405 Review which in the long run turned out to be irrelevant in the events of the war; we learn the details of the sophisticated international relations of the period, the system of alliances and its fluctuations, the intense diplomatic activity, as well as the painstaking military plans designed to ensure the earliest possible mobilisation of their troops. Yet we shall also hear the voices that are demanding peace and we shall see the launch of the first pacifist movements, alongside the failure of the international Socialist anti-war movement. It is therefore a history of diplomacy, of militia, of world geopolitics, of an emerging mass society, of explosive European nationalist movements, among them the Serb organisation “Young Bosnia”, with which Gavrilo Princip, the assassin, was involved, who, after a failed plot with bombs, by happenstance fired his Browning shotgun at Archduke Franz Ferdinand, killing him and his wife in Sarajevo. Undoubtedly these were the shots that lit the fuse. Nevertheless, without going on the guided tour that we as readers are invited to, one would not readily understand the impact of an assassination that could have merely resulted in the long list of killings of the period. On June 28, 1914 war was not inevitable. What MacMillan ultimately conveys is the prevailing climate of those warm summer months: war as a way out, the yearning to clean out in one fell swoop an atmosphere so heavily charged that it became stifling. A book that throws light on our present-day world by providing parallels that constitute food for thought on the underlying theme of war, not as a happening but as a result.
REVISTA IEEE 3
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