The Sleepwalkers (49 page)

St Petersburg's adoption of a more exclusively pro-Serbian position was reinforced by financial developments. In the aftermath of the Second Balkan War, the belligerent states were, as the Carnegie Foundation's inquiry into the cause and conduct of the Balkan wars put it, in the condition of ‘beggars [who] are seeking to borrow money to pay their debts and build up again their military and productive forces'.
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None was in a more parlous condition than Bulgaria, which had just fought a war against four opponents at devastating human and economic cost (Bulgaria suffered 93,000 casualties in the second war – more than its four opponents combined).
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Under the new liberal premier Vasil Radoslavov, who entered office at the head of a coalition on 17 July 1913, the Bulgarian government put out requests for a massive credit. Vienna was the first to respond, with a small advance of 30 million francs, at the end of October, but this amount was not even enough to enable the Bulgarian government to continue servicing its debts. Despite assurances that Sofia would assign the Dardanelles in perpetuity to the Russian sphere of influence, St Petersburg was unwilling to help out. Sazonov took the view that Russia must withhold any financial assistance to Sofia for as long as the Radoslavov government, which he viewed as hostile to Russia, remained in power. Russia was in any case in no condition to issue credits on the scale required by Sofia, even if it had wished to do so. More important, therefore, was the pressure applied to France, which still had access to substantial reservoirs of finance capital, to follow the Russian line and withhold support from Sofia.
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Not that the French needed much persuading. They had been channelling politically motivated finance into Belgrade since the Austro-Serbian ‘pig war'. International lending was an established and highly effective instrument of French diplomacy. André de Panafieu, the French minister in Sofia, captured the relationship between money and foreign policy when he observed in a dispatch of 20 January 1914 that as long as Sofia remained on friendly terms with Vienna, it would always be easy to think of reasons to turn down a Bulgarian loan.
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Yet it was also clear to Sazonov that pushing the policy too far might prove counter-productive. When the new Russian minister, Alexander Savinsky, was sent to Sofia in January 1914, his mission was to prevent Bulgaria from drifting towards the Germanic powers.
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From the Russian chargé d'affaires in Sofia came warnings that blocking the loan would simply mean that Bulgaria would wind up using German money to buy Austrian weapons.
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Under the pressure of these arguments, forcefully conveyed to Paris by Izvolsky, the Quai d'Orsay began in February to consider a Bulgarian loan, but under onerous terms, including the requirement that the money must be used to purchase only French armaments and munitions.
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Predictably, perhaps, it was the Germans who came to the rescue. By mid-March, the German government had agreed to support a Bulgarian loan backed by German banks. This did not reflect some long-laid German plan to draw Bulgaria into the clutches of the Triple Alliance – during the summer the Germans also offered large loans under generous conditions to Serbia.
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It just happened that whereas the Serbs already had a strong line of credit and had no intention of accepting any offer that might cast doubt on the strength of their commitment to the Entente, the Bulgarians were desperate. Once they learned of the negotiations going on between Berlin and Sofia, the Russian and French governments responded with last-ditch efforts to prevent the loan from going ahead. Savinsky placed inspired articles in the Bulgarian Russophile press and constantly urged Sazonov to step up the pressure on Sofia.
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And then, at the last moment, the French bank Périer & Cie, specialists in loans to Latin America and the East, appeared on the scene with a counter-offer: 500 million francs at 5 per cent. The Périer offer, which had almost certainly been brokered by the Russians through Izvolsky in Paris, stipulated that the loan would be secured with a Russian guarantee – in the event of default, Russia undertook to take over the Bulgarian obligations. The aim was to combine a very large credit with an element of political dependency that would reinforce the influence of the Entente in the Balkans; the plan was to persuade the Bulgarians to accept the loan and then pressure them at a later date into changing their government.
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But the Périer offer was finalized too late (16 June 1914), to turn the game around and it was the German loan that ultimately won out, after tortuous negotiations to secure improved terms.
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Amid scenes of uproar, the German finance package was passed, if that is the right word, by the Bulgarian Sobranje (the national parliament) on 16 July. In reality the bill was neither read, nor discussed, nor formally voted. At the close of the meeting, the government simply announced that it had been passed by the House. The opposition reacted by accusing the government of selling the country and ‘hurling books and inkstands at the heads of the ministers'. Prime Minister Radoslavov was seen calling for order and brandishing a revolver.
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The loan had become a dangerous tool wielded by the alliance blocs. This weaponization of international credit was nothing new, but its deployment in this instance locked Bulgaria into the policy of the Triple Alliance, just as Serbia had been integrated into the political system of the Entente.

