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Hello and welcome to the Rest is History. This I'm proud to say is the podcast that refuses to be

bound by format. Sometimes we like to ask the big questions, what are the lessons of history for

instance and sometimes we like to narrow our focus to a single year, the extraordinary events of 1981.

And sometimes we want to take you back to your nervous teams waiting to turn over your history

exam paper and today is just such a day. Our question has been asked and answered every June

for decades, what are the causes of the First World War? Dominic Sandbrook is with us and

Fetzer I think Dominic talked to you about this that you have some kind of quite radical views

on the subject. Yeah, heretical views. Yes, contrarian I think is the word that's always applied to you.

But before we get onto those contrarian views of yours, could you for the benefit of me who

never actually did the First World War for A level? Could you just run down? Give us a story.

How was it that the world went to war? Golly, that's a very big question. Well, I'll try to do

it as quickly as possible. So the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was divided into really

two main alliance blocks. So you had Russia and France with a sort of Britain semi attached to

the Russian and French alliance called the Antont. And then you had the central powers which were

Austria-Hungary which was perhaps Bergenpire and the newly formed empire of Germany. And

in 1914, in the end of June 1914, the Austrian throne, the Archduke-France Fertiland,

as many of our listeners will know, was assassinated in Sarajevo in Bosnia by a Bosnia-Serb

government called Gavrilo Princip. And the Austrians were furious as you might expect and they wanted

to launch a punitive war against Serbia. So after a bit of faffling around, they did. They'd got

...