July Crisis

1. Lead

The July Crisis was the five-week diplomatic crisis of June and July 1914 that turned the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo into the First World War. On 28 June 1914, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and his wife were shot by the Bosnian Serb student Gavrilo Princip. Within five weeks, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia, Russia had mobilised in Serbia’s defence, Germany had declared war on Russia and France, and German troops had invaded Belgium, bringing Britain into the war. The crisis is one of the most studied episodes in modern history, not only because of its consequences — a war that killed some ten million soldiers and millions of civilians and destroyed four empires — but because it raises the question of how a local Balkan crisis became a general European war. Historians disagree about who was responsible and whether the war could have been avoided, and the debate has continued for more than a century. What is clear is that the crisis was not an accident. It was the product of decisions taken by governments that understood the risks, that had the opportunity to stop, and that chose, for reasons of prestige, security, and alliance, to go forward. This article follows the crisis day by day, from Sarajevo to the declarations of war, and examines the people, the decisions, and the structures that made war possible.

2. Key Facts

Field	Value
Name	July Crisis
Period	28 June – 4 August 1914
Trigger	Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, Sarajevo, 28 June 1914
Assassin	Gavrilo Princip, member of Young Bosnia, supported by the Black Hand
Key document	Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia, 23 July 1914
Key commitment	The German blank cheque to Austria-Hungary, 5–6 July 1914
Declarations of war	Austria-Hungary on Serbia, 28 July; Germany on Russia, 1 August; Germany on France, 3 August; Britain on Germany, 4 August
Main powers	Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, France, Britain, Serbia
Outcome	Outbreak of the First World War
Estimated military deaths in the war	About 10 million soldiers, plus millions of civilians
Main sources	Diplomatic documents, memoirs, and the histories of Fischer, Clark, and MacMillan

3. Origins and Background

Europe before 1914: Alliances and Rivalries

Europe in 1914 was divided into two alliance systems that had been built up over decades. The Triple Alliance linked Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, while the Triple Entente linked France, Russia, and Britain. The alliances were intended to deter war by making any attack on one member an attack on all, but they also meant that a local conflict could draw in the great powers. The rivalries behind the alliances were real: Germany and France had been enemies since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, when Germany annexed Alsace-Lorraine; Britain and Germany competed in a naval arms race; Russia and Austria-Hungary competed for influence in the Balkans; and the Ottoman Empire’s decline had created a power vacuum in south-eastern Europe. The Balkans were the most unstable region in Europe. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 had doubled Serbia’s territory, and Serbian nationalists dreamed of uniting all South Slavs, including those living in Austria-Hungary, in a Greater Serbia. Austria-Hungary, a multi-national empire that included millions of Slavs, saw Serbian nationalism as an existential threat. Germany, Austria-Hungary’s ally, supported Vienna’s hard line, while Russia, which saw itself as the protector of the Slavs, supported Serbia. The assassination at Sarajevo took place in this context: it was not a bolt from the blue but the spark in a powder keg that had been filling for years.

The Balkans and the Road to Sarajevo

The Balkans had been the scene of repeated crises in the years before 1914, and each had brought Europe close to war. The annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary in 1908 had humiliated Russia and enraged Serbia, which had hoped to annex Bosnia itself. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 had shown that the Ottoman Empire could no longer hold its European territories, and they had increased Serbia’s power and confidence. The Black Hand, a secret Serbian military society founded in 1911, aimed to unite all Serbs in a single state, and it supported the Young Bosnia movement, a group of young Bosnian Serbs who believed that assassination was a legitimate weapon against Austrian rule. The Archduke’s visit to Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, a date of great significance to Serbs, was seen by the conspirators as a provocation and an opportunity. The Austro-Hungarian authorities, despite warnings of a plot, provided inadequate security, and the Archduke’s car took a wrong turn on the way back from the town hall, bringing it to a halt directly in front of Gavrilo Princip, who fired two shots. The assassination was the work of a small group, but its consequences were shaped by the decisions of governments, and it is those decisions, taken in Vienna, Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris, and London in July 1914, that form the story of the July Crisis.

