Greetings,
I want to kick off a thread recognizing the recent 90th anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and more importantly the 37 day crisis that followed with a discussion on the origins of the war and its consequences. For as much as World War I was an immensely impactful and shaping experience for the world and a (the?) defining event of the 20th century, its beginnings are perhaps some of the most bizarre in modern historical annals.
A short and ailing Balkan nationalist, as a part of an underground nationalist organization, assassinates the very unpopular and very nearly-disenfranchised runner-up for the imperial throne, and as a consequence all the great powers of the era plunge into a 4 year long slugfest that ends up destroying 4 of the largest empires in the world and seriously undermining the remainders. That's a bit like saying "A Canadian nationalist assassinated the American Vice President, and as a consequence Russia and China declared war against one another." In other words, there needs be some explanation as to how we got from point A to point Z, and so many history books don't bother with that - they stop at the dead archduke.
I want to take the process a part some. It is a strange process that had almost nothing to do with Serbian nationalism or Imperial Viennese dignity. I'll walk through the basic 6-step process of going from a street-corner brawl to a world-wide war. Please bear with me as each step requires some background. This is not a chronology of the events, but rather an exploration of their meaning and how they were understood at the time. I am assuming that you, the readers, already have a basic idea of the events. I especially want to underline the point that an intelligent and educated observer on the evening of 28. June, 1914, reading their newspaper and digesting the impact of the day's events, would probably not have guessed that a mere month and a half later the world's greatest armies would be marching against each other.
1. *Bang* and down he goes. Gavrilo Princip, a barely-18 year old Serbian Bosnian, just got the opportunity he'd dreamt of when Franz Ferdinand's coach driver had realized he'd made a wrong turn and stopped to reverse course. Princip took two steps forward, fired off several shots, killing almost instantly both the Archduke and his wife Sofie (or "Zofia", as Vienna derisively called her, a reminder of her Czech middle class-commoner origins). So we have a ghastly murder, and two are dead. The Sarajevo crowd, by the way, was infuriated with Princip's action and instantly pounced on him and began to pummel him. He was saved by gendarmes who also had to, after rescuing him, prop him up so he could vomit because in the melee he had managed to swallow a cyanide pill but it turned out not to be a fatal dosage. No matter; Princip already knew he had tuberculosis, a disease that was almost always fatal back then. (He would die of it ironically in 1918, in the Habsburg prison fortress of Spielberg in Austrian Brüno (modern Brno, Czech Republic). If Princip had just lasted a few more months, he probably would have been released by the intensely anti-Habsburg Czechs and welcomed home to the new "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" where he could die an agonizing but hero's death instead of in a cold Austrian dungeon. Oh well, c'est la vie.
In any event, this whole assassination episode needs some explanation. In 1815, Serbia was the northern-most province of the Ottoman empire and was a frontier state that saw frequent clashes between two hostile empires, that of the Ottomans' and the Habsburgs'. As such Serbia was subjected to a severe police regime by the Ottomans and worse yet, the main military forces in Serbia were the dreaded Janissaries who were once a crack military force dedicated exclusively to the Sultan's service but long since having devolved into a large mafia organization that ruled its own regions in a thugocracy that was as likely to ignore as to obey any command from the Sultan or Constantinople. The Janissaries had become very much like the Swedish armies in the closing years of the Thirty Years War, wandering southern Germany leaderless and pillaging at will, becoming a scourge in the lands they controlled. The Janissaries provoked the Serbian revolt of 1815 but could not completely suppress it, leading to decades of on-and-off warfare that eventually resulted in Serbian independence from the Ottoman empire. By the time of total independence in 1878, Serbia was a brutalized peasant state with a near-messianic nationalism.
But that year, 1878, was a crucial year for the Serbs and the Balkans. In 1876 the Bulgarians had revolted (again) against Ottoman rule and the Janissaries, since evicted from Serbia, wreaked a terrible revenge against the Bulgarian peasantry. This act - well, OK, other Balkan interests that conveniently utilized this act as a pretext - provoked Russia to declare war. Things see-sawed for a while but suddenly in the closing months of 1877 the Russian armies surged forward and seemed almost destined to take Constantinople itself. The Russians ended the war by imposing the Treaty of San Stefano on the Ottomans, in which they created a massive Bulgarian state that encompassed most of the southern Balkans and in which St. Petersburg intended to station large Russian armies. In other words, Russia was going to transform the Balkans into a Russian protectorate. This was amazingly crass behavior for the Russians because the Treaty of San Stefano knowingly broke several treaties and agreements Russia had with the other European powers. (More about that later.) The European powers in response convened the Berlin Conference in the summer of 1878 which re-organized the Balkans in such a way as to continue a general European policy decades old; namely, keeping Russia out of Europe and away from those damned (Dardanelles) Straits.
