My country is dying

The country I was born in and love is dying. The last week has seen a bare majority in polls for the Yes campaign in Scotland and all three main political parties in Westminster signal their support for a package of measures to radically devolve power to the Scottish government should it remain within the United Kingdom. Whichever way the vote goes, these developments have convinced me that the Britain I love is all but gone, and will not be seen again in my lifetime.

I should say from the start that the Britain I believe in is not simply the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the political union of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Should the No campaign prevail and, as seems likely, Gordon Brown’s plan for greater devolution be adopted, my Britain would still be a thing of the past, for all that the Union would remain.

There are two strands to my Britishness, the political and the cultural. I’ll deal with each in turn. My political vision of Britain has been influenced more than anyone else, I have come to realise, by such an unlikely figure as the late Tony Benn. I disagree with the majority of his politics, but I once spent an evening listening to him wax lyrical about the history of parliament and British radicalism, and a devotion to both has stuck.

I believe in a Britain in which all nations send elected representatives to a single parliamentary assembly, which is to all intents and purposes the highest authority in the land. I like the simplicity of it, I find having such power invested in a democratic body awesome and majestic, and it reflects where the British constitution, in its tangled and contradictory wanderings over the centuries, has come to rest. I like the multinationalism of it, based not on the borders traditionally occupied by one European linguistic-cultural group, but incorporating several. I do not care to justify the history of its formation, but to celebrate what it has become. For all that this was brought about by (to put it crudely) conquest in Wales, colonisation in Northern Ireland and dynastic chance in Scotland and England, then what has resulted is a polity which is forced to incorporate multiple nations, peoples and identities, and to do so not by splitting them off, dealing with them separately and playing them against each other, but by gathering them together in one parliament and letting them govern together

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I do not pretend that as it does exist or has existed the British Parliament is perfect, but the vision is there and inspires me. Indeed, in many ways this vision has never existed: just as Parliament made its most recent lurch towards a more perfect democracy, expelling most hereditary peers from the House of Lords, devolution was beginning to eat away at its unity. And now the vision will never be.

Further devolution of the kind proposed would break the British Parliament, even if the Union remained. The core historical reason for parliaments was to raise taxes, on the grounds that subjects ought to be represented on decisions of how to dispose of their property. Giving Scotland its own tax-raising powers destroys this ancient linkage, and would intensify the West Lothian question about Scottish MPs voting on English matter which do not affect them. So much power would be devolved to Edinburgh that the unified British Parliament at Westminster, if one even exists, would be a façade. It would be forced to either fragment entirely, or to only sit together on the remaining shared matters, largely defence and foreign policy, with perhaps some macroeconomics, making it a rather strange and rarefied political body, far removed from the jack-of-all-trades assembly we have now and which, for all its faults and shortcomings, I love.

From the political vision of many nations under one parliament, my cultural Britishness follows. Listen to Scottish nationalists like Alex Salmond or (as I did at the recent Greenbelt festival) the writer Alastair McIntosh, and you would think British identity is an imperial left over, all about nostalgia for when more of the globe was coloured pink and Britannia ruled the waves, about Horseguards and Her Majesty. But that is very far from what I think modern British identity is, can be and should be.

Because the  Scots, English and Welsh have all had to make room for each other under the umbrella ‘British’, then there’s enough inherent flexibility in it for others to join in too. Migrants and their children and grandchildren from the Caribbean or the subcontinent aren’t asked to give up their separate identities at the door but, like everyone else in Britain, is invited to keep it and be British as well. Because I’m already English and British, it doesn’t matter if my neighbours want to be British and Pakistani: we’re both British and we both live on the same street.

This is what makes Britain better than France or America, say. In those countries, national identity very much requires the stripping away of other loyalties and preferences. Modern Britishness is a triumph over the nationalism that has scarred Europe for two centuries. Because of the doublethink involved in being simultaneously British and [insert here], and because being British forces one to accept rather different people as being British as well, then we have thankfully been unable to take nationalism as earnestly as the rest of Europe.

