June 28, 1914, Assassination In Sarajevo

Today is June 28, 2014,. Exactly one hundred years ago today, an event which first appeared to be of no great global significance took place. But it would take the world in an entirely different direction.

The story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is well-known. The empire had annexed Bosnia, but many ethnic Slavs wanted to be free of Austrian Rule. Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Franz Josef, and the heir to the throne since Franz Josef had no living sons or brothers. Franz Ferdinand, with his wife princess Sophie, paid a visit to the town of Sarajevo in Bosnia.

The archduke and his wife rode in an open-top car along the broad street by the river, in the motorcade with several other cars. An organization known as Young Bosnia plotted to assassinate the archduke. Seven assassins positioned themselves separately along the motorcade route so if one couldn't get the archduke, the next one would. Each was armed with a small bomb and a gun and a cyanide capsule. The first would-be assassin saw the archduke, but couldn't take action because police were right behind him.

The second would-be assassin saw the archduke and threw his bomb. The bomb missed the archduke, bounced off the back of his car and exploded next to the car behind. The blast injured several people in the car and the crowd. At seeing that the assassination attempt had not been successful the rest of the would-be assassins fled, all except one.

The archduke stopped at the town hall, at which the mayor spoke, but then decided that he wanted to visit the wounded in the hospital instead of proceeding with the planned itinerary. The driver of the archduke's car had apparently not been informed of the change in plans, and started along the previous route until someone informed him otherwise. The driver stopped the car and attempted to reverse, but the car stalled.

The remaining assassin just happened to be very close by. He was too jostled by the crowd to throw his bomb but he got off two shots with his pistol. One shot struck the archduke, and the other his wife, both would die within minutes.

The assassin was a nineteen-year-old named Gavrilo Princip. He would ultimately die in prison of tuberculosis. At first, the assassination did not seem to be extremely important. Countries outside the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not pay much attention, and neither the archduke nor his wife had been very popular at home

Since the assassin was a Serb, the Austro-Hungarian Government blamed the nearby nation of Serbia for the assassination. A list of demands was issued to Serbia, and that country did not agree with all of them. According to some, this was used as a pretext to expand the empire by taking military action against Serbia, or it is possible that the ensuing conflict was punitive in nature.

At the time, Europe was a tangle of alliances. Russia had an alliance with Serbia, Germany had an alliance with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, France had an alliance with Russia. Britain had signed the Entente Cordiale with France a decade before, and also now had a treaty of friendship with Russia. Before the summer was over, Europe would be plunged into a war like it had never seen before. Today, we refer to it as the First World War. Before there was a Second World War, it would be referred to simply as "The Great War" or "The World War".

Ironically, the assassin got his wish although he would not live to see it. He died in prison in 1918, the year the war ended. His two shots set off the war that finished not only the ruling Austro-Hungarian Empire but also the Ottoman Empire, which had previously ruled Bosnia. The two formerly competing empires found themselves on the same side in this war.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire would be separated back into Austria and Hungary and the Slavic territories which had belonged to the empire would become the new states of Yugoslavia, in the south, and Czechoslovakia, in the north. The assassin also never knew that the unsatisfactory conclusion to the war he set off would bring about an even greater war a generation later, in which the prison he was in would be a concentration camp. Gavrilo Princip is a divisive figure to this day, who some consider a hero for setting off the events which freed Slavic people from outside control.

The assassination attempt on a prominent figure and his wife, riding in an open-top car, immediately brings to mind the Kennedy assassination, almost midway in time between the events in Sarajevo and today. The struggle of the crowd to subdue the assassin after the shots were fired brings to mind the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.

The thing that I find surprising about this assassination is, in stark contrast to the Kennedy assassination, the lack of conspiracy theories. An archduke that was not popular at home, but was next in line to the throne, just happened to be assassinated while on a visit to a territory that had been acquired relatively recently. Then, that possibly gives the empire a pretext for a military campaign against the country of birth of the assassin. This is usually the kind of thing that tabloids and conspiracy theorists have a field day with. I do not have a personal opinion on any such conspiracies.

We can say that the war was waiting to happen and if it had not been this that set it off then something else would have, somewhat like the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century. There was resentment among European countries about overseas colonies. Germany had been a united country for about forty years and thought it unfair that Britain and France had such colonial holdings, while it didn't. Germany did have some Pacific islands and Southwest Africa (Namibia) as colonies, but these were not comparable to the extent of that of Britain and France. Even small European countries like Belgium and Portugal had far more in the way of overseas colonies than Germany in 1914.

