Stumbling Into World War I, Like 'Sleepwalkers'
"And on the other hand, the young Balkan nations were ... young, virile, full of future. And of course, part and parcel of those narratives was an acceptance of the vitality and the positive value of nationalism as a force that was going to carry the future before it, with ethnically homogeneous populations. And of course, Austria-Hungary was anything but that. It was not ethnically homogeneous; it had 11 official nationalities and a few more unofficial ones."
On Italy's 1911 seizure of Libya from the Ottoman Empire
"I was writing about the Italian assault on Libya in 2011, exactly 100 years after this war had taken place. And suddenly the newspapers were full of headlines saying 'Airstrikes on Libya,' you know, Bengazi, Homs, Tripoli and so on. And these were exactly the place names that were coming up in my reading at the time. It is an odd fact that just over 100 years ago, the Italians attacked Libya; it was an unprovoked attack. Libya at that time wasn't called Libya, it was actually three different provinces, but it was an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. And it's the Italian attack on Libya that started this helter-skelter of opportunist assaults on the Ottoman patrimony that produces the two Balkan Wars and that make the First World War possible."
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