FOR over 25 years, Archduke Franz Ferdinand paced up and down in his palaces and castles waiting impatiently for the death of the ever more ancient emperor, his hated uncle Franz Joseph I. As we all know, his wait was in vain.

Of this summer’s great anniversary commemorations of World War I, the most important will be those marking the assassination on June 28, 1914 of Franz Ferdinand, the “original sin” from which all the terrible subsequent events followed. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne has come to symbolize everything backward and myopic about pre-1914 Europe. With his ostrich-feather hat, medaled bulk and waxed mustache, he was a sitting duck for a young radical with a cheap semiautomatic. In his apparent archaism, no leader could contrast more with the horrific modernity of his eventual postwar inheritor: the young Adolf Hitler, a gaunt Everyman with a toothbrush mustache and a raincoat.

In the public perception of history, Franz Ferdinand is thought to have had a mere walk-on role. But that is a measure of how low the Hapsburg empire had fallen. In an early-20th-century world of exuberant American and Russian expansion, of Britain and France as global colonial powers and of the newly united nations of Germany and Italy, the Hapsburg empire seemed ever more marginal. And yet the challenges and opportunities of the empire — encompassing a huge region, widely varied terrain, all of Europe’s religions and a dizzying variety of languages — are still relevant today. Franz Ferdinand was heir to an entity which now forms all or part of 12 modern states. Somehow, despite linguistic and religious disputes that could result in riots and legislative gridlock, it worked.

Following a deal in 1867, the empire had been split into two giant pieces, one ruled by German speakers in Vienna, the other by Magyar speakers in Budapest. Both groups formed large minorities in their own halves and had to ride wave after wave of nationalist agitation. The German speakers were distracted by the mesmerizing existence of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany on their doorstep; and it was in Vienna that both modern anti-Semitism and the logical Jewish response, Theodor Herzl’s Zionism, were created. The Magyar speakers were isolated by their language, and rule over their half was spent in a frantic but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to “Magyarize” the other nationalities — a battle that was played out bitterly across schools, churches and armies.