Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014. Chapters 5-Conclusion.
In the second half of his book, Clark considers not so much the conditions of Europe prior to the First World War as the prior events and decisions. There had been two Balkan Wars in the years 1911-1913, and the region had seen many conflicts over the centuries. Why did a third Balkan War precipitate a world war?
In 1911, as Clark has previously mentioned, Italy conquered Tripolitania, an Ottoman province, “triggering a chain of opportunist assaults on Ottoman territories across the Balkans.” This time, given the coalescence of two alliances in Europe, the weakness of the Ottoman Turks, and the self-perceived vulnerability of the Hapsburgs, “the conflicts of the Balkan theater” brought all of Europe into a much larger and more destructive fray.
Italy’s attack was “totally unprovoked” by the Ottomans. Italy was the third member of the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the past, Italian statesmen had refrained from doing anything that might damage the Ottoman Empire, which the alliance partners deemed a necessary stabilizing force linking Europe to the Middle East. But the recent English acquisition of Egypt and the French acquisition of Morocco inclined those countries to look with indulgence at a similar move by Italy. Italy’s allies disagreed, to no effect. “The Italo-Turkish War, today largely forgotten, disturbed the European and international system in significant ways,” inducing the first stirrings of Arab nationalism and “expos[ing] the weakness, indeed the incoherence, of the Triple Alliance.” The British, less concerned than it had been about Russian advances beyond the Black Sea, decoupled themselves from Ottoman security, leaving that task to the Germans, who had already invested in railway construction there, some twenty years earlier. “The gradual replacement of Britain by Germany as the guardian of the [Turkish] Straits at this particular juncture was of momentous importance, because it happened to coincide with the sundering of Europe into two alliance blocs.”
In the First Balkan War followed almost immediately after the Italo-Turkish War ended. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Montenegro moved against the Ottomans; Serbia, Greece, Romania and the Ottomans also seized sections of Bulgaria. And almost immediately after that war, the Second Balkan War broke out between Bulgaria and Serbia, allies in the first war. Although the Russian ambassador in Constantinople attempted to work out a deal with the Ottomans for security guarantees in exchange for free passage of Russian warships through the Straits, the Russian ambassador in Belgrade, Nikolai Hartwig, an ardent pan-Slavist and enemy of the Hapsburgs, urged a Serbian-Bulgarian alliance against the Ottomans, and this soon became Russian policy, albeit with much vacillation on the part of Russian foreign minister Sergey Sazonov. An accelerated military buildup ensued. This alarmed London and Paris, with British statesmen concerned about access to Persia and French statesmen concerned about substantial French investments in the Ottoman Empire. It alarmed Austria-Hungary even more, again leading to military preparations. Serbia had become “Russia’s salient in the Balkans, a “drastic diminution of Austria-Hungary’s political influence on the peninsula.” “Vienna’s axiom, that one must always maintain Turkey as the key ordering force in the region, was now irrelevant,” and its own irrelevance now loomed in what looked like the very near future. Equally alarming to Vienna, no one in Europe seemed to understand or care, since European states now thought in terms of the two major alliances; Britain and France in particular increasingly dismissed Austria-Hungary as “an anachronistic and doomed entity,” but even German statesmen seemed to be having their doubts. Indeed, in his current mood of quasi-Hegelian dialectic, Kaiser Wilhelm II regarded the Balkan wars as “part of a world-historical development that was going to drive Islam back out of Europe.” Even the ordinarily pacific Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand called for military confrontation with Serbia. On the other side, France’s premier, then President Raymond Poincaré, supported the Russians. His Chief of the Army General Staff Joseph Joffre, a devotee of the doctrine, “L’attaque, toujours l’attaque,” planned the recovery of Alsace and Lorraine with Russian and British military support.