Britishness is a triumph over imperialism, too, or at least it should be. This seems an odd thing for a former imperial power to claim. What I mean is this. Look at the later stages of the British Empire, and it is a remarkable diverse place: Indians, Africans, Arabs, Asians and, of course, the white British rulers all labour under it. But it is pervaded by racism and oppression, all excluded from power except the British, who put themselves on a civilising mission: it is doing diversity wrong. Now look at modern Britain: many of its inhabitants come from former imperial possessions, and live and work alongside the native English, Scots and Welsh. They are free and equal citizens, irrespective of race, and their cultural and religious expression is protected by law. We live in an experiment, never before tried, of people from all over the world living together as equals and trying to keep their own distinctiveness while also forming a greater whole. This is doing diversity right.

Neither the proponents of independence or of greater devolution would agree that their plans, which herald the end of my political vision of Britain, also herald the end of my cultural, or rather multicultural vision. But I worry that the yoking together of two old European nations, the English and Scots, and forcing them to forge an identity together, is the central prop of British inclusiveness without which the whole delightfully broad tent will collapse.

It is melodramatic to say that multiculturalism will end with the Union, but those who think that our society’s tolerance and appreciation for diversity and equality will continue unchanged if Scotland secedes, in whole or in part, are taking those things for granted. Where we draw our borders matters. The structure of our political institutions matter. Both independence and DevoMax are predicated on the idea that for a nation to effectively look after its interests it must not share power with other nations, but be alone. How can we talk of the need for greater understanding and cooperation in the world if the English and Scots are unable even to set a common taxation policy? A Britain which cuts itself in two is one which has concluded that the problem of coexistence is too hard, and has given up the struggle against divisive nationalism.

I am aware that my chosen vision of Britishness probably betrays me as a middle-class Englishman and that for many others, not least millions of Scots, Britain does not look the same, but I do not think it has any less nobility for that. I am taking what is happening in Scotland hard for three reasons, each bringing its own layer of emotion.

 First, as I strongly identify as British, I cannot help but feel rejected, unwanted. Second, I am having to face the future collapse of my vision of my country; I mourn for it. Third, and most uncomfortably, I am having to confront the fact that my Britain has failed on the terms I have set out for it: I see Britain as a multi-nation project, and a large part of one nation is dissatisfied. I see Britain as diverse, but its largest and longest-standing minority feel neglected. I see Britain as democratic and representative, and I want Parliament to be a body in which all can trust that their voice will be heard and their interest protected, but the core of the case for independence or devolution is that it is not. This leads to a host of self-doubting questions.

Am I naïve to think that the nations of Britain could rule themselves in a single assembly? Am I such a complacent English liberal that I’ve neglected the needs of others in these islands? Is a unitary Parliament actually a poor way of protecting the interests of minorities against majorities and the provinces against the centre? My belief in the intrinsic worth, equality and common humanity of everyone leads to me to treat national labels as unimportant: is it so foolish to think we should structure our politics on the same principle?

I don’t know where I go from here, in terms of identity. Physically, I know that from here I will be going to Scotland in the days after the vote, to live there for several years at least. Despite what I’ve written here, I am greatly looking forward to it; Scotland is also a country which I love. But what will I be when I’m there? Will I be an Englishman? Will I be welcomed and incorporated into whatever Scotland eventually emerges from the coming upheaval? Will I be able to still be British?

I sincerely hope that the answer to the last question will be YES, whatever answer come from the referendum; I have enough trust in the generosity and ingenuity of the Scots that they will allow me that. But it will not be being British as I know it now, because my country is dying, and when it is finally gone, I will find myself in a foreign land.

