, forever altering the structure of the geopolitical system. According to Professor Christopher Clark, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is of crucial importance in the unleashing of the conflict, not being a mere pretext for the latter. Thus, the Archduke was opposed to continuing with the various provocations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and he had even proposed a rather “federalizing” plan for Austria-Hungary, giving more power to the Balkan nations, in particular Croatia, than they had. It is by assassinating Franz Ferdinand that the “Black Hand”, the Serbian irredentist group responsible for the murder, setup three essential pawns: it eliminated one of the most powerful voices for peace, Franz Ferdinand, while destroying the possibilities for the Balkan nations of Austria-Hungary to find a better status within the Empire and, ultimately, it raised the prestige of General Conrad Von Hoetzendorf, an Austrian general deeply in favor of a war with the Serbs and whose prestige had fallen at Court in recent years.
The assassination itself of Franz Ferdinand remains a historical event filled with hazardous moments and possibilities of failure, again showing all the opportunities there were for this conflict not to occur, or, at the very least, not occur at this time or necessarily with this intensity. Thus, within the “Black Hand”, the Serbian irredentist group which had carried out several actions against the Austro-Hungarian Empire and which had infiltrated the highest spheres of the State in a very nationalist Serbia, several attacks against the Austria-Hungary had been planned, some of them having nothing to do with Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The team of six young Serbs formed by Danilo Ilić did almost not receive the weapons intended for them because the Austro-Hungarian Emperor had health problems and the Archduke was going to cancel his trip to Sarajevo. It is finally through a whole series of coincidences that these young people manage to arrive in Sarajevo from Serbia, via a secret route and the connivance of certain authorities of the Serbian State with the Black Hand.
Thus, on June 28, 1914, a date which fatally coincided with the battle of Kosovo Polje lost by the Serbs against the Turks on June 28, 1389, the murder was initially a failure. The first assassin, Mehmedbašić, does not act, as does the second, Čubrilović. The third, Čabrinović, threw a bomb at Archduke’s car, which the latter managed to throw back just before the detonation, causing several injuries in the cars following him. The procession arrives at its destination, the town hall of Sarajevo, without the attack having been a success. Franz Ferdinand, outraged by the attempted murder, decides to visit the wounded of the first attack and therefore to take the opposite route, but by another route far from the city center, in case there are new attempts. This idea is not communicated to the drivers and so finally is taken the road through the city center, where a certain Gavrilo Prinzip, who was part of the group of assassins but was not in charge of killing the Archduke, decides to stand near the car with a gun, firing twice, this time killing the Archduke and his wife and attempting to kill himself before being arrested.
We have seen to what extent the event which is considered by the general public as “fatal” to explain the beginning of the First World War was not really linked to an inevitability of fate brought by the geopolitical context but rather by the will of certain people who developed within this context. We will now see the diplomatic decisions, from an internal and not only an interstate point of view, which precipitated the War.
We will rely on this brief analysis on Christopher Clark’s masterpiece, “The Sleepwalkers”. It is in this book that the historiography does not seek to establish a link of responsibility, whether individual or shared, for the war, but rather to establish a factual account of the last month of 1914 before the conflict. The geopolitical tensions between Serbia and Austria-Hungary were so great that the attack only increased the prestige of the most radical voices within the Austro-Hungarian Empire against the Balkan country, wanting to annihilate it once and for all. Just after the murder of Franz Ferdinand, deep debates took place within the Empire and the ultimatum sent to Serbia, holding it responsible for the murder, was created by a series of military men who no longer sought peace but a “casus belli”. It was figures like Von Hoetzendorf who pushed for war, with peace and stability in the Balkans championed instead by Franz Ferdinand himself and his supporters, a faction that had just lost its moral “leader” as well as all its credibility. There is also a key element to consider, again according to Christopher Clark but also according to other multiple historians: it is the unconditional support given by Germany to Austria-Hungary on July 5, 1914 in any action it took against Serbia. This support is more than controversial among historians, because it is not really understood why it was not withdrawn when it became clear that the conflict was not going to be limited to the simple Western Balkans and that Russia was probably going to go to war just like France. We must see in this German decision on the one hand the policy of “calculated risk” of Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg and on the other hand the belligerent attitude of Kaiser Wilhelm II. The policy of its Chancellor was based on the idea that, through this crisis, never would the chances for Germany of defeating France, Serbia, and Russia in one go be so favorable, what is more with the complicity of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. It is a bet on a conflict to avoid successive conflicts with the great powers. Moreover, the German Kaiser was very friendly with the murdered Franz Ferdinand and was driven by an exacerbated Germanic nationalism, believing in some sort of conspiracy between all the other European powers to destroy a German Empire which was at its peak of glory.
All these tactical decisions by the Balkan countries on the one hand and the Germanic countries on the other probably would not have had such a great impact without the mobilization decreed by Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II, which encouraged Germany to maintain itself on the Austro-Hungarian side. Via the growing “pan-Slavism” in Russia, the Tsar wanted to defend the Serbs but did not want to go to war with the Germans because he thought it would be fatal for Russia. Russian Count Sergius Witte told French Ambassador Maurice Paléologue that the war was madness and that Slavic solidarity made no sense. Neither the German Kaiser nor the Russian Tsar wanted a war against each other, the Kaiser seeking to punish France and Serbia above all and Russia seeking to weaken the Austro-Hungarian Empire. However, the general mobilization of Russia against Austria-Hungary and therefore against its permanent ally, Germany, is decided above all because of the French diplomatic influence at the tsarist court. Russia knew that a war on one front with Germany was a great risk for its survival but, conversely, that a German war on two fronts, one French and the other Russian, had a great chance of a win. French President Poincaré and the ambassador in Moscow, Paléologue, hated Germany, particularly because of the 1870 war, and so Paléologue convinced Poincaré to give unconditional support to Russia in the event of war, knowing that Russia would announce a mobilization in this case, which would lead to a logical sequence of events seen previously. We know that Paléologue does not inform Paris of the real consequences of this unconditional support, but we do not know if he exceeded his instructions or if there was a real desire for a conflict on the part of the French state. In any case, Paléologue never told Poincaré that the conflict would be European and not just between Russia and Austria-Hungary. We can therefore see that many geopolitical actors, at the level of States but above all at the level of individuals, had a decisive influence in carrying Europe, “like a sleepwalker”, according to Clark’s own title, towards a nightmare that ends up seeming inevitable.
Is there then a fatality to the unleashing of the First World War? When we reconstruct the events using primary sources and various historiographical works, we realize more and more that this fatality is not one. It could have happened or it could not have happened. It is the result, as illustrated by its very trigger, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, of a series of very specific material conditions which, when linked to an increasingly tense context, exacerbated the conflict. We can say that the First World War is the daughter of its era, without a doubt, but we cannot say that this era would have had the First World War as its daughter in all possible worlds. The economic factors, so dear to a Marxist interpretation, as well as the factors strictly of geopolitical balance, all pushed towards peace. However, this war did take place and it is the result of a series of decisions, sometimes clumsy, sometimes intentional, which stretched and tightened the international framework to bring the continent to a catastrophic war.
Marcos Bartolomé Terreros
Bibliography :
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- Pindar, Ian (2013), The Sleepwalkers by Christopher Clark review by The Guardian. https://theguardian.com. theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/19/sleepwalkers-christopher-clark-review
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Marcos Bartolomé Terreros is a spaniard, born in 2003. He studies the double degree in Spanish and French Law at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. He is interested in politics, literature and cinema.