A war of words over 1914 centenary

How should the first World War be remembered? Some people had hoped that this year’s centenary of its beginning might be marked by a period of reflection and reconciliation. But that seems unlikely.

Every student of history knows the war started when Gavrilo Princip, a young Serb, shot dead the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914. A month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, precipitating the series of alliances that brought a cataclysm to Europe.

So Austria started the first World War, but was it responsible for it? There is no consensus on this question 100 years on. Would Austria have invaded Serbia without German support? Would the Serbs have resisted without the backing of Russia, their "brother Slavs"? Was Germany bent on a European war to press home its military advantage while it still could?

Serbian authorities, sensitive to enduring claims of state-sponsored terrorism, recently uncovered a document that they say proves Austria used the assassination as an excuse to provoke a final reckoning with the Serbs who were threatening its hegemony in the Balkans.

The letter, sent by the Austrian governor of the recently annexed province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1913, to the Austro-Hungarian minister for finance, refers to the dangers of a “union of all southern Slavs” and says the empire should prepare for “an inevitable large-scale war in a few years”.

Austrian newspapers have been dismissive of the letter, which they claim was poorly translated. The letter excoriates Serbia, it is true, but it also talks about an accommodation, with a “trade, customs and military agreement at least”.

Karl Habsburg-Lothringen, the grandson of the last Austrian emperor, Charles I, says Austria has nothing to feel guilty about. There were already “significant tensions” between Germany and Russia. “Many were already in the starting blocks, waiting for the great conflict. If you had to blame someone, then the greatest blame would lie with nationalism itself.”

In Britain, where the government is spending €60 million on commemorative events over the next four years – which will include funding memorials here, for soldiers from Ireland who fought in the British army – the centenary has started another round of the cultural war between left and right.

The film director Ken Loach, the actors Vanessa Redgrave, Jude Law, Alan Rickman and Timothy West, the politician Tony Benn and the writers Michael Morpurgo and Caryl Churchill are among the founders of No Glory, a group set up to counter what it believes will be a celebration of British militarism. They and many others signed the group's founding open letter, which says the war should be remembered as a "military disaster and a human catastrophe".

"Misbegotten shambles"
This month Michael Gove, the British education secretary, wrote an article for the Daily Mail that criticised "left-wing academics" and the depiction of the war in the 1980s Rowan Atkinson comedy Blackadder Goes Forth as a "misbegotten shambles". The first World War was just, Gove said, because of the "ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites, the pitiless approach they took to occupation, their aggressively expansionist war aims and their scorn for the international order", all of which "made resistance more than justified".

Tristram Hunt, the British Labour Party’s shadow education spokesman – and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society – responded by saying Gove was politicising the commemorations in the run-up to the European elections in May. “Few imagined the Conservatives would be this crass. The reality is clear: the government is using what should be a moment for national reflection and respectful debate to rewrite the historical record and sow political division.”

Then the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, joined the debate. The Germans were responsible for the first World War, he said – and would say so themselves. "The Germans are as they are today because they have been frank with themselves, and because over the past 60 years they have been agonisingly thorough in acknowledging the horror of what they did," he wrote in his Daily Telegraph column.

Germany has been remarkably quiet about how it plans to commemorate the first World War – a conflict that has always been overshadowed by the even greater catastrophe of the second World War.

Writing in the newspaper Die Welt in response to Gove, three German historians said that blaming Germany alone for the first World War was not only historically inaccurate but also politically dangerous. They pointed out that more recent accounts, including Christopher Clark's bestselling book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, have shared the blame around the main protagonists.

The official commemorations of the first World War start on June 28th in Sarajevo. The blame game has never ended.