well ladies and gentlemen I'd like to um Begin by um thanking uh s Richard Evans and Valerie shrimplin for inviting me to present this lecture uh this evening and I'd like to also to thank all of you for coming along and I'd like to thank uh and also apologize to the people who are standing outside and when hopes perhaps watching this from home in the form of a podcast um for the fact that we couldn't uh that they couldn't get in uh now I wanted today um to it is indeed a great a matter of great pride to be succeeding Sir Richard as as Regis Professor though I I hasten to um I want to reinforce his comment um about the duties of the professorship they are rather um moderate that is one of the key attractions of that post um now I wanted to um Begin by taking us back to the 28th of June um 19 14 which I think is the right place place to begin um you know the we should begin at the very beginning the very the very best place to start um in the words of the famous song um as this since especially since this is the first um lecture in a long series on 1914 and of course it does all in a sense start um not everything not all the the backstories of 1914 start on the 28th of June but short certainly the sort of Short history of the cause immediat the immediate causes um of the of the fr the K poen is as Pi Rovan called them they do begin on the 28th of June and there's a sort of dramatic drama and a density to the events of that day which I think repays uh revisiting them and I wanted to start with this picture here of a couple who are about to have what I think can only fairly be described as a very bad day um that's actually not them it's a that photo was taken a couple of days before you as you you'll see they're wearing different clothes on the day in Sara but there that's certainly them he's Arch duuk France ferdinant the a parent to the austr Hungarian Throne she's zofi hotk the descendant of a very distinguished Bohemian lineage not distinguished enough to rate in the eyes of the hapsburg family as of as of appropriate standing to be a member of hapsburg royalty for which reason she was never allowed uh in Vienna for example to sit be beside her husband um in the Royal Carriage with its beautiful gilded Wheels um and that of course is one reason why on the 28th of June in Saro she insisted on being beside him in the car this was a rare opportunity for the couple and they were very uh tender and close couple by the standards of dynastic um familial culture of that era um that that was one reason why she insisted on sitting beside her husband on that day the other reason was that the 28th of June was a red letter day it was of course a red letter day in the Serbian national calendar I'll come back to that in a moment but it was also a red letter day in their own private history because it was the uh the anniversary of their wedding and that's one reason why she was beside him in the car on that day on that morning here we see a couple of um final images before the assassination this is one which shows the arch Dukas and his Entourage waving to uh to various military individuals on the near the the S of a railway station and as you can see their their headgear is adorned with gy green ostrich feathers you can't tell that they're green because this is a black and white photo but they are take take my word for it and I'll come back to those ostrich feathers uh in a moment that's map of the Balkans because I think that one can never look enough at the map of the Balkans um it always repays inspection um these are the the far away countries as Neville Neville Cham Chamberlain called them that we of which we know nothing or little and it's important to to ref familiarize ourselves with the map I I made this comment once and I was giving a similar lecture to this one in Zagreb in Croatia and I said you know it's terribly important to familiarize oneself with the I just said it automatically with the bulans and then suddenly I realized I was in the bulans and and the the my CET audience was looking at me with puzzled Expressions but I've I've chosen these two maps because it's like two almost identical images on the back of a serial package where you've got to identify the 11 differences between image one and image two and I wanted to draw your attention just to a couple uh one is that um with no further Ado Albania suddenly appears between 1911 and 1914 it's suddenly there in 1913 a new nation state appears on the Bulan Peninsula another is that Serbia great greatly increases in its extent and both of these events are the consequence of the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 today largely forgotten conflicts but actually very bloody and traumatic conflicts for the societies involved Bulgaria Serbia um in the SEC case of the second um Balan War Romania Montenegro and of course the Ottoman Empire so those are two important differences and all of this has to do with the the the receding the the withdrawal of Ottoman power the collapse of power of Ottoman Imperial power on the periphery of Ottoman of the Ottoman Empire the loss of of most not all but most of Ottoman Europe of Islamic Europe um the other point I want to make is about something that both maps have in common and that is the the fact that Belgrade and this particular in this map here because of a printing error Belgrade almost looks as if it's inside the austr Hungarian monarchy of course it's not it's the capital city of the kingdom of Serbia but it's a few minutes Drive By by Carriage um from belg to the the border with Austria Hungary when the Austrian uh representative in Belgrade um packed up his bags and and left the broke off diplomatic relations and left the city of Belgrade having received the Serbian reply to the Austrian ultimatum on the 23rd of July I'm sorry on the 25th of July it took him a few minutes to get back into onto his own native terrain and this tells us something about the about the intimate relations between the intimate character of this relationship between Serbia and [Music] I'm very fond of because it conveys with such brutal Simplicity The Narrative of that morning um so I mean you can't ask for simpler than that as the cars pass the choria bridge just here a young man called nelo chabin noich a young Bosnian Serb and one of seven young men who've come to the city gathered in the city to uh attempt to assassinate the couple or not to assassinate the couple important distinction they want to assassinate him though in the case of Chavin noich he was willing to take the risk of assassinating her as well because he threw well we call it a bomb in fact it was a bit more like a grenade with a chemical fuse he broke at the detonated cap against a lamp post uh that made a loud bang it's thought that the driver hearing this bang um