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AUSTRIAHUNGARY AND THE ORIGINS OF WORLD WAR I

This research paper examines AustriaHungary's degree of

responsibility for the outbreak of World War I. Its thesis is

that actions taken by AustriaHungary to deal with Serbian

nationalism in the decade preceding, and in the five weeks

following, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in

Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 set in motion a series of events

which led to World War I. However, a number of other nations,

Serbia, Germany and Russia, and, to a lesser extent, France and

Great Britain, played important roles in causing that war. The

origins of the war lay in the mistaken judgements of many key

European statesmen and in the breakdown of the balance of power

system in Europe during the decades immediately preceding 1914.

War Guilt and the Serbian Problem

The Hapsburg Empire, the Dual Monarchy of AustriaHungary,

was dissolved in 1918 as a direct result of the defeat of the

Central Powers in World War I. Under Article 231 of the

Versailles Treaty, all damages and losses suffered by the

victorious Allies were stated to be "a consequence of the war

imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies."1

In fact, the central problem which triggered the initiation

of hostilities among all the Great Powers of Europe for the first

time in more than a century was an intractable dispute between

AustriaHungary and the kingdom of Serbia. Bismarck had predicted

that the next major European war would be ignited by "some damn

foolish thing in the Balkans."2Since 1914, historians have

disagreed as to the degree of complicity of the Serbian and

Russian governments in the plot to assassinate the Austrian Archduke. His murder was committed by a Bosnian teenager, who

was a member of terrorist group which had been recruited,

trained and armed by the Serbian ...