The Sleepwalkers (43 page)

Yet the situation in pre-First World War Europe was different (and worse) in one important respect. For all the tensions that may evolve within it, the American executive is actually – in constitutional terms – a very tightly focused organization in which responsibility for executive decisions in foreign policy ultimately falls unambiguously upon the president. This was not the case for the pre-war European governments. There were perennial doubts about whether Grey had the right to commit himself as he did without consulting the cabinet or Parliament; indeed, these doubts were so pressing that they prevented him from making a clear and unequivocal statement of his intentions. The situation was even fuzzier in France, where the balance of initiative between the ministry of foreign affairs, the cabinet and the presidency remained unresolved, and even the masterful and determined Poincaré faced efforts to shut him out of the decision-making process altogether in the spring of 1914. In Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent in Russia, the power to shape foreign policy flowed around a loose human circuitry within the hivelike structure of the political elite, concentrating at different parts of the system, depending upon who formed the more effective and determined alignments. In these cases, as in Germany, the presence of an ‘all-highest' sovereign did not clarify, but rather blurred the power relations within the system.

It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other's intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia. The volatility inherent in such a constellation was heightened by the fluidity of power within each executive and its tendency to migrate from one node in the system to another. It may be true that dissent and polemics within the diplomatic services could have a salutary effect, in that they raised questions and objections that might have been suppressed in a more disciplined policy environment.
²²⁷
But the risks surely outweighed the benefits: when hawks dominated the signalling process on both sides of a potentially conflictual interaction, as happened in the Agadir crisis and would happen again after 28 June 1914, swift and unpredictable escalations could be the result.

The First World War was the Third Balkan War before it became the First World War. How was this possible? Conflicts and crises on the south-eastern periphery, where the Ottoman Empire abutted Christian Europe, were nothing new. The European system had always accommodated them without endangering the peace of the continent as a whole. But the last years before 1914 saw fundamental change. In the autumn of 1911, Italy launched a war of conquest on an African province of the Ottoman Empire, triggering a chain of opportunist assaults on Ottoman territories across the Balkans. The system of geopolitical balances that had enabled local conflicts to be contained was swept away. In the aftermath of the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Austria-Hungary faced a new and threatening situation on its southeastern periphery, while the retreat of Ottoman power raised strategic questions that Russian diplomats and policy-makers found it impossible to ignore. The two continental alliance blocs were drawn deeper into the antipathies of a region that was entering a period of unprecedented volatility. In the process, the conflicts of the Balkan theatre became tightly intertwined with the geopolitics of the European system, creating a set of escalatory mechanisms that would enable a conflict of Balkan inception to engulf the continent within five weeks in the summer of 1914.

Early on the morning of 5 January 1912, George Frederick Abbott was woken in his tent in the Libyan desert by shouting and gunfire. Running out into the sunshine, he saw the Arab and Turkish soldiers of his encampment staring at something in the sky. It was an Italian monoplane flying at 2,000 feet, its wings touched by the rays of the morning sun. Heedless of the rifle-fire from the camp, the plane sailed off gracefully to the south-west. The Italian invasion of Libya was in its fourth month. Turcophile by sentiment, Abbott had joined the Ottoman forces there as a British observer with the intention of writing a history of the campaign. He noted that the Arabs, ‘beyond letting off their guns', appeared unimpressed by the flying machine: ‘They have an enormous capacity for taking new things as a matter of course.' When the plane returned a day later, it bombarded the encampment with bundles of proclamations, which fluttered in the sunlight ‘like so many flakes of toy snow'. The Arabs, Abbott recalled, ‘left off firing and, stooping, picked up the sheets eagerly, in the hope that they might be bank-notes.'
¹