The Alliance System and the Balance of Power

The alliance system of 1914 is often blamed for the outbreak of war, but its role was more complex than a simple chain reaction. The alliances were defensive in form, and none of them required a member to support an aggressive war. Germany’s alliance with Austria-Hungary, the Dual Alliance of 1879, promised support if Austria-Hungary were attacked by Russia, not if Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia. The Franco-Russian Alliance of 1892 promised support if either were attacked by Germany, and the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France, signed in 1904, was not a formal alliance at all and did not commit Britain to fight for France. The alliances mattered because they shaped expectations: Vienna expected German support, St Petersburg expected French support, and Berlin expected that Britain would stay out. Those expectations were often wrong — Italy, a member of the Triple Alliance, stayed neutral in 1914 and later joined the Entente — but they influenced the decisions of July. The alliances also created a timetable: once one power mobilised, its allies and enemies felt compelled to mobilise, and the military plans of the great powers, which required rapid mobilisation, left little time for diplomacy. The alliance system did not make war inevitable, but it made a local war much harder to contain.

4. The Main Participants

Austria-Hungary, Germany and Serbia

Austria-Hungary was the power most directly affected by the assassination, and its leaders were determined to use the crisis to destroy Serbia as a political force. The Emperor Franz Joseph, eighty-three years old, approved the hard line, and the Foreign Minister, Count Leopold Berchtold, and the Chief of Staff, Conrad von Hötzendorf, argued that Serbia must be punished and that war was necessary. Berchtold, who had previously been cautious, now believed that Austria-Hungary’s prestige required a decisive response, and Conrad had long advocated a preventive war against Serbia. Serbia, led by Prime Minister Nikola Pašić, was in a difficult position: its government had not ordered the assassination, and Pašić had tried to warn Vienna, but the Black Hand’s links to Serbian military intelligence made Serbia vulnerable to the charge of complicity. Germany, under Kaiser Wilhelm II and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, was Austria-Hungary’s ally and the decisive influence on Vienna’s decisions. On 5–6 July, Germany gave Austria-Hungary the blank cheque — a promise of unconditional support, whatever Vienna decided — and that promise removed the restraint that might have held Vienna back. The German military, led by Helmuth von Moltke, believed that war with Russia was inevitable and that 1914 was a better time to fight than later, when Russia’s military reforms would be complete.

Russia, France and Britain

Russia, under Tsar Nicholas II and Foreign Minister Sergey Sazonov, saw itself as Serbia’s protector and as the champion of the Slavs, and it was determined not to allow another humiliation like the Bosnian crisis of 1908–09. Russia’s military reforms, begun after its defeat by Japan in 1905, were incomplete, and its leaders knew that Russia was not ready for a major war, but they believed that abandoning Serbia would destroy Russia’s standing as a great power. France, under President Raymond Poincaré and Prime Minister René Viviani, was Russia’s ally, and it supported St Petersburg’s hard line. Poincaré’s state visit to Russia in July 1914, which took place during the crisis, was read in Berlin and Vienna as a sign of French support for Russia, and it strengthened Sazonov’s resolve. Britain, under Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, was the power whose position was least clear. Britain had no formal alliance with France or Russia, and Grey worked to mediate the crisis, proposing a conference of the great powers. His efforts failed, partly because Germany rejected them and partly because Britain’s own position was ambiguous: Grey warned Germany that Britain might intervene, but he could not promise that it would, and the German leadership gambled that Britain would stay out. The participants in the crisis were therefore not a single bloc but a set of governments, each with its own interests, fears, and miscalculations.

The Kaiser, the Tsar and the Monarchs

The monarchs of Europe played a personal role in the July Crisis, and their correspondence shows both the intimacy and the limits of royal diplomacy. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II were cousins, both grandsons of Queen Victoria, and they exchanged telegrams during the crisis — the so-called Willy-Nicky correspondence — in which each urged the other to avoid war. The telegrams were sincere, but they were overtaken by events: the Kaiser could not restrain Austria-Hungary, and the Tsar could not restrain his own generals, who insisted that mobilisation, once ordered, could not be stopped or reversed. The Emperor Franz Joseph, the oldest monarch in Europe, approved the ultimatum to Serbia and the declaration of war, and his signature gave the war the authority of the Habsburg crown. The monarchs’ inability to stop the war shows the limits of personal diplomacy in an age of mass armies, railway timetables, and alliance commitments. The war that began in July 1914 was not ordered by a single monarch but by a set of governments, and the monarchs, for all their titles, were unable to control the machinery they had inherited.

