It is not an exaggeration to say that no one in Sarajevo, Bosnia -- except, perhaps, very few scholars and freelance researchers -- knows about the magisterial work of Sidney Bradshaw Fay (1876-1967), an American historian whose The Origins of the World War has never been translated into Bosnian. One hundred years ago on this day, a murderer whose strings were pulled by the shadowy organization called Black Hand headquartered in London, assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a man who had no intent to plunge Europe into a catastrophe. In the fourty years following the Franco-Prussian War, as we have seen, there developed a system of alliances which divided Europe into two hostile groups. This hostility was accentuated by the increase of armaments, economic rivalry, nationalist ambitions and antagonisms, and newspaper incitement. But it is very doubtful whether all these dangerous tendencies would have actually led to war, had it not been for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand. That was the factor which consolidated the elements of hostility and started the rapid and complicated succession of events which culminated in a World War, and for that factor Serbian nationalism was primarily responsible.
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:42:32 +0000
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