Abbott's Ottoman companions were lucky to be bombarded only with verbose Italian war propaganda in antiquated Arabic. Elsewhere, the gross technological imbalance between the Italian armed forces and the Ottoman subjects whose provinces they were invading had more lethal effects. Before many major actions in the Libyan War, aeroplanes went up in reconnaissance, signalling the enemy's position and strength, so that the Italians could shell the Turkish guns from field batteries or from ironclads moored offshore. This was the first war to see aerial bombardments. In February 1912, an Ottoman retreat between the Zanzur oasis and Gargaresch to the south-east of Tripoli became a rout when the Italian dirigible
P3
dropped bombs among the retiring troops.
²
Dirigibles could carry up to 250 bombs charged with high explosive. Bombs were dropped in small numbers from aeroplanes too, though this was an awkward business, since the aviator had somehow to steer the machine while gripping the bomb between his knees and using his free hand to insert the fuse, before aiming it at the troops below.
³

The military searchlight, though a less new technology (the Royal Navy had used searchlights against Egyptian forces in Alexandria as early as 1882) was another high-tech weapon that figured prominently in contemporary accounts of the Libyan War. It was probably of even greater tactical significance than the planes and dirigibles, since its use prevented the Ottoman forces from mounting night attacks, or at least made these far more costly in casualties. The British observer Ernest Bennett recalled picking his way with a small group of Arab fighters along a coastal path towards their bivouac at Bir Terin, when the party were suddenly pinpointed by the searchlight of an Italian cruiser: ‘The sight of the poor Arabs silhouetted against the electric rays saddened me. Searchlights, Maxims, batteries, warships, aeroplanes – the odds seemed so terrible!'
⁴

The cascade of wars that brought mayhem to the Balkans began in Africa. It was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 that flashed the green light for the all-out Balkan assault on the Ottoman periphery. Unlike Egypt (now British) and Morocco (now effectively French), the three
vilayets
later known as Libya were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The totally unprovoked Italian attack on these last Ottoman African possessions ‘broke the ice', as one contemporary British observer put it, for the Balkan states.
⁵
There had been talk for some years of a joint campaign to drive the Turks out of the Balkans, but nothing in the way of practical measures. Only after Italy's assault were the Balkan states emboldened to take up arms. Looking back on these events in 1924, Miroslav Spalajković, the former political head of the Serbian foreign ministry in Belgrade, recalled that it was the Italian attack on Tripoli that had inaugurated the process that had led to the war: ‘all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression'.
⁶

Italian diplomacy had been trying to secure an Italian sphere of interest in North Africa since before the turn of the century. In the summer of 1902, under the terms of the Prinetti–Barrère Accord, Rome and Paris had secretly agreed that in the event of a major redistribution of territory, France would take Morocco, while Italy would be granted a free hand in Libya. The agreement ratified a process of rapprochement with France, the arch-rival in northern Africa, that had been underway since 1898.
⁷
A note from London in March 1902 helpfully promised that Britain would ensure that ‘any alteration in the status of Libya would be in conformity with Italian interests'. These agreements exemplify a policy of concessions that was designed to loosen the hold of the Triple Alliance on Italy, its most unreliable component. It was in keeping with this approach that Tsar Nicholas II agreed the ‘Racconigi Bargain' of 1909 with King Victor Emmanuel III, in which Russia acknowledged Italy's special interest in Libya in return for Italian support for Russian policy on access to the Turkish Straits.
⁸

Selling a policy of invasion and annexation to the politically active part of the Italian public was not difficult. Colonialism was on the march in Italy, as it was elsewhere, and the ‘memory' of Roman Africa, when Libya had been the bread basket of the empire, assured Tripolitania a central place on the kingdom's colonial horizons. In 1908, the modest Ufficio Coloniale in Rome was expanded and upgraded to the Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali, a sign of the growing weight of African concerns within government.
⁹
From 1909 onwards, the nationalist Enrico Corradini, supported by the nationalist organ
L'Idea Nazionale
, campaigned energetically for an imperialist enterprise focused on Libya; by the spring of 1911 he was openly demanding a policy of invasion and seizure.
¹⁰
It was widely believed within the political elite that Italy needed somewhere ‘fruitful' in which to plant her departing emigrants. Even the socialists were susceptible to these arguments, though they tended to shroud them in the language of economic necessity.
¹¹

