![]() ![]() Add to that the instability in Europe and the United States, as well as the palpable fear that instability has created, and surely 2016 is 1914 redux.īut here is the problem with such analogies: They latch onto similarities, flattening the particulars of each historical moment. Turkey is a member of NATO, an alliance system erected to counter Russian aggression. Both Turkey and Russia are led by authoritarians anxious to show their power. And when the dominoes fell, they fell with unimaginable consequences. The empires involved were too insecure to allow the moment of Ferdinand’s assassination to pass. What had once granted stability now almost assured chaos. A system of alliances that had kept peace, more or less, for a half-century had failed to adapt to the new realities of expanded empires, modern warfare and decaying monarchies. In 1914, Europe was a tinderbox in search of a spark. But the reality is that we have no idea what comes next, and if we act too assuredly, too trapped within the analogy, the odds of miscalculating grow exponentially. Such analogies give us a false sense of security, even when the antecedents are horrific: a sense that we know what’s coming next and how to respond, that everything is knowable and under control. But there is a real danger here, a danger that exists in any historical analogy that draws surface comparisons while ignoring particulars. Given the uncertainty of the current moment and the players involved, the pull toward such analogies is strong. That year, Bosnian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, setting in motion events that would result in World War I, a globe-consuming fight that left 17 million dead and Europe in ruins. Bill Kristol tweeted that the headlines had “an alarming 1914-ish feel,” and Owen Jones of the Guardian caught “a whiff of 1914 that is too pungent to be ignored.” Google searches for “Franz Ferdinand” briefly spiked. ![]() ![]() No sooner had the news broken that Andrey Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, had been assassinated than the comparisons to 1914 began to flow. ![]()
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