Technology not only brought much more terrible warfare when the war did happen, but the advances in communications and transportation technology helped to bring about the tangle of alliances which preceded the war. I do not consider it a coincidence that Germany and Italy finally became united countries at about the time that both railroads and the telegraph became widespread.

When the war ended the U.S., which had not itself been damaged by the war, turned the industrial capacity that it had built during the war to make America "The arsenal of democracy" to the manufacture of consumer goods. The result was "The Roaring Twenties". Factories mass-produced everything from cars to radios, like the world had never seen before.

But maybe it was more wealth than the economy was able to deal with. The trouble in America is that workers were not being paid enough to be able to afford all of the goods that they were producing, and the goods were just piling up in warehouses. Factories began cutting back on production, meaning that workers had even less money, and it spiraled into the devastating economic crash of 1929.

The effects of this calamitous crash spread around the globe. The economy of Germany was devastated by the crash. The country had used it's gold reserves to pay the ridiculous and destructive war reparations that had been imposed on it in the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War. Until this economic crash, the so-called Weimar Republic was prosperous.

A party called the Nazis were one of those fringe nationalist parties which are seen often in Europe, but which rarely get more than a few percent of the vote. But with the crash, it was the Nazis that had the answer to the economic crisis by drastically expanding the military forces to absorb unemployment and getting factories running again at full capacity to produce military equipment and, as the saying goes, the rest is history.

During the First World War, Germany had transported a Russian agitator by the name of Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, back to Russia in the hope that he would help to set off a brewing political revolution that might incapacitate Russia's ability to continue the war. The result was Communism, which did not seem to be of much global significance at first. But the great economic crash of Capitalism in 1929 made Communism into a major world system, and this would result in a divided world after the Second World War had ended. The end of the Second World War would also bring demographic effects like the Baby Boom, particularly in the U.S., with their anthem of rock music.

All of it can be traced to those two shots fired in Sarajevo.

The Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s would bring back the tactics of the First World War, with it's trenches and mustard gas. Eighty years after the assassination, the Yugoslavia that the assassin had hoped for would come apart and Sarajevo would again be in the world headlines. Eighty years after the economic crash of 1929, the U.S. economy would crash again due to people not being paid enough to buy the products that were being produced. But this time it would be the manic home-building spree in the southwest and Florida, until it was realized that people to not get paid enough money to afford all of these homes and the market crashed in a near-repeat of 1929.

The thing that I have always found so bizarre about the First World War is how enthusiastic people in many countries were for going to war. In London's Trafalgar Square, a crowd wildly cheered the declaration of war. It was as if people were bored, and the war provided some excitement. Both sides seemed to think that the war would last only a few weeks.

The First World War is sometimes referred to as "The war over nothing that changed everything". Part of what changed so much is that the war brought the end of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. The war began in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, apparently over Slavs being ruled by Austrians. When the war ended in 1918, two new Slavic nations were carved from the empire, Yugoslavia in the south and Czechoslovakia in the north. But these two new states were less than stable, being held together for decades by Communism. When that passed into history, both states came apart. As the world saw in the 1990s, Czechoslovakia came apart peacefully but Yugoslavia unfortunately didn't.

Like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire was also dismantled after the end of the First World War. New states came into being from the empire's former territories, in the same way as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the Ottoman Empire was the larger of the two empires and it's dismantling has had effects that are longer and more widespread. The root cause of turmoil in the Middle East today is that the region has not yet reached a new equilibrium following the end of the Ottoman Empire. The world saw the long-term effects of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the former Yugoslavia and now, in the Middle East, it is seeing the effects of the end of the Ottoman Empire.

(Just a thought-The Austro-Hungarian Empire was somewhat unique in that both Austria and Hungary were equal partners, maintaining their own capital cities and independence from one another, but cooperated in ruling the surrounding territories. My impression was that German-speaking Austria chose to join with neighboring Hungary to create an empire because it had been excluded from the union of German-speaking states across central Europe. Austria had been the second most powerful of these states, but for leadership of the new nation of Germany it lost out to Prussia. It was thus left outside the union, as it remains today. If Austria had been included into Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire would have never existed and the First World War would maybe not have happened. When the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled, some of the German-speakers that had been left outside the union found themselves in the border region of the new nation of Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland, and the resulting tensions helped to bring about another world war. Finally, the not-completely-logical separation of Austria from the union of Germany was a factor in the rise of an Austrian living in Germany to power with the goal of union between the two, his name was Adolf Hitler).

