The recent centennial of the outbreak of World War I has engendered many new examinations of the events leading up to this catastrophe. Paul Miller-Melamed, who teaches at the John Paul II Catholic University in Poland and McDaniel University in the United States, has added to this already extensive literature on the central and southeastern European events leading the to the outbreak of WWI. This concise and comprehensive book is a welcome addition to this collection.
While Miller-Melamed has written a lucid account of the events of June 28 in Sarajevo from the perspective of the Habsburg Thronfolger Franz Ferdinand and from that of his Bosnian Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip, the real value of this book is his analysis of the Austro-Hungarian, Bosnian, Serbian, and the wider European context of the event. He is particularly effective in elucidating the activities of important actors like Leopold von Bechtold, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, and Nikola Pašić, the Serbian Prime Minister. Miller-Melamed acknowledges that much about the latter's role in the events of the assassination remains elusive. He nevertheless places the main onus for the Sarajevo event on the young Bosnian conspirators themselves, especially Princip and his colleagues Nedeljko Cabrinović, Vaso Čubrilović, and Trifko Grabež. They acted according to their strong but inchoate nationalist assumptions. The purposes of others, such as Serbian Army Major Vojislav Tankosić and Lieutenant Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević (Apis), the leader of the Serbian quasi-military conspiracy known as the Black Hand, remain murky.
Although Miller-Melamed uses many primary sources, he avoids becoming entangled in the minute analysis of the published diplomatic documents of the Great Powers that have been the basis for many studies of the origins of WWI since the publication of Luigi Albertini's and Sidney B. Fay's works in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively. Instead he relies primarily on secondary sources ranging from the decade of the 1920s up to the present day, especially in English, German, and Serbian. These sources include many of the contemporary publications that have already resulted from various scholarly considerations of the assassination. This enables him to broaden and to modernize his analysis.
Miller-Melamed examines the Serbian political situation prior to and at the time of the assassination. He indicates the Serbian victories in the First and Second Balkan Wars as increasing nationalist sensibilities in Serbia. While the Serbian government knew of the existence of a plot against Franz Ferdinand, it made only desultory efforts to interdict the plotters.
Miller-Melamed might have broadened his examination of Serbian policies by a comparison of its domestic military political situation with those of the other southeast European states. Two quasi-military Macedonian groups operated in Bulgaria, the Supremists, who existed under the aegis of the Sofia government, and the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), who acted outside of it. During this time, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria feared assassination by elements of IMRO. In 1909, factions within the Greek military brought the nationalist Elefthérios Venizélos to power. The most important of such groups were probably the Young Turks, whose seizure of power in 1908 was an important factor in encouraging nationalist activities elsewhere in southeastern Europe. Romania, a nominal Habsburg ally but maintaining pretentions to Hungarian territories, had experienced a period of domestic turmoil in 1907 when the Romanian army crushed a countrywide peasant revolt. In tiny Montenegro the so-called Kolašin affair of 1908–09 demonstrated that significant opposition to Prince Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš's rule existed. All of the southeastern European states of that time had military-political unrest that threatened their neighbors and even the Great Powers by destabilizing the Berlin settlement of 1878.
Misfire is a well-organized and well-written account of the Sarajevo assassination of June 28, 1914, and of how reactions to this event culminated in the outbreak of WWI. Readers will gain considerable insights into this tragic process.
