Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations used in footnotes
- Preface
- Introduction: How do we define modern police?
- 1 Five national police styles in response to popular unrest in the nineteenth century
- 2 Modern police and the conduct of foreign policy. The French police and the recovery of France after 1871
- 3 International police collaboration from the 1870s to 1914 Professional contacts between police administrations
- 4 War and revolution, 1914–1922
- 5 The threat of totalitarianism. Nazi Germany's bid for European hegemony
- Epilogue
- List of archival files consulted
- Index
4 - War and revolution, 1914–1922
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Abbreviations used in footnotes
- Preface
- Introduction: How do we define modern police?
- 1 Five national police styles in response to popular unrest in the nineteenth century
- 2 Modern police and the conduct of foreign policy. The French police and the recovery of France after 1871
- 3 International police collaboration from the 1870s to 1914 Professional contacts between police administrations
- 4 War and revolution, 1914–1922
- 5 The threat of totalitarianism. Nazi Germany's bid for European hegemony
- Epilogue
- List of archival files consulted
- Index
Summary
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, 1914
General remarks
Every historian who has written on the causes of the First World War has included in his account a description of the assassination of the Austrian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and of his wife, the Countess Chotek, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The motive for this double murder has not caused much disagreement. Contemporaries and historians alike have recognized it as the product of a sweltering feud between Serbia and the Habsburg monarchy dating from 1903. What the Austrian vice-consul in Niš reported about the views held among Serbian patriots in his town shortly after the double murder reflected prevailing opinion: Franz Ferdinand had to die because of his imminent succession to the Austro- Hungarian throne. Once becoming emperor, Franz Ferdinand was expected to attack Serbia forthwith because Russia, Serbia's great pan-Slav protector, would not be ready, militarily, to enter a war on its side for another five to six years.
It follows that most historians of 1914 have also mentioned the police problem facing Austria at that time. What they have not examined is whether Austria's police service in 1914 was guilty of negligence and incompetence, or whether the security needs, particularly in the Balkans, were no longer manageable by the police of the European states working only within their own territorial jurisdictions.
The question of an Austrian police failure
Had the security for the Austrian heir and his wife at Sarajevo been sufficiently rigorous, and were the Austrians laying the blame on Serbia to cover the failure of their own police?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rise of Modern Police and the European State System from Metternich to the Second World War , pp. 182 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992