The Berlin Conference had enormous consequences for Europe. It finally drew the two German powers, Prussia (known by then as "Germany") and Austria back together in a rapprochement, restoring a Pan-German front in Europe damaged in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. It once again re-organized the system of alliances among the smaller states of Europe, generally creating a widely anti-Russian alliance system. Germany preferred to let Vienna deal with the smaller states though their policies were coordinated, so that over the 1870s and 1880s Vienna signed treaties with Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Romania and Greece, locking the Russians out of the Balkans. This system of alliances had cracks, however, as the events of 1914-18 would show but a crucial one for Austro-Serbian relations started immediately in 1878.
No self-respecting international peace conference can ever truly end without the great powers grabbing at least some real estate, and 1878 was no different. The Ottomans in the fracas of 1876-77 had been forced to withdrawal from several ancient medieval provinces south of the Sava River known collectively by only two of the several involved-provinces' names, "Bosnia-Herzegovina", and while the Conference ultimately decided these should remain Ottoman territories it did assign protectorate status to Vienna for these lands. In other words, on paper they answered to Constantinople but in reality they were now Austrian turf. Austria in 1878 was enjoying a revival of sorts, having sorted out some of its internal problems by splitting the monarchy in two the decade earlier between the German Austrians and the Hungarians (thus becoming "Austria-Hungary") and the new imperial authorities were indeed in an imperial mood. The Habsburg armies marched into Bosnia and unleashed a ferocious campaign of "pacification" designed to eliminate any hint of dissent or potential dissent. Nationalism gave Vienna and Budapest both the heebie-jeebies. Very broadly speaking Bosnia's urban centers were actually quite cosmopolitan and very connected, both culturally and economically, to the rest of Europe, while Bosnia's "interior" or rural areas tended to be some of the most backwards regions of Europe. Just as broadly speaking, the urban centers were generally populated by Slavic Moslems and Catholic Croats, while much of the countryside tended to be Serbian - although there's much to quarrel with definitions at this point in history. After the "pacification" ended, Bosnia's urban centers enjoyed the benefits of suddenly being given much greater access to the Habsburg economic and cultural centers, and would flourish while the countryside languished in its centuries' old poverty and hatred of the cities. Remember again that when Princip fired those fatal shots, he had to be rescued from the Sarajevo crowds by the gendarmes; Franz Ferdinand was genuinely popular in Sarajevo. (More on that later too.) General Mladic's artillerymen remembered this when they trained their fire on the Sarajevo center in the 1990s "Bosnian" Serbian siege of the Bosnian capital; the rural Serb hatred for the cosmopolitan Bosnian urban centers still burned.
I want to kick off a thread recognizing the recent 90th anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and more importantly the 37 day crisis that followed with a discussion on the origins of the war and its consequences. For as much as World War I was an immensely impactful and shaping experience for the world and a (the?) defining event of the 20th century, its beginnings are perhaps some of the most bizarre in modern historical annals.
A short and ailing Balkan nationalist, as a part of an underground nationalist organization, assassinates the very unpopular and very nearly-disenfranchised runner-up for the imperial throne, and as a consequence all the great powers of the era plunge into a 4 year long slugfest that ends up destroying 4 of the largest empires in the world and seriously undermining the remainders. That's a bit like saying "A Canadian nationalist assassinated the American Vice President, and as a consequence Russia and China declared war against one another." In other words, there needs be some explanation as to how we got from point A to point Z, and so many history books don't bother with that - they stop at the dead archduke.
I want to take the process a part some. It is a strange process that had almost nothing to do with Serbian nationalism or Imperial Viennese dignity. I'll walk through the basic 6-step process of going from a street-corner brawl to a world-wide war. Please bear with me as each step requires some background. This is not a chronology of the events, but rather an exploration of their meaning and how they were understood at the time. I am assuming that you, the readers, already have a basic idea of the events. I especially want to underline the point that an intelligent and educated observer on the evening of 28. June, 1914, reading their newspaper and digesting the impact of the day's events, would probably not have guessed that a mere month and a half later the world's greatest armies would be marching against each other.
1. *Bang* and down he goes. Gavrilo Princip, a barely-18 year old Serbian Bosnian, just got the opportunity he'd dreamt of when Franz Ferdinand's coach driver had realized he'd made a wrong turn and stopped to reverse course. Princip took two steps forward, fired off several shots, killing almost instantly both the Archduke and his wife Sofie (or "Zofia", as Vienna derisively called her, a reminder of her Czech middle class-commoner origins). So we have a ghastly murder, and two are dead. The Sarajevo crowd, by the way, was infuriated with Princip's action and instantly pounced on him and began to pummel him. He was saved by gendarmes who also had to, after rescuing him, prop him up so he could vomit because in the melee he had managed to swallow a cyanide pill but it turned out not to be a fatal dosage. No matter; Princip already knew he had tuberculosis, a disease that was almost always fatal back then. (He would die of it ironically in 1918, in the Habsburg prison fortress of Spielberg in Austrian Brüno (modern Brno, Czech Republic). If Princip had just lasted a few more months, he probably would have been released by the intensely anti-Habsburg Czechs and welcomed home to the new "Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes" where he could die an agonizing but hero's death instead of in a cold Austrian dungeon. Oh well, c'est la vie.
