The war that (almost) never was: why World War I was NOT inevitable

by Stephen Yellin

I first want to thank everyone who read, recommended and praised my articles covering the “Countdown to World War I” from July 23rd through August 4th, along with the 3 articles published in the weeks after the 100th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophiein Sarajevo. Your feedback was of great benefit to both me and the quality of my work!

For this, final, piece on the outbreak of the catastrophic war which in turn triggered the calamities of the 20th century and beyond – an even more terrible sequel, Fascist and Communist totalitarian nightmares, the Holocaust and other mass genocides, the cauldron of Middle Eastern instability and more – I want to make the argument as to why this global tragedy was one that need not have occurred. It is commonly, but not universally, accepted that World War I was inevitable: if Franz Ferdinand’s murder hadn’t happened, something else would have triggered an Entente vs. Central Powers showdown. I hope today’s article will demonstrate that, far from being inevitable, the “Peace of Europe” crumbled in July 1914 due to a unlikely combination of events: the sudden removal of major forces for peace from the scene at the worst possible moment.

(Note: click on the first link in the Intro section to read my Countdown to World War I series.)

It is worth considering the somewhat counterintuitive proposition that there may be no relationship between the number and intensity of underlying causes and the probability of an outcome… [Major political and social] developments are sometimes the result of accidental conjunctions…The concatenation [i.e. connection] of particular leaders with particular contexts, and of particular events with other events, is always a matter of chance, never of necessity.– Richard Ned Lebow. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations. Princeton University, 2010.

Waiting for the Streetcar

The ancient academic framework by which history was made by the decisions of a powerful few (the so-called “Great Man Theory” of history) has rightly been discarded by modern historians as outdated and prejudicial to the context in which such leaders operated. That the social and economic conditions in which history-changing decisions is made matters, to say nothing of the role played by the many non-elite individuals who sometimes made those decisions, is both commonly accepted and true. These contextual causes of World War I – imperial and European rivalries, a seemingly unending escalation of the arms race, nationalism and patriotism mixed with a belief in war as both necessary and glorious – all this made the catastrophe possible.

Yet these conditions were far from set in stone. Even in the months leading up to July 1914 the leaders of Germany and Great Britain agreed to draw down the naval arms race between them: Germany simply could not keep up, as Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg knew, and the British were equally happy to call an end to the escalation to save on expenses. Crises similar in nature to the one that broke out in July 1914 – wars in the turbulent Balkan peninsula as the Ottoman Empire’s shaky hold on the region collapsed, imperialist struggles over the fate of Morocco – saw the Great Powers work together to prevent escalation of the conflict. Several of the same leaders who provoked war when it came – Bethmann, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and his Russian counterpart, Serge Sazanov – worked together to ease tensions and prevent a European-wide war. These peaceful resolutions to European crises – 5 in the 9 years prior to 1914 – showed that the “peace of Europe” would still hold if its leaders wanted it to.

This outcome was viewed with increasing concern within the German military. When adopted in 1905, the Schlieffen Plan correctly assumed that Russia would take at least 6 weeks longer than Germany and France to fully mobilize its armies. This was due to Russia’s smaller railroad infrastructure, industrial strength and military capacity following the disastrous Russo-Japanese War. Yet the years leading up to 1914 saw the gap between Russia and the West close rapidly: massive French bank loans helped push Russian railroads closer and closer to the German border, construct new factories and both grow and reequip the Russian army. By 1917, the German high command noted, Russian railroad growth and rearmament would have reached the point where they could mobilize and attack Germany well before the invasion of France could be completed. This would make a preemptive war suicidal and thus turn German foreign policy on its head, from seeking war to seeking peace. The German military command in the years prior to 1914 were, in short, looking for a pretext to launch a European-wide war while they were still able to win it.

In seeking a pretext for increased American military involvement in Vietnam, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy seized on the February 1965 Vietcong attack on the U.S. advisors barracks in Pleiku as the “trigger’ for escalation. Bundy termed such catalysts for war “streetcars”: they allowed the war machine to go forward along the tracks, so to speak. For the warmongers in the German military the murder of Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 was their “streetcar”. A vengeful Austro-Hungarian government sought revenge on Serbia, whose propaganda calling for a “greater Serbia” carved out of Austrian land hand inspired the terrorists who’d killed the heir apparent; the Kaiser and Bethmann, swinging into the war camp for different reasons – the former out of anger at his friend’s murder – gave Vienna the go-ahead with its infamous “blank check”, and the “streetcar” rolled along towards its fateful destination.

