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 ...