5. The Course of Events

From Sarajevo to the Blank Cheque

The first week after the assassination was deceptively quiet. Austria-Hungary did not immediately respond, and the European press treated the assassination as a Balkan tragedy rather than as the prelude to war. Behind the scenes, Vienna was deciding on its response. On 5 July, Count Hoyos, Berchtold’s emissary, travelled to Berlin to ask for German support, and on 5–6 July the Kaiser and Bethmann Hollweg gave the blank cheque, promising that Germany would support Austria-Hungary even if its action against Serbia led to war with Russia. The blank cheque was the decisive commitment of the crisis: it removed Vienna’s fear of Russian intervention and it committed Berlin to a course that could lead to a general war. Vienna then delayed, partly to allow the harvest and partly to prepare its case, and the delay allowed the sense of crisis to fade. On 23 July, Austria-Hungary delivered its ultimatum to Serbia, a document of ten demands that included the suppression of anti-Austrian propaganda, the dismissal of Serbian officials, and the participation of Austro-Hungarian officials in the investigation of the assassination on Serbian soil. The ultimatum was deliberately designed to be unacceptable, and its forty-eight-hour deadline left Serbia little time to respond.

The Ultimatum, the Serbian Reply and the Declarations

Serbia’s reply to the ultimatum, delivered on 25 July, accepted most of the demands but rejected the participation of Austro-Hungarian officials in the investigation, offering instead to submit the dispute to international arbitration. The Serbian reply was conciliatory, and the Kaiser himself, on reading it, remarked that it removed any reason for war, but Vienna had already decided on war and rejected the reply as unsatisfactory. On 28 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, exactly one month after the assassination, and began to bombard Belgrade. Russia, which had begun a partial mobilisation, now ordered general mobilisation on 30 July, and Germany, which had warned Russia to stop, declared war on Russia on 1 August and on France on 3 August. The German war plan, the Schlieffen Plan, required the invasion of France through Belgium, and on 4 August German troops crossed the Belgian frontier. Britain, which had guaranteed Belgian neutrality under the Treaty of London of 1839, delivered an ultimatum to Germany and, when it expired, declared war on 4 August. Within five weeks of the assassination, all the great powers of Europe were at war, and the crisis that had begun in Sarajevo had become a general European war.

The Forty-Eight Hours of the Ultimatum

The forty-eight hours of the ultimatum, from 23 to 25 July, were the most intense of the crisis, and they show how little time diplomacy had. Serbia’s government, led by Pašić, worked through the night to draft a reply that would satisfy Vienna without surrendering Serbian sovereignty, and it consulted Russia, which advised acceptance of as many demands as possible. The Serbian reply, delivered minutes before the deadline, accepted nine of the ten demands and offered arbitration on the tenth, and it was widely seen in Europe as a reasonable response. The Austrian ambassador in Belgrade, Baron Giesl, had instructions to break off relations if the reply was not fully satisfactory, and he did so immediately, leaving Belgrade on the evening of 25 July. The rejection of the Serbian reply shows that Vienna was not seeking a diplomatic solution but a pretext for war, and that the ultimatum had been designed to be rejected. The forty-eight hours also show the limits of mediation: Grey’s proposal for a conference was still on the table, but Vienna and Berlin were no longer interested in a conference, and the machinery of mobilisation was already moving.

