The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (37 page)

CHAPTER 8
The Loyalty of the Nibelungs: The Dual Alliance of Austria-Hungary and Germany

In March 1909 as a crisis over Bosnia between Russia and Austria-Hungary threatened to start a war, Bülow, the German Chancellor, assured the Reichstag that Germany would stand behind its ally down the Danube with ‘Nibelungen loyalty’. It was a curious metaphor to use. If he was referring to the Wagner operas the Ring Cycle (and he knew the composer’s family), then the Nibelungs stand for greed and treachery. If he meant the historic Nibelungs (as the Germans called the Burgundian kings of the Middle Ages) then indeed there was loyalty, but it led to destruction. According to myth, the Burgundian court, surrounded by its enemies, refuses to surrender Hagen who has betrayed and murdered Siegfried, and in his defence the Burgundians die to the last man.

For all the professions of loyalty, the German leadership had mixed feelings about Austria-Hungary. They were aware of its many weaknesses and they found that Austrian charm did not make up for what they saw as the Austrian slapdash ways of doing things. Germany’s problem was that it had few possibilities of finding allies elsewhere. It
had alienated Great Britain by the naval race and as long as Tirpitz and the Kaiser refused to back down, the British were not going to be friendly. Partly in response to Germany’s challenge, Britain had moved closer to both France and Russia and, although the British said and perhaps even believed that the Triple Entente was defensive and non-binding, nevertheless the three countries had got into the habit of consulting each other and making shared plans. Their officials, whether civilian or military, had built links and made friendships.

8. German leaders liked to claim that Germany stood by its ally Austria-Hungary with loyalty worthy of the Nibelungs. It was a curious choice of metaphor which shows something of the ambiguities and strains in the Dual Alliance. According to the myth portrayed here the noble Burgundian warriors of the Middle Ages die to the last man as the result of intrigues between two women.

If Germany was looking for friends, France, with its military alliance with Russia and its Entente Cordiale with Britain, could no longer be intimidated, as it had been in Bismarck’s day, and it was not going to choose freely to align itself with its eastern neighbour. Russia was a
more likely prospect for Germany for any number of reasons but for the time being its need for French money and its relief at settling its outstanding issues with Britain in the east made it resistant to German attempts to woo it. Among the great powers that left only Italy, which was indeed part of the Triple Alliance but since it was both weak militarily and deeply at odds with the other member of the Alliance, Austria-Hungary, it could not be depended upon. In southern Europe, if Germany wanted support against Russia or for itself and Austria-Hungary, the prospects were slim: the Ottoman Empire was in rapid decline and the smaller states in southern Europe – Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece – were sensibly watching and waiting to see which way events would fall out.

That left Austria-Hungary. As Heinrich von Tschirschky, Germany’s ambassador to Vienna since 1907, was to say pensively in 1914: ‘How often do I ask myself whether it is really worth it to attach ourselves so firmly to this state which is almost falling apart and to continue the exhausting work of pulling it along with us. But I cannot see any other constellation that could replace the still existing advantages that lie in an alliance with the Central European power.’
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In the years before 1914, Germany, rightly or wrongly, increasingly saw itself as encircled. (Of course, its neighbours saw it quite differently as a great economic and military power dominating the centre of Europe.) With a friendly Austria-Hungary to the south, it still had one frontier which it did not have to worry about. Count Alfred von Schlieffen, the chief of Germany’s general staff who gave his name to one of the most famous military plans of the twentieth century, wrote in 1909, after he had left office: ‘The iron ring forged around Germany and Austria only remains open towards the Balkans now.’ The enemies of Germany and Austria-Hungary – France, Britain, and Russia – were bent on their destruction but biding their time until internal divisions, in Austria’s case among its many nationalities and in Germany’s among its political parties, did their malign work. At a given moment, he warned, ‘the doors are to be opened, the drawbridges let down, and the million-strong armies let loose, ravaging and destroying …’
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What also worried Germany was that Austria-Hungary might itself decide to drift away from the Triple Alliance. There were those on both sides in Russia and Austria-Hungary, including the monarchs
themselves, who still hankered after a conservative alliance with or without Germany. And in Austria-Hungary there were plenty who hated Italy and would have much preferred to wage war on it rather than on Russia. Many Austrian patriots found it hard to forgive and forget that the unification of Germany had come at the expense of their empire’s traditional role as one of the leading German states. It also did not help that the Germans tended to patronise their ally, the Kaiser saying, for example, what a loyal second Austria-Hungary was in a conflict. German officials often treated their Austrian counterparts in a high-handed way. ‘I had never been in any doubt’, said Bülow in his memoirs, ‘that, if we accept the comparison which that experienced diplomatist, Talleyrand, made between States in alliance and a horse and rider, we must play the part of rider in our alliance with the Danubian monarchy.’
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It was never going to be as simple as that and Germany was to find that its horse headed where it wanted, particularly down into the Balkans. In taking on Austria-Hungary as an ally, Germany also took on its ambitions and its quarrels in a volatile part of the world where the rapid decline of the Ottoman Empire in Europe was not only drawing in both Russia and Austria-Hungary but stimulating the appetites of the small independent Balkan states. The challenge for Germany was to reassure Austria-Hungary that it was firmly in support but to keep it from acting recklessly. As Bülow said, with the advantage of hindsight:

