The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (69 page)

The Balkan nations, which had emerged from the Ottoman Empire in the course of the nineteenth century, were themselves now playing a part in international affairs as well. They had to manoeuvre between the two great powers of Russia and Austria-Hungary while keeping an uneasy eye on each other. Through the work of poets and historians, with the spread of modern communications, and with the spread of the idea from western Europe that human beings were properly divided into races or nations, what had been separate religious or ethnic identities were solidifying into Bulgarian, Greek, Serbian, Rumanian or Montenegrin nationalisms. Unfortunately for the peace of the Balkans the vagaries of history and the mix of peoples throughout the Balkans
meant that each of these emerging nations could lay claim to another’s territory, and in the case, of Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece and Serbia to what was left of the Ottoman Empire’s European territories. Increasingly the Balkan nations added to the complexity and instability of the international relations of their region as their governments, dominated more often than not by radical nationalists, called on ethnic or religious ties or rummaged through the past to find arguments for acquiring more territory, from each other, from the Ottoman Empire, or, in the case of Serbia and Rumania, from Austria-Hungary.

Rumania under Carol I, a determined and strong ruler who came from the Catholic branch of the Hohenzollerns, had successfully freed itself from the Ottoman Empire by 1880 but for Rumanian nationalists the Rumanian state was not yet complete. Some 3 million Rumanian speakers lived, not always happily, under Hungarian rule in Transylvania. (The total population of Rumania itself was just under 7 million.) On the other hand, Rumania was on bad terms with Bulgaria and its great neighbour Russia, both of which had taken territory Rumania thought was rightfully its. As Aehrenthal once said, Austria-Hungary’s policy towards Rumania must ‘prevent artificially fostered hate of Hungary from becoming stronger than the very fundamental fear of Russia’.
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In 1883, under pressure from Bismarck, King Carol signed a secret defensive alliance with Austria-Hungary but since only he and a couple of his minsters knew about it, Vienna could never be entirely comfortable that Rumania would be an ally in a general war. When he considered Austria-Hungary’s strategic position, Conrad hoped at best that Rumania could put some sixteen divisions into the field against Russia; second best was Rumania’s neutrality, which would at least tie down some Russian forces; worst of all would be for Rumania to switch sides. The German Kaiser, who placed an exaggerated faith in family ties, believed that, as the senior member of the Hohenzollern dynasty, he could keep Carol loyal to the Triple Alliance.
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In the years before the Great War, Archduke Franz Ferdinand contemplated handing over Transylvania to Rumania and so weakening the Hungarians, whom he hated, and cementing the friendship with Rumania.
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The archduke also liked Carol, who made sure that his duchess, Sophie, was received with full royal honours in Bucharest, something Franz Joseph had
refused her.
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Such hopes were illusory: the Hungarians would never have agreed to losing what many of them regarded as the cradle of the Hungarian nation. Unfortunately for the future of the secret alliance the Hungarians continued to deny the Rumanians within their borders political rights. Before 1914, the 3 million Rumanians in Hungary had five deputies in the Hungarian parliament while 10 million Hungarian-speakers had almost 400.
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Rumania’s neighbour to the south, Bulgaria, was closer to Russia in the early stages of its independence. The Bulgarians, unlike the Rumanians who spoke a Latin language and who liked to think of themselves as the descendants of Roman settlers, spoke a Slavic language close to Russian and had looked to Russia for support and encouragement in their struggle in the 1870s to free themselves from Ottoman rule. Although Bulgarian dreams of a large and independent Bulgaria were blocked in 1878, unfortunately for the future stability of the Balkans, the Bulgarians themselves clung to the belief that the only just borders for their country where the ones they had briefly enjoyed. In the 1880s, in spite of objections from Russia which had set itself up as Bulgaria’s patron, the Bulgarian government went ahead and brought the Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia under its administration. Tsar Alexander III, the father of Nicholas, was enraged. Not only did he strip Prince Alexander, who had been summoned from Germany to rule Bulgaria, of his rank in the Russian army, but he did his best to drive him from Bulgaria’s throne. In 1886 the tsar was successful and the following year Bulgaria elected another German prince, who became widely known to his subjects and throughout Europe as Foxy Ferdinand. Relations between Bulgaria and Russia remained cool. From Russia’s point of view it had wasted resources and spilt good Russian blood in the war with the Ottomans to free the Bulgarians who had behaved with appalling ingratitude. By the start of the twentieth century the Russians, for all the talk of Panslavist brotherhood, increasingly saw Bulgaria, with its clear interest in detaching Macedonia from the Ottoman Empire, as a threat to stability in the Balkans, to Russia’s status quo agreement of 1897 with Austria-Hungary, and to the safety of the Straits.