6. Turning Points

The Blank Cheque and the Ultimatum

Two decisions were the turning points of the July Crisis, and both were taken in the first half of July. The first was the German blank cheque of 5–6 July. Without it, Austria-Hungary would have had to consider the risk of Russian intervention, and Vienna might have accepted a more limited response to the assassination. With it, Vienna was free to act, and Berlin was committed to the consequences. Historians debate whether the blank cheque was a deliberate decision for war or a miscalculation: Bethmann Hollweg believed that Russia would not intervene and that the crisis could be localised, and the Kaiser believed that the Tsar would not go to war over Serbia. Both were wrong, but the blank cheque was not an accident; it was a conscious decision to support Vienna unconditionally, and it was taken by men who understood that it could lead to a European war. The second turning point was the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum of 23 July. The ultimatum was designed to be rejected, and its delivery, after three weeks of delay, came as a shock to Europe, which had begun to believe that the crisis had passed. The ultimatum’s terms, above all the demand for Austro-Hungarian officials to participate in the investigation on Serbian soil, infringed Serbian sovereignty in a way that no government could accept, and its forty-eight-hour deadline left no time for mediation. The ultimatum turned a diplomatic crisis into a countdown to war, and it is the point at which the crisis became irreversible.

Mobilisation and the Point of No Return

The second half of the crisis was dominated by mobilisation, and the mobilisation timetables of the great powers created a point of no return. Russia’s decision to order general mobilisation on 30 July was the decisive step: once Russia mobilised, Germany’s war plan required it to mobilise and to attack France before Russia could complete its mobilisation, and the German ultimatum to Russia, demanding that mobilisation be stopped within twelve hours, was a demand that Russia could not meet. The Tsar, who had at first ordered only partial mobilisation, was persuaded by his generals that partial mobilisation was technically impossible and that general mobilisation was the only option, and he signed the order on 30 July. The German declaration of war on Russia on 1 August, and on France on 3 August, followed from the logic of the Schlieffen Plan, which required Germany to defeat France quickly before turning east. The invasion of Belgium on 4 August, which brought Britain into the war, was also a product of the plan, which required German armies to pass through Belgium to outflank the French. The mobilisation timetables did not cause the war, but they compressed the time available for diplomacy from weeks to hours, and they made it difficult for any government to change course once the machinery had started. The point of no return was not a single moment but a sequence of decisions, each of which narrowed the options of the next.

The Schlieffen Plan and the Timetable

The Schlieffen Plan, the German war plan drawn up by Count Alfred von Schlieffen and modified by Helmuth von Moltke, was the military framework within which the July Crisis unfolded. The plan assumed that Germany would have to fight France and Russia at the same time, and it proposed to defeat France quickly, in about six weeks, by invading through Belgium, before turning east to face Russia, whose mobilisation was expected to be slow. The plan required speed above all, and it left no room for delay: once mobilisation was ordered, the armies had to move according to a railway timetable that could not be changed without chaos. The plan also required the violation of Belgian neutrality, which Germany had guaranteed by treaty, and it assumed that Britain would not intervene, or would intervene too late. The Schlieffen Plan was a gamble, and its assumptions were wrong — Russia mobilised faster than expected, Britain intervened immediately, and the French army did not collapse — but in July 1914 the plan shaped the decisions of the German leadership, who believed that any delay would be fatal. The plan is a reminder that military planning, intended to prepare for war, can itself make war more likely, by creating a timetable that diplomacy cannot match.

7. Consequences

The War and Its Human Cost

The immediate consequence of the July Crisis was the First World War, a conflict that lasted more than four years and transformed Europe. The war killed about ten million soldiers and millions of civilians, wounded millions more, and left a generation of survivors with physical and psychological injuries. The war’s battles — the Somme, Verdun, Passchendaele, and the Eastern Front — became synonymous with industrial slaughter, and the war’s new weapons, including machine guns, artillery, poison gas, tanks, and aircraft, changed the nature of warfare. The war also caused a humanitarian catastrophe: the Armenian genocide, the blockade of Germany, the influenza pandemic of 1918–19, and the displacement of millions of people. The economic cost was enormous, and the war left Europe in debt, with its infrastructure destroyed and its societies traumatised. The July Crisis is therefore not only a diplomatic episode but the beginning of a catastrophe, and its consequences were felt for decades. The war’s survivors, the so-called lost generation, carried its memory into the interwar years, and the war’s unresolved issues — the peace settlement, the reparations, and the national resentments — contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War twenty-one years later.

