Posted on 03/06/2014 3:10:44 PM PST by nickcarraway
World War I began 100 years ago this summer. It's a centennial that goes beyond mere remembrance; the consequences of that conflict are making headlines to this day.
To underline that, All Things Considered wanted to turn history on its head and ask historians and listeners alike: What if World War I had never happened? (Submit your answer in the form below.)
If that sounds like an unlikely exercise, compare it to an even more unlikely event — the one that occurred on June 28, 1914, in the city of Sarajevo. It was the spark that ignited a global conflagration, a moment in history that was dramatic, tragic and — in some ways — almost comic.
Christopher Clark is a historian who's spent a lot of time reviewing the events of that day in Sarajevo and what led up to it. He's the author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War.
"It's one of those subjects that — no matter how many times you go through it — it never loses its magnetism," he says.
Clark tells All Things Considered host Robert Siegel that despite warnings of a Serbian plot to kill the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archduke and his wife went on a visit to Bosnia-Herzegovina. They had minimum security and their motorcade route through the city had been published.
Partway through the trip, one of the cars was bombed and several people were injured. The tour was supposed to take a new route (but no one told the Czech-speaking drivers, who carried on as before). Clark says the miscommunication took the royal couple right in front of Gavrilo Princip, one of the assassins who was stationed on the original path. Princip had just stepped out of a general store where he'd purchased a sandwich.
"Suddenly the car is in front of him [Princip] and to his astonishment, the car stops because someone in the car is telling the driver, 'You idiot, you're not supposed to go down this road. Stop the car and back up,'" Clark says. "And just as the car comes to a halt ... he took these two shots."
The rest, as they say, is history.
You can hear the entire interview with Clark here on Monday, March 10. In the meantime, we invite you to play along in a counterfactual history of World War I we will be exploring March 10-14 — use the form below to imagine how one aspect of the last 100 years would be different if Ferdinand had lived in 1914.
NPR ASKS: What If World War I Had Never Happened?
All Things Considered wants you to help us imagine a counterfactual history of the last 100 years. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand propelled the world into a war that left millions dead, shattered empires and rearranged power throughout the world.
But what if the assassin in Sarajevo had missed? What if, like his small band of amateur co-conspirators, he didn't hit his target?
That's hardly unthinkable. Moments before the murder, Franz Ferdinand's car made a wrong turn. The vehicle was pushed backwards to turn around and came to a stop right in front of the gunman.
So, what if Franz Ferdinand had lived?
EXAMPLE: Without World War I, Russia remains prosperous and the Bolshevik Party's October Revolution fails. As a result, Vladimir Lenin moves to the United States where he becomes a professor of Russian history at Columbia University. Having maintained his left-wing connections, he comes in contact with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and helps write the pro-union musical, "Pins and Needles."
The rising German Empire and the Kaiser’s ambitions were on an inevitable collision course with the more established Powers.
Russia was developing very rapidly and closing the gap between itself and Germany. When Russia reached developed status, Germany would be surrounded by enemies fully capable of resisting her.
(He never realized his isolated position was largely his own doing. Bismarck generally remained on good terms with everybody but the French, keeping them the isolated nation.)
The Germans, probably accurately, thought they had reached their pinnacle of relative power and the correlation of forces would only move against them in future years.
IOW, it was now or never. Strike for world dominance or accept inevitable decline.
From this POV, FF’s getting bumped off was only the spark. If it hadn’t been him, something else would have sparked the war in the next year or so.
Hey, wait a minute...
Europe was a tinderbox full of explosives and gasoline. The war would have happened regardless. The Kaiser wanted an empire. The British wanted to stop him. But those were just two of the players. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the verge of revolution. Muslims were ready to revolt. The Turkish empire was tottering, killing more and more people to keep itself alive. If it hadn’t been Ferdinand it would have been something else.
The Kaiser probably changed his mind, but his directions were not delivered and entreaties to him were kept from him by his aides who wanted war. Somebody once said that a fatal accident is almost never just one failure or incident. It’s the end result of several failures or incidents.
Recall, that there had been numerous European wars recently past. Frenchmen are still dying to this day from shells fired during the 1871 Franco-Prussian war. So, World War one is just a continuation of other events that started in 1810 or so. (Or, earlier, if you want to go back to the French revolution.)
No one thing could have stopped world war one. Probably no ten things or hundred changes to history could have prevented it. It might have taken longer, but it would still have happened.
World War II was like a continuation of World War I. The Cold War was about the terms of the end of World War II. It can be argued that the war that started in 1914 did not end until the last Soviet troops pulled out of Germany in 1994. All of this because of a sandwich.
“What if WWI had never happened? Why, Russian wouldn’t be Communist and neither would China,”
I have to disagree. Even America was turning communist. The intelligencia thought it a good idea. FDR was lauded by Hitler and Mussolini. The entire US University system was becoming communist. Most people thought that it would be easy to just give entitlements away. We got Social Security because FDR was trying to one-up a Louisiana politician who wanted to run against him on the plan of giving everybody a wage from the government. So, communism was going to happen. It didn’t have the same impact here as in Russia and Germany because everybody had guns.
Nicely played.
Most of that was a carefully-phrased joke. I was trying to work in turbans being worn in Istanbul but it just wasn’t coming...
That damn Jerod and his 5 dollar foot longs.
Sorry. I did recognize some humor, but I took the first part as serious. I’ve read a lot on WW1 lately. (Don’t ask why. It started with Walter Lippmann’s “Public Opinion” and just out of control. I’m feeling the urge to build zeppelins now...)
It was all faked. The royal couple was hustled out of the area, put on a ship and spent the next six years on the French Riviera. They were located there by a Lithuanian waiter who was later credited with causing Latvia to bomb Pearl Harbor using German Stuka’s.
Although not entirely accurate, I like this take on the ham sandwich;
Adult language warning.
http://www.cracked.com/article_17298_6-random-coincidences-that-created-modern-world.html
The plot that killed the Archduke was very widespread. There were 6 killers assigned, plus their supervisor. Each was supposed to make an independent attempt. It covered several eventualities. Before Princip got in his shot three others had had their opportunities but failed.
That Princip succeeded almost by accident is no accident, overall. The odds were against the Archduke.
Roll forward to January 2008 and Barack 0bama, a young high school teacher, is watching President Sara Palin being inaugurated as President.
How would no WWI make the U.S. election cycle a year earlier?
A place near me makes a 16" italian sausage and cappicola sub with peppers that might just be worth another world war.
I once saw a comic strip about a man who owned a time machine and realized he had a library book that was overdue. He thought he could avoid paying the fine by having his time machine take him back a few days in time so he could return the book before the due date.
However, on the machine’s control panel, he set the date and place of his destination wrong and wound up in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914—right at the spot where Archdduke Ferdinand confronted Gavrilo Princip. As he got out of the machine and tried to get his bearings, Princip fired his shot, but the bullet hit the book that the library patron was holding, and the Archduke drove away.
Dejected that his book was now ruined and that he would have to pay a replacement fee in addition to the fine, the man got back into his machine and headed back to the present. But when he got there, he found that by saving the Archduke’s life, he had changed the course of history and that Canada now ruled the world.
Let me guess, it was on a Kaiser Roll...
D’oh!! Time travel?
Or perhaps the driver taking the route that brings him right to the assassin, and stopping right in front of him, was no accident.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.