Many horrors of the 20th century began with an assassination that had a good chance of not happening. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sofia, in Sarajevo, on June 28, 1914, which would eventually trigger the First World War, occurred after an enormous accumulation of coincidences. The Bosnian writer living in France Velibor Colic, author of a novel about the assassination, Sarajevo Bus, described the crime as a “chaotic vaudeville.” Would the story have changed if it never happened? Maybe. The historian Christopher Clark argued that, if Gavrilo Princip, the author of the assassination, failed, Franz Ferdinand, who was not a warmonger, would have tried to avoid war.
Clark coined the concept of “sleepwalkers” – the title of his most famous book – to describe the way in which the great powers headed towards the disaster from which all disasters arose: without World War I the birth of Nazism cannot be explained, nor World War II, nor certainly the Russian Revolution and, therefore, Stalinism. Without being fully aware that their actions were going to lead the world towards destruction, European leaders moved steadily towards the abyss. When they realized the mechanism they had set in motion, it was too late to stop it.
Many analysts wonder if we are living in a new era of sleepwalking in Europe, one of the reasons why Clark’s extraordinary book had such an impact. And the attempted assassination this Wednesday of Slovakia’s prime minister, the populist Robert Fico, is especially shocking because it comes at a time when many Europeans think that anything—even a full-scale war with Russia—is possible. . No assassination is harmless, especially in places where history is as dense as central Europe. And much less in a time as volatile as the current one.
The data surrounding the attempted murder of Fico, who is in critical condition, is scarce. On Wednesday afternoon, Slovak authorities suggested that the crime was politically motivated. Fico is a complicated politician: an ally of the Hungarian Viktor Orbán, closer to Russia than to Ukraine, his views rarely coincide with those of the rest of the EU leaders, who have unwaveringly condemned the crime. Too many complex political issues come together in his figure for a clean resolution of the crime to occur, although one person has already been arrested.
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It took the police 34 years to solve the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme, killed in Stockholm in 1986 at the age of 56: in 2020, they named the crime to a guy who had been dead for 20 years. In the figure of Palme, one of the founders of European social democracy and one of the greatest symbols of honesty in politics, all the currents and conspiracies of his time also converged – although in a sign totally contrary to that of Fico. In the Europe of the Ukrainian war, with Russian networks roaming freely across the continent, a new assassination produces more than just concern. It is one more indication that we live in, unfortunately, interesting times.
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