With Russia’s rival chief rival for influence in the Balkans, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria’s relations were somewhat warmer. Austria-Hungary sold weapons to Bulgaria and dominated its international trade. From
the point of view of the Dual Monarchy, Bulgaria had one further point in its favour. It was not Serbia; there were no Bulgarians living in Austria-Hungary to be lured away by nationalist siren songs from their co-nationals outside the empire’s borders.
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In 1891, a few years after Ferdinand became prince of Bulgaria, Franz Joseph invited him to Vienna. When the Russians complained, the Dual Monarchy’s Foreign Minister expressed surprise: ‘little Ferdinand’ had known Franz Joseph since he was a boy. So when, in 1904 Bulgaria and Serbia signed an arrangement on customs, it set off alarm bells in Vienna which suspected the two Balkan powers were moving towards a union.
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Relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, which gradually freed itself from the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century to become an independent state in 1878, had initially been good. In the 1880s and 1890s the Serbian economy became closely intertwined with that of its great neighbour to the north and the first Serbian king, Milan, had even suggested to Austria-Hungary in 1885 that it might want to annex his country in return for a nice pension so that he could abdicate and enjoy the fleshpots of Europe. Vienna turned down the offer for fear of what Russia might say or do and the Minister of Foreign Affairs told the unhappy Milan that he had an obligation to stay in his country and be a good ruler.
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In the next few years Milan managed to alienate Serbian nationalists by his subservience to Austria-Hungary and shock even his supporters by quarrelling openly with his Russian-born wife in various Belgrade cafés. In 1889, by now divorced from her, Milan finally managed to abdicate in favour of his thirteen-year-old son, Alexander. Unfortunately for the family and for Serbia, the boy grew up to be a chip off the parental block. In 1900 he married an older woman with a very shady reputation. In 1903 both were murdered, along with the Prime Minister and the Minister of War, in a particularly brutal fashion by nationalist officers. Peter Karageorgević, from a rival dynasty, became king and, after some political turbulence, the intensely nationalist Radicals under the cagey and cunning Nikola Pašić took over the government which they were to dominate until the end of the Great War.

The assassination not only set Serbia on a new path of confrontation with Austria-Hungary, it helped to build the chain of events which led to the summer of 1914. In 1906, in a clear indication that the new regime
in Belgrade was determined to free itself from Austria-Hungary, the Serbian government, which had previously bought most of its armaments from the Dual Monarchy, awarded a substantial contract to the French firm of Schneider.
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In retaliation, Austria-Hungary suspended its trade treaty with Serbia and closed its borders to Serbian exports (mainly livestock) on the spurious grounds that the animals had diseases. The ‘Pig War’ lasted until 1911 but it did not bring Serbia to heel. Although their economy suffered, the Serbians were able to look elsewhere, to France, for example, which had money to lend and arms to sell, but above all to Russia.