In any event, this whole assassination episode needs some explanation. In 1815, Serbia was the northern-most province of the Ottoman empire and was a frontier state that saw frequent clashes between two hostile empires, that of the Ottomans' and the Habsburgs'. As such Serbia was subjected to a severe police regime by the Ottomans and worse yet, the main military forces in Serbia were the dreaded Janissaries who were once a crack military force dedicated exclusively to the Sultan's service but long since having devolved into a large mafia organization that ruled its own regions in a thugocracy that was as likely to ignore as to obey any command from the Sultan or Constantinople. The Janissaries had become very much like the Swedish armies in the closing years of the Thirty Years War, wandering southern Germany leaderless and pillaging at will, becoming a scourge in the lands they controlled. The Janissaries provoked the Serbian revolt of 1815 but could not completely suppress it, leading to decades of on-and-off warfare that eventually resulted in Serbian independence from the Ottoman empire. By the time of total independence in 1878, Serbia was a brutalized peasant state with a near-messianic nationalism.
But that year, 1878, was a crucial year for the Serbs and the Balkans. In 1876 the Bulgarians had revolted (again) against Ottoman rule and the Janissaries, since evicted from Serbia, wreaked a terrible revenge against the Bulgarian peasantry. This act - well, OK, other Balkan interests that conveniently utilized this act as a pretext - provoked Russia to declare war. Things see-sawed for a while but suddenly in the closing months of 1877 the Russian armies surged forward and seemed almost destined to take Constantinople itself. The Russians ended the war by imposing the Treaty of San Stefano on the Ottomans, in which they created a massive Bulgarian state that encompassed most of the southern Balkans and in which St. Petersburg intended to station large Russian armies. In other words, Russia was going to transform the Balkans into a Russian protectorate. This was amazingly crass behavior for the Russians because the Treaty of San Stefano knowingly broke several treaties and agreements Russia had with the other European powers. (More about that later.) The European powers in response convened the Berlin Conference in the summer of 1878 which re-organized the Balkans in such a way as to continue a general European policy decades old; namely, keeping Russia out of Europe and away from those damned (Dardanelles) Straits.
The Berlin Conference had enormous consequences for Europe. It finally drew the two German powers, Prussia (known by then as "Germany") and Austria back together in a rapprochement, restoring a Pan-German front in Europe damaged in the 1866 Austro-Prussian War. It once again re-organized the system of alliances among the smaller states of Europe, generally creating a widely anti-Russian alliance system. Germany preferred to let Vienna deal with the smaller states though their policies were coordinated, so that over the 1870s and 1880s Vienna signed treaties with Bulgaria, Serbia, Italy, Romania and Greece, locking the Russians out of the Balkans. This system of alliances had cracks, however, as the events of 1914-18 would show but a crucial one for Austro-Serbian relations started immediately in 1878.
No self-respecting international peace conference can ever truly end without the great powers grabbing at least some real estate, and 1878 was no different. The Ottomans in the fracas of 1876-77 had been forced to withdrawal from several ancient medieval provinces south of the Sava River known collectively by only two of the several involved-provinces' names, "Bosnia-Herzegovina", and while the Conference ultimately decided these should remain Ottoman territories it did assign protectorate status to Vienna for these lands. In other words, on paper they answered to Constantinople but in reality they were now Austrian turf. Austria in 1878 was enjoying a revival of sorts, having sorted out some of its internal problems by splitting the monarchy in two the decade earlier between the German Austrians and the Hungarians (thus becoming "Austria-Hungary") and the new imperial authorities were indeed in an imperial mood. The Habsburg armies marched into Bosnia and unleashed a ferocious campaign of "pacification" designed to eliminate any hint of dissent or potential dissent. Nationalism gave Vienna and Budapest both the heebie-jeebies. Very broadly speaking Bosnia's urban centers were actually quite cosmopolitan and very connected, both culturally and economically, to the rest of Europe, while Bosnia's "interior" or rural areas tended to be some of the most backwards regions of Europe. Just as broadly speaking, the urban centers were generally populated by Slavic Moslems and Catholic Croats, while much of the countryside tended to be Serbian - although there's much to quarrel with definitions at this point in history. After the "pacification" ended, Bosnia's urban centers enjoyed the benefits of suddenly being given much greater access to the Habsburg economic and cultural centers, and would flourish while the countryside languished in its centuries' old poverty and hatred of the cities. Remember again that when Princip fired those fatal shots, he had to be rescued from the Sarajevo crowds by the gendarmes; Franz Ferdinand was genuinely popular in Sarajevo. (More on that later too.) General Mladic's artillerymen remembered this when they trained their fire on the Sarajevo center in the 1990s "Bosnian" Serbian siege of the Bosnian capital; the rural Serb hatred for the cosmopolitan Bosnian urban centers still burned.
nice to see you around again
) analysis, certainly expanded my understanding of the road to WWI.. 