The Collapse of Empires and the New Europe

The political consequences of the war that followed the July Crisis were equally profound. Four empires — the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman — collapsed, and new states were created in their place: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The Russian Revolution of 1917, which followed the war, created the Soviet Union, and the peace settlement at Versailles redrew the map of Europe and imposed reparations on Germany. The League of Nations was created to prevent another war, but it lacked the power to enforce its decisions, and the war’s legacy of resentment and instability contributed to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany. The July Crisis thus marks the end of the old Europe of empires and monarchs and the beginning of the modern Europe of nation-states, democracies, and dictatorships. The crisis also changed the way historians think about war: the debate over its causes, known as the war-guilt debate, shaped the writing of history for a century, and the question of whether the war was inevitable, accidental, or the result of deliberate decisions remains one of the central questions of modern history.

The War-Guilt Debate

The debate over responsibility for the First World War began with the Treaty of Versailles, whose Article 231, the war-guilt clause, blamed Germany and its allies for the war and justified reparations. German historians rejected the clause, and the debate continued through the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the German historian Fritz Fischer argued, in his book Germany’s Aims in the First World War, that Germany had deliberately sought war in 1914 to achieve dominance in Europe, and his work transformed the debate. Later historians, including Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, argued that all the great powers shared responsibility and that the war was the result of a series of miscalculations rather than a single plan. Margaret MacMillan, in The War That Ended Peace, emphasised the role of individuals and the failure of diplomacy. The debate continues, and it matters because it shapes how we understand the origins of war in general: whether wars are caused by aggressive plans, by miscalculation, by the structure of alliances, or by the failure of leaders to imagine the consequences of their decisions. The July Crisis is the case study through which these questions are most often discussed.

8. Geography and Context

Sarajevo, Vienna and the Capitals of Europe

The geography of the July Crisis was the geography of Europe itself, from Sarajevo in the Balkans to the capitals of the great powers. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, was a city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a mixed population of Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Jews, and its streets, where the Archduke was killed, became the starting point of the war. Vienna, the capital of Austria-Hungary, was where the ultimatum was drafted and the declaration of war was signed, and its ministries and palaces were the scene of the decisions that led to war. Berlin, St Petersburg, Paris, and London were the other capitals, each with its own ministries, generals, and monarchs, and the telegrams that passed between them in July 1914 traced a network of communication that spanned the continent. The crisis was therefore a European crisis in the fullest sense, and its geography shows that the war was not a Balkan war that spread but a European war that began in the Balkans. The railway lines that carried the mobilising armies, the telegraph wires that carried the ultimatums, and the borders that the armies crossed were the physical infrastructure of the crisis.

The Balkans as the Powder Keg of Europe

The Balkans were described, before 1914, as the powder keg of Europe, and the metaphor captures the region’s instability. The Balkans had been the scene of the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of nationalism, and the competition of the great powers, and the region’s small states — Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro, and Romania — were caught between the ambitions of Austria-Hungary and Russia. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 had shown that the region’s states could change the map by force, and they had increased the confidence of Serbia and the fear of Austria-Hungary. The assassination at Sarajevo was a Balkan event, but it was the great powers that turned it into a European war, and the Balkans’ role was to provide the spark, not the fuel. The geography of the Balkans — its mountains, its mixed populations, and its position between empires — made it a place where nationalism and great-power rivalry intersected, and the July Crisis shows how a local conflict in such a place could draw in the whole of Europe. The Balkans remained a source of instability after 1914, and the region’s history in the twentieth century, including the wars of the 1990s, shows that the questions raised by the July Crisis — of nationalism, of empire, and of great-power intervention — did not end with the First World War.

