The Road to Europe’s Apocalypse

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since...

min read

Vladimir Dedijer’s long-neglected The Road to Sarajevo remains one of the finest guides to the assassination that changed the course of the twentieth century. Later this month, on July 28th, the world will quietly pass the 112th anniversary of one of history’s defining moments. On that day in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. Within days, Europe’s elaborate alliance system would lurch into motion. By August, the Continent, which had largely been at peace for nearly a century since Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, was engulfed in the ‘war to end all wars.’ The First World War would claim more than 20 million lives, bring about the downfall of four empires, redraw maps from the Baltic to the Levant, and sow the seeds of Bolshevism, fascism and, lead ultimately to an even deadlier World War within the next two decades. The catastrophe that led to the First World War began with seven young conspirators waiting to assassinate Archduke Franz Ferdinand – the heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne - on the streets of Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. Few episodes in modern history have generated so vast a literature from so small a stage. By 1939 itself, as Europe stood on the brink of World War Two, nearly 3,000 books and pamphlets had already appeared on Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Among this formidable library stands one unjustly neglected masterpiece. Yugoslav author-politician Vladimir Dedijer’s Road to Sarajevo, published in 1966. It deserves to stand beside other great ‘origin’ classics of WW1, namely Luigi Albertini’s monumental The Origins of the War of 1914 (1942-43); Barbara Tuchman’s riveting narrative history The Guns of August (1962) and Christopher Clark’s celebrated The Sleepwalkers (2012). If Albertini reconstructed the tangled diplomacy that led to the Great War, Tuchman recreated the drama and Clark the intricacies of the European system, Dedijer illuminated something that few authors could ever possess on the subject -the historical and political psychology of Bosnia and its peculiar political turbulence. Tangled Geopolitics As a Bosnian Serb by birth and a Partisan fighter under Tito during the Second World War, Dedijer, later to become one of the former Yugoslavia’s foremost historians, brought to the origins of the First World War not merely archival diligence but an intimate understanding of the land, its people and the tangled skein of its many ethnic nationalisms. What distinguishes Road to Sarajevo from the shelves groaning with WW1 books is the balance of its historical imagination. Dedijer understood that Sarajevo was simultaneously a provincial Bosnian town and the fault line of European geopolitics. He neither elevates the 19-year-old Gavrilio Princip – the student activist and Franz Ferdinand’s assassin - into a nationalist martyr nor reduces him to a terrorist in search of notoriety. Princip emerges as a product of a peculiar political ecology born from the cauldron of Habsburg rule, South Slav nationalism, youthful idealism and the febrile atmosphere created by the Balkan Wars. Few historians have so convincingly captured the tension between individual agency and the larger historical forces that converged on June 28, 1914. Conspiracy Theories One of the book’s great pleasures lies in its treatment of the extraordinary historiography surrounding the assassination. Dedijer is less interested in peddling yet another grand theory than in forensically dissecting the countless theories that others invented. The result being that The Road to Sarajevo reads like a controlled Umberto Eco novel – a febrile, yet historically grounded thriller populated by diplomats, spies, policemen, Freemasons, revolutionaries and ambitious politicians - each cast in successive generations as the hidden puppeteer pulling the strings on that fateful day in Sarajevo. Almost immediately after the Archduke’s assassination, the hunt for invisible hands began. The American historian Sidney B. Fay, whose landmark The Origins of the World War (1928) overturned the simplistic Versailles thesis that Germany alone bore responsibility for the conflict, accused Serbia of failing to warn Vienna despite prior knowledge of the conspiracy. Bernadotte E. Schmitt’s meticulous two-volume The Coming of the War, 1914 (1930) reconstructed the July Crisis with exemplary scholarship while Pierre Renouvin, himself a decorated veteran of the Great War, subjected the diplomatic record to equally rigorous scrutiny in Les Origines immédiates de la guerre (1925). Dedijer catalogues these competing claims with enviable detachment. Few