Assisted Suicide and Unassisted Regicide

A record number of peers wanted to speak in last Friday’s House of Lord’s debate on the Assisted Dying bill, from a wide variety of viewpoints and professions, but to my knowledge none of them had actually administered lethal drugs to a terminal patient, which cannot be said of a 1936 debate in the same chamber on a not dissimilar Voluntary Euthanasia Bill.

Lord Dawson of Pell, the president of the Royal College of Physicians, had gained fame by saving George V’s life in 1928. He opposed the bill’s setting up of legal safeguards within which a dying patient could choose to end their own life. Rather, he thought ‘the guidance of [euthanasia] properly lies within the medical profession itself’. Doctors knew better than legislators.

This was not an opinion he held in the abstract, but that he applied to his patients, including royal ones. Earlier that same year, as George V lay dying of bronchitis, Dawson had issued a famous bulletin that ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close’. He made sure of it later that evening by administering a lethal dose of cocaine and morphine to the King.

His action was only revealed by the release of his diary in 1986 [subscription requited], as was his reasoning: he timed his patient’s death to ensure it made the morning edition of The Times rather than later evening papers, thinking this was the proper way for the public to be informed of their monarch’s death – he even telephoned his wife so she could ensure The Times was ready for the announcement.

Dawson’s actions would have been roundly condemned in the debate on Friday. Speakers in favour of the bill emphasised patient choice and control, the very option of suicide being available having an empowering and positive effect. Baroness Warwick of Undercliffe quoted the late Baroness David:

‘If I were terminally ill, I believe that I would be the only person with the right to decide how I die and whether I preferred palliative care to assisted dying. It would provide me with an additional option on how to end my life, which I would find tremendously reassuring, whether or not, in the end, I decided to exercise that option’

 Viscount Dawson (he gained the title after George V’s death) barely made reference to such things:

That can only be decided by her doctors, who know the thoughts and feelings of the patient and the realities of her state. This is something which belongs to the wisdom and conscience of the medical profession and not to the realm of law. [Emphasis mine]

Dawson’s diary suggests that he alone made the decision about the King’s death, without consulting the other attending doctors, and that the monarch had no say in the timing, or indeed the act of being ‘assisted’ in his death at all. This is the kind of death no-one in 2014 is arguing for: for all that it might be born of compassion it takes the power from the patient and puts it in the hand of the doctor. From the debate, it seems that the present bill’s purpose is to give power to the patient themselves, that by giving them some measure of control over their death they can confront it more easily.

Some of the debate looked at the doctor-patient relationship. Lord Brennan put it starkly: ‘This Bill dismantles the Hippocratic oath by creating two kinds of doctor: those who will not help you to kill yourself and those who will.’ This division is however preferable to the third option offered by Dawson: the doctor who will kill you, even when you haven’t asked them to.

Lord MacKenzie of Culkein, a former nurse, worried that in practice the ‘authorised health professional’ the bill allows to assist a patient in their death would end up being a nurse rather than a doctor, and that this would damage their relationship with patients:

I do not want nurses to be in a position where in the course of their normal duties a patient might say—it could be said as a joke, but it might be said seriously out of concern by a vulnerable patient—“I hope, nurse, you’re not one of these who assist dying”, or perhaps in the more vernacular, “I hope you’re not one of these who bumps people off”.

So it was at the deathbed of George V. His last word were not, as legend has it, ‘Bugger Bogner!’, but rather a mumbled ‘God damn you’ to his nurse, Sister Catherine Black, as she sedated him for the last time. True to Lord Mackenzie’s fears that the practical care given by nurses would extent to assisted dying, Dawson initially expected Black to administer the fatal dose. She refused, and he had to the deed himself.

Looking over the 1936 debate on voluntary euthanasia, I was shocked by the attitude shown by the proposer of the bill, Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, towards the terminally ill. He cited approvingly Captain Oates, who sacrificed himself while injured in an attempt to save the remainder of Captain Scott’s doomed expedition to the South Pole, as an example for patients to follow.

