The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (41 page)

In 1879 Austria-Hungary showed which way its loyalties were likely to lie in the long run by signing an alliance with Germany whose main aim was to contain Russia. Both signatories promised to come to each other’s aid if Russia attacked one or the other; they would remain neutral, ‘benevolently’ so, if a third party attacked either one unless that third party was supported by Russia, in which case they would also intervene. The treaty, which was renewed at intervals, lasted until the end of the Great War. Austria-Hungary’s other main pact was the Triple Alliance with Germany and Italy, first signed in 1882, and which survived until the outbreak of war in 1914. The signatories promised to help Germany and Italy if either was attacked by France, and to come to each other’s aid if attacked by two or more powers.

Although the preamble described the Triple Alliance as ‘essentially conservative and defensive’, it contributed to the division of Europe as much as the Triple Entente of later years did. Alliances, like weapons, may be categorised as defensive but in practice their use may well be offensive. The Triple Alliance, like the Triple Entente, had the effect of encouraging its members to work together in the international arena and during the increasing number of crises; it established links of cooperation and friendship and created expectations of support in the future; and it led to shared planning and strategies particularly between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Arrangements meant to provide security were in 1914 to put pressure on their members to remain true to their alliance partners and so turn a local conflict into a more general one. Italy, the weakest of the European powers, in the end proved to be the only one willing to stand aside in 1914.

Italy had joined the Triple Alliance partly because its monarch, King Umberto, liked the idea of conservative support at a time when his country was experiencing social and political upheavals which looked far too much like revolutions and partly for protection against France. The Italians could not forgive the French for seizing the port of Tunis, which had long been an object of Italian interest, or for extracting territory from Italy in return for France’s support in the Italian wars of
unification. Moreover, being part of an alliance with Germany, the dominant power on the Continent, satisfied Italy’s longing to be considered among the great powers.

The Triple Alliance, however, also brought Italy and Austria-Hungary together which was never going to go smoothly. Both sides were well aware that there was the potential for conflict along their common frontiers. Austria-Hungary, which had already lost the rich provinces of Lombardy and Venetia to Italy, had the deepest suspicions of Italian designs on its own territory including the Italian-speaking areas in South Tyrol and the Adriatic port of Trieste, what had once been Venetian territories at the top of the Adriatic and down Austria-Hungary’s Dalmatian coast as well as what Italian patriots called Italy’s ‘natural boundaries’ up to the highest points along the Alps. The crumbling of the Ottoman Empire opened up new vistas for Italian expansion just across the Adriatic. Ottoman Albania and the independent state of Montenegro offered what Italy as a naval power badly needed – ports. Nature, as the Italians were fond of complaining, had made the western side of the Adriatic flat and muddy with only a few harbours and no natural defences while the eastern side had deep, clear seas, and good natural harbours. The Austrians were not pleased when Italy allowed an Albanian National Congress to be held in Naples in 1903 or when King Umberto’s heir married one of the many daughters of the king of Montenegro or when the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi opened the first telegraph station there.
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Italians for their part saw Austria-Hungary as the enemy which had blocked unification and continued to stand in the way of the completion of the Italian national project and was hostile to Italian ambitions in the Balkans. Some Italian politicians argued, though, that the Triple Alliance could be useful in putting pressure on Austria-Hungary to concede territory. As one said in 1910: ‘All efforts must unite to preserve the Austrian alliance until the day when we are ready for war. That day is still far off.’
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It was closer than he realised.

For Austria-Hungary, its key relationship was with Germany. Memories of defeat by Prussia in the 1860s had faded with time, especially since Bismarck had wisely offered generous peace terms. On both sides public opinion shifted significantly towards friendly feelings, and, as Russia’s power grew again after 1905, a feeling that Teutons needed to stick together against Slavs. At the highest levels of society, the
bureaucracy, and the officer corps were dominated by German speakers who tended to feel an affinity with Germany rather than with Russia. Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand both got on well with Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand was particularly grateful to him for treating his wife, Sophie, with full honours. The old emperor liked Wilhelm from the first because he had dismissed the hated Bismarck, but he also came to regard him as a friend, something that was increasingly rare in his life. Wilhelm made a point of visiting Franz Joseph frequently, every year in the period immediately before the Great War, and the younger man was deferential and charming. Wilhelm made repeated declarations of his friendship for Austria-Hungary. ‘For whatever reason you mobilize,’ he assured Franz Joseph and his chief of staff in 1889, ‘the day of your mobilization is also the day of mobilization for my army, and the Chancellors can say what they want.’ The Austrians were delighted, especially since the Germans were to repeat their promise in the crises which lay ahead. Franz Joseph sometimes worried that Wilhelm was too impulsive but, as he told his daughter after a visit in 1906, he trusted in his peaceful intentions. ‘It has done me good to shake hands once more with the emperor: in the present times, peaceful on the surface but stormy below, we cannot meet too often to assure each other, eye to eye, how sincerely we both desire peace and peace alone. In this endeavour we can indeed rely on mutual loyalty. He would no more think of leaving me in the lurch than I him.’
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There were, inevitably, strains in the relationship over the years. Although Germany was Austria-Hungary’s biggest trading partner, German tariffs, for example to protect its own farmers, hurt producers in the empire. And Germany’s economy was simply more expansive and dynamic; in the Balkans, where Austria-Hungary had been used to being the dominant economic power, German competition was increasingly sharp. When newspapers in Germany attacked Czechs or when the Prussian government treated its Polish minority badly, that caused repercussions across the border in Austria-Hungary. Germany’s handling of its foreign policy also worried its ally. Gołuchowski expressed a common view in 1902 when he wrote to Austria-Hungary’s ambassador in Berlin:

Altogether, the ways that German policy has been going of late give
indeed great cause for concern. The ever-increasing arrogance, the desire to play the schoolmaster everywhere, the lack of consideration with which Berlin often proceeds, are things which create a highly uncomfortable atmosphere in the field of foreign affairs, and cannot but have harmful repercussions on our own relationship with Germany in the long run.
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Yet in the long run the relationship remained strong because each needed the other and, increasingly, as the divisions in Europe deepened, their leaders felt that they had no alternatives.