The new regime in Belgrade was not only hostile from the start to its great neighbour to the north but it was strongly Russophile. Russia, for its part, moved partly by emotion and partly by calculation, came to see its role as defending its little Balkan brother. And the little brother was motivated not just by hatred and fear of Austria-Hungary but by grand ambitions. Serb nationalists relied on history to claim what in the fourteenth century had been the kingdom of Tsar Dušan, and that included lands to the south of Serbia occupied mainly by Albanians, Bulgars, and Turks. Montenegro was more indisputably Serb but its ruling family was frequently at loggerheads with the Serbian dynasty so that might have to wait. In addition, the Montenegrin king, the artful Nicholas I, had married his numerous children well, two to Russian grand dukes, one to the heir to the Italian throne, and one to King Peter of Serbia himself. As well as history, the Serbian nationalists used linguistic and ethnic evidence to argue that other South Slavs, the largely Catholic Croats and the Muslims of Bosnia-Herzegovina, were really renegade Serbs who should be Orthodox in religion; so Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia, Istria, Croatia, and Slavonia, all inside Austria-Hungary, might also become part of a Greater Serbia. By the twentieth century, the growth of a transnational Yugoslav movement, which took its name from the Serbo-Croatian for South Slav, was causing considerable concern to the Habsburg authorities as its own South Slavs went to Belgrade for congresses and meetings and there was heady talk of an eventual union of Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bulgars.
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For Serb nationalists, Bosnia-Herzegovina was both a sore point and a temptation. The provinces’ population was some 44 per cent Serb
or Orthodox (the two were seen as virtually synonymous), 33 per cent Muslim, and about 22 per cent Croat or Catholic.
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From the Serb nationalist point of view, the last two could be seen as part of the Serb nation even if they did not yet realise it. The provinces were under the control of what Serb nationalists increasingly saw as their enemy, Austria-Hungary, but, and this was important, they were still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. If that empire finally disappeared, perhaps with a little help from its neighbours in the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina might well become part of a Greater Serbia. That in turn would give Serbia a border with Montenegro, better still union, and access to the Adriatic, something which landlocked Serbia badly needed for trade. Agitators from Serbia were already busy in Macedonia and, after 1900, they increasingly moved into Bosnia-Herzegovina. The Serb-language press in both Belgrade and Sarajevo denounced Austria-Hungary’s tyranny and called on the peoples of the provinces to rise up. In 1907, Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina ran their own elections for a national assembly which met in Sarajevo to demand an independent state within the Ottoman Empire.
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Austria-Hungary, which had administered the provinces efficiently if autocratically, had few supporters within Bosnia-Herzegovina. Since the Hungarians had insisted that no common funds be spent there, or even railways built that did not benefit Hungary in some way, Bosnia-Herzegovina remained a largely rural backwater. In an unsuccessful attempt to win over the landlords, who were largely Muslim, the provinces’ governors had left the archaic landholding system alone with the result that they had alienated the tenants who were mostly Serb. While the Muslims still tended to look to Constantinople, the Serbs increasingly looked to Belgrade. Only the Croats showed some loyalty to Austria-Hungary.
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‘When I was here, for the first time, in 1892’, wrote a leading liberal from Vienna, ‘the atmosphere was one of energetic progress, well-considered and full of eager hopefulness in the future; today, inactivity, doubt, apprehensiveness are the notes.’
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On the credit side, the Dual Monarchy had provided greater security than its Ottoman predecessors and some progress had been made in communications and education but, as so frequently happened in other colonial empires, those developments also served to produce an educated class of nationalists.

By the time Aehrenthal took up his post as Foreign Minister, Serbia had become for Austria-Hungary’s leaders both its most dangerous neighbour in the Balkans and an existential threat, undermining the empire in Bosnia-Herzegovina and stirring up nationalist longings among its own South Slavs. The conclusion that many in Austria-Hungary drew was that such troubles would disappear if Serbia did. Conrad and his fellow military argued for dealing with the problem by waging war on Serbia and annexing it to the empire. Although Aehrenthal initially told Izvolsky, his opposite number in Russia, that his aim was to preserve peace in the Balkans and improve conditions for the Christians still under Turkish rule (and, of course, remain on the best of terms with Russia), by 1907 he had given up hoping to win Serbia over by peaceful means.
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In a memorandum the following year, he painted the prospect, a promising one for Austria-Hungary, of the growing antagonism between Serbia and Bulgaria over Macedonia leading to war. Then, so Aehrenthal hoped, Austria-Hungary could scoop up whatever was left of Serbia. In the longer run, an independent Albania bordering on the Adriatic and under Austrian-Hungarian protection might emerge. (The Albanians, who were possibly the oldest peoples in the Balkans and who spoke a language different from that of their Slavic neighbours, were conveniently starting to develop their own separate nationalism.) As for Bulgaria, in the ideal scenario for Vienna, it would be heavily in debt after its war with Serbia and therefore forced to lean on Austria-Hungary.
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