WHAT IF... ARCHDUKE FRANZ FERDINAND HADN'T BEEN ASSASSINATED?

Professor Paul Miller-Melamed and Nige Tassell question the mythologised importance of the Sarajevo assassination over the last century, and whether it really made World War I inevitable

- Professor Paul Miller-Melamed and Nige Tassell

This is not an uncommon T question; historians have chewed it over for more than a century now. At its heart is the notion that had the heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, not been shot dead by Gavrilo Princip on 28 June 1914 - indeed, had he and his wife Sophie not visited Sarajevo, capital of Austrian-occupied Bosnia, on that weekend - then World War I would never have happened.

Without the Sarajevo assassination triggering a chain of events that led to the declaration of war a month later, years of bloodshed and slaughter could have been avoided and Europe would likely have been a very different place during the 20th century. Paul MillerMelamed, associate professor of history at McDaniel College in Maryland, sees this endless conjecture as largely optimistic in nature. "Most paint a positive trajectory. For example, the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire might have eventually unified with union," he says. "Then these central European powers could have constituted the seedbed for today's European Union, a union forged not in two world wars, but in peaceful economic interests."

TRIGGERING A WAR?

There are a number of other things that would have been different had there been no war. Firstly, there would have been no Hitler or Mussolini coming to power as a result of the grievances arising from the war's peace treaties, and there would have been no Bolshevik revolution in Russia, and so no Lenin or Stalin. "The only thing that I feel at liberty to say about subsequent events is that they could not have been any worse," asserts Professor Miller-Melamed. "It's simply impossible for me to imagine Europe following a worse trajectory than it did during the 20th century."