What was happening in the Balkans was nothing less than the reversal of the old pattern of allegiances. In the past Russia had backed Bulgaria, while Austria-Hungary looked to Belgrade and Bucharest. By 1914, this arrangement had been turned inside out. Romania, too, was part of this process. By the early summer of 1913, Sazonov was inviting the government in Bucharest to help itself to a piece of Bulgaria in the event of a Serbo-Bulgarian war. The time was ripe for such an overture, because the Romanians resented what they saw as Vienna's flirtations with Sofia; King Carol of Romania also resented Austrian opposition to the Treaty of Bucharest, which he saw as his personal diplomatic achievement.
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The deepening rapprochement between St Petersburg and Bucharest was formalized on 14 June 1914 when the Tsar visited King Carol at Constanţa, on Romania's Black Sea coast. It was an occasion heavy with symbolic freight. The only foreign representative to receive a decoration from the hands of the Tsar was the French minister to Romania, Camille Blondel, who had, as it happened, only recently been awarded a high decoration by King Petar of Serbia. Present at the festivities was Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian minister to Bucharest, who interpreted the day as the public consummation of Romania's ‘realignment towards the Triple Entente'.
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The consequence was a further drastic diminution of Austria-Hungary's political influence on the peninsula. Romanian irredentism would now be deflected away from Bessarabia, where it conflicted with Russian interests, and oriented towards Transylvania, where it would threaten the integrity of the Habsburg monarchy. There were, of course, limits to Romania's willingness to be coopted to Russian objectives. When Sazonov asked the Romanian premier and foreign minister Ion Brătianu what attitude Romania would adopt ‘in the event of an armed conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary,
if Russia should find itself obliged by circumstances to commence hostilities'
, the Romanian statesman, ‘visibly shocked' by Sazonov's question, gave an ‘evasive reply'. When pressed further, however, Brătianu conceded that Romania and St Petersburg had a common interest in preventing ‘any weakening of Serbia'. That was enough for Sazonov. The Russo-Romanian rapprochement thus constituted, as a French ministerial report observed, ‘a new means for Russia of applying pressure to Austria'.
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But perhaps the most striking feature of this restructuring of Balkan geopolitics was how quickly it came about. This was not a phenomenon of the
longue durée
, which would have taken years to undo, but rather a short-term adjustment to rapid changes in the geopolitical environment. In November 1913, Sazonov had told the Belgian minister in St Petersburg that he believed the current Bulgarian reorientation towards Vienna was likely to be shortlived – it was the work of one particular parliamentary faction, supported by the mercurial King Ferdinand, ‘for whom we have not one atom of respect'.
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Given time, the new Balkan alignment might just as quickly have made way for further adjustments and new systems. What matters is that this particular pattern of alignments was still in place in the summer of 1914.

Serbia was now Russia's salient in the Balkans. There was nothing necessary or natural about this state of affairs. In 1909, Aehrenthal had railed against Russia's ‘mad claim' to act as protectress of Serbia, even in situations where no Serbian question touching on the interests of the powers had arisen. He had a point. Russia's claim to act on behalf of its orthodox Balkan ‘children' was nothing more than a populist justification for a policy designed to weaken Austria-Hungary, win popularity at home and secure hegemony on the Balkan hinterland to the Turkish Straits. The doctrine of pan-Slavism may have been popular with the Russian nationalist press, but it was no more legitimate as a platform for political action than Hitler's concept of
Lebensraum
. Nor was it in any sense a coherent foundation for policy, since the Bulgarians, too, were orthodox Slavs and the Romanians, though orthodox, were not Slavs. Russia's commitment to Serbia was driven by power-politics, not by the diffuse energies of pan-Slavism. It created a dangerous asymmetry in relations between the two Balkan great powers, for Austria-Hungary possessed no comparable salient on the periphery of the Russian Empire.

It is difficult to quantify, but impossible to deny, the galvanizing effect of the Russian commitment on the Serbian kingdom. In February 1914, Pašić returned from his visit to Russia ‘completely intoxicated and touched to the depth of his soul' by the favour shown to him by the Russian Tsar:

In every word of your tsar [Pašić told Hartwig], I felt the particular benevolence of His Imperial Majesty for Serbia; for us this was a valuable reward for our unalterable veneration for Russia, whose advice in all matters of foreign policy I have unswervingly followed. The good will of the tsar is in our eyes also a guarantee for a bright future for Serbia, which, without the powerful moral help of Russia would be in no position to overcome the difficulties which the neighbouring monarchy, always hostile to Serbia, creates for us at every turn.
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The dispatches from Spalajković in St Petersburg conveyed a similarly exultant confidence in the strength of Russian support. The Tsar ‘declared his sympathies for Serbia', Spalajković reported after a meeting with the Russian sovereign on 21 January 1914, ‘and assured me that this was true of all the Russian nation and especially of that part that has the influence to make decisions'.
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The ‘entire Russian press is pro-Serb', he announced on 27 March. Criticism of the Serbs in the Bulgarian press received extremely hostile attention in the Russian papers. ‘Once it was the Bulgarians who had influence over the Russian press, now it's our turn,' he declared. Only one paper,
Rech
, was less friendly; in recent months it had published reports criticizing the behaviour of the Serbian government in the newly conquered areas of Macedonia.
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But these negative reports appeared to have no effect on the official Russian view of the new provinces, which was reassuringly rosy. According to Spalajković, who had spoken with Sazonov's deputy, Neratov, the Russian foreign ministry was very impressed by how well the Serbs were performing in the annexed territories, speaking blithely of how they were building roads and restoring buildings ‘so that in a very short time it was impossible to recognise them' – there was no mention of expulsions or massacres here.
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M. Descos, the French envoy in Belgrade, registered the new mood of confidence in the kingdom. Reporting on a speech by Pašić to the Skupština, he noted that the key to the government's current ‘policy of peace' was to secure for Serbia an opportunity to ‘fortify her army and cultivate her alliance and seek to draw the best part possible from new events as they arise'. It was noteworthy that ‘M. Pašić, who is usually so modest, seems to want to arrogate to himself a certain authority in Balkan affairs – perhaps he thinks the moment has come for Serbia to take a leadership role.' On the other hand, Descos added, the Serbian leader lives ‘in such close contact with the Russian minister that it is difficult to distinguish the latter from those [Serbian] statesmen whose ideas dominate the issue'.
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Assured of the deepening identity of Serbian and Russian interests, the leaders in Belgrade in turn became increasingly ready to accept the promptings of St Petersburg. At the end of 1912, for example, the Russian ambassador in Vienna complained to St Petersburg that the Serbian minister seemed excessively friendly in his dealings with the Austrians. The result was a note from the Russian foreign ministry to Pašić urging that the Serbs avoid ‘all too open discussions' with the Austrians, lest these give rise to ‘the rumour of a special [Serbian] agreement with Vienna'. Pašić responded by sending his representative a telegram consistingly solely of the words ‘Be careful' and composed in the presence of Hartwig.
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‘They will of course follow our instructions,' Hartwig assured Sazonov in his New Year's letter of January 1914.
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‘The actual beginning of the great Balkan war,' the
Times
correspondent Wickham Steed reported from Vienna on 17 October 1912, ‘is felt here to be a moment of historical solemnity. Whatever its course, it must radically change the situation'.
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For no other great power did the conflict unfolding in the Balkans pose problems of such urgency and magnitude. The unexpectedly swift victories of the League states confronted Austria-Hungary with a skein of interwoven issues. First, there was the fact that Austria's Balkan policy was irreparably ruined. Vienna's axiom, that one must always maintain Turkey as the key ordering force in the region, was now irrelevant. Rapid improvisation was called for. The ‘status quo conservatism' of the summer of 1912 had to be abandoned; in its place a new programme emerged focused on managing the changes underway in the Balkans so as to minimize the damage to Austro-Hungarian interests. Serbian territorial conquests were acceptable, but they must be accompanied by assurances of Serbia's good behaviour in future, preferably through some form of institutionalized economic cooperation (Vienna was prepared to settle this on a much more generous basis than under the old customs union and a mission was dispatched to Belgrade to propose terms).
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On the other hand, Serbia must not under any circumstances be permitted to push its frontiers to the Adriatic coast. The reasoning behind this was that a Serbian port might in time come under the control of a foreign power (namely Russia). This apprehension sounds far-fetched, but it gained plausibility from Hartwig's reputation as the vehemently Austrophobe uncrowned ‘king of Belgrade'.