The War That Shouldn’t Have Started: How a Murder Turned Into a World War

World War I began over a hundred years ago this month. It is one of history’s great tragedies, because it had no clear and definitive reason, no clear justification for killing 20 million people and wounding 20 million more.

The tragedy is compounded by the fact that this was presented at the time as ‘The War to End All Wars,’ as HG Wells promoted it in a pamphlet in 1914, and yet World War II broke out a mere twenty years later; World War I settled nothing. The motivations of the various state actors and their decisions remain subjects of dispute among historians, even a hundred years later.

In my view there are three factors which may help to explain how an avoidable disaster became an unstoppable reality.

• We should remember that communications technologies were primitive and error-prone by today’s standards. The fastest way of communicating over long distances was by telegraph. (Long distance telephone calls were problematic.) Letters and written material traveled by train. Short distances were covered on horseback. A fast response time for a question and answer was 24 hours. People often refer to Clausewitz’s famous formulation, ‘the fog of war.’ They should also remember that the fog of diplomacy is just as thick, and perhaps thicker.
• War was not unusual to the men making the decisions. Europe was chronically unstable. It is not wildly inaccurate to say that the normal condition of Europe was war rather than peace—there were so many wars, so frequently. There were 16 wars in Europe in the nineteenth century—and that’s counting the Napoleonic wars and the Italian Independence wars as only one war each, and not counting a dozen major civil wars.
• European diplomacy was based in part on complex alliances and interlocking treaty commitments which grouped nations together, making limited conflicts less likely. (For example, the last war against Napoleon, leading to the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, is officially known as the War of the  Seventh Coalition.) In addition, armies moved slowly and ponderously. Once an order was given to ‘mobilize,’ the stakes were raised and war seemed to become more likely than not.

A Cascade of Disaster

Propelled by a fatal combination of distrusts, hatreds, long-unsettled feuds, formulistic alliances, confusion and misunderstandings, World War I was started by a cascade of individual declarations of war over a period of two weeks, from July 28^th, 1914, until August 12^th.

The original causus belli was the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire by a Bosnian Serb assassin on June 28^th, 1914. (This empire was a short-lived combination of approximately ten central European and Balkan countries.) The assassination triggered anti-Serbian rioting within Bosnia and a diplomatic crisis between Austro-Hungaria and its Balkan neighbor Serbia.

It is reasonable to assume that this could have led to yet another regional war in the series of seemingly endless regional wars in the Balkans, which were rife with ethnic tensions, religious strains, and territorial disputes, but not to a global conflagration. Unfortunately, on this occasion once the first domino fell all the others followed.

Counting the Countless

As I opened, approximately 40 million people were killed or wounded in the war, representing about 2% of the world’s then population of approximately 2 billion. Of course, the devastation was concentrated.

This list indicates which countries suffered the worst. So, for example, Serbia and what was then Persia, lost about 1 person out of 5 of their entire populations. Far-away Australia and New Zealand, dragged into the conflict by their imperial connections, each lost more than 1%. For comparison, if the US fought the war with its current population and lost 1%, it would lose 350,000 people.

The map of Europe was significantly redrawn after the conflict in 1918, with the demise of the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman Empires, but it was redrawn again in 1945 and yet again in 1989.

The immediate area of dispute where World War I was triggered, the area of Bosnia and Serbia, became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918; was partitioned by Germany, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria in World War II; was reunified as a communist state of Yugoslavia under Tito in 1945 following his determined fight against the occupiers; and devolved into its present countries and boundaries during the Yugoslav Wars of 1991 to 2001.

In addition to the killed and wounded, the war displaced an unknown number of refugees who were simply driven off their lands and out of their homes. The total number of homeless in Europe is estimated at 12 million out of a population of 270 million, or approximately 4% to 5%.

Who Knows?

Why was World War I fought?  Who knows?

It is interesting that the Allied Victory Medal is inscribed: THE GREAT WAR FOR CIVILISATION 1914–1919. Oh, so that’s why it was fought—civilization! I’m sure if someone has conducted a survey in the muddy, rat-infected trenches on the Western Front in 1916 and asked the terrified 18-year-old conscripts, ‘why are you fighting?’  they’d all have replied ‘for civilization, of course, isn’t it obvious?’

History shows that every 20 or 30 years or so the Europeans like to have a war, or at least flirt with one. The Yugoslav Wars ended in 2001 … Twenty-odd years later Mr. Putin is nibbling at Ukraine, in defiance of yet another chiffon de papier, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Russia solemnly guaranteed to protect the sovereign boundaries of Ukraine and the Ukrainians trusted Russia … who knows?

One is reminded of the quotation by Alphonse Karr, ‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose’  —the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Who knows?

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