crimes in modern history have attracted so many imaginary accomplices. Alfred von Wegerer, the German authority on the Sarajevo assassination, writing in 1937, suspected a Bolshevik hand behind the deed. His argument rested largely on testimony extracted from Karl Radek - the brilliant, caustic Polish-born Bolshevik intellectual - during Stalin’s infamous Moscow show trials. Leon Trotsky, who had visited Serbia several times before 1914 and knew some members of the revolutionary circles surrounding Princip, inevitably found himself drawn into the speculation, though he had consistently opposed individual acts of terrorism as a revolutionary method. Others found darker conspirators. Father Anton Puntigam, the Jesuit priest who administered the last rites to Franz Ferdinand, believed that international Freemasonry had engineered the assassination. Count Ottokar Czernin, later Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister and one of the Archduke’s closest associates, claimed Franz Ferdinand himself had confided that Freemasons intended to murder him. Under Nazi rule, such allegations acquired an unmistakably antisemitic colouring. Hitler’s party paper - Völkischer Beobachter - described Princip as both a Jew and a Freemason - a grotesque fabrication entirely in keeping with the conspiratorial obsessions of the Third Reich. Wickham Steed, the influential British journalist and historian, suggested remarkable negligence on the part of Sarajevo’s security arrangements while others hinted that the Hungarian Prime Minister, Count István Tisza, had maintained secret contacts with Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević - better known by his nom de guerre ‘Apis’ - the formidable chief of Serbian military intelligence and guiding spirit behind the clandestine Black Hand organisation. Franz Ferdinand’s own family entered the debate. His eldest son, Max Hohenberg, accused the German secret service of complicity. The charge proved inconvenient after Hitler annexed Austria in 1938; Max and his younger brother soon found themselves imprisoned at Dachau. In one of history’s stranger ironies, Hitler himself later blamed British intelligence for the 1914 assassination while justifying his invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941. A.J.P. Taylor, in his delightful review of Dedijer’s book for The New Yorker in 1966, observed that almost everybody eventually found themselves accused. Serbia, Russia, Germany, Britain, Hungary, the Bolsheviks and even American anarchists - all appeared, at one time or another, in the dock for Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Taylor’s own description of Dedijer remains one of the finest appreciations of the man: “He is a Yugoslav, not a Serb nationalist, and is not committed either to Pasic, the Serbian prime minister, or to Apis, the head of the Black Hand (though he was once dandled on Apis’s knee as a little boy).” Few historians have enjoyed quite such a colourful connection to their subject. Perhaps that explains the book’s extraordinary confidence. Dedijer neither sensationalises nor dismisses these theories. He simply lays them before the reader, examines their evidentiary foundations and wryly allows most of them to collapse under their own improbability. Every generation invents the conspiracy it deserves. Just as the assassination of Julius Caesar generated tales of omens and prophecies, and the murder of John F. Kennedy continues to nourish an endless conspiracy industry, Sarajevo has repeatedly become a screen onto which successive political eras have projected their own anxieties. But the book is perhaps even more vital - and rewarding - beyond the assassination itself. Behind Princip’s pistol stood decades of imperial rivalry, the slow retreat of Ottoman power, the ambitions unleashed by Italian and German unification, and the unresolved ‘Eastern Question’ that had vexed European statesmen since the Congress of Vienna. More signally, Dedijer anticipated a truth that later events would painfully confirm. The collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the brutality it unleashed demonstrated that the region’s history was a bottled djinn of unresolved grievances. Once uncorked, the questions of identity, sovereignty and historical grievance that animated Princip’s generation resurfaced, in a far more violent form, during the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo. There are books that answer historical questions. There are rarer books that teach readers how history itself is constructed. The Road to Sarajevo belongs firmly in the latter category. More than sixty years after its publication, this rich, humane and intellectually honest work deserves to find a new generation of readers.