The trouble is that the artificial countries created by the victorious Allies from the remnants of these two empires, following the First World War, require strong leaders to hold them together. This must go on for a long period of time, and is what I refer to as "The Strong Leader Binding Phase", as described in the posting by that name on this blog.

Such new states may be planned to encompass multiple ethic groups and religious sects, in order to prevent wars, but that is going to mean that the country will require a strong leader to hold it together. But the west does not like dictators and reflexively supports virtually any uprising against a dictator in the name of democracy, forgetting that it is the dictator that is holding the country together. It is sheer fallacy to think all that is necessary is to remove a dictator and democracy will automatically take hold.

In Iraq, put together from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire around Baghdad and Mesopotamia, the removal of Saddam Hussein did not bring anything remotely resembling democracy. What it brought was a "democratic" government that simply did not have control over the country the way Saddam did, a near-civil war situation as we saw in "Critical Situation In Iraq" on the world and economics blog and, most recently, the rise of IS. While Saddam was in power in his artificial country, with minority Sunnis Moslems like himself ruling over the majority Shiites and the non-Arab Kurds in the north he felt that he had to repeatedly launch bloody repressive actions against the Kurds and, being alarmed that his own majority Shiite population might be inclined to join the 1979 Revolution in neighboring Iran, launched the preemptive attack that led to the nearly-endless Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s which, ironically, looked like a replay of the First World War with it's trenches and use of poison gas.

By the way, in battling IS we are actually in combat with many of the same people for the third time. The first was with Saddam's army during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. After the bizarre decision was made to disband that army the soldiers, having military experience and knowing where armaments were stored but now having no way to earn a living, regrouped as the costly insurgency that went on for years. Now that stage has passed, they have regrouped again as the core of IS. The U.S. should have treated the Iraqi Army with respect, and given them a pay raise.

Now you see why Iraq had to have a dictator like Saddam, to hold it together and stop insurgencies from taking hold. By removing Saddam, we have learned once again the lesson of the necessity of dictators in artificial nations. At least IS has roots in history that the nation of Iraq didn't have. IS claims to be the legitimate caliphate and, in fact, it spans Iraq and Syria. The first caliphate, the Umayyads, were based in Damascus in Syria and the second caliphate, the Abassids, were based in Baghdad in Iraq. If it could ever capture both Damascus and Baghdad, it will have it made.

Syria is another creation of the Allies after the First World War. The so-called heartland of the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, to which Bashar Assad belongs, is supportive of his leadership. But, generally, the Sunni Moslems in most of the rest of the country that was put together by the Allies with the Damascus and coastal area, are not supportive. This was explained in "Another View On Syria", on the world and economics blog. Once again IS, which at least has history behind it because the first caliphate was based in Damascus, is battling to replace a nation whose boundaries are an artificial creation that does not have history behind it.

From the secular west, it is sometimes easy to forget just how important his divide between Sunni and Shiite Moslems is. The Baath Party formerly had branches in both Syria and Iraq. Both Saddam and Bashar Assad's father, Hafez, belonged to it. But there was a nasty split between the two branches, with Saddam and Hafez Assad becoming rivals to the point where he supported the First Gulf War effort against Saddam, in 1991. The Assad family, as mentioned above, is from the Alawite sect of Shiite Islam, which explains their enduring links with Iran and Hezbollah, while Saddam was a Sunni Moslem.

In the posting on the world and economics blog, "A Few Words About Libya", we saw a similar scenario there. The country consisted of two historically disparate halves that were joined, the Tripoli and Benghazi sides, and which required a leader like Moammar Gaddafi to hold them together. When we support the removal of the leader, before the necessarily long "Strong Leader Binding Phase" is complete, we just get chaos rather than democracy.

Notice that there has been no corresponding split in countries like Iran, Turkey and, Egypt because these are well-rooted in history. The only exception to this is the would-be nation of Kurdistan, spanning Turkey, Iraq and, Iran.

If we break up empires and create artificial countries, we are going to need strong leaders such as kings or dictators to hold those countries together. If we get the idea that these dictators could be prematurely overthrown, we will just get a mess rather than a democracy.