There was a danger that the Dual Monarchy, if tried too far, would lose its nerve and fall into the clutches of Russia as the terrified dove falls to the snake. Our policy would have to put forth every effort to keep Austria faithful to ourselves and, in case of war – which, if we were skilful, was avoidable, but which naturally remained a possibility – to be assured of the co-operation of the Imperial and Royal army, still formidable and efficient enough in spite of the inner weakness of the Monarchy. On the other hand, we must avoid letting Austria drag us, against our will, into a world war.
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On paper and on the map, Austria-Hungary looked an impressive ally. In today’s terms, it stretched from southern Poland down to the
north of Serbia and included the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, the south-western corner of Ukraine, Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and a large piece – Transylvania – of Rumania. It had a population of more than 50 million, a strong agricultural sector, resources from iron to timber, growing industries, a rapidly expanding railway network, a peacetime army of nearly 400,000 as well as a modern navy. Its great capital cities of Vienna and Budapest and the smaller cities too, Prague for example, or Zagreb, had been modernised and beautified with proper drains, tramways, electricity, and massive and heavily decorated public buildings and solid bourgeois apartment blocks. The Dual Monarchy’s universities ranged from the Jagiellonian in Cracow (one of the oldest in Europe) to the Vienna Medical Schools and its schools and colleges were expanding fast. By 1914 80 per cent of the empire’s population could read and write.

While there were parts of the Dual Monarchy which seemed not to have changed at all – peasant life in Galicia or Transylvania, for example, or, at the other end of the social scale, the intricate ritual of the court in the great imperial palaces – the modern world was shaking up Austria-Hungary, producing new communications, enterprises, and technologies as well as new values and attitudes. The old restrictions which kept Jews out of certain professions had gone, for example, although a new and virulent anti-Semitism, sad to say, was to make its appearance in the years before 1914. While the Dual Monarchy’s economic growth could not match that of Russia’s, it was at an average of 1.7 per cent per year in the two decades before 1914. The empire’s development followed a pattern familiar from western Europe, with the growth of industries and a corresponding move of peasants from the countryside into the cities and towns and, in spite of booms and busts, a gradual spread of prosperity throughout a wider section of the population. The Czech lands, which were already advanced technologically and commercially, had the highest concentration of modern industry such as the great Skoda works which produced some of the best guns in Europe. Vienna also had modern industry on its outskirts including the Daimler works. By 1900, Budapest was catching up as well as becoming a banking centre for much of eastern Europe. Although Hungary’s economy remained predominantly agricultural, it was industrialising fast in the years after 1900.

Government spending on such things as infrastructure and social programmes, which was also increasing, helped what looked set to be a steady march towards modernisation and greater prosperity. The picture was not entirely rosy, however. Austria-Hungary’s imports greatly exceeded its exports and government debt was climbing. Its military expenditure remained the lowest of all the big four powers; in 1911 it was spending just over a third of what Russia was.
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Any increase in international tension was bound to be bad for Austria-Hungary’s fiscal health. Moreover, progress inevitably brought its own problems and strains. Small peasant farmers and the minor landholding nobility, for example, saw the prices for such products as wheat going down in the face of competition from Russia. The decades before 1914 saw increased peasant strikes and protests and the break-up of some of the old estates. In the towns and cities, craftsmen who could no longer compete with the output of modern factories and industrial workers whose conditions were often appalling were becoming organised and militant.

In some ways politics in the Dual Monarchy were similar to those elsewhere in Europe: the old landed classes hoped to hang on to power and influence, radicals were anti-clerical, middle-class liberals wanted greater freedoms, at least for themselves, and the new socialist movements wanted reform or in some cases revolution. And like Europe itself, Austria-Hungary included a range of ways of governing from autocracy to parliamentary democracy. The Austrian half had a parliament elected, after 1907, by universal male suffrage; in Hungary by contrast the franchise was restricted to about 6 per cent of the population. While Franz Joseph, the emperor from 1848 to 1916, was not as powerful as the tsar, nor was he as constrained as the king of Great Britain. The Austrian emperor determined foreign policy and was the supreme commander of the armed forces but his powers were laid out in constitutional laws. He appointed and dismissed ministers and had emergency powers, which his government used frequently, to govern without parliament yet he could not modify the constitution. The business of government nevertheless went on, taxes were collected and bills were paid. The emperor himself was popular with most of his people and the prospect of revolution seemed much more remote than in Russia.

What made German statesmen ask themselves in the decades before 1914 whether they had made the right choice in allying with
Austria-Hungary was the question mark over its long-term survival. In an age of growing national consciousness, it, like the Ottoman Empire, was increasingly at the mercy of its nationalities. Lord Durham said of Canada in 1838 that it consisted of two nations warring within the bosom of a single state and the conflict between French and English is still working itself out there over a century and a half later. How much greater the challenge was for Austria-Hungary, which recognised ten or eleven main languages. This had not mattered for centuries, when people defined themselves by religion or ruler or village and not by nationality. By the late nineteenth century, however, nationalism – the identifying of oneself as a member of a group distinguished by language as well as religion, history, culture or race – was a force for change all over Europe. Just as a growing sense of belonging to something called the German or the Italian nation had helped lead to the creation of a German and an Italian state, Polish, Hungarian, Ruthenian, Czech and still more nationalisms were pushing inside Austria-Hungary towards greater autonomy if not full independence.

Austria-Hungary had no strong countervailing identity around which its citizens could rally since it was not so much a country as a collection of properties acquired by the Habsburgs over the previous millennium through skilful manoeuvring, marriage and war. Franz Joseph had so many titles, ranging from emperor to count, that they were often written with many an etc. etc. There were, of course, those who believed in a multinational empire: perhaps of mixed nationalities themselves, or the great aristocratic families whose connections and interests spanned the empire and indeed often Europe itself, or Habsburg loyalists who put duty to the dynasty above all else. The army too was a genuinely multinational organisation and it dealt with the language issue in a sensible way. Soldiers had to know the basic technical and command words in German but otherwise they would usually be placed in regiments where their fellow soldiers spoke the same language. Officers were expected to learn the language of the soldiers under their command. It is said that during the war one regiment found that English was the most common language and so used that.
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