thought that somebody had fired a shot and pressed hit the accelerator and that is why uh instead of Landing inside the car where it would have you know killed or very seriously maimed um the arch dukee and his wife uh it landed behind the car it may also have been swatted away from the car by the arch Juke there the the witness testimony is confusing or or is conflicting on this question but in any case it rolled under car number three exploded under the car gaging a hole in the road uh injuring the people inside the car but not seriously a lot of superficial cuts a lot of blood everywhere but nobody uh in danger in serious danger um the the people in the third car were carried off to hospital the third car was a sort of stricken Hulk the other cars picked their way around the third car and at this point you might have thought it might have been time to call off the visit to Saro and indeed this point was made to France Fant it was suggested you know things are not going well um the bomb has being thrown um shouldn't we be leaving and upon which the arch duuke replied absolutely not don't be ridiculous the man is clearly insane have him taken to an asylum he was suffering from uh A syndrome for which the technical term is grumpy old man something that happens to a lot of us we get more and more irritated by less and less but um in of course having a bomb thrown at you was no small irritation but in any case he was having none of and he he didn't like to be given advice he didn't like security details he didn't like all the fuss that went with that and he insisted on uh on business as usual carrying on as planned uh even though his wife uh there was a sort of trickle of blood down his wife's cheek she'd been struck by one of the metal splinters from the bomb that had exploded under car number three and so it um came to came about that the cars continued their progress along the Appel key alongside the river motka towards um the the um City Hall which you can't see on that map and the next picture I'm particularly fond of because it shows the it's actually a still from a film and it shows them coming out from various um meetings that took place at the city hall I mean the the arrival at the city hall was in itself something to behold because of course by the time they got to the City Hall the mayor mhmed churich to whom fell the unenviable task of welcoming the couple of course the noise of the bomb had already been heard he'd been informed you know a bomb has gone off it's going terribly badly um he was a nervous man at the best of times he didn't like giving public speeches and and now he the speech he had and had prepared to give which had been glued onto a sort of paddle of wood for him to read from um was woefully inadequate to the situation because it began with but he was too nervous to change the text it began with the words which he then proceeded to read out in a trembling voice um it is with Sentiments of the deepest joy that the citizens of Saro welcome your highnesses to our beautiful city halfway through this sentence he was interrupted by grumpy old man with the words deepest Joy welcome is this how you welcome your visitors with bombs um I mean he had a point and um at this point his wife was seen Sophi kotk was seen leaning towards him and and Whispering something into his ear it's not known what it was but it was probably something along the lines of you know don't don't you know let him get get on with it dear it's not his fault there are moments like this in every marriage and uh he said very well you may continue and um the and geich continued with his with his uh talk and then it was time for the arch duuk to reply um whereupon it turned out that the text of his rep speech in reply had been in the the pocket of the agitant who had been in car number three so it was now covered in blood and a lot of wiping and scraping had to be done so that he could read the text I mean things were going really horribly wrong and at this point uh and they they then um met with she met with Muslim ladies he went up to the balcony and took a look at the last look at the city chatted with various dignitaries um at which point by this point he there were signs according to eyewitnesses signs that he was starting to get nervous uh he was starting to get jumpy and his voice was getting higher and higher and he was clearly Keen to be off they came back down um it got back into the car and of course what happened next um you all know this is a fanciful French rendering of what happened next from the Pretty Journal which is beloved of historians because of the wonderful color lithographs that this journal specialized in this is a front page image uh they really were fantastic uh pictures of course this is does not give you anything like an accurate rendering of what was what actually happened on that day the shot is being fired from the wrong side of the car prince in fact was standing on the other side um they didn't rise up like figures in Opera um here here it looks as if as if he's singing I die I die and so on um in fact nothing of that kind happened the shots were both so effective one struck him in the jugular vein the other struck her deep in the abdomen that they remained sit seated exactly where they were and it was not clear even to the um The Bodyguard count haak who was standing on the running board of the car um though of course in very Austrian Fashion on the wrong side um it was not clear even to count harak that they had been struck by um by the the shots fired by the Assassin it looked as if the shots might have gone wide and Governor poor who was sitting in the jump seat the spring seat opposite um the the jump seat it's called I think the opposite the couple you can't see him in that picture he's been left out um he uh recalled in his deposition before the court at which these young men were arraigned that um before which they were arraigned he he record in his deposition that it wasn't clear to him that the shots had actually met their Mark he he hadn't even managed to hear the shots he saw the young man step forward and hold the gun uh up to up to eye level like this and fire from Point Blank Range U but he didn't hear any reports um he saw flags of smoke uh and the next thing he knew um some someone was kak was shouting to the cck driver to to get back into the appal key and to drive back towards the konak the the palace where they were going to see what should be done next uh and as only as they were driving back down the Appel key that it became clear as some blood began issuing from his mouth Sophie um ziot sort of tilted sideways until her head was resting on his lap and at this point harak heard the um the Archduke say to his wife uh Words which very quickly became famous throughout the monarchy