But what if the streetcar was never activated? What if, in other words, Franz Ferdinand survived his trip to Sarajevo – as, even with absurdly lax security measures put in place, he failed to do so only by a stroke of pure luck? A murderer, after all, cannot shoot their victim until they pull the trigger.

“I consider war to be lunacy!” Why killing Franz Ferdinand mattered.

Those who read my article on the personal tragedy of the Sarajevo murder – the remarkable forbidden romance of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie that saw them fall in love and stay together in the face of fierce, unyielding opposition from most of Viennese society – saw a side of the Archduke that is usually forgotten in the story that led to their death the morning of June 28. Yet “Franzi” (as he was called by his beloved “Soph”) was much more of a pivotal factor in making World War I possible than most people realize. He was the reason Austria-Hungary, despite acknowledging the threat to its survival from pan-Serbian nationalism, did not launch a military strike on Belgrade during the several Balkan crises prior to 1914. The political tragedy spawned by Gavrilo Princip’s bullet is even more acute than the traditional narrative tells us: his victim was the one man capable of preventing his empire from launching the “damned foolish war in the Balkans” that Bismarck prophesized would start the next European-wide war.

To understand why Franz Ferdinand needed to be the victim for World War I to break out as it did, you need to understand his plans for the future and how it affected his mindset. Austria-Hungary was a “dual monarchy” as its hyphenated name indicates: 2 separate governments that administered equal parts of the empire while cooperating on policies that affected the empire as a whole (such as the military and foreign policy). In reality this “cooperation” rarely happened: the Hungarians, having won autonomy from Emperor Franz Joseph in the aftermath of the disastrous 1866 war with Prussia, repeatedly used its veto power over such decisions to block policies that might force them to share their power with other, equally aggrieved nationalities within the empire. This added to the administrative blockage that, in economic, military and social ways alike, increasingly weakened Austria-Hungary compared to its Great Power colleagues in the decades leading up to 1914. The unerringly conservative, staunchly traditional government of Franz Joseph – and the emperor’s refusal to accept much needed reforms – only made matters worse.

Franz Ferdinand represented the last, best hope of reformers desperate to save the Hapsburg Empire from collapse. He himself was eager to change a system where the other dozen nationalities of the empire were denied political rights despite making up 56% of its population. With a clear-eyed understanding of what needed to be done to save his empire (and, to be fair, with a degree of personal prejudice towards Hungarians stemming from his army days), the Archduke committed himself to a fundamental reform of the Dual Monarchy once he succeeded the aging Franz Joseph. His plan, surprisingly, owed itself to none other than the United States: Franz had visited America in 1893 and was highly impressed by its government, seeing its federal system as a model for his multi-national empire to follow. When a group of scholars attached to the staff of the heir apparent presented a similar plan to Franz Ferdinand in 1906, he eagerly adopted it as his policy upon ascending the throne.

The plan was to convert Austria-Hungary into the “United States of Greater Austria”: 15 semi-autonomous “states” for each of the ethnic groups within the empire, with a strong central government in Vienna setting national policy just like the U.S. federal government. Each “state” would be free to promote the cultural and linguistic norms of its populace; these ethnic populations were rather homogenously distributed prior to 1914, as the map for the “United States” above shows. This transformation would give the other dozen nationalities an equal stake in the empire and thus recommit them to preserving it, or so at least Franz Ferdinand his fellow reformers hoped. Not surprisingly, Hungarian officials aware of the “United States” plan promised to veto it; the autocratic Franz Ferdinand promised to send in the army to enforce it if need be.

Why does all this matter with regards to World War I? It does because Franz Ferdinand was opposed to Austria-Hungary going to war until such time as he could complete his empire’s internal conversion.“I consider war to be lunacy!” he declared on at least 1 occasion in the years prior to his trip to Sarajevo; while he would have been happy to put an end to Serbian agitation, he believed Russia would not let such a lopsided invasion occur without intervening on Serbia’s behalf. With the Austrian army outnumbered nearly 2:1 by the Russians – and knowing his German ally would concentrate its force against France, not Russia – Franz Ferdinand rightly believed that such a war could destroy the Hapsburg monarchy, especially if Italy then entered it to seize ethnic Italian territory from it. As heir to the throne he was a significant political figure: since the death of the increasingly frail Franz Joseph was clearly not very far away in the year prior to 1914, few were willing to defy a man able and willing to terminate your career if he felt like it.

