July Crisis
Europe took five weeks to turn an assassination into a world war, and almost every government believed it was acting defensively. The sequence is worth setting out because it is the clearest case anyone has of how a crisis escapes control. Franz Ferdinand was shot on 28 June. Vienna decided within days that the opportunity should be used to destroy Serbia and asked Berlin for support, receiving on 5 and 6 July the assurance that has been called the blank cheque. It then did nothing for a fortnight, partly to let the French president finish a state visit to Russia so that the two allies could not concert a reply. The ultimatum of 23 July was designed to be refused; Serbia accepted all but one point and mobilised; Austria declared war on 28 July. Russia ordered partial mobilisation in support of Serbia and then general mobilisation on 30 July, because its planners said a partial one could not be converted. German war planning had no defensive option: the Schlieffen design required an immediate attack on France through Belgium the moment Russia moved. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August, on France on the 3rd, and invaded Belgium the same day. Britain declared war on the 4th over the Belgian guarantee of 1839. Nobody had wanted this particular war and every general staff had a plan that made it unavoidable. The documents were published by every government afterwards in selections designed to prove that somebody else had started it. The argument about responsibility has run for a century and has moved several times, and the one point nobody now disputes is that the decision-makers had far more room to stop than they used.
- Year: 1914 CE
- Category: Diplomatic
