![]() Neither one of them wanted to back down and appear weak. As the U.K.’s Imperial War Museum notes, the killing put both Austria-Hungary and Russia, which saw itself as the Serbians’ protector, in a bind. Instead, the tension between European powers increased, as they took different sides in the crisis. “His assassination killed the idea, whether or not it was ever realistic to begin with, and radicalized Serbian defiance and Austrian determination to solve the nationalism problem for good, at least with respect to Serbia,” Fogarty says. “The assassination highlighted the nationalism that was pulling the Austro-Hungarian Empire apart at the seams,” Fogarty explains, noting that Serbian extremists actually wanted Franz Ferdinand dead because they feared he was too moderate and would promote a power-sharing arrangement that would keep Slavic peoples in the empire. He and his wife Sophie were shot to death in their car by a 19-year-old Serbian revolutionary, Gavrilo Princip. The archduke, who was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, went to Sarajevo to inspect the imperial troops stationed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. WATCH: How a Wrong Turn Started World War I That, in turn, was one of the factors that ultimately led to World War I, which Fogarty describes as “a war of empires, some expanding or seeking to expand, some keen to hold on to what they had, others trying desperately not to lose what they had left,” It was the first military conflict that featured aerial bombing, but as Fogarty notes, the real significance was that it exposed the shakiness of the Ottoman Empire and its slipping control over peripheral territories. The Italo-Turkish War ended with a peace treaty, but the Ottoman military left Libya and let the Italians colonize it. The Italian government set its sights on Libya, a North African country that hadn’t been claimed by another western European power, and decided to take it from the Ottoman Empire. The modern Italian state, which didn’t begin until 1861, had been “largely left out of the scramble that built Britain, France, and other powers into worldwide empires,” Fogarty explains. Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images Italian troops are seen here landing after the bombardment of Benghazi. The Italian government declared war on Turkey in 1911 because it had refused to permit the military occupation of Tripoli by Italy. “This turned Russian ambitions westward, especially in the Balkans, and influenced hardliners within the government to not back down in future crises.” That Russian combativeness helped trigger World War I less than a decade later. ![]() In addition, “Russia's expansion in the East had been stopped by Japan,” Beiriger says. France later convinced the Russians to enter into an alliance with the British as well, laying the groundwork for their alliance in World War I. Russia’s allies France and Britain, which were allied with Japan, signed their own agreement in 1904 to avoid being pulled into the war. The resulting war, fought both at sea and on land in China, was won by the Japanese, and as Beiriger notes, it helped shift power the power balance in Europe. The Japanese saw Russia’s rising aggressiveness as a menace, and launched a surprise attack on Nicholas’ fleet at Port Arthur in China. Russia’s Czar Nicholas II wanted to obtain a port that gave his navy and commercial ships access to the Pacific, and he set his sites on Korea. “The alliance system was critical to shaping the war, and even in helping bring it on: it created a set of expectations about international rivalry and competition, determining what kind of war Europeans imagined and prepared for.” Fogarty, an associate professor of history at University at Albany, explains. “To my mind, it is the coming together of the Triple Entente in stages-the Franco-Russian Alliance in 1894, the British-French Entente Cordiale of 1904, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907-that really solidified the system of diplomatic agreements that formed the main antagonistic blocs that went to war in 1914,” Richard S. It was the start of what would become the Allied side, the Triple Entente, in World War I. ![]() So the two nations decided to join forces for mutual protection as well. Both Russia and France, which had been humiliated in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, feared the rising power of Germany, which had already formed alliances with Austria-Hungary and Italy. ![]()
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