The 1914 Breakdown: A geopolitical perspective.

2014

"Beyond their initial decisions which ultimately led to the First World War, the Austro-Hungarian leaders played a vital role in continuing and expanding the conflict to feed their territorial ambitions. Using previously secret material, Marvin Fried analyzes the Monarchy's aggressive and expansionist war aims in the Balkans. The conquest and subjugation of Serbia was but a cornerstone of a wider Austro-Hungarian imperialist dream of further annexations and the precursor to a hegemonic economic empire in the rest of South-East Europe. Was the purpose to make Austria-Hungary, in the words of one of its leaders, a truly 'European Great Power of the first order,' or were these simply the death throes of an obsolete empire, loathe to voluntarily part with its Great Power status and prestige? In either case, these war aims were 'life and death questions' for the Monarchy's leaders, without which there would be no peace and for which they were prepared to sacrifice enormous quantities of blood and treasure. Dr Marvin Benjamin Fried teaches First World War and Twentieth Century International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. His research focuses on the grand strategy, alliance diplomacy, and civil-military relations of the Central Powers during the First World War." http://www.palgrave.com/Products/title.aspx?pid=696913

Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 2013

The war, which began in August 1914 – to contemporaries the Great War, to posterity the First World War – marked the end of one period of history and the beginning of another. Starting as a European war, it turned in 1917, with the entrance of the US into a world war. The spark that triggered it off was the assassination of the Austrian heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1864−1914), by a Bosnian nationalist of Serb origin – Gavrilo Princip , a member of the Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna) movement, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 on his official visit to administrative centre of Bosnia-Herzegovina – the province that was illegally annexed by Austria-Hungary in October 1908 by breaking the decisions of the 1878 Berlin Congress. What is today the proponents of revisionist historiography hiding from the discourse is a very fact that the Austrian-Hungarian authorities did everything to directly provoke Serbs in this province for the sake to have formal casus belli for the aggression on neighboring Serbia. Therefore, Vienna organized a massive military exercise on the very border with Serbia to be attended by a warmonger Archduke F. Ferdinand exactly on the holiest day of Serbian history – the Kosovo Battle on June 28th (1389).

2015

War and Nationalism: The Balkan Wars 1912-1913 and their Sociopolitical Implications, 2013

(Includes Introduction authored by Blumi and Yavuz to the larger volume) War and Nationalism presents thorough up-to-date scholarship on the often misunderstood and neglected Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which contributed to the outbreak of World War I. The wars represented a pivotal moment that had a long-lasting impact on the regional state system and fundamentally transformed the beleaguered Ottoman Empire in the process. This chapter invariably also suffers from this methodological weakness in that it too mobilizes a narrow selection of events (at the expense of excluding others) in order to suggest possible interpretations of so-called origins and enduring legacies of the 1912–13 Balkan Wars. A major impediment to analyzing the disparate events identified as contributing to the Balkan Wars’ long-term consequences is in some part the result of focusing on specific administrative zones — the mountainous borderlands of Kosova, İşkodra, Serbia, and Montenegro known here as the Malësi e Madhe — without fully engaging seemingly peripheral events beyond these locales.

2017

The process of the two Balkan Wars (1912-1913) remained incomplete until the First World War started. The aim of this study is to give some informations about The First World War and the role that Balkan region played to this war when the national consciousness of Balkan peoples began to crystallize. After the two Balkan Wars, all the Balkan states continued their efforts to gather their co-nationals into their national states. It's concluded that the Balkan Wars leaded to the internationalization of this crisis spreading it to an ample area while many other crises at the same region were resolved without a general war in Europe. It appears that the First World War that began in 1914 in the Balkan region was a continuation of the wars that started in 1912-1913 period in the same are. İki Balkan Savaşı (1912-1913) süreci, Birinci Dünya Savaşı başlayana dek eksik kalmıştır. Bu çalış-manın amacı, Birinci Dünya Savaşı ve ulusal bilinçlerin belirginleşmeye başlayan Balkan halklarının...

B. Jacobs, W.F.M. Henkelman & M.W.Stolper (eds.), Die Verwaltung im Perserreich – Imperiale Muster und Strukturen. / The Administration of the Achaemenid Empire – Tracing the Imperial Signature (Wiesbaden 2017), 613-676