What if archduke franz ferdinand

He believes that World War One could have been prevented, if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had survived the assassin's bullet. He believed that a war with Russia would lead to the downfall of both empires. Professor Lebow says the assassination of the Archduke "removed this brake on going to war", and created "a pretext and incentive to go to war". The Austro-Hungarian empire itself might not have collapsed if it had not gone to war, Holger Herwig from the University of Calgary believes.

Posing such "what if? How did an assassination in Sarajevo lead to war? The living legacy of Gavrilo Princip. Was there an alternative strategy? Was there an alternative political approach to this?

He says it is important for historians to recognise there were choices to be made. Professor Lebow says counterfactual history is not just about the past, but has lessons for contemporary politicians and decision makers. He says leaders have a tendency "to exaggerate their ability to control events, which they all did in World War One with fatal consequences".

The second lesson, he says, is that leaders convince themselves that while they have no freedom of action, the other side does. The third lesson, he says, is that leaders tend not to question the set of assumptions they bring to problems and, in crisis situations, surround themselves with people they feel comfortable with. It doesn't matter how clever your policy-making is, he warns. And that, too, happened in Bosnia marks centenary of WW1 spark.

Today's troops reflect on World War One. Nation falls silent in remembrance. Scale of British war effort in World War One. Why God was not killed by the Great War. How close did the world come to peace in Looked at one way, Franz Ferdinand's was the most successful assassination in modern history, as it resulted in a vastly expanded Serb-ruled state that was only finally dismantled in the Yugoslav wars of the s.

In Lebow's alternative, Franz Ferdinand's survival at Sarajevo forestalled the conflict in unforeseen ways.

For one thing, it deprived the war party in Vienna of the pretext it needed to open hostilities with Serbia, so peace in Europe was maintained. Throughout, Lebow stresses that minor events can have huge consequences, and huge events do not necessarily have huge causes. Thus at Sarajevo the Serbian assassin Gavrilo Princip set in motion an "unintended chain of events" that culminated in carnage such as the world had never seen and Princip himself could not have imagined.

The first world war, in Lebow's view the "defining event of the 20th century", killed and wounded more than 35 million people, both military and civilian, through poison gas, starvation, shell fire and machine-gun. Few had reckoned on such a long, drawn-out saga of futility and wasted human lives.

The conflict was thick with forebodings of the second world war. The "ethnic cleansing" of Armenians in present-day Turkey during and after the first world war foreshadowed a new age of atrocity and diminished individual responsibility for it, says Lebow. Once people have been deprived of their humanity, it is much easier to kill them; all future dictatorships were to understand this.

Lebow has written a sharp if at times cliche-ridden work "heated debate", "stiff competition" that many with an interest in the first world war will enjoy. As well as providing a "what-if" analysis of a world without the conflict, Archduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!

Richard Ned Lebow imagines how European history would have unfolded if Archduke Franz Ferdinand had not been assassinated in Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination changed the course of European history.