Your Lordships may say the cases I have quoted are those of noble acts of self-sacrifice for others and the cases that come under this Bill will be acts of people who are sparing themselves pain. I think that is a mistaken notion. I think in many of these cases consideration for others will be uppermost in the and of the patient; in fact to go so far as to say that that the consciousness of being a burden, the despairing veiw that you yourself are no longer of any use, the prolonged anxiety of others of which the patient is aware, may be as poignant as the suffering itself.

This is precisely the attitude feared by the opponents of today’s bill. Lord Tebbit made one of the few jokes of the debate while discussing the danger to the frail, ill and elderly:

They—or perhaps I should say, looking round the House, “we”—are a financial drain ... The Bill would provide a route to great savings in public and private expenditure, and to a great pressure on the elderly, the sick and the disabled to do the decent thing and cease to be a burden on others. Those who care for such people are all too familiar with the moments of black despair that prompt those words, “I would be better dead, so that you could get on with your life”.

Happily, Lord Ponsonby’s view was not in evidence in the modern House of Lords. The Earl of Glasgow angrily rejected the idea that such motivations were behind the Assisted Dying bill:

It has nothing to do with coercing vulnerable old people into killing themselves. Yet our opponents ... talk about this being a slippery slope that could lead to the eventual demise of the frail, disabled or mentally ill. No, it does not. No, it is not. The Bill is about personal choice and the alleviation of unnecessary suffering—the choice to decide how, where and, to a small extent, when you want to die.

However, for all that no peer would any longer suggest that terminally ill patients should kill themselves for being a burden to others, the same may not be true of all medical professionals, according to a disturbing story told by Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne:

I am the visitor beside the bed of a very sick, motionless and almost speechless friend. In comes a doctor who, during a brief two-minute patient record check, comments loudly that this patient would be better off dead. Five minutes later, an agency nurse comes in. I thank her for her work to ease the patient to a more comfortable head position. She answers, “This patient should be dead; we need the bed”. I murmur an objection, fearful that the patient can hear and will feel distressed. The nurse replies, “All these old people taking up NHS space should not be allowed to survive. Those beds are needed for the living”.

If such views are still expressed by some doctors and nurses in private, it is at least progress that this is shocking, and that it is no longer acceptable for someone to claim in public debate that the terminally ill killing themselves to be less of burden to the living is ‘the act of a brave man and of an English gentleman.’

The death of George V is no model of assisted dying, as it was the killing of an unconscious patient by a doctor without the consultation with his colleagues or the patient’s family, never mind with the express instructions of the patient himself. I mention it not as a warning of what assisted dying might become, but rather because both it and that year’s later debate on euthanasia reveal how attitudes have changed.

I have deep misgivings about both the ethics and the practicalities of assisted dying but comparing the two House of Lords debates, separated by 78 years, I am oddly heartened. As a society we have divested ourselves (in public at least) of unpleasant and dangerous attitudes, both the arrogance of the medical profession that they know better than patients and the awful expectation that ‘burdensome’ members of society should sacrifice themselves. I still don’t think we have a society or health service that could handle assisted dying well (if indeed any society can do so) but perhaps we’re getting there.

A Clash of Anniversaries

Today is St Vitus’s Day. The day is particularly significant in Serbian history, as in 1389 it saw the Battle of the Field of Blackbirds (or Kosovo) in which the expanding Ottoman Empire destroyed the Serbian army and set the course for centuries of Ottoman dominance of the Balkans.

By 1914, that dominance had collapsed. The nineteenth-century had seen the creation of an independent Serbia, and during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, Serbia had increased its territory by 80% at the Ottomans’ expense. 28^th June 1914 was the first anniversary since the Kosovo battlefield had come under Serb control.

For the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, then visiting the town of Sarajevo in Austrian-ruled Bosnia, the day had a different significance. Fourteen years earlier, Franz Ferdinand had humiliated himself in front of the Austro-Hungarian court in order to marry her. Emperor Franz Josef did not consider Sophie Chotek a suitable wife for his heir, since although she was an aristocrat, she did not come from one of the great European dynastic families.

