Once in a generation a book appears that transcends all others on its subject. John Zametica has written such a book about the outbreak of World War One. His work will be impossible to ignore despite or indeed because of the plethora of recent titles in this field. More than a century after the event, the circumstances which in 1914 transformed Europe into a slaughterhouse continue to fascinate historians. With “war guilt” the main issue, widely divergent interpretations characterise the ongoing debate. Permanent controversy surrounds this topic. John Zametica’s work stands out because he has been able to resolve questions that have successfully confused generations of his predecessors. He has focused his attention on the pre-1914 situation in Austria-Hungary and the Balkans where the conflict began. They have had their fair share of scholarly attention, but remain the areas least understood when the origins of the war are discussed. Zametica’s mastery of Serbo-Croat and German sources has put him in a unique position to write this book, a revisionist account that slays many shibboleths of current orthodoxy. The author demolishes one myth after another in showing how far and how often historians have diverged from what the sources say. Thus he documents that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austro-Hungarian Heir to the Throne, was anything but a “federalist”, modern-minded reformer of the multi-national Habsburg Empire; that the people who killed the Archduke in Sarajevo were not proponents of the “Great Serbia” project, but supported a “Yugoslav” ideology which they shared with the young Croat intelligentsia; and that the secret “Black Hand” officers’ organization in Serbia, far from organizing the assassination in Sarajevo, had in fact tried to prevent it. While not sparing the Serbian leadership, Zametica shows that Austro-Serbian antagonism arose from the internal agonies of Austria-Hungary and the ineptitude of its statesmen. He argues that there was nothing inevitable about this collision course. The main conclusions of the book are: the contempt and fear felt by Vienna towards Belgrade gave rise to ill-conceived polices which led to the cataclysm; the war came about because Austria-Hungary, a so-called “Great Power”, thought the path to its salvation lay in its small neighbour’s destruction; and lastly, this ramshackle empire, faced with the prospect of its own demise, was prepared to gamble recklessly with the peace of Europe.

Folly and Malice: The Habsburg Empire, the Balkans and the Start of World War One PDF

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