“It is nothing,” the archduke Franz Ferdinand is reported to have assured his adjutant as he and his wife lay bleeding in their car, struck down by the bullets fired by the assassin Gavrilo Princip. It was a brave statement perhaps, certainly deluded, and also plainly wrong. The archducal couple was dead within a few minutes, and the Sarajevo murders triggered a chain of events that ended ultimately in the First World War.

It was not, of course, the killing of the heir to the Habsburg throne that brought about the cataclysm, as Paul Miller-Melamed points out, but the decisions made by the rulers and governments of Europe in the days and weeks after Sarajevo. He contends that the real causes of the war are to be found in the capitals of the Great Powers, in “civilized” Europe, rather than in the Balkan backwater of Austrian-administered Bosnia-Herzegovina. At the same time, he also argues that the origins of the 1914–1918 conflict need to be studied from the perspective of the Balkans, and that the events on that fateful day must be embedded in the broader sweep of Southeast European history. Keeping both the international and the regional sphere in focus is a laudable ambition, and if done well, it can yield significant insights. Alas, in the case of Misfire ambition and achievement are uneasily matched.

There are some clever twists to the book, which is based on extensive reading of the secondary literature. The juxtaposition of assassin and victim, of Gavrilo Princip and Franz Ferdinand, makes for lively reading. Even so, there is little that is particularly new in Miller-Melamed's treatment of either man. That Princip was a troubled young man, radicalized or self-radicalized and ready to seek martyrdom in pursuit of his chosen ideological cause, few will deny. Whether it is helpful to speculate about a Freudian inferiority complex on account of his diminutive stature is altogether more doubtful, not least because here – as too often elsewhere – Miller-Melamed confines himself to an en passant remark, suggestive but not conclusive and, above all, not substantiated. Likewise, it is an odd omission on his part not to have considered the Habsburg archduke's profound clericalism. No doubt, as recent studies of Franz Ferdinand have shown, his political views were not of one piece, and nor was he the constitutional reformer manqué presented in the older literature. Even so, his pronounced clerical leanings shaped his outlook on politics in general and on international affairs too.

Miller-Melamed is on surer ground when dealing with the internal dynamics of Bosnia-Herzegovina, administered by Austria-Hungary since 1878 and annexed by Vienna in October 1908. But here, too, he tends to be allusive rather than incisive. This also extends to the author's treatment of Princip and his associates. He stresses particularly the fact that they did not espouse the idea of a Greater Serbia but were instead inspired by visions of a future Southern Slav or Yugoslav state. What precise shape their Yugoslavism took remains unclear. Similarly, the extent to which the latter might have been a cover for the regional ambitions of key players in Belgrade is not explored. But this is one of the many intricate knots that constitute the challenge of 1914. Miller-Melamed confidently asserts that Princip and his comrades “duped” Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević, the head of Serb military intelligence, into supporting them. Perhaps they did, but Miller-Melamed provides no evidence. Indeed, he rather skirts over the fact that the ultranationalist and regicide Apis pursued his own political agenda in his power struggle with the government of Nikola Pašić, in which an “incident” in Bosnia might well have been useful.

More disappointing still is the treatment of relations between the European Great Powers at the close of the long nineteenth century. This is complex terrain, of course, and anyone entering it will tread warily. It clearly is not Miller-Melamed's area of expertise, and in consequence the reader is treated to reheated notions that have been discarded by recent scholarship, such as the idea that Kaiser Wilhelm II's injudicious congratulatory telegram to President Kruger of Transvaal of 1896 was the opening act of the European war of 1914 or that the ententes were some form of alliances. Often, the version of events presented is somewhat hackneyed. The Bosnian uprising of 1875, for instance, led straight to the Berlin Congress three years later, without the reader hearing of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 and Russia's punitive preliminary peace treaty of San Stefano. The idea that they gave Italy free rein to attack Tripoli in October 1911 would, this reviewer suspects, come as a surprise to senior British diplomats. Baron Aehrenthal would similarly have raised a quizzical eyebrow at finding himself described several times as “the Russian ambassador” – he was, in fact, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador at St. Petersburg and later Habsburg foreign minister. And the reader is not spared the hoary old chestnut of Europe's leaders not responding to Franz Ferdinand's murder. If only!

The events at Sarajevo on that fateful June 28, 1914 are treated at some length, though without adding much to our knowledge and at the price of repetition (there is indeed considerable “padding out” here and throughout the book). But this raises a wider question. If, as Miller-Melamed argues, Franz Ferdinand's chauffeur's “wrong turn” on Sarajevo's Appel Kai was irrelevant, in sharp contrast to the many “wrong turns” by Europe's leaders after June 28, then one is left wondering why he treats those same events at such length but compresses what happened after Sarajevo into barely a dozen pages.

At the root of the book's flaws seems to lie a confusion about its aims and conceptualization, which its author's liberal spraying of other scholars with criticism cannot quite hide (for the sake of transparency, the reviewer catches a few droplets too). In consequence, it is neither an explication of the centrality of the Balkans to European power politics nor does it elucidate why Europe's statesmen were unable to prevent the Sarajevo crisis from spiralling out of control. Instead of laying to rest the mythology that has arisen around Princip's gunshots, Paul Miller-Melamed has resurrected older ones about linear developments that led to the outbreak of war in 1914, and that is far worse than “nothing.”