The Emperor only grudgingly gave his consent to the marriage on condition that Sophie would not have the title of Empress and that their children would not have the right to inherit the Habsburg throne. The Archduke was so in love and determined to marry Sophie that he swore an oath to this effect on 28^th June 1900, and married her three days later.

The Archduke and his wife were not popular at court, and one reason (aside from their upcoming wedding anniversary) Sophie was so determined to accompany Franz Ferdinand on his 1914 tour of Bosnia was that, being far from disapproving Vienna, they could officiate at public events together. Although they had received various warnings about the dangers of going to such an unsettled region, the couple were relaxed and felt welcomed, even shopping at the Sarajevo bazaar a few days before their official visit to the town. The Archduchess rebuked a Bosnian Croat leader who had said it was too dangerous for the couple to visit:

‘You are wrong after all […]. Everywhere we have gone here, we have been treated with so much friendliness –and by every last Serb too– with so much cordiality and unstimulated warmth that we are very happy about it’

She could not have known that, as she walked through the narrow streets of Sarajevo’s bazaar, that she and her husband were being shadowed by a young Serb named Gavril Princip.

Princip likely did not know about the significance of the 28^th June to the royal couple, but he was deeply familiar with its associations for Serbs. He was part of a group of perfervid Serbain nationalists who saw themselves in the tradition of Miloš Obilić, legendary Serbian hero of the Battle of Kosovo, who had assassinated the Ottoman Sultan. Like Miloš, they were prepared be martyred in the attempt, either at the hands of their enemies or by their own cyanide capsules.

Their targets were the Archduke and his wife. It was Princip who fired the fatal shots, which led Europe into the Great War, and gave us a very different anniversary to remember .

Sleepwalking again?

I recently read Christopher Clark’s excellent and informative tome The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. He sets out to understand the July Crisis (the confusing sequence of diplomatic moves which linked the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand to the outbreak of the Great War thirty seven days later) as a modern international crisis. Far from monolithic imperial states jostling with each other, Clark portrays the jostling between government departments, officials and personalities that produced policy and pronouncements and traces the way these were transmitted to other governments, both through (often contradictory) diplomatic communications and through the echo chamber of the international press. It is difficult to summarise his thesis, as he doesn’t have an explicit explanation for the war, except that no-one really intended it (though if it came to a war, they were ready to fight it, by Jingo!), and that the chances of a war were increased by each of a number of factors including (but not limited to):

·         the polarisation of Europe between the Entente powers of Britain, and Russia, and the Central powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary

·          the willingness of international players to commit themselves strongly in the tinderbox of the Balkans

·         an unwillingness to think through how one’s own actions might appear to another state

·          the developing view in Britain, France and Russia of Austria-Hungary as an empire on the verge of collapse with no legitimate interests outside its borders

·         an upsurge in militarism, particularly France, in the years before 1914

·         an anti-German phobia in the British press and political class that viewed its intentions as predatory and dishonest, focused particularly on the Kaiser

·         Russian enthusiasm for pan-Slavism and supporting Slavic peoples beyond its borders

·         An ambiguity on the part of the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, who privately committed Britain to support France and Russia, but denied any alliances in public. This meant that on the one hand France felt insecure and upped its military spending, while on the other Germany was confident Britain would not intervene in a European war.

The list could be doubled many times over, but these are the ones that particularly stick in my mind when comparing the world in 1914 and 2014. Clark’s great strength is in making the July Crisis feel contemporary, by giving it a cast of worried politicians and obsessive policy wonks. Looking at the international stage a hundred years later, the actors themselves may have changed, but the roles and portions of the script seem very familiar. A century after the catastrophic breakdown of the international system of European world empires, how much has changed? Allow me to hand out some prizes for similarities.

