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For comments and assistance with case material, we would like to thank Blake Allison, Dan Bogart, Pierre Landry, Nuno Monteiro, Brendan O'Leary, John Owen, Gary Richardson, Jonathan Steinberg, Yuhua Wang, Jessica Weiss, Alex Weissinger, seminar participants at Yale, ETH Zurich, Penn, Irvine, and Pittsburgh, and, especially, Alex Debs, Kevin Morrison, Tudor Onea, Andreas Wimmer, and the APSR editor and referees.
INTRODUCTION
A century ago the leaders of Austria-Hungary determined that Serbia's nation-building efforts were a mortal threat to their empire. A series of military victories in the Balkan Wars had so enhanced Serbia's prestige that increasing numbers of southern Slavs--not just Serbs, but Croats and Slovenes as well--came to identify with the idea of a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia whose existence could only come at Austria-Hungary's expense (Banac 1984). Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination in June 1914 was a convenient pretext to settle accounts with Serbia once and for all, through war. Meeting at a palace outside St. Petersburg in July 1914, Czar Nicholas II and his ministers decided to mobilize their army in response to Austria-Hungary's move, risking war with Germany even though Russia's military program was expected to improve its odds if war could be delayed for a few more years. Accounts of the decision stress Russian leaders' obsessive preoccupation with their empire's great power status, which they expected to suffer an irreparable blow should they fail to stand by their Serbian ally (Lieven 1983). International status competition was inexorably entwined with the period's revived Russian nationalism: "Nationalist ideology. . . insisted that Russia must be a great power. . ." Dietrich Geyer (1987, 317) concludes in his classic study; ". . . and demonstrated its ability to unite the nation, apparently able to integrate an old society riven by economic, social and political divisions. In a unanimity of view based for the most part on ideology alone, the wealthy and educated classes put themselves at the service of the government. The capacity of nationalism to mitigate internal conflict allowed Tsarist Russia to go to war."
This interaction between victory in war, the social identification of the individuals who comprise states, and the power and security of those states helped prime Europe for war in the...