No one wants war; but that is not enough

The 2014 centenary of World War I provided an opportunity for historians to re-examine the causes for the Great War that devastated Europe and created the conditions for the outbreak of the next world war.

 While everyone agrees that the killing of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia, on June 28, 1914 triggered WWI, historians continue to debate what its root causes were. Did the collapse of the great empires and the rise of nationalist movements made war inevitable? Or perhaps we should blame the machinations by the European leaders for what happened? Did they expect the war or did events caught them by surprise?

 To most Europeans, the Great War seemed to come out of the blue, at a time when the European continent was enjoying a long period of peace and prosperity, recalling our current age of globalisation. It may not be surprising that the World War III scenarios, drawn up by today's military thinkers or by authors of apocalyptic fiction, imagine the two great powers of our age, the United States and China, in a military conflict as a result of a WWI-like chain of events that no one saw coming, and is triggered by, say, an accidental shooting down of a Chinese civilian plane by an American warship over the South China Sea.