they became they went viral I mean they they really went Global very very swiftly he said to her Sophie Sophie don't die stay alive for our children this is an extremely as I say very unusual usually tender um family with a very intense familiar life and um that was a very typical sort of moment and um harak recorded that in fact that the letter in which harak reports these words to his wife was just the other day um was just the other day auctioned I think at Christies for a vast sum um an undisclosed sum as far as I know in any case um that's what happened next and here you see what an image that was um sold worldwide as a as a photo at the time as a photograph of the arrest of gilo prip the the most active Commander the man who took the two shots outside Schiller's uh General Store on the 28th of June the man who killed the two people in the in the car and of course if if given the the the state of Photography the the its technological development in 1914 somebody had managed to get a snapshot like this of the arrest of princip it would be nothing short of a miracle in fact this is not the arrest of princip uh the photographer who took this picture had been warned in advance that an arrest was going to take place it took place a couple of days later it's the arrest of a man called Fodor be who was picked up along with a lot of other suspects during the sort of police drag net that inevitably always follows assassinate political assassinations of this kind but I've included this picture because uh I mean firstly it's a a marvelous example of journalistic resourcefulness and wit uh because the journal the journalist the photojournalist who took this picture um subsequently captured captured as the arrest of princip and made an absolute Fortune from its indication though that was of course the last time in which last occasion on which a journalist has behaved like that um the picture is also interesting because what you can see and of course all images even if this is a this image is false in as much as it reports to show the arrest of princip it's true in in the sense that it it shows the arrest of someone and what it also shows is is that this young man is not just being arrested he also being protected by the Austrian officials who are arresting him and he's being protected from local Bosnian Muslims you can tell because they're wearing feather U and that's a reminder of two things first that that Sara was a very Bosnian Muslim town the Muslim uh Elite ran the this the sort of Machinery of City Administration the mayor mhmed chich was um himself um a Muslim bosan Muslim and as you may recall from that image showing the couple issuing from the city hall a lot of the people standing there sort of waving them on are uh or welcoming them rather saying goodbye to them as they leave rather as they leave to to get back into the car are wearing feather in the in the Bosnian Muslim fashion and so um what that tells us is something about the very the extreme emotion that respond that uh that was triggered by these um these two assassinations um there's a lot of Bosnian Muslim violence against serbs in Saro and other parts of Bosnia hgov and also Violence by croats against serbs so in other words this assassination awakened sort of inter ethnic tensions um which were always um Fair alive in the region uh in any case this is an image of the the young man who took the two shots um as you can see he's slender and and rather salow he was already quite ill by the time he took these two shots not mentally ill but suffering quite seriously from tuberculosis of which he subsequently died in the teresian shot um prison one of the many sort of ironies or you know tragic residences of this story is that he died in trinot um later of such such evil Fame due to it the role it played in the Holocaust the interesting thing about um I mean prip and his friends is simply couple of points to bear in mind they were not terrorists in the sort of 21st century sense they did not rejoice in indis indiscriminate Carnage when um the words of the arch duuk you know zal zel stban and so on were read out in at Court Prince visibly wept um he was upset he hadn't intended to kill the arch Duke's wife he was uh several of the boys were shocked to see that she was riding beside him this made this worried them several in a couple of cases it may be the reason why they failed to take their shots or to throw their bombs um they didn't want to kill a lady uh they wanted to kill him because he was a representative of political power so they were carriers of a sort of State terrorism which is narrowly focused on the carriers of power the second shot fired was not aimed at her but in all almost in you know in all probability it's true that his princip claimed he was aiming at Governor poor a very hated figure in the province U of in the um in Bosnia hergo the in the Lun as it was called of Bosnia re Lun of Bosnia herzo uh but that he missed because his arm was probably already been grabbed by uh someone in the crowd or he's being jostled uh by someone in the crowd as you can imagine as people would once the first shot had been uh fired the other thing to bear in mind here some of his collaborators um chich chabin noich and graes um is simply that these um seven men six of them are Bosnian serbs and they were not subject to the of the kingdom of Serbia they were Bosnian um bosnians in other words they were subjects of the austr Hungarian monarchy though of course six of them were Serb nationalists there was a young man by the name of mhmed bashit who was a Bosnian Muslim um but not a religious man a man who effectively a radical socialist um why he had was recruited to the group is not clear but one reason maybe he wasn't actually recruited in Belgrade he was recruited by Danel ilich a local um operative um working within Sarah Evo itself um and he may have done that because he wanted to sort of Des Serbian eyesee the the group it's not clear um mhmed bashid had a record of sort of failed political actions he' already failed to carry out an assassination on another occasion so it's rather mystifying that he should have been chosen for this task uh and in any case um of the of the of the group of seven young men men in the city the three most active ones chabin noich um grabes and um princip had all been and this was quickly established by the austrians had all been um supplied with their guns and um and bombs uh in in Belgrade uh they'd been trained in Marksmanship in a park outside the capital city they'd be they had made it across the borders this was also quickly established across the Serbian borders with the assistance of members of the Serbian border force in other words of the Serbian border troop what the austrians did not succeed in demonstrating was um direct