Notes on The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark
On June 28, 1914, the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One month later, World War I began. It caused 20 million deaths and destroyed three empires.
The Unification or Death movement, which was gaining momentum in Serbia, planned the murder. The Austro-Hungarian Empire construed it as an attack on its very existence because Emperor Franz Joseph I was already 83 years old. A harsh ten-point ultimatum followed. Backed by Russia, Serbia equivocally acceded to nine of the ten points but couldn’t agree to “the participation of Austrian officials in the prosecution of implicated persons” as this touched upon its sovereignty. And the war began.
However, this is only a tiny portion of what happened. In Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark attempts to explain the backdrop against which this intricate conflict developed.
It was a time of widespread irredentism and chauvinism, fluid political alliances, distrust, and paranoia. Numerous European countries were engaged in a pissing contest to see who could conscript the most soldiers or build the most war machines. To avoid unfavorable wars, major powers were contemplating preventive wars. And everybody believed that the others were to blame.
But who was to blame in the end? One of the book’s main ideas is that looking for a culprit is meaningless. The author explores in detail the points of view of the key players. They all had their share of reasons, ulterior motives, blunders, misjudgments, and questionable beliefs. They were all “sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring to the world.”
Could the war have been avoided? Maybe. But it wasn’t. It took place and the lives of many. It showed that bad events can escalate into disasters. And that the world is far too complex for reliable predictions to be made. All in all, Sleepwalkers is a book worth reading. It tackles problems with eternal relevance. There will always be conflicts and opposing perspectives, and we are not going to stop making emotional decisions anytime soon. Maybe we’ll never fully agree with Falstaff that “honor is a mere scutcheon.” But let’s at least learn from past mistakes and try to avoid them in the future.
