It is our duty on Remembrance Sunday to honour the fallen. But to do justice to their sacrifice, we should also remember why the world descended into war in 1914. The history of the Great War has captivated and divided historians since Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip fired that fateful shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914. Only later did we come to realise the full significance of that date. British military historian of the First World War and Conservative cabinet minister, Alan Clark, recorded the moment in his diary on Tuesday, 28 June 1983, with characteristic wit: ‘Today is the sixty-ninth anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo, the date from which the world changed. At the time, no one knew what it meant, though I often think of that prize-winning spoof headline in the New York Daily News in June 1920: “Archduke found alive, World War a mistake.”’
Herein lie lessons for today’s armchair pundits who forecast a Third World War
How the First World War began remains a rich field of historical inquiry. Debates over which country was to blame have shifted with time, politics, and intellectual fashion. Structural causes like nationalism, economics, militarism, and alliance systems vie with the personal responsibilities of the leaders of the time – their imperfections, misunderstandings, and miscalculations. But impersonal forces don’t pull a trigger or declare war.
Some historians argue that, rather than asking why war began in 1914, we should instead ask why peace ended. After all, 1914 marked the first time the European Great Powers had clashed in forty years, and the first conflict involving all the Great Powers in a century. Why was it that between 1815 and 1914, while Europe saw twenty-three international wars – half of which involved fewer than 10,000 battle fatalities – none escalated to a general conflagration of the Great Powers? Notably, the First World War began as a local war between Austria-Hungary and Serbia. Herein lie lessons for today’s armchair pundits who forecast a Third World War.
Those who argue that the First World War offers warnings for our own time can draw from numerous interpretations, from the idea of leaders ‘sleepwalking’ into war, to the impulsive demeanour of figures like the German Kaiser, or the failures of diplomacy. One interpretation with contemporary relevance comes from Cambridge historian Sir Harry Hinsley, who in 1962 suggested that every general war since 1494 occurred amidst major shifts in international power. Thus, the First World War partly resulted from the rise of Germany and the relative decline of other powers.
The outbreak of the war has also served as a cautionary tale for policymakers. The First World War is often cited as an example of poor ‘crisis management’. During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear war, American President John F. Kennedy, lacking a crisis-management playbook, ordered his inner circle to read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August. Tuchman’s book recounts the frenzied and confused international decision-making that precipitated the Great War. Kennedy’s aim was to prevent decision-making from spiralling out of control, as it had in 1914, and to keep open lines of communication with Soviet leaders. Reflecting on Cuba, US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara observed, ‘Today there is no longer any such thing as military strategy; there is only crisis management.’ An overstatement perhaps, but before Cuba there was little by way of an explicit theory of crisis management to guide policy-makers. Since then, management textbooks have analysed the 1914 July Crisis as a case study in information processing, decision-making under stress, and the coordination of diplomatic and military actions.
For today’s generations, who have lived eighty years at peace – as did our forebears for a century – this blessing can risk becoming a malediction. Decades of peace led Europe’s leaders to lose, in the words of Henry Kissinger, the Harvard historian and statesman who understood the reality of international affairs, ‘the sense of the tragic’.
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