y in the wake of the assassination of Ferdinand (125).
But just as it is possible, according to Sagan (125), to make too much of Britain's equivocation about continental intervention during the diplomatic crisis preceding the war, it seems possible to make too much of the power of democracy to forestall war. For one thing, even if democracy might be a superior form of governance, it is not necessarily the only kind of government to be associated with a sense or a policy of national duty. According to Trachtenberg (199), (antidemocratic) Russia saw itself as Serbia's protector, particularly against Austrian imperialism, much as France, a republic, and England, a constitutional monarchy, saw themselves as allies. Thus a nondemocratic government structure does not ipso facto mean that there would be no justification for going to war.
But the moral foundation for war, whatever form of government might be involved, is a matter apart from the impetus toward war that appears to have dominated policy in the weeks leading up to the Great War. Trachtenberg develops the argument that war came about not because of the inexorable forces of well-established contingent military plans that policy makers were powerless to overcome, but because of political decisions made by those policy makers. For example, Trachtenberg (204) characterizes the foreign minister of Austria as being aware and in control of events surrounding the diplomatic situation, and more generally develops the view that the statesmen of Europe, not the generals, chose to escalate their responses to rival states' military and political actions. This is so, argues Trachtenberg, despite the famous Schlieffen "mobilization system" (197) military plan, which as early as 1906 (Tuch
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