The Railway Timetables and the Map of War

The railway timetables of 1914 were as important as the map, because they determined how quickly armies could mobilise and where they could go. The great powers had built their railway networks for war, and their mobilisation plans were based on detailed timetables that specified which trains would carry which units to which stations on which days. Once mobilisation was ordered, the timetables took over, and the armies moved according to a plan that had been rehearsed for years. The German plan required the rapid movement of armies through Belgium, the French plan required the concentration of armies on the German frontier, and the Russian plan required the movement of armies to the German and Austrian frontiers. The timetables left little room for political decision: a delay of a few days could disrupt the plan, and the generals warned their governments that mobilisation, once begun, could not be stopped. The railway timetables are a reminder that the July Crisis was not only a diplomatic crisis but a crisis of technology and organisation, in which the machinery of war moved faster than the diplomacy that might have stopped it.

9. Outcome and Legacy

The War That Followed and Its Settlement

The outcome of the July Crisis was the First World War, and the war’s outcome was the defeat of Germany and its allies in November 1918. The peace settlement, negotiated at Versailles and in the other treaties of 1919–20, redrew the map of Europe, imposed reparations on Germany, and created the League of Nations. The settlement was controversial from the start: Germany regarded it as unjust, the new states of Eastern Europe regarded it as incomplete, and the victors disagreed among themselves about its terms. The settlement’s failures contributed to the instability of the interwar years and to the outbreak of the Second World War. The July Crisis is therefore remembered not only as the beginning of the First World War but as the beginning of a period of European history that lasted until 1945, in which the questions raised by the crisis — of nationalism, of empire, of alliance, and of the use of force — were fought over in two world wars. The crisis also left a legacy in the study of history: the diplomatic documents of July 1914 were published in full, and they have been studied by generations of historians, making the July Crisis the best-documented diplomatic crisis in history.

The July Crisis in Historical Memory

The July Crisis occupies a central place in the historical memory of the First World War, and its centenary in 2014 was marked by conferences, exhibitions, and publications across Europe. The crisis is remembered as a warning about the dangers of miscalculation, the rigidity of alliances, and the failure of diplomacy, and it is often cited in discussions of contemporary crises, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to the tensions of the present day. The crisis is also remembered through its places: the street in Sarajevo where Princip fired, the Latin Bridge, is marked by a plaque and a museum; the palaces of Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg are preserved as museums; and the battlefields of the Western Front are maintained as sites of remembrance. The memory of the July Crisis is not only a matter for historians: it is part of the public understanding of how wars begin, and it shapes the way people think about the responsibility of leaders and the importance of diplomacy. The crisis’s legacy is therefore both historical and practical, a case study in the origins of war that continues to be studied by diplomats, soldiers, and historians.

The Centenary of 2014

The centenary of the July Crisis in 2014 was marked by a major international effort to understand the origins of the First World War, and it produced a new wave of historical writing. Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, Margaret MacMillan’s The War That Ended Peace, and Sean McMeekin’s July 1914 were among the books published for the centenary, and they reopened the debate over responsibility for the war. The centenary also saw exhibitions in Sarajevo, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and London, and commemorative ceremonies in the capitals of the former belligerents. The centenary showed that the July Crisis remains a live subject, not only for historians but for the public, and that the questions it raises — about the causes of war, the responsibility of leaders, and the possibility of avoiding war — are as relevant today as they were in 1914. The centenary’s most important legacy was the reminder that the war was not inevitable, and that the decisions of July 1914 were choices, made by people who could have chosen differently.

10. Leaders and Key Figures

Berchtold, Bethmann Hollweg and Sazonov

The leaders of the July Crisis were, for the most part, men who had spent their careers in diplomacy and who understood the risks they were taking. Count Leopold Berchtold, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, was the man who drafted the ultimatum and who pushed for war, believing that Austria-Hungary’s prestige required a decisive response. Berchtold was not a warmonger by temperament, but he was convinced that Serbia must be punished, and he was willing to accept the risk of a European war. Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the German Chancellor, was the man who gave the blank cheque and who tried, too late, to restrain Vienna. Bethmann Hollweg believed that the crisis could be localised, and he was slow to understand that Russia would intervene, but he was also the man who, on 4 August, admitted to the Reichstag that Germany’s invasion of Belgium was a breach of international law. Sergey Sazonov, the Russian Foreign Minister, was the man who insisted on supporting Serbia and who ordered mobilisation, believing that Russia’s honour required it. Sazonov was not a warmonger either, but he believed that abandoning Serbia would destroy Russia’s position as a great power. These three men, and the other leaders of the crisis, were not monsters but officials who made decisions under pressure, and their story is a reminder that wars are made by people, not by impersonal forces.