involvement by by the Serbian State and in fact we can say now with confidence that the Serbian State as such was not complicit in the carrying out of this assassination the president um pasich um Nicola pasich had full knowledge of the the movement of bombs and guns and young men across the border from Serbia into Bosnia herzo shortly before the um the arrival of the of the arch dukee in in the province um but he was unable to prevent it because these movements were taking place under the control of an underground Network that was operating with support from the support of part of the of the officer Corp of the Serbian Army a movement known as Union or death also famously in history um as the black hand and it was this it was pich's inability to control this movement which gave rise to um the problems that in a sense allowed the assassination to happen not his direct complicity or the intention of the Serbian government as such to carry out an assassination of this kind pasich recognized perfectly clearly that this form of ultraviolent irredentist activity posed a very grave security risk to his State okay well there there there are the events of the 28th of November 1914 um and I I just want to start really the more formal part of what what I want to say by reminding you of something you all know already which is that on on that morning the morning of the 28th of June when this couple um arrived at SAR Evo railway station um Europe was at peace and in fact if you'd asked the Statesmen the best informed Statesmen they were all men in this era um of Europe whether they believed that a major Continental configration a major Continental war was imminent or highly probable then the great majority probably all of them would have told you that in the last 12 to 18 months War had been becoming less likely not more likely after all one had made it through the two Balan Wars um the these two major wars in the Balan Peninsula they're in an interstitial space between the austr Hungarian Empire the Russian Empire and the failing or receding uh Ottoman Empire without without there being a broader configuration and Margaret McMillan has written very persuasively and spoken very persuasively of the sort of deadening drum beat of crisis in the pre-war era you know we tend to think that you know people are warned by crisis that you know they become each crisis makes us more acute more acutely aware of the dangers to come but actually repeated crisis can have the opposite effect they can deaden our awareness of danger and um in some ways that seems to have been happening in 191 12 and 13 uh and we have the very eloquent testimony of sarur Nicholson a senior functionary in the British foreign office uh who commented to or wrote to a colleague um in May 1914 May 1914 he wrote to a colleague in all the years I have been at the foreign office I have never seen such calm international waters so not a starry hour of diplomatic prognosis in any case 37 days after the visit to Saro only 37 days later of course as you all know uh a war had broken out a European War had broken out and out of this European War um there emerged or there evolved uh a global war a war a World War and this War I think is rightly been described as the Primal catastrophe the term is is kennons Geor Kennan originally the Primal catastrophe of the 20th century it's been widely taken up in the German anguage historiography the UR catastrophe it has a sort of UR catastroph has a kind of um I don't know a hairy scary sort of feel to it which Primal catastrophe doesn't but in any case uh if it consumed and and this term Primal catastrophe is now is now controversial the point has been made that you know this war was not a primal catastrophe for everybody it wasn't for the Baltic states or for Poland it's a it's a painful moment of birth for those um States um you know I had a very interesting conversation with the Polish um journalist Adam shinsky and he made the point he said you know I I can't possibly be asked to to lament the first world war that's that is the birth hour the hour of birth of the Polish nation state how are you supposed to have a modern Poland without this war um there is no other conceivable way to unlock the Polish Nation from the control um exercised over it by Russians uh Germans and austrians so for Poland clearly it's not a primal catastrophe it probably isn't for Australians either uh for Australia it's of course it's a very bloody war the the sacrifice in terms of blood and treasure is great as it is for so many other countries but um Australians all fight as volunteers uh they all go to war willingly um they uh and and the war becomes a kind of a myopic moment it's it's a very important uh constituent in the in the myth of Australian nationhood it's the first major political Act of the Australian nation state after Confederation in 1901 this is the first war that Australia chooses as a sort of um out out of its own free inititive and so it's not a primal catastrophe for everybody but it is I think if we think about the amount of poison released into the European political system by this war about its destabilizing effect on global politics about its long-term consequences in the Middle East it is I think our right to think of this war in its Global frame as a primal catastrophe it consumed four great Empires the German Empire the Russian Empire the Ottoman Empire and of course the um now what's the fourth one the Ottomans the oh that's a Hungarian of course the austr Hungarian the Russian the Ottoman and the German all consumed in the in the in The Cauldron of this war um it more importantly it caused the deaths of between 10 and 13 million young men these are just military deaths on its numerous fields of conflict um the the global statistics about wounded men are not very reliable but um it's estimate the estimates sort of oscillate between 15 and 21 million wounded men and I'm not talking here about lightly wounded men who were treated in theater or or in in local in s sort of you know um field hospitals um just behind the front but men who had carried serious wounds many of whom um felt the effects of these wounds right through until the end of their lives and certainly people of my generation in Australia and it's not different no different in Britain or in Germany or France um remember from their um youth uh elderly relatives and elderly Friends of the family um elderly men of course who were still carrying around with them the effects of wound that they had um that that they' got in that in that conflict and so I think that Fritz stown the the German American sort of immigrate a Jewish German American um historian wonderful historian is right when he says that this is the disaster out of which all the disasters of the 20th century sprang