The Wilhelm II Award for Closeted Homoerotic Bombast must surely go to Vladimir Putin. While he may have swapped the Kaiser’s fabulous collection of uniforms for topless photo-ops, the Russian President has constructed a hypermasculine image of himself, simultaneously bringing a certain amount of domestic respect (rather more than Wilhelm, at any rate) and Western ridicule. Indeed, the Western media’s obsession with Putin as the autocratic driver of an aggressive policy mirrors its previous portrayal of the Kaiser. See this piece on how the media regularly fits Russia and its leader into the ‘threatening autocrat’ box. This isn’t to deny the truth of many of the charges against Putin; indeed, he fits the box rather better than the Kaiser, who had far less say in the running of his government and was terrified at the prospect of an actual war. But there is a striking similarity to the ‘press wars’ which preceded the Great War, in which the newspapers of different nations frequently panicked about each other’s ambitions and painted each other as bellicose imperialists. Putin’s defence of annexing Ukraine in the name of defending its Russian inhabitants has echoes of Imperial Russia as the defender of the Slavic people, which can only be worrying for the Baltic states which have large Russian minorities. Annexation is classic Great Power stuff.

However, the outraged rumblings among hawks in America also have the feel of the old Great Powers about them, and they are worthy recipients of the Raymond Poincaré Medal for Blinkered Paranoia.  They worry about how Russian success shows up their own impotence, and demand action in response. There is little consideration how their own actions, in extending NATO to the borders of Russia and planning for a defensive missile shield, are seen by Russian hawks as aggressive.  They deny that Russia has any legitimate interest in Ukraine, while at the same time project American military power across the world. I don’t mean to say that Russia does in fact have a right to intervene in what it regards as its backyard. But there is a similar hypocrisy to American objections to Russian actions in Ukraine and Georgia after their own invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as there is in the French spluttering over the 1908 Austrian annexation of Bosnia before making Morocco a French protectorate in 1911 (having sent in troops, incidentally, on the pretext of protecting the European population). The international system is viewed by its main benefactors in a similarly one-sided way.

There are many worthy contenders for the Habsburg Memorial Prize, awarded to that state or empire made up of many nationalities, whose chaotic politics make it appear to be constantly about to collapse. The EU, a multilingual bureaucratic nightmare of a polity to rival the Austro-Hungarian Empire if ever there was one, is a strong runner, but seems oddly calm so far this year, with no worries (yet) of the imminent exit of its indebted Mediterranean members as there has been in previous years, and the possibility of a British exit is (thankfully) unlikely to materialise for several years, if at all. However, there are other wavering polities about: Ukraine itself is obviously terribly divided, Britain has an upcoming referendum on Scottish independence, and Spain is facing an increasingly assertive movement for Catalan independence. These all deserve recognition, so I shall have to invent some more categories. The Irish Home Rule Bill Prize for Country That Looks Most Likely to Descend into Civil War goes, without a doubt, to Ukraine. The Ottoman Cup for Inability to Deal With Breakaway Regions must go to Mariano Rajoy, whose government is refusing to accommodate Catalan nationalists, which looks likely to provoke a unilateral response.

This means the Habsburg Memorial Prize goes to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This isn’t intended as a prediction of dissolution, but instead one of hope: the Habsburg Empire was able to greatly extend its life through the Compromise of 1867, giving essentially separate jurisdiction to Hungary and the Austrian lands, and Franz Ferdinand himself was an advocate of greater federalisation. Indeed, the parallels between the UK in 1914 and 2014 are striking: in 1914 the imminence of Irish Home Rule and the likelihood of civil war loomed over the nation, and people wondered just how the rest of the United Kingdom might get on following the devolution of power and/or secession of one part of it. ‘Home rule all round’ was the slogan proposing greater devolution of powers to all the nations, and it’s started to be picked up again as a rallying cry in our own times. Today, we similarly ponder the consequences of Scottish independence or ‘devo-max’. I don’t approve myself of the splitting of countries simply on the basis on nationalism (this, in fact, is one of the lessons of 1914), but I predict that whatever the outcome of the Scottish referendum, we shall hear similar proposals about greater devolution and power for regional governments across the UK.

