Can thinking about the past improve the way you handle the present? If so, this year’s centenary of the outbreak of the first world war could do the world a great service by persuading modern politicians to spend more time thinking about Sarajevo, and less time worrying about Munich.

“Sarajevo” and “Munich” are, of course, shorthand for the diplomatic crises that preceded the outbreaks of the first and second world wars. Yet the two events have been used to support very different approaches to international affairs. If leaders warn against “another Munich”, they are almost always advocating a tough response to aggression – usually military action. If they speak of “Sarajevo”, however, they are warning against a drift to war.

The British and the French are generally believed to have made a terrible mistake, which led to a wider war, by failing to confront Hitler during the Munich crisis of 1938. By contrast, most historians look back at the events provoked by the assassination of an Austrian archduke in Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 and are horrified by how heedlessly Europe slipped into war. Margaret Macmillan, author of a compelling new account of the outbreak of conflict, The War that Ended Peace, laments that – “none of the key players in 1914 were great and imaginative leaders who had the courage to stand out against the pressures building for war.”