it's very difficult to imagine the rise and seizure of power of fascism in Italy without this war it's difficult to imagine the October revolution in the Russian Empire without the first world war everybody predicted something like the February Revolution collapse of tarist autocratic Authority a seizure of Power by a sort of middling Coalition of political entities you know social so right-wing social Democrats perhaps kadets you know constitutional Democrats nationalists and so on um but no one had foreseen the koulik um takeover of Power by the Bolsheviks and the the creation thereafter of a one- party State under bvy control um which of course in its car was attended by a further Russian Civil War that consumed yet another 5 to 7 million lives there again we don't have very good statistics and of course it's difficult to imagine German history taking the disastrous and appalling turn that it took in the direction of Nazism and of the Holocaust without the um Titanic pressures brought to bear on German POL on German society and above all on German political culture um by this by this vast conflict and so I think that my um former Richards and my former colleague in Cambridge now teaching at Yale University I think he's about to move to Colombia Adam TW um is right when he speaks in a book that he just finished writing called the Deluge about the long-term Legacy of this war he right I think to speak of the um of this war as unhinging the global international the global political system uh and the book goes into great detail we don't have time to do that today on the various ways in which it did and the consequences that they had and so from all of this it follows that the question of how this war came about um possesses certain intrinsic interest and I don't want to disappoint you but I'm not the first person to have noticed that um this is an old debate uh in fact it's as old as the war itself it's even slightly older than the war because the argument um about who was responsible who was guilty of bringing this war into the world began before the first shots were fired and it's amazing um how many of the thesis and arguments including some of the most sophisticated ones that you can find in the secondary literature you can already find on the lips of those who themselves helped to bring this war into the world so it's an old debate according to uh John W Langdon the American historian who um who published a book called The Long debate in 1991 um he counted 25,000 books and articles in English that you really ought to read in order to be uh in control of this subject matter and um we have the even more eloquent example of Rebecca West the author in my view of of the the the one of the deepest and most sophistic reflection on the place of the Balkans in 20th century history a person who loved um the Balkans and its peoples and I'm thinking of her book Black lamb grey fulcon she traveled to Saro in 1937 to see the place where the the sort of the fuse was lit and she she walked up the stairs with her husband Paul to the to the balcony and they looked out over the city and she turned to him and she said I shall never understand how it all came to pass it's not that we know too little it's that we know too much and that was 19 37 and of course today we know a hell of a lot more so the question then arises why add yet another book to this pyramid of paper um and as you can imagine my colleagues were not slow to ask this question um surely this has been done to death I remember a colleague and my colleagu is just saying to me for about the ninth time once at lunch um and you know one of those moments when you feel like just like dumping your Cutlery and walking away uh and I think that colleagues often have a sort of a genius at this you know just as you're struggling with the cruelties of a really difficult problem they come up with excellent reasons why you should just curl up and die but of course you have to find an answer to these taunts and um and I I did find an answer and the answer is this that yes the debate is old there's no doubt about that but the subject is still fresh in many ways the subject is fresher now than it was 10 20 or 30 years ago when I first encountered the problem of the first reward it's an absolutely Central problem in history teaching at Australian schools I grew up in Sydney Australia and when I first encountered it at my high school in Sydney I kind of period charm had accumulated around the events of 1914 this was Europe's last summer there was a lot of Gonic and Tennis um if you read The Marvelous books of Barbara tuckman which by the way I still recommend um to everyone I think they're still fantastic um pieces of historical reflection on the problems of the world that brought this War uh into existence but if you read these books you notice that there was a lot of or one notices now the loving detail with which uniforms are described eccentric personalities um you know you have um Lord Salsbury riding to um to the House of Commons on uh London's first pneumatically tired tricycle pushed by his valet James he has to be pushed because there are no pedals on this thing um didn't occur to him to put any on um and as you and there's a lot of detail on on the on the the menus at gala dinners and on details of hapsburg Court precedence on the sort of this sort of extraordinary late flowering of of um courtly excess which which was a characteristic of Europe in the last couple of decades before the outbreak of the first world war and as one is acquainted with the sort of panoply the the the the um Vista of the ornamentalism of this world then gradually um the Assumption stealthily asserts itself that these must be the inhabitants of a bygone World um that if their um hats had gudy green ostrich feathers on them then perhaps their dreams their thoughts and arguments also had gudy green ostrich feathers perhaps these are people who are are utterly UNC contemporary they can't speak to us we've lost touch with them and yet if you take another look at the events of the 28th of June not from the perspective of the of the 197s but from the P perspective of today as people of the early not quite beginning 21st century and you think of what happened on that day the Cavalcade of automobiles on the on the on the appal key you can't help but be reminded of Dallas in November 1963 it's the it's the raw modernity of the events that strikes you the story starts with a squad of suicide bombers um exotic figures when they first appeared in when they when they when they you know populated European the historiography of the first world war in the 1970s but much less exotic figures now and they're very they're very familiar part of our historical landscape um and of course Behind these young men were underground networks