Dear Reader,
Looking back at the fateful spring of 1915, eighty years ago, when Italy betrayed the Austrians and joined France and Britain in the Great War, we see the roots in the conflicts just a few years before.
While in June 1914, the world was not on fire, it simmered. There was smoke. With hindsight, you can see, but I think if we could travel together in a time machine, we would see the sparks ignite in real time. Mexico was in the middle of a brutal civil war, and the Ottomans began massacring Greeks in response to their failure in the wars of 1912–1913. It is a mistake to treat Europe as in a state of bliss prior to the summer of 1914. The issues that exploded in June had been mismanaged for a while, and many elites were adrift on seas of vanity. The European leaders, far more than the North and South Americans or the East Asians, normalized aggression and romanticized war. They lost touch with the reality of their behavior, and eventually, the aggression they exported returned home and ruined them. The story of the World Wars is the tale of how Europe did this to itself. In 1914, the Europeans were on top of the world, and they threw it away.
Again, the idea that European leaders in 1914 were shocked by the potential of war, that it came like a bolt from the blue, is one of the most enduring myths in modern history. The preceding years offered no shortage of warnings. And some actively sought the conflict.
The Italo-Turkish War of 1911–1912 was a clear signal that even the lower-tier European powers were eager to flex. Italy, considered the weakest of the European “great” powers, invaded Ottoman Libya with every expectation that a war conflict would cement its status as one of the top nations. While some treat this as a “colonial war,” there are sober reasons to reject that designation. The first is that Libya is not distant from Europe; it is just across the Mediterranean from Sicily, and therefore not that far from Turkey, which was the heartland of the Ottoman Empire. Also, in any war, the casualties are real; treating colonial wars as not a big deal was part of the casualness with which Europeans treated war. The war revealed not only the rottenness of the Ottoman military, but also the willingness of the European powers to wage wars of choice. Italy used aircraft and modern artillery—warfare was evolving fast, and everyone knew it. Over 100,000 Italians invaded Libya when fewer than 30,000 Ottoman troops were able to fight back, as many Ottoman troops were in the Arabian territory of the empire, putting down a revolt in Yemen. British Egypt lay between reinforcements and Libya, and the British connived to refuse to allow the Ottomans passage to defend their territory. Mustafa Kemal, who later became the founder of the Republic of Türkiye, volunteered as a commander but had to sneak past the British into Libya. The Ottomans, weakened and humiliated, became the wounded animal in the European menagerie, and their vulnerability invited further attacks. And then the jackals came.
The First Balkan War began in October 1912, just as the Libya war ended, the newly emboldened neighboring states sought to finish what the Italians had started—carving up Ottoman territory. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro acted in concert, but their unity was temporary. The allies coveted the same lands and the same legacy of the East Roman Empire, “Byzantium.” Bulgarian and Greek forces marched on Salonica, and as his hometown fell to the Greeks, who moved faster than the Bulgarians, Mustafa Kemal was stuck, helplessly in Libya. He would not forget. After the Ottomans’ defeat, the victors turned on one another in the Second Balkan War, each determined to take the lion’s share of Macedonia. This intra-Balkan violence drew in Romania and even the Ottomans again, all scrambling for advantage. By the time the dust settled in 1913, the region was soaked in blood and full of resentments. These wars from 1911-1913 cost around 650,000 casualties.
None of this went unnoticed by the great powers. Austria-Hungary viewed Serbia’s gains with growing alarm, seeing a Serbian imperialism coded as Slavic nationalism on the rise that threatened to rip its empire apart. The Russian Empire, for its part, backed Serbia as a fellow Slavic nation and client state, both out of cultural kinship and strategic ambition. Japan’s defeat of the Russians in Asia forced the Tsar to look elsewhere for glory, and the Balkans were an opportunity to exploit. The alliances were declared. The tensions were public. The precedent had been set: aggressive war in Europe was not a long-past nightmare—it was recent history. The difference between 1912 and 1914 was that in the latter date, the target was Austria and not the Ottomans.
Only 200 miles separate Kumanovo, where Serbia first defeated the Ottomans in 1912, from Sarajevo.
Diplomats and generals in 1914 may not have predicted the exact scale or nature of the Great War, but they certainly knew war was a very real possibility. The near-constant agitation and now open warfare in southeastern Europe had become a proving ground for future conflict, a madhouse of imperialist ambition and irredentist rage. Europe was not the peaceful continent of post-1815 Congress diplomacy. It was a boiling cauldron. And the major powers did not seek to turn down the heat—they watched it bubble, each calculating how to benefit when the lid finally blew.
In short, the idea that Europe "stumbled into war" in 1914 because its leaders could not imagine it happening is a convenient fable for leaders evading responsibility. They had seen war. They had waged war. They had cheered it on, mapped out the contingencies, and weighed the costs. The Italo-Ottoman War and the Balkan Wars were not scenic detours from the road to Sarajevo; they were the signposts guiding civilization to catastrophe. And Europe, instead of turning back, marched confidently toward its own destruction. The Italians hacked Libya off the Ottomans and now looked to slice into Austria-Hungary. The Russians, especially, watched the smaller powers pick apart the Ottomans. They watched, contemplated, and planned to take the spoils in the next conflict. They had the men, they had increased their industrial capacity, and made alliances with the great western powers.
And then there were the spies.