Constructing the July crisis

the practice of recognition and the making of the first world war

Michelle Murray

pp. 68-85

in: Christopher Daase, Caroline Fehl, Anna Geis, Georgios Kolliarakis (eds), Recognition in international relations, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015

Abstract

The decade preceding the First World War saw the major European powers become embroiled in a series of crises that threatened general war. In each of these crises, the great powers confronted one another about the nature of the European order and inched the Continent closer to war through increasingly aggressive and dangerous threat making. On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, initiating the final diplomatic crisis before the war. Like the four that preceded it, no European power had a vital material interest at stake in the dispute, and for most of July the great powers worked to resolve the crisis short of war. However, unlike the crises that went before, the great powers were not able to resolve their differences: on 1 August, Germany declared war on Russia, bringing about the start of World War I. Why were the European powers able to solve the previous diplomatic crises short of conflict, whereas the July Crisis quickly escalated to continental war? What was it about the events of July 1914 that pushed Europe over the precipice to war?