uh with with with a only obliquely linked to any kind of sovereign structure I mentioned before the very oblique connections between the Serbian State and the underground networks that were um driving this kind of violent irid gen ISM and I think our Compass has shifted in other ways as well if you think about the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s one of the extraordinary features of the literature on the outbreak of the first world war and the literature on the origins of the first world war was that in large parts of this literature with a few distinguished exceptions but in large parts of it the Balkans are almost entirely airbrushed from the scene it's as if they're not there uh this is all about relations between the great Powers the peripheral zones simply not visible they're not in the field of vision but I think since the laav Wars of the 1990s it makes less sense or it's it's less obvious that we should uh dismiss or disregard the power of Bulan nationalism um it's its its role as an historical factor in its own right and then there's the fact that 91 the attack on the the Twin Towers in New York reminded us of the power of an event the power of a terrorist event freighted with with symbolic um meanings and by that I don't wish to suggest a kind of cheap comparison or equ you know an equivalence between the extraordinary Carnage in New York and the murder of two people in Saro but nevertheless um the effect of this event on in particular on on the austr Hungarian PO on the political mood the chemistry of politics and decision making in Vienna is absolutely Beyond Dot and I think it's worth remembering this because the event as an analytical category has sometimes fallen out of favor with historians there was a time in the 1970s and ' 80s when it was very um trendy to to site and recite and recite the Beautiful quotation or the beautiful um comment by fernon bordell I mean wonderfully eloquent where the the the the great Doan of the anal School of history in in France who commented that you know events with a sort of soft contemptible foam that rides on the back of the Great Waves that are history structures so that historians who worked on events were just barking up the wrong tree that was not the part of history that mattered What mattered was the deep Long dur of structures changing slowly over many generations but of course it can be the other way around I mean there's certainly a lot in what Pell says but it can be the other way around sometimes events can be hard and structures can be soft um we need to think more dialectically about the relationship between these two categories and finally there's the fact that you know we're no longer in the era of bipolar stability that we used to call the Cold War and we're still sort of scratching our heads and trying to work out what that means I went to an interesting paper in Belgrade by George Freedman the American political scientist and he commented that you know we had the Cold War then we had the postc Cold War that was the period from 1989 till about 2007 and that was an era of total unipolarity there was only one great power left and everybody was watching Washington and there was talk of full spectrum dominance um and so on that era is now passed and we're now in what he calls the postpost Cold War it gets more and more unwieldy I was hoping he'd come up with something a bit more bit more handy but no the postpost Cold War um and that's the that this is an era when it's no longer unipolar we're back in a period of which is authentically multi poolar with with numerous centers of power um a world populated not just by on the one hand a weary Titan uh that was the term sometimes used about Britain uh before 1914 uh and some might like today to describe Washington as a weary Titan it's not you know it's not in decline in any kind of metrically provable sense but it's certainly wearing in some respects of it's subjectively at least of its World role or parts of it are on the one hand we have that on the other hand we have Rising Powers uh one in particular which is you know rattling at the cage of the geopolitical system in ways which C unsettle many Chancellor and this is uh here I'm not of course referring to Russia so um these shifts in perspective which I mean this is of course a world which in many ways resembles 1914 more and more rather than less and less so we have a paradoxical situation where even as 1914 recedes further away into the past it actually in some ways feels more relevant it's it speaks to us more intimately and more urgent and these shifts in perspective prompt us to rethink the story of how war came to Europe in 1914 accepting that challenge doesn't mean um you know embracing a vulgar presentism which remakes the past to suit the political preferences or demands of the present rather it means acknowledging those features of the past of which our changed Vantage Point can afford US a clearer View and bearing all this in mind how does one go about refreshing the narrative how do you develop a a distinctive approach to a question like this one and in the last part of what I want to say today I want to touch on some of the ways in which I tried to do that the first was um and this is some all all historians have to you know we're all we all have to sort of earn our keep by coming up coming up with something new to say and one way you can do that is you can try and think of a new answer to an old problem um but in the case of 1914 that's really difficult because in a way all the possible answers have already been given uh it was it was nobody it was everybody it was Germany it was Russia it was France we even have the Neil Ferguson who who you know in a sort of perverse moment of Brilliance um blamed Britain for the outbreak of the first world war um and so you know it's the point is not to find a new answer I thought it might be more interesting to find a new question in other words instead of asking the question which is the heart of the origins literature why did this war come about I thought it might be more interesting to ask the question how did peace become War why does that make a difference after all how and why questions are intrinsically linked they're like Kathy and Heath Heathcliff they're kind of entangled at the root you can't pull them entirely apart and yet they do lead us in different questions because why questions lead us in the direction of categorical causes or of categories that are deemed to be causes like for example nationalism the rise of imperialism the spread of social Darwinism Armament stockpiling and as you uh pile you know as you as you troll the last few decades before the outbreak of War looking for causes you you start to fall prey to an optical illusion as you pile the causes onto