The first world war's commemorations reveal today's truths Europe's governments will present it as a lesson in the importance of unity, says Tony Barber The street intersection in Sarajevo from which Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28 1914 was, until about 20 years ago, graced by a plaque that saluted the assassin as a Serb patriot. On my first visit to the Bosnian capital in the 1980s, this startling inscription inverted my assumptions about the first world war and memory. In much of Europe it was, and is, common to remember the war as a tragedy that wiped out millions of lives, shattered the concept of inevitable human progress and set the stage for a still more frightful cataclysm in 1939. Yet the plaque in Sarajevo revered the bullet that plunged the world into disaster. Now all participants in the conflict are preparing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of its outbreak and a rolling series of war-related centennials up to 2018. It is safe to say there will be no pro-Princip plaques - the old one was destroyed in the 1992-95 Bosnian war and replaced by a neutral engraving - but it is still proving to be a delicate business. For no two nations, even among the victorious Allies, remember the war in the same way. To a certain extent, the commemorations will testify to the common humanity of former enemies. Britain and Germany are thinking about restaging the football game in Flanders that their soldiers played in no-man's-land, during a 1914 Christmas truce - before they resumed shelling, shooting and bayoneting each other. But the forthcoming events also promise to throw a fascinating light on how the war contributes to each nation's understanding of its own place and interests in the modern world. Far from disappearing into unread history books, the first world war resonates across a century with extraordinary freshness. The world the war left us, after the peace conferences of 1919-23, was unimaginable in 1914; but in important respects it is the world we live in today. The French and German governments will present the war as a lesson in the vital importance of European peace and unity - a message with direct relevance to today's eurozone crisis. But whereas the outbreak of war in August 1914 is sure to be scrupulously commemorated in cities, towns and villages across France, it will be a lower-key affair in Germany. This is not just because Germany opened proceedings by invading neutral Belgium. Nor is it because Germany went down to defeat in 1918, a shock that led to imperial collapse, territorial dismemberment, reparation bills, hyperinflation, extremist political violence, economic depression and Nazism. Rather, it is because the huge collective effort that Germany has made for more than half a century to confront and accept responsibility for the Third Reich's horrors has had the effect, for much of the population, of blanking out the country's national history before the 1933 Nazi takeover. The rest of the world can only admire modern Germany (in pre-unification times, the old West Germany, not the old communist East Germany) for telling the unvarnished truth to itself. Yet the focus on the Nazi era means that the first world war has receded to a corner of the German imagination not much bigger than the War of the Roses occupies in the English. That said, Germany will derive comfort in 2014-18 from playing its European tune. Not so Britain, with its increasingly ambiguous place in the EU. The UK's commemorations will mark the wartime alliance with France and the US, but they will pay special tribute to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa - English-speaking nations that rallied to the imperial mother country's cause at searing cost to themselves. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The first world war marked the moment when the national identities of Australia and New Zealand came of age. For post-apartheid South Africa, however, the war's defining event is not some hard-fought battle to help the British on the western front, but the sinking in February 1917 of the SS Mendi in the English Channel, a catastrophe that killed more than 600 black South African troops. In honouring its allies, the British - and the French and Americans - should take care not to forget Italy, whose grim alpine war against Austria-Hungary was anything but a sideshow. Just as the Italians were relegated to a secondary role at the 1919 Versailles peace conference, so they fret today that their wartime allies will not fully recognise their contribution to victory. It matches their sense of not being treated as equals by Germany and France in the eurozone crisis. Others will have different concerns. For Dutch-speaking Flanders, next year is an opportunity to promote its aspirations for greater autonomy within Belgium. Turkey will be braced for a campaign to highlight the massacre of Armenians in 1915. For the US, 2017 - the 100th anniversary of America's entry into the war - is the key date. President Vladimir Putin will no doubt seek to coat his authority with a resurgent popular pride in pre-communist Russian history but his countrymen well know that the first world war led to a Bolshevik coup, civil war, famine and eventually Stalinism. There are no straightforward answers. But perhaps the spirit of Franz Ferdinand will rest easy. On June 28 2014, Sarajevo is to host a concert given by the Vienna Philharmonic, representing Austria.