The paper deals with Western (Anglo-American) views on the Sarajevo
assassination/attentat and Gavrilo Princip. Articles on the assassination and
Princip in two leading quality dailies (The Times and The New York Times)
have particularly been analysed as well as the views of leading historians
and journalists who covered the subject including: R. G. D. Laffan, R. W.
Seton-Watson, Winston Churchill, Sidney Fay, Bernadotte Schmitt, Rebecca
West, A. J. P. Taylor, Vladimir Dedijer, Christopher Clark and Tim Butcher.
In the West, the original general condemnation of the assassination and its
main culprits was challenged when Rebecca West published her famous
travelogue on Yugoslavia in 1941. Another Brit, the remarkable historian A.
J. P. Taylor, had a much more positive view on the Sarajevo conspirators and
blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary for the outbreak of the Great War. A
turning point in Anglo-American perceptions was the publication of Vladimir
Dedijer?s monumental book The Road to Sarajevo (1966), which humanised the
main conspirators, a process initiated by R. West. Dedijer?s book was
translated from English into all major Western languages and had an immediate
impact on the understanding of the Sarajevo assassination. The rise of
national antagonisms in Bosnia gradually alienated Princip from Bosnian
Muslims and Croats, a process that began in the 1980s and was completed
during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Although all available sources
clearly show that Princip, an ethnic Serb, gradually developed a broader
Serbo-Croat and Yugoslav identity, he was ethnified and seen exclusively as a
Serb by Bosnian Croats and Bosniaks and Western journalists in the 1990s. In
the past century imagining Princip in Serbia and the West involved a whole
spectrum of views. In interwar Anglo-American perceptions he was a fanatic
and lunatic. He became humanised by Rebecca West (1941), A. J. P. Taylor
showed understanding for his act (1956), he was fully explained by Dedijer
(1966), challenged and then exonerated by Cristopher Clark (2012-13), and
cordially embraced by Tim Butcher (2014).
Anglo-American views of Gavrilo Princip