Assassination In Sarajevo

Europe was shaken this week by the assassination attempt on the Prime Minister of Slovakia. It is very reminiscent of the 1914 assassination of the heir-apparent of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that set off the First World War. At the time Slovakia was part of the same Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The story of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand 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.

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. While there was no pressing reason for a major war, and I think it was just that the long period of relative peace was getting boring, 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.