From Concrete to Compute

Correspondent
6 hours ago
3 min read

How SN Subrahmanyan Is Shaping L&T's AI Future

For more than eight decades, Larsen & Toubro (L&T) has been synonymous with India's physical infrastructure, delivering metro systems, airports, power plants and some of the country's most complex engineering projects. Under L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan, however, the company's definition of infrastructure is expanding. Increasingly, it includes artificial intelligence, cloud computing, data centres and sovereign digital infrastructure the building blocks of India's next phase of economic growth.

That shift came into sharp focus at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, where SN Subrahmanyan joined NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang to unveil a strategic collaboration aimed at accelerating AI infrastructure in India. The announcement reflected more than a technology partnership; it signalled L&T's ambition to evolve from a builder of physical assets into an enabler of the country's AI-powered future.

An Engineer's Perspective on AI

Unlike many business leaders who entered the AI conversation as the technology gained mainstream attention, SN Subrahmanyan approaches it through the lens of an engineer. A civil engineering graduate, he joined L&T in 1984 as a project planning engineer and spent four decades leading some of the company's largest infrastructure businesses across India and the Middle East, including projects such as the Riyadh Metro, Doha Metro and Salalah Airport. After serving as Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director from 2017, he became Chairman and Managing Director in 2023.

That experience continues to shape his leadership philosophy. Rather than viewing AI as a standalone technology trend, Subrahmanyan sees it as an extension of engineering one that can improve planning, design, execution and operations at scale. During L&T's FY2024 Annual General Meeting, he described generative AI as a "game changer" and outlined how the company was embedding it across the project lifecycle to improve productivity and decision-making.

Why L&T Is Investing in AI Infrastructure

For L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan, AI is not only about adopting intelligent software; it is about building the infrastructure that makes large-scale AI deployment possible.

Through its collaboration with NVIDIA, L&T plans to develop one of India's largest proposed AI infrastructure ecosystems. The first phase includes expanding GPU capacity at its Chennai campus to approximately 30 megawatts while developing a 40-megawatt AI-ready data centre in Mumbai. The infrastructure is intended to support hyperscalers, enterprises, research institutions and government organisations building AI applications across manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, energy and the public sector.

The initiative aligns with Lakshya 2031, L&T's long-term growth strategy, which identifies digital infrastructure, cloud services and artificial intelligence as key growth engines. Alongside expanding AI-ready data centres, the company has strengthened its technology portfolio through investments such as its strategic stake in E2E Networks while leveraging businesses including LTIMindtree and L&T Technology Services to create an integrated digital ecosystem.

As governments worldwide race to build sovereign AI capabilities, companies that control compute infrastructure rather than just software are expected to occupy a strategic position in the AI value chain. L&T's investment signals that India's AI ambitions extend beyond developing models to building the physical and digital infrastructure required to run them at scale.

Building India's AI Backbone

Subrahmanyan has consistently argued that AI requires more than algorithms it requires infrastructure. As enterprises move from experimentation to production-scale AI, access to secure compute, cloud platforms and data infrastructure is becoming as critical as traditional industrial assets.

This philosophy reflects a broader global trend. Countries are increasingly investing in sovereign AI capabilities to reduce dependence on overseas infrastructure and strengthen digital resilience. L&T's strategy positions the company to participate in this transformation by combining its expertise in large-scale infrastructure delivery with emerging AI technologies.

For an engineering company known for constructing roads, ports and industrial facilities, building digital infrastructure is a natural evolution rather than a departure from its core strengths.

Leadership Beyond Technology

Despite leading one of India's most significant AI infrastructure initiatives, SN Subrahmanyan has consistently maintained that technology alone cannot drive transformation. In L&T's FY2025 Annual Report, he emphasised that while AI is accelerating innovation, long-term value will continue to depend on human judgment, responsible deployment and disciplined execution.

That balanced perspective reflects the leadership approach that has defined his career. Rather than pursuing technology for its own sake, he has focused on integrating new capabilities into L&T's long-standing engineering excellence and execution discipline.

From Concrete to Compute

As industries become increasingly digital, infrastructure itself is being redefined. The assets powering future economies will include not only highways, airports and power plants, but also AI factories, cloud platforms, GPU clusters and data centres.

Under SN Subrahmanyan's leadership, L&T is positioning itself at the intersection of these two worlds. The company's strategy is not about replacing concrete with compute; it is about recognising that tomorrow's infrastructure will combine both. If that vision succeeds, L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan may be remembered not only for leading one of India's largest engineering companies but also for helping build the digital foundations of the country's AI economy.