The Message That Might Have Saved the World

“Though a Serbian minister, Jovanović was an odd choice to carry out this assignment since he was close to the outfit, The Black Hand, which, supported by the Russians, was putting together the very plot against which he was supposed to inform.” Sanford Rose

Dolors & Sense

By Sanford Rose

KISSIMMEE Florida—(Weekly Hubris)—7/22/2013—This is a posting about a communications breakdown that contributed mightily to the onset of World War I—a conflict that can be said to have run, though not continuously, from 1914 to 1945, when World War II, which was really an extension of the World War I, ended.

The communicator who failed to communicate has a name: Jovan Jovanović.

He was the Serbian Ambassador to Austria in 1914. He was told by his boss, Serbian Prime Minister Pasic, to warn Austria that there was a plot to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, who was planning to visit the recently annexed province of Bosnia, which, then as now, was heavily populated with Serbs.

Though a Serbian minister, Jovanović was an odd choice to carry out this assignment since he was close to the outfit, The Black Hand, which, supported by the Russians, was putting together the very plot against which he was supposed to inform. (Indeed, he had been tapped by The Black Hand as foreign minister in the government it hoped to form after supplanting the prime minister who had handed Jovanović this job.)

Prime Minister Pasic, himself conflicted (https://weeklyhubris.com/the-lethality-of-unspoken-warnings/), probably didn’t intend Jovanović to do a very good job of communicating. Jovanović went a step farther. He did as bad a job as possible. He simply told the Austrian finance minister that the Austrian archduke’s visit was ill-advised because among the troops he was to inspect there might be a Serb who would load his rifle with a live round instead of a blank.

The Austrian finance minister felt he had nothing to relay to the archduke, who went to Bosnia and of course was assassinated by a civilian, not military, Serb fanatic planted in the crowd by The Black Hand.

To be sure, many would contend that the assassination of the archduke was not terribly important, in that: 1) Austria was already itching for a war against Serbia, which was sowing discontent among all its subject Slavic nationalities; and 2) Russia needed war in order to prevent Turkey from acquiring British dreadnoughts and thus jeopardizing its access to the Mediterranean.

While there is much to be said about the inevitability of World War I, the fact remains that the assassination triggered it and, what’s more, eliminated one of the powerful forces working for peace: the archduke himself. Though no warm friend of the Serbs, Franz Ferdinand was a vocal critic of Austria-Hungary’s treatment of its subject nationalities. Had he lived to reign in Vienna (Franz Joseph died in 1916), it is quite possible that he would have sanctioned reforms that would have defused the Balkan time bomb and thereby undermined Russia’s disingenuous claim that its interest in the area stemmed merely from its desire to protect its Slavic brothers from Austrian oppression.

The communication between Serbia and Austria in the 1914 period was mostly static. The one message that might have fundamentally changed the nature of the traffic—and not just between these two countries but throughout Europe and the world—just didn’t get delivered.