Sleepwalking towards catastrophe, once again?

IN HIS magisterial narrative about the crisis that led to World War I, “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914”, distinguished British historian Christopher Clark detailed mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the world toward the catastrophe that destroyed Europe and planted the seeds of global conflict.

The legendary German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had predicted in 1888 that “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” would one day trigger a great European war, which was exactly what happened on June 28, 1914 after the murder of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian empire by a young terrorist trained in Serbia.

But as Clark argues, there was nothing inevitable in what happened, that an event in the Balkans, a peripheral region far from Europe’s centres of power and wealth, would end up destroying the international balance of power and ignite a world war.