the scale the tongue of the scale tilts from a possible War to a likely War to a highly probable War to an inevitable war and as it tilts the agency of those individuals those Statesmen who chose this war because this war was not a natural event it wasn't a volcanic eruption it didn't have to happen it was a war that like all wars was chosen by the individuals who made it um the the agency of those people who chose and decided for this war is squeezed out of the field of vision they become mere executors of forces beyond their control so that was a a sort of optical uh flaw which for which I wanted to correct in this book the second problem about why questions was um was I was alerted to that by um a Bulgarian historian of the SEC of the the two Balan Wars who makes the interesting comment in the introduction to his book and I quote once we asked the question why guilt soon becomes the focal point in other words when we ask the question why did this war happen What really mean is who did this who brought this war into the world and in fact that question has been at the center of the literature on the origins of the first world war and it's hard to imagine how it could not have been given that the Versa treaty at the end of the first world war named a guilty party it's it didn't use the term guilt or Schult in the uh in the original in the actual text of the treaty itself but the accompanying documentation made it clear that Germany was the power Germany and its allies but Germany in particular was the power responsible for the outbreak of the war and so since since then the question of um who brought about this war has been at the center of the origins debate and the problem with a a blame centered approach is of course that it tempts us into identifying a suspect we identify a likely suspect and then we um we draw up a charge SE sheet we collect proofs we collect evidence that's exactly what the most influential single utterance on this problem uh the the the the the historian Fritz Fischer wrote several books on this problem the the Germany's grass Germany's drive for world power and then much more importantly the war of Illusions and various other books that followed uh in which he argued that it was Germany that caused this war it didn't only cause it it planned it in advance um and so Germany alone in a sense I mean he never used the term Soul culpability but that's in effect what his books were arguing because he took no interest whatsoever in any other state so one consequence of the blame focused um approach is that you you you zero in you narrow you you n the field of vision to examine the behavior of one supposedly blameworthy State at the expense of thinking hard about how the behavior of this state interacts with the behavior of other states by contrast the the how approach does something different it aims to draw a a a sort of line a plot a a a track through the events that that um and the decisions and the behaviors and the developments that allowed risks to accumulate within the European system before 1914 this does not mean mean excluding questions of responsibility or guilt uh you have to face them in the end but the my objective was to try and answer the how questions first and then answer the why questions rather than deciding to answer the why or rather the who question first and then find out how that particular State um did what it did which is effectively the way that Fritz Fischer proceeded and and people who operated in that who worked in that Tradition now of course there are other things what has to do I I had to do as well in order to refresh this debate or to try and refresh the debate um one was to capture Trends from the literature and um this is you know sometimes claimed that we have a consensus in the in the literature on 1914 um I would be very wary of accepting that claim um this is an extremely interesting literature it's in very rapid um and transition right at the moment uh and one of the most interesting recent developments in writing on the first world war has been a globalization of the field of vision we don't anymore think of the origins of the first world war as a solely European matter um you know in terms of an Anglo German antagonism or um you know the tension between France and Germany there have been recent Studies by Thomas OTE for example of the China question showing how the rising importance of China um creates tensions between the great powers and increasingly it's become clear in recent writing on the International System before 1914 that this was a world in which each of the great Powers had more than one enemy the new school on British Naval History For example has shown that Britain the great the Empire of Great Britain faced or lived within what they perceived in London to be a threat environment it wasn't just about Germany Russia was also perceived as a very serious threat there was deep hostility to Russia uh in London and that one has to um complicate these narratives which uh like the one that I was told at at school when by a teacher fantastically Effective Teacher who is a pupil of Fritz fiser um he was very excited by the Fisher thesis it was then in the 1970s the Absolutely Fresh Orthodoxy on the question of the Orin of the war and I still remember him standing up in front of the class with his hand held up like this and saying boys if you get a question on the outbreak of the first world war just remember the five German provocations right ships they built ships that upset the British you should never build ships because it's upsets the British Morocco the Moroccan crisis they they challenged the French in Northern Africa they should never do that the French get very upset when you do that there's the Bosnian annexation they support Austria over Bosnia that upset the Russians you shouldn't upset the Russians Russians they they they challenged the French in Morocco again in the second Moroccan crisis and they issued a blank check of support to Austria on the 5th of 5th of July 1914 now that is inspired piece of teaching and I still remember every single one of those points um though I I no longer agree with them but there you are I mean I well they're all true but they just have to be embedded in a larger picture so um you know the idea was to get away from I mean that clearly once you think about these the sort of multipolarity of the system before 1914 it becomes harder and harder um to think in terms of the of five German provocations and then there are just a couple of other points before I close the first is that I was very struck when I um worked on the background to the to the to 1914 at the chaotic quality of decision-making in the executive structures of Europe at that time um and I don't have time to dwell on this in any detail but suffice it to