Europe's Last Summer (7 page)

The several dozen leaders who did discuss and decide these matters lived in a world of their own, and it was a world in which war and warriors were glorified.

CHAPTER 6: DIPLOMATS ALIGN

Among the Great Powers of Europe, peace had prevailed from 1871 to 1914. It was a long run. It is at least arguable that what had made that achievement possible was not only the skill but also the character and the outlook of Europe's statesmen. In large part they were a sort of extended family: monarchs and aristocrats whom the French Revolution had failed to sweep away. Shaped by the tolerance and the values of the eighteenth century, they had kept their positions and their system throughout the nineteenth. They were bound together by ties of education, of culture, and, in many cases, of blood. The conduct of foreign affairs was their shared vocation. Cosmopolitan and disinclined to prejudices, they tended at times to put the welfare of Europe as a whole ahead of that of their own country. Indeed, it was not unusual for a diplomat to take service with a foreign country: for a German or a Corsican, for example, to serve as foreign minister of Russia. Once—a long time before, it is true—an Austrian, the
Count of Stainville, had been Vienna's envoy to Paris at the same time that his son was Paris's envoy to Vienna.

Hans Morgenthau (1904–80), the great twentieth-century theorist of
international relations, describes the way it used to be in terms that exude nostalgia:

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and to a lessening degree up to the First World War, international morality was the concern of a
personal sovereign—that is, a certain individual prince and his successors—and of a relatively small, cohesive, and homogeneous group of aristocratic rulers. The prince and the aristocratic rulers of a particular nation were in constant, intimate contact with the princes and aristocratic rulers of other nations. They were joined together by family ties, a common language (French), common cultural values, a common style of life, and common moral convictions about what a gentleman was and was not allowed to do in his relations with another gentleman, whether of his own or of a foreign nation.

In other words, they played the game of world politics as though it had rules. The loss of aristocratic values and the weakening of ties were what made the behavior of some of the statesmen in July 1914 possible.

In our democratic age, we tend to forget how great a role continued to be played by kings and emperors and by the hereditary aristocracy as recently as a century ago, not merely by their values and their codes of conduct, but by themselves. We have been reminded of it by a study that has just been published,
Royalty and Diplomacy in Europe, 1890–1914,
by
Roderick R. McLean. Personal friendships among monarchs could help to bring countries together. The reverse could also be true. Both possibilities could be seen at work in the ambivalent relationship between the two most powerful Continental emperors, Nicholas II of Russia and Wilhelm II of Germany. Each could exercise almost absolute powers within his country in matters of war and peace.

Czar Nicholas II succeeded to the Russian throne at the end of 1894 and was crowned the following year. Deferential and inexperienced, he had been described only shortly before by his father as inadequate: "He is nothing but a boy, whose judgments are childish."

Kaiser Wilhelm II undertook to guide his young relative through the jungles of world politics. There was nearly a decade's age difference between the two. Moreover, Nicholas was hesitant where Wilhelm was assertive. The young Czar was so polite that the Kaiser believed he was hearing agreement even when he was not. Wilhelm initiated a secret correspondence with him that lasted for nearly two decades. At first Nicholas welcomed the letters.

In 1896 the two emperors met for a conference in Breslau, in what now is Poland. Agreements between them were reached easily. But
Wilhelm's desire to tutor and dominate turned Nicholas against him. From then on, the Czar regarded the Kaiser with a dislike bordering on hostility. Nicholas decided that he wanted to break off their correspondence. Ignoring Nicholas's desires, Wilhelm continued to write to him for a further eighteen years. On occasion the two rulers did hold meetings. After one such, in 1902, Nicholas commented: "He's raving mad!"

From time to time the Kaiser did seem to exert some influence; he may have played a part in persuading the Czar to involve his empire in a war against Japan (1904–05), a war that proved to be a disaster. Mostly, however, Nicholas preferred neither to see nor to hear from his tiresome relative. In this he was not alone.

Queen Victoria, the Kaiser's grandmother, warned Nicholas against Wilhelm's "mischievous and unstraight-forward proceedings." To her prime minister, Victoria described Wilhelm as "a hotheaded, conceited, and wrong-headed young man." She did not invite Wilhelm to her Diamond Jubilee (1897) or to her eightieth birthday celebration (1899). In his own version of history, the Kaiser described himself as Victoria's favorite grandson.

For all of the German emperor's failings, he was a blood relative and was treated as such. This solidarity among cousins was a sentiment that made for peace and stability between the Czar and the Kaiser. McLean tells us: "Until at least 1908, both monarchs remained convinced that neither would undertake a hostile act against the other."

These
personal relationships played their role in the story of how Europe managed
not
to have a war among the Great Powers in the opening years of the twentieth century. But ultimately family ties did not succeed in relaxing the tensions that arose among the powers. Indeed it would have taken statesmanship of a high order to guide the countries of Europe through the explosive issues with which they had to deal. It was like walking through minefields.

PART TWO
WALKING THROUGH
MINEFIELDS

CHAPTER 7: THE EASTERN QUESTION

Ever since the beginning of the nineteenth century, the statesmen of Europe—the handful of prime ministers, foreign secretaries, and chancellery officials who dealt with arcane issues of foreign policy—remained convinced that they knew how (though not when) their world would be brought to an end. The war among the advanced industrial Great Powers, they believed, would be occasioned by the
breakup of the Ottoman Empire, as its vast and valuable territories excited the predatory instincts of the rival expansionist European empires. There had been a time, centuries before, when the Turks had ruled not just the Middle East but much of North Africa and Balkan Europe as well—all the way to the gates of Vienna. Now the Sultan's backward and demoralized forces were in full, if slow, retreat before the Christians. Which European powers would take, in particular, southeastern Europe for themselves—"the Eastern Question"—was commonly seen as the most explosive long-range issue in international politics. "One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans," Bismarck was quoted as saying at the end of his life.