While Austria-Hungary continued to reach out to one member, Russia, of the Triple Entente, it allowed its relations with France and Great Britain to attenuate, like, said a young diplomat, a good wife who is so loyal that she will not go out to see old friends if her husband does not approve. And, to be fair, the old friends were not always welcoming. France and Austria-Hungary had moved in different directions politically since the Third Republic was established in 1871. The Establishment in Vienna, monarchical, aristocratic, and Catholic, disliked what it saw as a France dominated by anti-clericals, Freemasons, and radicals. In foreign relations France was tied to Russia and would not do anything that would upset its crucial alliance. French money markets were therefore closed to Austria-Hungary. In the Balkans French diplomats tried to win over Serbia and Rumania to the Triple Entente while French investment and businesses were cutting into Austria-Hungary’s markets. The French armaments firm of Schneider, for example, was winning new orders in the Balkans by the first decade of the twentieth century while firms from Austria-Hungary were losing out. From time to time French statesmen such as Delcassé worried about the future collapse of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of a massive German state in the centre of Europe, but they took no steps to improve relations.
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Austria-Hungary’s relations with Britain over the years had been closer and more cordial than with France. Although Britain had its own radical traditions, it was seen from Vienna as a more stable and conservative society than France and one where the aristocracy, quite properly, still dominated politics and the civil service. The appointment of Count Albert Mensdorff in 1904 as Austria-Hungary’s ambassador was seen
as a clever move since he was closely related to the British royal family and welcome in British aristocratic circles. And there were no colonial rivalries as there were between Britain and Russia, for example, to drive Austria-Hungary and Britain apart. Even in the Mediterranean where the two were both naval powers, they shared an interest in keeping things calm, especially at its eastern end. For both the other was a convenient counterweight against Russia. During the Boer War, Austria-Hungary was one of the few powers that supported Britain. ‘
Dans cette guerre je suis complètement Anglais
,’ said Franz Joseph in 1900 to the British ambassador in the hearing of the French and Russian ambassadors.
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Nevertheless relations gradually cooled. The agreements on maintaining the status quo in the Mediterranean, which was partly about blocking Russian control over the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, were effectively dead by 1903 as each country moved to make its own accommodation with Russia. From London, Austria-Hungary was increasingly seen as being under the dominance of Germany. As the naval race heated up, for example, the British feared that every new ship built by Austria-Hungary would simply add to German naval strength. And once Britain came to an understanding with Russia in 1907, it did its best to avoid anything, such as supporting Austria-Hungary in the Balkans or the Mediterranean, that would disrupt an important relationship. As Austria-Hungary’s own relationship with Russia frayed, its relations with Britain grew even cooler.
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Austria-Hungary found it increasingly difficult to remain on good terms with both Germany and Russia as those latter two drifted further apart. Although Franz Joseph and his Foreign Ministers regretted the trend, Austria-Hungary found its relations with Russia more difficult than those with Germany. The awakening of Slav nationalism in Austria-Hungary stirred Russian interest and sympathy but for the empire that only added a layer of complication to its internal troubles. Even if Russia did not appoint itself protector for Europe’s Slavs, its existence was enough to make its neighbour wary of its intentions.

The changes in the Balkans brought Austria-Hungary fresh worries. As the Ottoman Empire receded, not willingly, from Europe, the new states – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Rumania – that appeared were potential friends for Russia. They had predominantly
Slav populations (although Rumanians and Greeks would insist that they were different) who largely shared the Orthodox religion with Russia. And what about the remaining European territories of the Ottoman Empire such as Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace? Would they become the object of intrigues, rivalry and war? In 1877, the Dual Monarchy’s Foreign Minister, Julius Andrassy, observed that Austria and Russia ‘are immediate neighbours and must live with one another, either on terms of peace or of war. A war between the two Empires … would probably only end with the destruction or collapse of one of the belligerents.’
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By the end of the nineteenth century Russia also saw the dangers posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Since it could no longer count on German friendship after the lapse of the Reinsurance Treaty and was in any case turning its attention to the Far East, its rulers were amenable to a détente with Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. In April 1897 Franz Joseph and his Foreign Minister Gołuchowski received a warm welcome in St Petersburg. While military bands played the Austrian anthem and Austria’s yellow and black flag and Hungary’s red, white, and green one flew alongside the Russian one in the spring breeze, the tsar and his guests rode in open carriages along Nevsky Prospekt. That night the two emperors exchanged warm toasts at a state banquet and expressed their hopes for peace. In subsequent conversations, the two sides agreed to work together to keep the Ottoman Empire intact and to make it clear to the independent Balkan nations that they could no longer play off one of them against the other. Since the Ottomans might well lose their grip in their remaining Balkan territories, Russia and Austria-Hungary would work together on a division of the Balkans and then present a united front to the other powers. Russia got a promise that, whatever happened, the Straits would remain closed to foreign warships coming into the Black Sea and Austria-Hungary got, or thought it did, an understanding that it could annex the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by its forces since 1878, at some future date. The Russians, however, later sent a note saying the annexation ‘would raise a more extensive question, which would require special scrutiny at the proper times and places’.
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In 1908 that question would indeed be raised in a particularly damaging way.