Two shots, One World War and a Hundred Years

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Politics and history must trade carefully. The former has far too often exploited and manipulated the latter for its earthly and unearthly purposes. History has on the other hand offered at times the wrong lessons to politics. In both cases, the consequences have been disastrous.
World War One has always been a magnet for interpretation, analysis and dissection. The debate about the responsibility for the outbreak of the war has been one of the most polarised and polarising in history with historians and politicians on all sides digging-in to assign responsibilities to persons, countries and events.

World War One was cataclysmic: it brought death and devastation; it destroyed, cemented and created new states and nations; it mutilated families, brought dynasties and empires to an end; sparked revolution; created new world powers; it sowed the seeds for more war and created a florid debate about itself.

As its one hundredth anniversary approaches, Europe should also look back to WWI. I retain three lessons for this anniversary: the first has to do with the origin of the war, the second with its outbreak and the last with the war as such.
The first lesson is the illusion of interdependence as a bulwark against war. Europe before the war was interdependent, growing and open. Only in the 1980s did we again reach the same degree of globalisation we had before the First World War. Take Florian Illies excellent book 1913: the year before the storm. Illies quotes Norman Angell's 1909 international bestseller The Great Illusion: 'The era of globalisation is making world wars impossible, for the simple reason that international economic ties have already been too close for some time. (...) Alongside economic networks, international links in the communications sphere and, above all, in the financial world, are making war pointless (...).'
The idea that economic ties are the best immune-system against war is still popular today. Even if the EU did not exist, a war between European countries could never happen, some say. Close ties and interdependence make wars more expensive but not necessarily less likely. The outbreak of WWI in 1914 teaches us how fragile our interdependence can be and how quickly an established order can be reversed.
The second lesson is the relevance of choices and leadership. As Christopher Clarke puts it: European leaders 'sleepwalked' into the first great disaster of the 20th century. War was not inevitable, but Europe was faced with a leadership of gamblers who found themselves trapped in a system which left no room for de-escalation and negotiation. There was no common institution to act as an honest broker between dissenting interests, no one stopped the brinkmanship.
The third lesson of war was equality before the tragedy. It led to the realisations that in wars countries and states might win or lose a war, but peoples are all on the losing side. It is difficult to put it more succinctly than Erich Maria Remarque did in his All Quiet on the Western Front: “But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony - Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”