Fearing the cataclysm, with its incalculable consequences, Great Britain traditionally tried to postpone facing the issue by propping up the decaying Turkish empire. On the opposite side, Austria, later joined by Russia, pursued expansionist policies at the Sultan's expense, looking toward an eventual partition of the Ottoman domains.

As so often happens when the political world focuses on a particular threat, the threat in question failed to materialize; the danger was averted. Over the course of the nineteenth century, one Christian people after another in southeastern Europe threw off the shackles of Ottoman rule without then being absorbed by a Great Power. By the first decade of the twentieth century
Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia,
Montenegro, and
Greece all had become at least de facto free countries. They were quarrelsome nations; some at times were aggressive rivals; and each set its own course in world affairs. They coveted the territories remaining to the Turks in Europe. By the beginning of the twentieth century Constantinople mostly had to fear these local states rather than the Great Powers. The greatest of the Great Powers—Britain, France, Germany, and even Russia—now preferred the Ottoman frontier to remain where it was. In April 1897, Russia and Austria-Hungary agreed to preserve the status quo in what remained of the Ottoman Balkans.

In this respect, the chancelleries of Europe could breathe a sigh of relief. For a century they had been walking through a minefield, and they had emerged from it not merely alive but relatively unscathed.

CHAPTER 8: A CHALLENGE
FOR THE ARCHDUKE

The Hapsburgs had served as a ruling dynasty in Europe for so long that it could easily be forgotten that the country they ruled in 1914—Austria-Hungary, or the Dual Monarchy—was of quite recent origin. It was so new that the man who created it—the emperor Franz Joseph—was still alive and ruled. In 1914, Austria-Hungary was forty-seven years old; Franz Joseph, eighty-four.

The Dual Monarchy was an improvisation. There had been an urgent need of it in the 1860s when the Germans of Austria, expelled from the world that Prussia consolidated, found themselves cut off from other Germans and unable to stand on their own. A permanent alliance with the Magyar rulers of Hungary was Franz Joseph's solution in 1867. The economic provisions of the agreement were not permanent; they came up for renewal every ten years.

But Austria and Hungary had interests and ambitions that sometimes were antithetical. Archduke
Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph's nephew and heir presumptive, had devoted much thought to the question of how he would reconstitute the Hapsburg lands when he ascended the throne. One plan ascribed to him was to create a triple monarchy, joining Slavs to Germans and Magyars as a governing people of the empire, enabling Austro-Germans to play the Slavs off against the Magyars. He seems to have dropped that scheme in favor of others, all aimed at restoring Austrian greatness.

Franz Ferdinand deplored the consequences of his country's Hungarian connection. His feelings in this respect were both known and reciprocated. It was not unreasonable to predict that when Franz Joseph died and Franz Ferdinand ascended the throne with radical constitutional changes in mind, disturbances would ensue.

Austria-Hungary was a ramshackle structure, then, only with difficulty holding itself together, and maintaining its formal ranking as a Great Power in part by courtesy of the others. So in retrospect the Eastern Question—the issue of what to do with the European possessions of a collapsing Turkish empire—overlapped an emerging Austrian question: what to do with the shaky Dual Monarchy. There were those who asserted that, after the Sultan of Turkey, the Hapsburg emperor was the new Sick Man of Europe. In the deadly game of world politics, Austria-Hungary continued to hunt, but also was being hunted. The Eastern Question had been turned upside down and stood on its head. The Hapsburgs had coveted Balkan lands; now Balkan peoples coveted Hapsburg lands.

Austria-Hungary was in area one of the largest states in Europe. Two of its perhaps eleven nationalities, Germans and Magyars, exercised most of the
political power. In Austria the one-third of its population that was German tended to dominate the two-thirds that was not; in Hungary, the 40 percent that was Magyar ruled the 60 percent that was not.

Nationalism had been sweeping Europe since the days of the French Revolution. It inspired a literature in which a repressive Austria was singled out as a villain. Thus, sinister and unbending, and an implacable enemy of the liberties of mankind, Hapsburg Austria casts a dark shadow over Europe in such works as
Stendhal's
Charterhouse of Parma.
Some, and maybe most, of the leading ardent nationalities' movements in Europe—those of the Czechs, for example, and a number of ethnicities in the Balkans—aimed at breaking up the Hapsburg Empire, or at least decentralizing it.

One of Austria-Hungary's weak spots was that it ruled so many Slavic peoples—members of the largest ethnic group in Europe— and that Slavic Russia, it was feared, could exert a pull on their loyalties by sponsoring pan-Slavism.

Historians tell us that the
Austrian army was strong, although it had an astonishing record, going back more than a century, of losing battles and wars.

The generals of the Dual Monarchy knew that they could not fight, on their own, on equal terms against Russia, with its vast expanses and enormous population. In order to stand a chance Austria-Hungary would require the protection of Germany.

CHAPTER 9: EXPLOSIVE GERMANY

As it entered the twentieth century, the German state was still in its infancy. Yet in many ways it already had become—or perhaps had been from the start—out of date in its
political structure. In the thirty years of its existence, Germany had stopped being an essentially agricultural country and had surged ahead to become the Continent's most dynamic commercial and industrial power. One result was that the country was now divided against itself.

As noted before, farming interests still demanded protective tariffs in order to survive, while industry now pushed for the free trade it needed in order to thrive. This was but one of the many contradictions that made Kaiser Wilhelm II's Reich so difficult to fathom— and to govern. At the cutting edge of the modern world in some respects, Germany was obsolete in politics, and therefore unable to reconcile the diverse trends to which modernism gave rise.