When Otto von Bismarck was asked what would start the next war in Europe, he replied “Some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”.

He was right.

The match that lit the fuse for the First World War was a little nebbish from Serbia named Gavrilo Princip.  He was able to parlay a failed assassination attempt in the morning, along with a snack and a chauffeur who got lost, into a clear shot at Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife.  It wasn’t great princes, or conniving politicians that sent Europe into a maelstrom, it was a 19-year-old ‘revolutionary’ who was made into a lever of history by a chance of time and place.

Princip was a member of a Serb nationalist cell in what is would eventually become Yugoslavia.  Somehow, (most indicators point to the Serbian intelligence services) they were tipped to the planned trip of the Archduke to Sarajevo and were able to get to the city with guns and explosives.  Their first attempt, in which a bomb was thrown at the motorcade, failed, but did manage to wound several people.  The group dispersed, and Princip apparently went into a shop to get something to eat.

In the meantime, the Archduke and his wife decided to visit the people who were hurt in the earlier attack, and had their chauffeur head to the hospital.  Unfortunately for them and the rest of humanity, their driver took a wrong turn, and ended up trying to turn around right in front of Princip.  The dastardly terrorist, or national hero, depending on who you are, whipped out his pistol and fired into the car, killing the Archduke and his wife.

Over the next few weeks, Austria-Hungary would declare war on Serbia, which would bring in the Russians.   Germany would declare war on Russia, in accordance with its defense treaty with Austria-Hungary.  A defense pact between the Russians and the French would expand the war to both sides of Germany’s borders.  Eventually, almost all of Europe would be engulfed, along with battles on the oceans, in Africa, Asia, and the Mid-East.

If Princip hadn’t been successful, would a European war have happened?  Probably, at some point, yes.  Germany, France, Britain, and Russia had all spent decades upgrading and augmenting their armaments.  They had locked themselves, with the sort-of exception of Great Britain, into an Edwardian version of Mutually Assured Destruction.  One of them going to war with any of the others would bring all of the others in.  I don’t really see a scenario where the great powers went to war in the first third of the 20th century without it ending up being very similar to what actually happened.  Something would have caused a war, and it just happened that an idealistic teenager with political murder on his mind set it all in motion.

So, some damned foolish thing happened in the Balkans, and it set Europe aflame.  In a way, Princip and his fellow conspirators were successful.  The war ended with the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian empire into smaller, ethnic countries, but the cost was very dear.