Rationality is no safeguard against another world war

One hundred years ago today, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the outbreak of the first world war, and whose effects ultimately stretched even to the second world war. Are there any lessons here? Is there only one lesson to be learned - that you can learn nothing from history? Or are we doomed to repeat history if we don't learn anything from it?

History will not repeat itself exactly, but wars have repeatedly occurred throughout history, even great wars. We are living in an age in which a war between the great powers is viewed as unlikely, because the outcome would be so devastating that each party will do their utmost to avoid it. Rationality seems to prevail in our times. But no war would have been waged if the losing side, or even both sides, knew the outcome in advance.

The beginning of the first world war will not repeat itself as the First World War in Asia, 100 years later, in 2014. But there are striking similarities between the era leading to the first world war and current developments in Asia: the anniversary of the first world war signifies the danger, not the inevitability, of a new world war to come.

The year 1914 is a symbolic representation of the risk that a war among the great powers could erupt although nobody would benefit from it. It is symbolic of the problem that rationality is no guarantee of avoiding self-destruction.

All reckoning about a repetition of such a war in Asia is based on the assumption that it would be in no one's interest to fight a large-scale war, even without weapons of mass destruction, the use of which could lead to the destruction of great parts of the region. But what if conflicts in Asia were not fought to pursue national interests so much as recognition? What would this mean: to be accepted as an equal again after humiliation in the course of European colonisation and subsequent American hegemony? Indeed, acknowledgment of past suffering seems to matter to many Asian nations. Are those desires merely irrational or a different kind of rationality?

The first world war is foremost a lesson that a limited conflict could escalate into a nightmare of millions of deaths and unspeakable suffering, for which no rational explanation could be found. Military aims and strategies took priority over meaningful political purpose.

Although the generals of the German empire believed they were relying on Clausewitz's theory of war, in fact they perverted it. Tactics replaced strategy, strategy substituted politics, politics gained momentum above policy, and policy was militarised. It was as if everybody was saying: being at war would mean a stop to thinking.