29 - Nationalism, Terrorism, and the State: Historical Perspectives

Summary

On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, a young Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian heir presumptive, Franz Ferdinand. By killing the archduke (and his wife), Princip set in motion the well-oiled wheels that would, just a month later, lead to the outbreak of what George F. Kennan called “the great seminal catastrophe of [the twentieth] century,”¹ the First World War. It resulted in the demise of most European monarchies and empires, and – by extension – triggered the next two global conflicts, the Second World War and the Cold War. Princip was a member of the secret Serbian society the “Black Hand,” which had grown in response to the illegal occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1908. He shot Franz Ferdinand to intimidate Austria-Hungary so that it would let go of Bosnia and Herzegovina.² This assassination demonstrates how terrorism and nationalism can be intertwined and how potent and destructive this mix can be.