Mutual suspicion between and among alliance partners stoked prewar militarism and detente. No statesman could be quite sure of the intentions of his international rivals or those of his friends. Would the Germans treat with Russia, the Habsburgs worried? Might there be a Russo-German partnership in the Balkans, or an Anglo-German agreement of some sort, Poincaré wondered. The British ambassador to Russia alarmed himself over a possible thaw between the Austrians and the Russians; there was also the very real “armed Russian penetration of northern Persia,” in contravention of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention. Further, “from the standpoint of the most influential German military commanders, it seemed blindingly obvious that the geopolitical situation was shifting rapidly to Berlin’s disadvantage,” that “a war between the two alliance blocs was inevitable over the longer term” and that “time was not on Germany’s side,” in view of Russia’s economic growth and “virtually infinite manpower” reinforcing a substantial rearmament campaign, beginning in 1910. The Balkan Wars and British foreign minister Edward Grey’s stated support of France and Russia against Germany in any future war didn’t improve the Germans’ mood, although Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, fearing a two-front war, reined in the more aggressive General von Moltke for a time. Nonetheless, German military planners did prepare for such a war, citing the 1905 Schlieffen Plan, “which aimed to resolve the problem of a war on two fronts by first mounting a massive strike against France, accompanied by a holding operation in the east.” But again, what if French and especially Russian military power gathered to the point that even that plan wouldn’t work? For his part, Sazonov advocated the seizure of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits, what he called “the natural crown” of Russian “efforts and sacrifices over two centuries of our history” and a path toward unifying the Russian government with its increasingly restive society. Seeking firmer international support, he sought “measures that would transform the Entente into a fully-fledged alliance,” what he called the “greatest alliance known in human history.” He was especially interested in reaching a deal with Britain on naval arrangements in the Turkish Strait. Russia, he wrote, “must still undergo a terrible struggle.” To prepare for this, he also needed to turn Serbian attention away from Bulgaria, a mere sideshow, and toward Austria-Hungary, an entity that could not withstand the impending “verdict of History” against it. That is, not only the Kaiser but the Russian Czarists were as much historicists as their Marxist enemies were, albeit with entirely different ideas about what ‘History’s’ judgment would be.
“By the spring of 1914, the Franco-Russian Alliance had constructed a geopolitical trigger along the Austro-Serbian frontier,” tying “the defense policy of three of the world’s greatest powers to the uncertain fortunes of Europe’s most violent and unstable region.” The French needed the Russians as a counterweight to Germany, whether for the reacquisition of Alsace and Lorraine or, more modestly, for self-defense. “Betting so heavily on enabling Russia to seize the initiative against Germany inevitably involved a certain reduction of French autonomy,” a risk Poincaré and his colleagues took “because their primary concern was not that Russia would act precipitately, but rather that she would not act at all,” or, if acting, might target Austria instead of France’s main adversary, Germany. And in fact, the Russians were ‘aiming’ Serbia against the Hapsburgs in order to secure “access to or control of the Straits.” “The Russian ministry of foreign affairs came to see a general war—which in effect meant a war begun in the Balkans—as the only context in which Russia could be sure of acting with the support of its western partners.” Clark cites this as an example of the security dilemma, whereby one state’s efforts to ensure its security makes other states feel insecure, leading to a spiral in which each one edges closer to war without intending war.
And so, the Austrians determined to check Serbian ambitions while the Germans reinforced the Bismarckian “policy of strength.” “That the policy of strength might antagonize Germany’s neighbors and alienate potential alliance partners was a problem successive policy-makers failed to address.” They exhibited the tendency that the Austrian jurisprudent Georg Jellinek had called, in his 1892 book, System of Subjective Public Laws, “the normative power of the factual,” whereby human beings “tend to gravitate from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity.” Historicist doctrines do nothing if not amplify this mindset in a ‘secularized’ world, even as doctrines of divine providence had amplified it in earlier times. “These narratives of inevitability take many different forms,” Clark writes, some of them indeed “appeal[ing] to the personal forces of History or Fate.”
Clark himself rejects inevitability, emphasizing the fact of statesmanlike agency paralyzed both by the complexity of a ‘multipolar’ world now increasingly but far from entirely ‘bipolar’ and by the fashionable doctrines of historical inevitability that both shaped their perceptions and justified their actions in their own minds. “The future was still open,” inasmuch as “none of the European great powers was at this point,” early in 1914, “contemplating launching a war of aggression against its neighbors,” even while all feared and prepared for war while entertaining hopes of detente.
The assassinations of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914 “destroyed the best hope for peace.” As one Austrian diplomat said at the time, “the archduke was always against war,” but even foreign minister Leopold von Bechtold, a childhood acquaintance of Franz Ferdinand and no warmonger, now prepared for “direct action” against Serbia, and the elderly Emperor Franz Josef agreed. Only the Hungarian prime minister István Tisza, strongly opposed to the late archduke’s intention to centralize the empire, felt “not grief” but “raw relief” at the murders, pointing to the likelihood that Romania would align with Russia in the event of war; “in view of the immense size of the Romanian minority in [the Austro-Hungarian province of] Transylvania and the indefensibility of the long Romanian frontier, Bucharest’s realignment posed a serious security threat.” As it happened, the Romanians had regarded the Archduke as a friend of the minorities within the empire, but given Tisza’s recalcitrance, both sides agreed to consult their German allies.