The Kaiser, the Tsar and Edward Grey

The Kaiser, the Tsar, and Edward Grey were the other central figures of the crisis, and their roles show the different ways in which leaders could influence events. Kaiser Wilhelm II was impulsive and inconsistent, giving the blank cheque in early July and then, on reading Serbia’s reply, suggesting that there was no longer any reason for war, only to be overruled by his generals and his chancellor. Tsar Nicholas II was weak and indecisive, ordering partial mobilisation and then general mobilisation under pressure from his generals, and exchanging telegrams with the Kaiser that neither man could act on. Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, was the most persistent advocate of mediation, proposing a conference and warning Germany of the consequences of war, but he was hampered by the ambiguity of Britain’s position and by the fact that his warnings were not believed in Berlin. Grey’s failure is often cited as an example of the limits of diplomacy, but his efforts show that a peaceful solution was sought, even if it was not found. The leaders of the July Crisis were, in the words of Christopher Clark, sleepwalkers: men who walked towards war without fully understanding where they were going, and who, when they did understand, found that it was too late to turn back.

Gavrilo Princip and the Conspirators

Gavrilo Princip, the assassin of the Archduke, was a nineteen-year-old student from Bosnia, a member of Young Bosnia, and a believer in the unification of the South Slavs. Princip and his fellow conspirators were young, idealistic, and poorly organised, and their plot nearly failed: the first assassin threw a bomb that missed, and Princip himself was on his way home when the Archduke’s car stopped in front of him. Princip was arrested immediately, tried, and sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, because he was too young for the death penalty, and he died of tuberculosis in prison in 1918, before the war he had helped to start had ended. The conspirators’ story is a reminder that the July Crisis began with the act of a small group of young men, and that the decisions of governments turned that act into a world war. Princip is remembered differently in different places: in Serbia he is a hero, in Bosnia a controversial figure, and in Austria a terrorist. His legacy, like the legacy of the crisis itself, is contested, and it shows that the meaning of an event depends on who is remembering it and why.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the July Crisis?
The July Crisis was the diplomatic crisis of June and July 1914, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June to the outbreak of the First World War in early August, in which the great powers of Europe moved, step by step, from a local Balkan crisis to a general war.

What was the blank cheque?
The blank cheque was Germany’s promise to Austria-Hungary on 5–6 July 1914 of unconditional support, whatever Vienna decided to do against Serbia. It removed Vienna’s fear of Russian intervention and committed Berlin to the consequences of Vienna’s actions.

Why did Austria-Hungary issue an ultimatum to Serbia?
Austria-Hungary issued the ultimatum on 23 July 1914 to punish Serbia for the assassination and to destroy Serbia as a political force. The ultimatum’s ten demands were designed to be unacceptable, above all the demand for Austro-Hungarian officials to take part in the investigation on Serbian soil.

Why did Russia mobilise?
Russia mobilised in defence of Serbia, which it saw as a fellow Slav state and a client, and because its leaders believed that abandoning Serbia would destroy Russia’s standing as a great power. General mobilisation was ordered on 30 July 1914.

Could the First World War have been avoided?
Historians disagree. Some argue that the war was the result of deliberate decisions, above all by Germany and Austria-Hungary, and could have been avoided if those decisions had been different. Others argue that the structure of alliances and the arms race made war likely, though not inevitable. Most agree that there were moments in July 1914 when a different decision could have stopped the war.

Who was responsible for the First World War?
Responsibility is debated. The Treaty of Versailles blamed Germany, Fritz Fischer argued that Germany deliberately sought war, and Christopher Clark argued that all the great powers shared responsibility. The debate continues, and most historians now emphasise the shared responsibility of several governments rather than a single culprit.

Sources

• Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1967)
• Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012)
• Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (2013)
• Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to War (2013)
• The British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, edited volume
• Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914 (1952)