Event #6

 

This year is the one hundredth anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, triggered by the assassination in Sarajevo. The four weeks between the assassination and Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war on Serbia on 28 July 1914, but more importantly the five or six days that followed, in which Germany, Russia, France and England, one after another, were dragged into the war, are studied today by political scientists as a classic and chilling example of how a war can start without any of the powers involved in it really wanting it to. However, there exists a condition in which this can occur, and it is a military culture where war is at any rate considered to be possible, and everyone is prepared to fight it in the most favourable conditions: if the European countries hadn’t been so well armed and so suspicious of each other they would never have been overrun by that tragedy.