Sarajevo, Samarra

It may or may not have come to your attention if you’re in the United States, but today marks the centenary of the spark that ignited a conflagration which over the next four years would consume more than 37 million people, either whole or in part.

(As in: more than 16 million dead, 20 million wounded, most of them concentrated in the area circumscribed by the English Channel, the North Sea, the Mediterranean and a line roughly from the Baltic to the Black Seas. More than six million of the deaths were civilian.)

And then it would live on, and on, and on.

That event would be the assassination in Sarajevo of Franz-Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire, by Bosnian nationalists, who were badly equipped but thoroughly propagandized by the early-20^th Century Serbian equivalent of the CIA.

It seems a little odd today, 100 years on, to think that this sort of individual act could set off such a catastrophe, but of course it wasn’t really an individual act. There were what Californians would call “issues” (long-standing ones) between the Serbs and the Austrians—well, between the Serbs and pretty much everyone, since they did not play well with others.

(And you’ll note from their non-stop aggression ever since the break-up of that post-WWI construct, Yugoslavia, that they still don’t. There are multiple reasons why so many of their political and military leaders have ended up in the Hague.)

The Serbs didn’t much care what they started because they were confident that their brother Slavs in Russia would back them in whatever whackjob enterprise they embarked on. (This confidence was based on years of assurances to that effect from the Russians, who thought the Austrians were in worse shape than they themselves were.) And since they’d been getting up Austro-Hungarian noses for decades, the latter were thinking that the time had come to crush the Serbs like cockroaches. And they were feeling pretty feisty despite their lack of, you know, modern armies, on account of their friends of the recently-established German empire thought this would be as good an occasion to stick it to the Russians as they were ever going to get, and so they were all in favor of that cockroach-crushing exercise, which they figured would draw the tsar's armies towards Austrian territories to the south, leaving them free to attack Russia in the north.

Meanwhile, the French were egging on both Serbia and Russia (having huge investments in the form of massive loans and arms sales to both), and the Brits were really hoping to stay out of all this Continental chicanery. But on the other hand they did not like the idea of Germany’s empire expanding at the potential cost of their own, so...

And with the Ottoman Empire creaking and shaking and dropping off miscellaneous parts like fingers from a leper’s hand, the Russians, Serbians, British, French and Germans were positioning themselves to each grab up the bits and pieces while trying full-on to prevent everyone and anyone else from taking any.

Well, as you can imagine, it was a whole thing.

Historians have been making their bones on the long- and short-term causes of and responsibility for the war pretty much since they scraped the trench mud off their khakis and field greys and replaced their rifles with pens. If you’re not a historian, you might be surprised at the vehemence of some of the discussions; there are a lot of hifalutin multisyllabic versions of “No, you’re a poopy-head” involved. In the past couple of years there has been a spate of detailed monographs (some less meticulous than others, Max Hastings), and I expect to see a lot more over the next few years.

As you might deduce from my précis above, I believe that it was started and fought for reasons of empire—acquiring, defending, expanding what you had or thought you deserved to have. Military and political leaders were ignorant (woefully or wilfully? I don’t know; maybe some of both) of what advances in technology were about to do to warfare, and they were criminally slow in realizing what was happening and what it was costing as the war wore on.

And after they’d all been in it for a couple of years, and had been depleting their treasuries, exhausting their citizens, consuming their resources, killing off their young men in their tens of thousands on a daily basis—well, a surreal stubbornness seemed to grip them all. Essentially, the argument was, “We’ve already spent this much and lost that much, now we have to stay in it until we win.”

Right up until almost the very end, the Germans were still marking out territories on maps of Western Europe that they intended to annex upon victory—parts of France, Belgium, Luxembourg to which a noble and martial people like the Teutons were entitled.

Meanwhile the French and Brits had a slightly tighter grasp on the geopolitical possibilities before them, and were secretly negotiating to carve up pieces of the Middle East which they expected the Ottomans were going to lose control of. They were haggling between themselves, you understand, not with any of the peoples who actually, you know, lived in those areas. Oh, yeah, they were making promises, to Arabs, to Jews, to Kurds; but those were measures of expediency and not agreements between gentlemen such as the ones they made among themselves. Meaning—not anything they really expected to have to honor.

And so many, many of those imperial chickens have been coming home to roost ever since those shots echoed through Sarajevo. World War I reverberated throughout the 20^th Century. The wholesale slaughter not only killed off much of the presumptive ruling youth in the nations of Western Europe, it left the old men who held the reins of government throughout the 30s psychologically crippled and unable to screw their courage to the sticking point to check Hitler on the many occasions when a steadfast approach would have lessened the likelihood of the global conflagration that ensued.

But we’re even now feeling the effects of what was known at the time as the Great War. (People came to understand the magnitude of it; they didn’t realize they would have to start numbering them until 20 years on.) The nearly farcical assassination carved a pretty straight path to the collapse of the Russian government and the communist revolution. Along the way there was another imperial assassination, of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, the liquidation of millions of Soviet subjects and more than 70 years of totalitarian government and global hegemony.

The viciousness of the Allied victory, embodied in the Treaty of Versailles, signed on this date in 1919, set the stage for the next war. It wasn’t just the dismembering of the parvenu German empire or even the onerous reparations payments demanded of Germany. (The Prussians had extracted even more ruinous indemnities from France in 1870, when Wilhelm I was crowned Kaiser of Germany—in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Just think about that for a minute: talk about sticking it to your defeated foe...) It was that whole sanctimonious black/white good/evil package that went with that settlement. "Germany started it; the rest of us are victims." 

The Treaties of Saint-Germain (with Austria) and Trianon (Hungary) set loose the turbulent peoples of the Balkans. You’ll recall how that shook out in the 90s, with our Serbian comrades reviving the concept of eradicating entire ethnic groups like pest exterminators. Those actions required intervention by NATO and UN forces throughout the decade. And if they’re not actively committing acts of aggression against their neighbors at the moment, they will be doing so as soon as they think they can get away with it. This is not over.

The Treaties of Sèvres (1920) and Lausanne (1923) carved up the Ottoman empire along the lines that Britain and France had mapped out earlier in the war, picking up choice parcels of real estate in the Middle East. As with the Balkans, those arbitrary geographic divisions, ignorant or dismissive of ethnic, religious or other loyalties of the resident peoples, are still reverberating on the global stage.

Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon? Mes chers amis—ces poulets have been coming chez le roost for more than 90 years, with no signs of abatement in the merde being produced.

German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, Russian empires were all shattered, although the Soviet Union pretty well replaced the last one. And since the break-up of the Soviet empire in the 1990s, we see Putin attempting to rebuild the tsarist holdings. If I were a Finn, a Latvian, an Estonian or a Lithuanian, I’d be nervous.

Even the Brits and the French were not going to hold on to their empires for more than a few decades.

For the entire month of July, 1914, the European powers and Serbia would jockey back and forth—not to prevent a war starting so much as to ensure that the war that ensued was the one they wanted: small, localized and one they could win. But the conflict that creaked into action in August was none of those things. Sixteen million dead, 20 million wounded, lands laid waste, nations paupered, and the bands, basically, just played on.

There are no more archdukes to assassinate, so that’s a good thing. But basically the weaponry has advanced tremendously in the past hundred years, while the notion of restraining human greed and national arrogance hasn't. This is a situation that worries me.