say that power is buzzing around in these systems from one point one node in the structure to another and one of the questions that you know diplomats are constantly being asked to answer in their various station in the various embassies and and um and missions is who's actually running the show who is determining foreign policy um and the the ANW is coming from Russian Russia are constantly changing it's the foreign minister no it's not sorry it's the tar the tar is intervening directly no it's not he's now disappeared from politics now it's the the the minister of war no now it's the foreign minister again no now the Prime Minister Stalin has taken over and so on so there's a sense in which you know there's a Heisenberg and uncertainty about where power actually is and this applies to all of these systems including the British one where we have a constitutionally very powerful foreign secretary in the person of Edward gray but this is a person who has to whose own support for a policy of on tant with France is not sustained is not backed by the majority of his cabinet colleagues let alone the majority of British parliamentarians or the majority of his own liberal um party and so there too you have confusion about what can gray promise and what county promise how much power does he have to make engagements Visa France and the classic example I think you can capture it statistically is the fact that during the tenure in office of redward gray in Paris 16 foreign ministers came and went from office and two of them came and went twice um in France you had a kind of Guerilla Warfare between the the permanent functionaries of the foreign office the Kor the senior ambassadors in places like London and Berlin um you know the brother the brothers combo and you had um you know the ambassadors themselves are great independent decision makers I mean you have the case of Paul com B the the French Ambassador in London who famously commented in a letter to a colleague he said look when I don't like the instructions I get from Paris I burn them of course you could do that in those days because they had open Chimneys in uh open fireplaces in the offices and there were no smoke alarms um one last point before I close um and that is I tried to you know to highlight links in the chain of of events before 1914 that I thought had been underexposed and one of these was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 now this is today an almost entirely forgotten War it's even forgotten in Italy um and yet it was a very traumatic War for um for North for the northern African societies affected by it um the Italians launched this war without any provocation it was simply an Imperial War of annexation they wanted to make it make Libya and we call it Libya it wasn't called Libya then it consisted of three integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire fizan tuna and um and and tri tripolitania but the point about this war is it's very interesting in all sorts of ways this is the first war that ever to see the use of planes of airplanes for reconnaissance and bombardment it's the first war ever to see air strikes now these air strikes were primitive by today's standards they involved um hand throned bombs which had to be primed by hand the fuse had to be screwed into the back of the Bomb by the pilot who had to grip the bomb between his knees screw the fuse in while controlling the his his machine so it was a fairly adventurous business but of course it was much more comfortable on board the the airships that the Italians also deployed which had racks that could carry up to 250 of these bombs which were thrown by trained bomb throwers and the effect on the Turco Arabic troops troops on the ground the people we today call Ground troops um was predictably drastic the Serbian head of the Serbian political section of the of the Serbian foreign office in Belgrade a man called mlav bikovic commented in an interesting interview after the first world war to a French journalist he said this Italian war on Libya that was the first aggression from that folded all that came thereafter the two Balan Wars The Great War it all started with the Italian attack on Libya and it's interesting that um you can find many other voices saying this as well including the the French um foreign minister stepan Pichon who was in charge of the K do at the time uh in Paris and so that's an interesting uh moment in the in the prehistory of the war the backstory of this war because it's a moment that simply doesn't remotely fit into the Fisher um view of the world which is a world of you know quiet and calm great Powers quietly and um and peaceably getting along with their business uh until one very aggressive and Psychopathic power um disturbs the peace uh it's it it reminds us of how complex how multiv vectoral this system is how many disturbances are occurring from from how many different sources and the the Italian war in Libya is just one of many many other examples that one could give and so I want to close by saying that once one walks these paths and thinks about the how rather than the why it becomes very difficult to return to the blame game um so brilliantly expounded by um Fritz Fischer and by calling it a game I don't wish to belittle it um any more than game theory is a is a belittling of what people do when game theorists talk about them but uh I simply want to suggest that you can't it becomes very difficult to return to the uni pooli and the certainties of a Fisher style view uh or for that matter to those studies that blame Russia or France for the outbreak War which I think is equally um an equally equally serious misprision of how this war came about there's no question about the appeal of the blame game there's a sort of moral payload when we can finally um Point our finger at a guilty party but it's not that kind of narrative this is not um a James Bond movie script in which at the end we find velvet jacketed villains in a sort of mountain Hideway lined with flashing LEDs um stroking a white cat with a prosthetic steel hand and and planning World Armageddon it's not an Agatha Christi murder mystery in which at the end we find the Vicor with a bloodstained swordfish standing beside the prone body of Lady Carrington in the conservatory this war was the fruit of was the consequence of decisions made in many places um with whose effect of course was cumulative and interactive uh decisions made by a gallery of actors who shared a fundamentally similar political culture it was genuinely complex not just complicated but complex it was genuinely multi-polar and it was genuinely European and it was to highlight or to illuminate these aspects of the story of how this world this war came into the world that I wrote this book and I thank [Music] you