In Europe as a whole, “attitudes to the murders were refracted through the geopolitics between states.” The Germans sympathized with Austria-Hungary while the Russians cheered the news. The Serbians were stupefied by their compatriot’s act but didn’t regret it. England blamed Serbia; the Italians had “mixed feelings”; the French were distracted by a sex scandal. Russia’s response was the ominous one. The Russians falsely believed that the archduke had been “the head of an Austrian war party,” when the truth was quite the opposite. If so, then Austria’s outrage was feigned, a pretext for war, and the plot merely reflected “the local unpopularity of the Habsburg dynasty among the Southern Slavs,” having “nothing to do with Serbia” at all. And even if the assassin was a Serbian nationalist, no one in the Serbian government had anything to do with his plot, the Russians believed. All of this meant that Vienna had no right to punish Serbia, as no sovereign state could be held accountable “for the actions of private persons on foreign soil,” doubtless anarchists. Poincaré picked up the latter part of this argument; “neither London nor Paris intended to challenge the Russian version of events.” “The entire history of Russia’s sponsorship of Serbian expansionism and of Balkan instability in general was elided from view,” as was “any acknowledgement of Russia’s own links with the Serbian underground networks” that had planned the atrocity.
Contrary to the sentiments of the Entente countries, “for once, the German government was speaking with one voice,” assuring Austria-Hungary of its support in the event of punitive action. The Germans miscalculated on one thing, however, assuming that Russia would not come to the aid of the Serbs if the Austrians moved against them. They were so confident of this that they didn’t mobilize for what they expected to be a “localized” conflict—a “gross misreading of the level of risk.” After all, according to the Germans’ own analysis, wasn’t time “on Russia’s side”? And why would a monarch, the Czar, side with regicides, the Kaiser asked, rhetorically. “The Germans were unaware of the extent to which an Austro-Serbian quarrel had already been built into Franco-Russian strategic thinking,” and “how indifferent the two western powers,” France and Britain, “would be to the question of who had provoked the quarrel.” Even as the Germans expected a Balkan war to solidify Austria’s adherence to Germany, so the French expected that a Balkan war would solidify its alliance with Russia. That part, unfortunately for all concerned, proved correct, as in the end even Tisza went along with the Austrians. “No sustained attention was given to the question of whether Austria-Hungary was in any position to wage a war with one or more other European great powers,” perhaps out of confidence in the alliance with powerful Germany, perhaps because “the hive-like structure of the Austro-Hungarian political elite was simply not conducive to the formulation of decisions through the careful sifting and balancing of contradictory information,” and surely because “the Austrians were so convinced of the rectitude of their case and of their proposed remedy against Serbia that they could conceive of no alternative to it.” How else could Austria-Hungary remain “a great power,” if it couldn’t even punish little Serbia for an outrage quite likely committed with the knowledge of its rulers?
The new French ambassador in St Petersburg was Maurice Paléologue, a high school classmate of Poincaré who shared the Prime Minister’s antipathy to the Germans. In Paléologue’s view, no “reconciliation between Austrian and Russian interests” in the Balkans was possible. “Enough of all this,” he exclaimed, “we should show Germany our strength!” This entirely comported with “Poincaré’s security credo: the alliance is our bedrock; it is the indispensable key to our military defense; it can only be maintained by intransigence in the face of demands from the opposing bloc.” Although he didn’t propose war against Austria-Hungary, he hinted to the Czar that he would support one, if Austria attacked Serbia. “This time we must hold firm.” He expected peace because he supposed “that Germany and Austria might well back down in the face of such unflinching solidarity.” At the same time, Czar Nicholas II, relieved of any concerns about France, wanted to make sure of Britain.
Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia, first recalling Serbia’s assurance of good relations in the 1909 Treaty of Berlin, in which Serbia recognized Austria’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegonia. This notwithstanding, the Serbian authorities had continued to tolerate a “subversive movement,” the Black Hand, which had undertaken “acts of terrorism, by a series of outrages and by murders” and moreover had fomented hatred of Austria among the Serbian people. Still worse, those authorities may well have aided and abetted the murderers of the archduke, both planning the crime and facilitating the entrance of the assassins into Bosnia. Accordingly, the Serbs must publicly repudiate pan-Serbian irredentism, collaborate with Austrians to suppress the subversive movement within Serbian borders, and assist Austrian investigators in finding and arresting those responsible. “Without some form of Austrian supervision and verification,” Serbians could not be trusted to do those things themselves. The Austrians scarcely expected Serbia to acquiesce in such violations of its sovereignty and, after receiving assurances that Russia backed them, they didn’t. The Serbs replied, carefully, that they were perplexed by the Austrians’ demands—shocked, simply shocked, as the movie line has it, that any such base actions could be ascribed to them. The Russians undertook a precautionary mobilization and on July 28th the Austrians declared war. Russia requested that Austria extend the time limit of its ultimatum, told the Serbians not to strike first but to withdraw its troops from the border, withdrew funds invested in Germany and Austria, and continued to prepare for war. For their part, the Germans had no way to distinguish between pre-mobilization and real mobilization, seeing only troop movements. Russia had “escalated the crisis and greatly increased the likelihood of a general European war,” simultaneously emboldening the Serbs and alarming the Germans. Sazonov “had never acknowledged that Austria-Hungary had a right to countermeasures in the face of Serbian irredentism. On the contrary, he had endorsed the politics of Balkan irredentism and had explicitly aligned himself with the view that Serbia was the rightful successor to the lands of unredeemed South Slavdom within the dual monarchy, an obsolete multiethnic structure whose days, in his view, were in any case numbered. It does not seem to have occurred to him that the days of the autocratic, multi-ethnic Russian Empire, whose minority relations were in worse condition that Austria-Hungary’s, might also be numbered.” He rather expected war to unite all the minorities behind the czarist regime.
