What led to World War I? The question is surprisingly difficult to answer, yet it is vitally important to an understanding of modern times. Much of the violent change of the twentieth century had its origins directly or indirectly in World War I. Even before it ended the war brought the fall of Czarist Russia, the Russian Revolution, and the emergence of Communism as a revolutionary political force. World War II stemmed so directly from the unsettled issues of World War I that the two can be regarded simply as two phases of one war. Indirectly, World War I set the stage for the decline of Britain as a world power, and more broadly for the end of European imperialism, while the the massive and futile slaughter on the Western Front battlefields permanently shattered the cultural self confidence of the West.
The specific trigger of all this was the assassination of Austrian archduke Frantz Ferdinand by a Serbian nationalist in July, 1914.1 The assassination, in the now Yugoslav city of Sarajevo, set in train a series of increasingly harsh diplomatic confrontations among the major European powers, confrontations which by August brought every leading European power into war. Yet a single political assassination seems a fundamentally inadequate explanation for a war that engulfed the world and shaped a century. Compared to the immediate triggers of World War II the Nazi invasion of Poland in Europe; the bombing of Pearl Harbor in the Pacific the Sarajevo assassination seems almost trivial. Moreover, the triggering events of World War II ________
1L. F. C. Turner, Origins of the First World War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), 79ff.
"primed" for war by the massive social dislocations of the Depression and by the passionate ideological hatreds associated with Nazism, Communism, and Japanese militarism.
By contrast, the Sarajevo assassination took place in a prosperous world, and in a world whe...