La decisión del Imperio Austrohúngaro de anexar los territorios de Bosnia y Herzegovina (1908) frustra el proceso de creación de la “Gran Nación Serbia”, razón por la cual diversos sectores de la sociedad Serbia complotan (con la colaboración directa de Rusia) para iniciar un conflicto armado en contra aquel Imperio.
52 “The cars rolled past houses and shops decked with Habsburg black-and-yellow and Bosnian red-and-yellow banners, towards the Sarajevan Muhamed Mehmedbasic, who had taken up a position by the Cumurija Bridge. As the cheers rose from around him he prepared to prime and throw his bomb. It was a tense moment because once the percussion cap on the bomb was cracked (…) there was not going back (…) The next assassin in line (…) was the Bosnian Serb Nedeljko Cabrinovic, who had places himself on the river side of the Quay. He freed his bomb and broke a detonator against a lamppost (…) Instead of leaving the danger zone immediately, the archduke saw to the treatment of the wounded and then ordered that the cavalcade should continue to the Town Hall (…) ‘Come on’, he said. ‘That fellow is clearly insane; let us proceed with our programme’ (…) The archduke asked Potoriek whether he thought a further attack was likely (…) Potoriek made a disheartening reply that he ‘hoped not, but that even with every possible security measure, one could not prevent such undertaking launched from close quarters’ (…) It was agreed that the tour of the museum should be cancelled, and the motorcade should proceed straight back to Apple Quay rather than up Franz Joseph Street as any further prospective assassin would presumably be expecting (…) The motorcade rolled back though the city in the gathering heat, westwards now, away from the City hall. But no one had informed the drivers of the changed itinerary. As they passed the bazar district, the lead vehicle swung to the right into Franz Joseph Street and the car carrying Franz Ferdinand and Sophie made the follow suit. Potoriek upbraided the driver: ‘This is the wrong way! We are supposed to take the Appel Quay!’ The engine was disengaged and the car (which had no reverse gear) pushed slowly back on the main thoroughfare. This was Gavrilo Princip’s moment. He had positioned himself in front of a shop on the right side of Franz Joseph Street and he caught up with the car as it slowed almost to a stop. Unable to disentangling in time the bomb tied to his waste, he drew his revolver instead and fired twice (…)” (Clark, 2013, pp. 370 – 374).
53 El asesinato del Archiduque Franz Ferdinand es el resultado de una serie decisiones desafortunadas. La visita a Sarajevo es altamente riesgosa, pues existe información (conocida por el propio archiduque) acerca de posibles atentados terroristas. La fecha elegida para dicha visita es inconveniente, pues en Sarajevo se recuerda la derrota que Serbia sufre a manos de los otomanos en 1389. La continuación de las actividades oficiales programadas es, cuando menos, negligente, pues la delegación del archiduque sufre un primer atentado a manos de los terroristas serbios. Finalmente, la omisión de informar de manera oportuna a los conductores de los vehículos de la caravana oficial el cambio de itinerario (utilizar la calle “Appel Quay” en lugar de la calle “Franz Joseph”) es trágicamente desafortunada, pues expone al archiduque a la acción de Gavrilo Princip (que espera en la calle “Franz Joseph”).
54 “(…) Alexander (…) understood that Napoleon wanted battle. If that was he wanted, that was exactly what he should not have. The Russians plan therefore was to fall back (…) By trading space for time, they would gain strength (…) As Napoleon chased the Russians in search of a battle, he exhausted his men and particularly his horses (…) By the time of the battle, the Grand Armée had already lost a third of its original 450,000 men –without a proper fight” (Freedman, 2013, p. 79).
55 “While Ford stuck with the Model T, the others set the pace with a greater range of new cars (…) He did not even appreciate how costumers, whose aspirations he had championed, were becoming more demanding about products, fickle in their tastes, interested in style, and self-indulging in their spending. He assumed that low prices would continue to persuade costumers to forego the novelties and gadgets offered by his competitors” (Freedman, 2013, pp. 481 y 482).
56 “Thomas Hobbes famously claimed that the state of nature –that is, the social condition without law and government- would be a ‘war of all against all’ in which life would be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ (…) It turns out that Hobbes was doubly wrong. His first mistake was relatively minor. Anthropologists now believe that humans mostly lived without law for the vast majority of their time on earth (…) Hobbes’s second, more serious mistake was to assume that the state of nature was a state of war. Although almost certainly brutish and short, human life, at least within the band themselves, does not appear to have been specially solitary or nasty. Human beings are social creatures and as such they worked together more or less peacefully in groups to collect food, raise children, and protect one another from outside predators (…) In other words, cooperation and order have not only been possible throughout human prehistory: they have been the norm (…) Hobbes was right when he claimed that without law there would be “no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society”. Civilization is possible only with a very high degree of social cooperation and interdependence, which, in turn, is possible only when a community has the ability to regulate social relations efficiently and effectively” (Shapiro, 2011, pp. 35 y 36).
57 “Power alone without some support from the people cannot ensure the survival of Leviathans. The Roman Empire lasted as long as it did because it replaced a collection of often-quarreling states and because, within its borders, peoples, foods and goods could travel freely along its well-built roads or across the Mediterranean, which had been cleared of pirates. Within the empire economic prosperity grew and people lived longer. Indeed foreigners moved into the Roman Empire rather than Romans moving away (…) The better Leviathans have consistent laws, reasonable taxes and security of property, and sometimes even, as the Roman Empire, a tolerance of different costumes and religions” (MacMillan, 2020, pp. 17 y 18).
58 “The ‘realization’ (i.e. the making real) of the legal system involves inscribing its categories and logics within the political, social, and economic realm. Viewed solely from the standpoint of realization (and, relatedly, efficacy, legitimization and domination), modern legal systems can be described in terms of various stages of development (…) In this first stage, positive laws are enacted on paper and applied by able and willing legal officials to citizens who obey for instrumental reasons (…) In the second stage, both legal officials and the citizens obey the law –precisely because they understand that law poses obligations for them (e.g. internalization). The third stage, the most advanced, is achieved when both legal officials and the citizenry unconsciously deploy legal categories and logic, not just because they are the law, but because they are experienced as simply the way things are (e.g. naturalization)” (Schlag y Griffin, 2020, pp. 14 y 15),
59 “(…) when legal rules do have distributive effects, the effect usually should not be counted as favoring or disfavoring the rules because distributional objectives can often be best accomplishes directly, using the income tax and transfer (welfare) programs. One reason economists have tended to favor this direct means of redistribution is that they reach all individuals and are based explicitly on income. In contrast particular rules affect only a relative small fraction of the population and ordinarily constitute relatively crude means of redistribution. For example, a pro-plaintiff tort rule will affect only people involved in accidents, and the resulting redistribution will be haphazard because whether and to what extent plaintiffs are poorer than defendants will vary greatly from context to context. In addition the income tax and transfer programs tend to involve less distortion