One of the few who consistently did defy Franz Ferdinand was, ironically, a man he’d put in power in the first place: the Austrian military’s Chief of Staff, General Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf. Motivated in part by his desire to lead a victorious war that would enable him to marry his lover, Gina von Reininghaus, Conrad called for preemptive war against Serbia no less than 25 times in 1913 alone. Yet Franz Ferdinand prevailed in the internal debate over Vienna’s response to 3 Balkan crises prior to 1914; the heir apparent spoke out publically against war, with Foreign Secretary Berchtold and other key government figures joining him. According to The Assassination of the Archduke, a recently published biography of Franz Ferdinand and Sophie sponsored by their descendants, Franz Ferdinand was actively pushing to remove Conrad from his post and was prepared to expose the general’s affair to achieve it.

The Streetcar Does Not Come

This brings us to Sarajevo in June 1914. Even with the criminally lax security measures put in place by the Governor of Bosnia, General Potiorek, it took a chain of unrelated decisions made on the spur of the moment for Franz Ferdinand’s car to stop in front of Gavrilo Princip. Princip’s co-conspirators scattered following a failed attempt to throw a bomb into the Archduke’s car (the chauffer pressed on the accelerator and the bomb bounced off the back of the car before exploding beneath the next one). Princip positioned himself at the street corner where the Archduke was to pass en route to his next stop, but admitted afterwards he did not expect to get a chance to shoot. As it was, Franz Ferdinand decided to cancel the day’s program and visit his wounded aide in the hospital, which would have taken him out of Princip’s range. Only because his chauffer was not informed of the change, and then brought to a halt by Potiorek right in front of Princip, was the assassin given a clear shot; even then, a nearby policeman grabbed Princip just after he fired the fatal shots.

Change any of these events – Princip gives up, the chauffer is notified, Potiorek stops the car elsewhere, the policeman reacts more quickly – and Franz Ferdinand makes it safely back to Vienna. There’s little reason to believe he would have changed his mind on whether to start a war that could destroy the monarchy; if so, then Conrad would have once again been defeated and Austria-Hungary would not light the fuse for war. Without the call to action from Vienna there is no “blank check” from Berlin, and war does not break out in 1914. The “streetcar” the German high command was waiting for remains inactive.

Time was running out for it to be activated, as Jack Beatty points out in his excellent examination of the unlikelihood of the outbreak of war, The Lost History of 1914. Franz Joseph passed away towards the end of 1916; given the likelihood that Franz Ferdinand would have had to crush Hungarian resistance to his “United States” plan, as well as implementing it afterwards, it means Austria will not be ready to join Germany military for at least several years. The German high command, as already noted, believed that starting a war would be futile beginning in 1917 thanks to Russian rearmament, nor would they launch a war without allies. As such it is highly probable that if Franz Ferdinand survived Sarajevo, Germany would have been forced to abandon its plans for war.

What about the other Great Powers? Most Russian government officials preferred not to go to war until its rearmament program was completed; even then there were many who feared that another prolonged war might topple the Romanov dynasty, as the Russo-Japanese War had nearly achieved a decade before. Perhaps the most influential voice for peace was a most unlikely one: Grigori Rasputin, the debauched monk with a seemingly mystical ability to save the hemophiliac heir apparent, the Tsarevich Alexei from death. His influence over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra was thus profound, particularly in the latter’s case, and he used it to repeatedly warn the Tsar against going to war in the years prior to 1914. Rasputin was not in St. Petersburg in July 1914, however: he was recovering from being stabbed in the stomach by a deranged woman and would not return to the capitol until the war was underway. We can expect him to have retained his influence and anti-war stance for any future, hypothetical crisis over the next several years. Without Germany, Austria and/or Russia starting such a war it is hard to see either France or Great Britain provoking one.

None of this means that a European-wide war would never have happened; what it does mean is that such a war was far from inevitable. The same political elites capable of achieving peace prior to 1914 could have continued to do so in the years that followed. Continuing socio-economic changes, particularly German economic growth, would have also shuffled the political deck going forward. We must always keep in mind that history is shaped not only by the context in which events occur but by the events themselves and the response by leaders capable of reacting to those events. Sarajevo was such a historical event, and the response by European leaders to it enough to trigger the calamitous First World War. It could easily have been different, and our world completely changed in the process – almost certainly for the better. Or as Shakespeare wrote in Troilus and Cressida:

…untune one string, And, hark! What discord follows; each new thing meets In mere oppugnancy [resistance, i.e. to the world around it]…