Archduke Franz Ferdinand: The man whose assassination is blamed for triggering World War I

ABC (AUS) ^ | 06.28.14

[Perdogg]

Archduke Franz Ferdinand is best known as the man whose assassination is widely believed to have led to the outbreak of World War I.

But behind that figure lies a story of forbidden love, an obsession with hunting, and a near-miss that could have killed the archduke months before he was shot dead with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo 100 years ago.

[ConservativeMan55]

bttt

[Sherman Logan]

The world would have been better off had Kaiser Wilhelm at the very least fought the UK and France to a stalemate, which could have happened had the slavish Anglophile Woodrow Wilson kept the US out of the war.

Ahh, the couterfactual thought experiment where all bad things that we know happened are removed from the board, but no thought is given to the bad things that might have happened instead.

I agree that without German defeat in WWI there would have been no Hitler. But a world-dominating German Empire might have been as bad in many ways.

All of the tendencies carried to extremes by Nazism were already active in Wilhelmine Germany. And one thing that is certain is that German victory in the War would have done nothing to tamp down Aryan delusions of racial superiority.

We probably would also not have had a USSR. As the Germans would probably have conquered the rest of Russia after taking a break for a few years to consolidate.

But then you've got a German Empire in control, direct or indirect, of essentially all of Europe plus Russia. Given Willie's peculiar personality, it seems likely he would have struck for total world power by the 40s, anyway. Or possibly his successor.

What is obvious is that with German victory in WWI the world would be a very different place. It's not obvious that it would be a better one.

[Sherman Logan]

I think a bigger problem for the European powers was the unconcious self-glorification created by their colonial conquests.

Tiny European armies repeatedly defeated much larger native armies, even when similarly armed. The Maxim gun and other high tech weaponry just made it worse.

So the Brits, and the French, and the Germans looked at their ability to crush native armies when outnumbered 20:1 in India, North Africa and East Africa and thought it was due entirely to their own national prowess. Then extrapolated that inappropriately to similar results when facing other Euro armies.

The American Civil War and the Boer War should have given them reason to think otherwise, but neither the American nor the Boers were “real armies” in the Euro POV, so they didn’t count.

So their conflicting delusions banged into each other and blew up the world. All sides had their plans to win the war, and apparently never gave much thought to the fact that the enemy gets a vote, you can’t just march out and implement your plan.

[Sherman Logan]

Yes, American support for WWI is overstated today.

Any such discussion is meaningless without a timeline. Late 1914 was very different from early 1917.

Same as national support for war in WWII. September 1939 very different from January 1942.

[jjotto]

Quite correct.

A good reason why leaders should be of good character and judicious judgment. The issues faced in the years after an election may not have even been discussed before the election.

[SoCal Pubbie]

I don’t disagree with your assertion, but the Europeans had experienced all the wars I listed AFTER both the Civil War and the Boer Wars, and none led to catastrophe. Okay, the second Boer War I did not list, but it was the guerrilla war aspects that were particularly nasty, not the conventional fighting of army against army.

I can’t see how one avoids the conclusion that Europe was still looking at war as it had in 1864, without realizing that the nature of war had changed by 1914. Everyone understood what total war meant in 1945, because they had been through two before and had seen atomic bombs in action. No one could imagine WWI in 1914.

I think we’ll both agree there was massive failure of imagination in the decision making when going forward to war in 1914. The Germans in particular were expecting to fight and win a quick, decisive conflict as they had in 1870. I can’t believe that any of the European leadership, as inbred and decadent as it was, would have jumped for mobilization if they had any clue it was going to mean millions of dead four years later.

[Sherman Logan]

I generally agree.

However, the problem, as in the Japanese decision to attack Pearl, is often that elites believe they have no choice. It’s fight now or die. Whether that belief in lack of alternatives is accurate or not is much less important than whether it is believed.

In 1914 the Germans saw that they had turned every other major Power against them. That this was primarily due to Willie’s blundering about was by then irrelevant.

France hated Germany because of 1870, and there was no way to reconcile them. Russia had become an enemy because Germany unnecessarily opposed Russian ambitions in the Balkans and Black Sea. Britain, even less needfully, because Germany insisted on challenging Britain’s naval and colonial predominance.

Germany had by 1914 achieved essentially all it could within the existing framework. They could keep pace with UK and France, but would inevitably lose ground relative to a Russia starting from a very low base but rapidly catching up, and with enormous advantage of resources and manpower. Extend the Russian economic and military gains of the previous decade for another decade or two, and the German position for a two front war starts looking pretty bad.

So the General Staff, the only institution that really mattered in the German Empire, saw war in 1914 or shortly thereafter as their only chance to defend or expand their position.

They were probably right.