Clark judges that Russia’s policy “fully makes sense only if we read it against the background of the Russian leadership’s deepening anxiety about the future of the Turkish Straits” in the wake of the disruptions of the Balkan Wars and an ongoing naval arms race between the Ottomans and the Greeks in the Aegean Sea. A war between those countries might bring the British navy into the region and even worse, the Turks might bring their modern battleships into the Black Sea, battleships the Russians didn’t have. As Sazonov told his ambassador in London, “We cannot stand idly by and watch the continued and also very rapid expansion of the Ottoman naval forces.” To deter the Ottomans, we must bridle the Hapsburgs.
In the summer of 1914, the question of Irish Home Rule preoccupied British politicians and military officers. With “an army corps dominated by Protestant Anglo-Irish families” opposed to Home Rule, and given the likelihood that “a continental military intervention would mean forgoing the introduction of Home Rule,” the pro-Home Rule Liberal Party government of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith announced that while Austria-Hungary’s “bullying and humiliating ultimatum” might lead to “a real Armageddon” on the continent, the British would need be no more than “spectators”; his Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, advised the Russian ambassador not to give Germans any pretext to intervene, then proposed diplomatic mediation. He was inclined to overlook Austria’s security concerns, taking Austrian and Russian mobilization as morally equivalent. He “acquiesced in the Russian view that a ‘Serbian war inevitably meant a European war.'” He reaffirmed his opinion that the interests of the Entente prevailed over any Balkan conflict, which Entente partners Russia and France considered to be “pretexts” for war against themselves. “It would be impolitic, not to say dangerous, for England to attempt to controvert this opinion, or to obscure the plain issue,” namely, that the struggle “is not for the possession of Serbia,” but “between Germany aiming at a political dictatorship in Europe and the Powers who desire to retain individual freedom.”
For their part, the Germans warned the Russians “that they would consider mobilizing their own forces unless Russia halted its own mobilization,” a warning Russia, in “one of the most momentous decisions of the July Crisis,” ignored after Austria-Hungary declared war on July 28. Sazonov suspected that “Austria’s intransigence was in fact Germany’s policy,” which to some degree it was, inasmuch as Germany supported the Austrians “rather than pressuring its ally to back down.” “This was an idea of great importance, because it allowed the Russians to establish Berlin as the moral fulcrum of the crisis and the agent upon which all hope of peace rested.” France’s Paléologue chimed in, assuring the Russians of his country’s support “in case of necessity.” In the last days, Nicholas II nonetheless attempted to avert the war in an exchange of telegraph messages to his cousin, Wilhelm II (the Czar’s permission was needed to authorize a general mobilization), but his counterpart rejected the overture.
Clark describes the statesmen’s mental “environment” as “saturated with paranoia.” Everyone “claim[ed] to be standing with their backs against the wall.” He judges that there was “nothing in how [the Germans] reacted to the events of summer 1914” that “suggests that they viewed the crisis as the welcome opportunity to set in train a long-laid plan to unleash a preventive war on Germany’s neighbors.” They expected both France and Britain to hold back. Britain nearly did, but Grey conceded that a German attack on the French coastline or an attack on France through Belgium might well be a casus belli in the eyes of the Cabinet. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill asked for, and received, Cabinet permission for “a precautionary mobilization of the fleet.” In addition to the German threat, however, Clark suggests that the British were at least equally concerned about ever-increasing Russian power, especially in Persia and Central Asia; as one British ambassador put it, “We must retain [Russia’s] friendship at almost any cost.” “Whether one identified Russia or Germany as the chief threat,” Clark writes, “the outcome was the same, since British intervention on the side of the Entente offered a means both of appeasing and tethering Russia and of opposing and containing Germany.” In response, the Germans miscalculated, disbelieving that the Brits meant business.
In view of all this, Clark judges “the outbreak of war [as] a tragedy, not a crime.” The “multipolar and genuinely interactive” geopolitics of Europe, with its complex intertwining of widely different regimes that shared the common state form of imperialism led to a war in which “none of the prizes for which the politicians of 1914 contended was worth the cataclysm that followed.”
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