We come now to the Sir Edward Grey Trophy for Unhelpfully Ambiguous Diplomacy. In recognition of Grey’s love of cricket, it is a small urn containing the ashes of Neville Chamberlain’s umbrella. In an accolade even more unwelcome than his Nobel Peace Prize, I award it to the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama. It is not often I agree with Neil Ferguson, but the comparison he draws here (behind the Times paywall, I’m afraid) is too apt. Sir Edward Grey walked the difficult tightrope of promising support to France in private, while denying any such continental entanglements in public (and, indeed, in Cabinet meetings). As the world’s greatest power, it is conceivable that had Britain made more explicit its support of France and Russia in 1914, Germany and Austria might have been cowed into backing down. Similarly, Ferguson and others think that the current international status quo depends on the world’s foremost power, the USA, being more explicit about its willingness to support its allies (South Korea, Japan, Israel, the Baltic members of NATO) against rising, threatening powers (Russia, China, Iran). Unlike Ferguson, I think both these interpretations are based on a militaristic wishful thinking, and that greater commitment would be as likely to raise tensions as solve problems.

While it’s possible to draw many parallels between 1914 and 2014 as years of international crisis, there are thankfully elements Clark identifies as preconditions for the Great War that are absent. There isn’t a theatre or region in which the big actors have so committed themselves that a local crisis could escalate into a global conflict. In 1914, the Russians were busy committing themselves to Serbia, with French blessing and tacit British approval, while the Germans were happy to offer unconditional support to Austria-Hungary. Consequently, when the First Balkan War of 1912-13 and the Second Balkan War of 1913 were followed by another conflagration in 1914, the result was not the Third Balkan War but the First World War. Looking at the trouble spots of the world today nowhere quite contains the series of dominoes that the Balkans in 1914 did. In the Middle East, an Israeli and/or US intervention in Syria and/or Iran now seems unlikely in itself, and unlikelier still to provoke an armed response from Russia on behalf of her allies. No-one has proposed the West goes to war over Ukraine or Crimea. However, one can see there are areas that might develop such a trigger mechanism. Should Russia start fiddling around in Lithuania, say, in the way it has in Ukraine, then it would force NATO to weigh its willingness to go to war against its alliance commitments. The dispute between Japan and China over the Senkaku/ Diaoyu  Islands also threatens to drag the US into a regional conflict. Indeed, the comparison with 1914 has already been made by no less a figure than Shinzo Abe, the Japanese Prime Minister, who said  Japan and China were like Britain and Germany a century ago.

However, despite some sabre-rattling, there does not appear to be a resignation to war on the part of any of the international players. Although none of the Great Powers actually intended war in 1914, many soldiers and diplomats were convinced that one was coming (because of the other chaps, obviously), and were quite prepared to fight it when it did. It was fatalism that led Germany to mobilise against Russia, reckoning that it was better to fight before the latter’s militarisation was complete. Russia and France, too, assumed that a conflict with Germany was inevitable, and armed themselves for it. Austria-Hungary and Serbia equally thought they would one day come to blows, whether or not they wanted to. Today there is thankfully no such sense of looming conflict. China’s rise is being greeted peacefully and does not appear to portend global war. It is difficult to imagine Russia, China, America and the European nations seriously considering war with each other. Everyone simply has too much to lose.

After a century, we have, perhaps learnt that it is a good idea to avoid the horrors of war, even it is probably the threat of nuclear annihilation rather than the dreadful cataclysm of 1914-18 that has taught us it. Therefore the final prize, the Gavrilo Princip Medal for Sparking Global Conflict will not be awarded this year. But it is only May.