Until the summer of 1911, however, Italy's leading statesmen remained faithful to the country's ancient axiom that Italy must not provoke the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the summer of 1911, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti was still firmly rejecting calls to adopt a more aggressive position vis-à-vis Constantinople on a range of issues relating to the governance of Ottoman Albania.
¹²
It was the French intervention in Morocco that changed everything. The Italian foreign ministry believed it had excellent grounds for demanding a
quid pro quo
in Libya. In view of France's ‘radical modification' of the situation in the Mediterranean, it would now be impossible, an Italian foreign ministry senior official pointed out, to ‘justify' a policy of continuing inaction ‘before public opinion'.
¹³

It was Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Entente, rather than Italy's allies within the Triple Alliance, that encouraged Rome to take action. In early July 1911, the Italians mentioned to the British government the ‘vexations' supposedly visited upon Italian subjects in Tripoli by the Ottoman authorities (it was standard practice for European powers to legitimate their predations with the claim that their presence was needed to protect their nationals from ill-treatment). On 28 July, when the question of an actual intervention was raised with the foreign secretary by the Italian ambassador in London, Marquis Guiglielmo Imperiali, Grey's reaction was astonishingly favourable. Grey ‘desired to sympathise with Italy', he told the ambassador, ‘in view of the very good relations between us'. If the Italians were receiving unfair treatment in Tripoli and ‘should the hand of Italy be forced', Grey undertook to ‘express to the Turks the opinion that, in face of the unfair treatment meted out to Italians, the Turkish government could not expect anything else'.
¹⁴
Unsurprisingly, the Italians read these obfuscating formulations as a green light for an attack on Libya.
¹⁵
And Grey remained faithful to this line: on 19 September, he instructed Permanent Under-secretary of State Sir Arthur Nicolson that it was ‘most important' that neither England nor France obstruct Italy in her designs.
¹⁶
Italian enquiries in St Petersburg produced an even more accommodating response. The Italian ambassador to St Petersburg was told that Russia would not complain if Italy acquired Libya; indeed St Petersburg urged Italy to act in a ‘prompt and resolute manner'.
¹⁷

There was thus intensive prior discussion with the Entente states. By contrast, Italy treated its allies in the Triple Alliance with cavalier disregard. On 14 September, Giolitti and the Marquis di San Giuliano, Haly's foreign minister, met in Rome to agree that a military action should be launched as swiftly as possible, so that it would be under way ‘before the Austrian and German governments [were aware] of it'.
¹⁸
This reticence was well advised for the Germans had no wish to see their Italian ally go to war against their Ottoman friends and were already doing what they could to achieve a peaceful resolution of the issues outstanding between Rome and Constantinople. The German ambassador in the Ottoman capital even warned his Italian colleague that an Italian occupation of Libya might bring down the Young Turk regime and trigger a sequence of disorders that would reopen the entire Eastern Question.
¹⁹
The Austrian foreign minister Count Aehrenthal repeatedly urged restraint on the Italians, warning them that precipitous action in Libya could have undesirable consequences on the Balkan peninsula and reminding them that they themselves had always proclaimed that the stability and integrity of the Ottoman Empire were in Italy's best interests.
²⁰

San Giuliano was fully aware of the contradictions in Italy's policy and cognizant of the ‘undesirable consequences' that worried the Austrians. In a long report of 28 July 1911 to the king and prime minister, the foreign minister weighed up the arguments for and against an invasion. He acknowledged the ‘probability' that the damage inflicted on the prestige of the Ottoman Empire would ‘induce the Balkan peoples to action against it and hasten a crisis that might [. . .] almost force Austria to act in the Balkans'.
²¹
The train of thought underlying these prescient comments was not solicitude for the security of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as such, but rather apprehension at the possibility that a wave of upheavals might favour Austrian Balkan interests at Italy's expense – especially in Albania, which was viewed in many quarters as yet another future Italian colony.
²²
Yet these Balkan dangers were balanced in San Giuliano's mind by the thought that time might be running out for an Italian venture in northern Africa: