The Sleepwalkers (51 page)

For Austria-Hungary, the Balkan Wars changed everything. Above all, they revealed how isolated Vienna was and how little understanding there was at the foreign chancelleries for its view of Balkan events. St Petersburg's hostility to the empire and its utter disregard for Vienna's interests in the region could be taken for granted. More worrying was the indifference of the other powers. The reluctance of the international community to see that Austria faced genuine security threats on its southern periphery and had the right to counteract them reflected a broader shift in attitudes. The western powers had traditionally viewed Austria as the fulcrum of stability in central and eastern Europe and thus as a power that must be preserved at all costs. But by 1913, this maxim no longer appeared so compelling. It was undermined by the tendency – which swiftly gained ground among the Entente states after 1907 – to think of Europe in terms of alliance blocs, rather than as a continental geopolitical ecosystem in which every power had a role to play. The anti-Austrian animus of much political reportage in Britain and France during the last pre-war years reinforced this tendency by spreading the view that Austria-Hungary was an anachronistic and doomed entity, or, as the Serbian papers put it, the ‘second sick man of Europe' (after the Ottoman Empire, to which this epithet was more commonly applied).
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Particularly alarming was the lukewarm nature of German support. Berlin firmly endorsed a policy of confrontation with Serbia in October 1913 – at a time when support could be offered at little risk of a broader conflict – but its record was otherwise patchy. In February 1913, when troop strengths on both sides of the Galician border were so elevated that war seemed imminent, even the military urged caution. Moltke wrote to his colleague Conrad von Hötzendorf, assuring him that while Germany would not hesitate to support Austria-Hungary against a Russian attack, ‘it would be difficult to legitimate German intervention in a war provoked by Austria, for which there would be no understanding in the German people'.
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One of Vienna's chief concerns was the attitude of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Far from urging his government to solidarity with the Austrians, Wilhelm forbade the Foreign Office in Berlin to participate in any action that ‘might impede the Bulgars-Serbs-Greeks in their victorious progress'.
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The Balkan Wars, he argued, were part of a world-historical development that was going to drive Islam back out of Europe. If one allowed the Balkan states to consolidate themselves at the expense of Turkey, this would create the basis for a stable array of entities that in due course might form a confederation of some kind, the ‘United States of the Balkans'. Nothing could be better suited to the preservation of the peace, the buffering of Austro-Russian tensions and the emergence of a new regional market for German exports.
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And Wilhelm continued to expatiate in this vein. During the crisis of November 1912 over Serbian access to the Adriatic, Wilhelm explicitly rejected the notion that the German government had any obligation to support Vienna against Belgrade. To be sure, the current changes on the peninsula were ‘uncomfortable' for Vienna, but he would ‘under no circumstances consider marching against Paris and Moscow for the sake of Albania and Durazzo'. On 9 November, he even proposed to the Foreign Office that it should urge Vienna to place Albania under the suzerainty of a Serbian prince.
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There was little comfort in these quixotic speculations for the harassed decision-makers in Vienna. At a secret conference with his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 22 November 1912, Wilhelm did express his readiness to support Austria's position on the Serbian troop presence in Albania, even at the risk of war with Russia, but only if it were certain that neither Britain nor France would intervene; an isolated Russia, he added, would be extremely unlikely to risk such a conflict.
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Yet even these mildly encouraging signals were cancelled out three days later by official messages from Bethmann Hollweg and Kiderlen-Wächter to the effect that Germany would seek a multilateral solution.
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In February 1913, when the Balkan winter crisis was at its height, Wilhelm wrote a letter to Franz Ferdinand urging that he seek a negotiated de-escalation with Russia on the grounds that the matters at issue were not important enough to justify a continuation of the current armed stand-off.
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On 18 October, when the Albanian crisis was seething, Wilhelm conceded in a conversation with Conrad that the situation might ‘finally' have arrived ‘in which a great power can no longer look on but must reach for the sword'. Yet only ten days later, he was telling the Austrian ambassador in Berlin that Vienna should mollify Belgrade by bribing the leadership with large cash gifts (‘from the king downwards they can all be had for money'), military exchange programmes and improved terms of trade.
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In December 1913, Wilhelm assured the Austrian envoy in Munich that ‘a few millions' would suffice to buy Berchtold a firm foothold in Belgrade.
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In a report dispatched on 25 April 1914, Fritz Count Szapáry, a foreign ministry high-flyer and specialist in Austro-German relations now serving as minister in St Petersburg, painted a bleak picture of recent German Balkan policy. The solid German backing that had helped to bring the Bosnian annexation crisis to a close in March 1909 was a thing of the past, Szapáry declared. What had replaced it was – Szapáry quoted the mealy-mouthed jargon of the decision-makers in Berlin – a ‘conflict-free dialogue directed towards the consolidation of economic-cultural activity zones'. All of Berlin's forward positions vis-à-vis Russia had been abandoned, and Berlin took no steps whatsoever without first consulting St Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Germany had compromised the Austrian position by joining the chorus of support for
déinteressement
, pressing Vienna to accept Serbian conquests and provocations. It all amounted to the wholesale ‘sacrifice of Austria-Hungary's Balkan interests'. This was a rather histrionic view of the matter, coloured by Szapáry's Hungarian apprehensions at Russia's deepening support for Romania, but it captured a widely felt mood of frustration at the failure of Berlin to deliver any real leverage on the Balkan peninsula. Especially galling was the haste with which Berlin had endorsed the Treaty of Bucharest, thereby depriving Austria of the opportunity to better the position of Bulgaria, which the Austrians, but not the Germans, viewed as a potential counterweight to Serbian power.
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This sense of isolation, coupled with the repeated provocations of 1912–13, in turn heightened the readiness in Vienna to resort to unilateral measures. There were signs that the resistance to militant solutions among the key decision-makers in Vienna was waning. The most conspicuous sign of the change in mood was the decision to recall Conrad at the height of the Russian mobilization scare. ‘You must again become Chief of the General Staff,' the Emperor wearily informed the general at an audience on 7 December 1912.
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After his reinstatement Conrad continued, of course, to counsel war, but that was nothing new. More worrying was the diminishing resistance to extreme measures among the other key actors. During the autumn of 1912, nearly everyone (including the Hungarian prime minister Tisza) at one point or another favoured a policy of confrontation backed up by the threat of military action. A notable exception was Franz Ferdinand, who warned Berchtold in a forceful letter of 12 October against allowing the monarchy to be dragged into Conrad's ‘witches' kitchen of war'. There was also Russia to think of, and Bulgaria, and the Germans, who would presumably shrink from any high-risk démarche. As for Belgrade, Franz Ferdinand added, the only people there who sought a conflict were the regicide war party (the party that, unbeknown to him, would slay him eight months later). He did not, he concluded, believe there ‘existed any necessity' for war. The pressure to wage it came exclusively from those servants of the Austro-Hungarian crown who ‘consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy'.
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And yet, on 11 December 1912, during a meeting of senior officials with the Emperor at Schönbrunn palace, even Franz Ferdinand broke with his accustomed support for peace at any price to advocate a military confrontation with Serbia.

This was a momentary lapse, to be sure: as soon as he heard the contrary arguments of Berchtold and the civilian ministers, the heir apparent immediately backed away from his earlier view and expressed his support for Berchtold's diplomatic solution. Four months later, it was Berchtold's turn to break ranks. At a meeting of the Joint Ministerial Council on 2 May 1913, exasperated by the renewed Montenegrin attack on Scutari, Berchtold for the first time accepted the case for mobilization against Montenegro. This was not, of course, tantamount to calling for a European or even a local war, since Montenegro was by this time totally isolated – even the Serbs had withdrawn their support.
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Berchtold hoped that a mobilization alone would suffice to dislodge the invaders from Albania and believed it highly unlikely that Russia would intervene. As it happened, even mobilization proved unnecessary; Nikola climbed down before the ultimatum was presented.
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Nevertheless, the resolute tone of that meeting heralded a more belligerent attitude in Vienna. In September–October 1913, after the second Serbian invasion of northern Albania, with Conrad begging as usual for war, Berchtold again agreed in general terms with a policy of confrontation, as did, unusually, Franz Joseph. At this point, Franz Ferdinand and Tisza (for widely differing reasons) remained the only doves among the senior decision-makers. And the success of the ultimatum in securing the withdrawal of Serbian troops from Albania was itself seen as vindicating a more militant style of diplomacy.
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This militancy of attitude coincided with a growing awareness of the extent to which economic constraints were starting to limit Austria-Hungary's strategic options. The partial mobilizations of the Balkan War crises had imposed immense financial strains on the monarchy. The extra costs for 1912–13 came to 390 million crowns, as much as the entire yearly budget for the Austro-Hungarian army, a serious matter at a time when the monarchy's economy was entering a recession.
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In this connection we should recall that Austria-Hungary spent very little on its army: of the great powers, only Italy spent less. It called up a smaller percentage of its population each year (0.27 per cent) than France (0.63 per cent) or Germany (0.46 per cent). The years 1906–12 had been boom years for the empire's economy, but very little of this wealth had been siphoned into the military budgets. The Empire fielded fewer infantry battalions in 1912 than it had in 1866, when its armies had faced the Prussians and the Italians at Königgrätz and Custoza, despite a twofold increase in population over the same period. Dualism was one reason for this – the Hungarians consistently blocked military growth;
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the pressure to placate the nationalities with expensive infrastructural projects was another block on military investment. To make matters worse, mobilizations in summer and/or early autumn gravely disrupted the agrarian economy, because they removed a large portion of the rural workforce from harvest work.
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In 1912–13, the critics of the government could argue, peacetime mobilizations had incurred huge costs and disrupted the economy without doing much to enhance the empire's security. Tactical mobilizations, it seemed, were an instrument that the monarchy could no longer afford to deploy. But if that was the case, then the government's flexibility in handling crises on the Balkan periphery must be gravely diminished. Without the intermediate option of purely tactical mobilizations, the decision-making process would inevitably become less nuanced. It would be a matter of peace or war.

In the summer of 1912, it was not at all clear that France would support Russia in a purely Balkan conflict. The terms of the Franco-Russian military convention of 1893–4 were ambiguous on this point. Article 2 stipulated that in the event of a general mobilization by
any one
of the powers of the Triple Alliance, France and Russia would simultaneously and immediately mobilize the totality of their forces and deploy as quickly as possible to their frontiers, without the need for any prior agreement.
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This seemed to imply that a Balkan crisis severe enough to trigger an Austrian mobilization might under certain circumstances automatically bring about a joint Franco-Russian counter-mobilization, which was in turn certain to trigger a German counter-mobilization, since Articles 1 and 2 of the Austro-German Dual Alliance of 1879 required that the signatories assist each other in the event of either of them being attacked by Russia or a power supported by Russia. Here was a mechanism that looked, on the face of it, capable of escalating a Balkan crisis into a continental war, all the more so as it made no distinction between a partial and a full Austrian mobilization.

Confusingly, Article 1 of the Franco-Russian military convention envisaged an obligation to intervene only in the following circumstances: (a) an attack by Germany on France
or
(b) an attack on Russia either by Germany or by Austria-Hungary supported by Germany. This article set the bar for a French military intervention much higher than Article 2. The dissonance in the text reflected the asymmetrical needs that had given rise to the treaty in the first place. For France, the alliance and the military convention attached to it were a means of countering and containing Germany. For Russia, the central concern was Austria-Hungary – try as they might, the French negotiators were unable to persuade their Russian counterparts to renounce the link asserted in Article 2 between an Austro-Hungarian and a French general mobilization. And this, in turn, effectively placed a trigger in the hands of the Russians, who – on paper at least – were free at any time to instigate a continental war in support of their Balkan objectives.
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