The Sleepwalkers (16 page)

Bosnia-Herzegovina 1914

All was not sweetness and light in Bosnia-Herzegovina, to be sure. The Habsburg administration bore down hard on anything that smelled like nationalist mobilization against the empire, sometimes with a heavy and undiscriminating hand. In 1913, Oskar Potiorek, military governor of Bosnia-Herzegovina, suspended most of the Bosnian constitution of 1910, tightened government controls of the school system, banned the circulation of newspapers from Serbia and closed down many Bosnian Serb cultural organizations, though this was, it should be pointed out, in response to an escalation in Serbian ultra-nationalist militancy.
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Another vexing factor was the political frustration of Serbs and Croats just across the border to the west and north in Croatia-Slavonia, and to the east in the Vojvodina, both ruled from Budapest under the restrictive Hungarian franchise. But all in all, this was a relatively fair and efficient administration informed by a pragmatic respect for the diverse traditions of the national groups in the provinces. Theodore Roosevelt was not too far off the mark when he observed, during a visit to the White House by two senior Austrian politicians in June 1904, that the Habsburg monarchy had ‘understood how to treat the different nations and religions in this country on an equal footing and how thereby to achieve such great successes'; he added, perhaps unhappily, that he believed the US administration in the Philippines could learn a lot from the Austrian example.
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Visitors, too, were struck by the even-handedness of the Habsburg regime: there was a tone of ‘mutual respect and mutual toleration' among the ethno-religious groups, one American journalist observed in 1902; the courts were ‘wisely and honestly administered' and ‘justice [was] awarded to every citizen, regardless of his religion or social position'.
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Evaluating the condition and prospects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the First World War confronts us in an acute way with the problem of temporal perspective. The collapse of the empire amid war and defeat in 1918 impressed itself upon the retrospective view of the Habsburg lands, overshadowing the scene with auguries of imminent and ineluctable decline. The Czech national activist Edvard Beneš was a case in point. During the First World War, Beneš became the organizer of a secret Czech pro-independence movement; in 1918, he was one of the founding fathers of the new Czechoslovak nation-state. But in a study of the ‘Austrian Problem and the Czech Question' published in 1908, he had expressed confidence in the future of the Habsburg commonwealth. ‘People have spoken of the dissolution of Austria. I do not believe in it at all. The historic and economic ties which bind the Austrian nations to one another are too strong to let such a thing happen.'
⁴²
A particularly striking example is the sometime
Times
correspondent (later editor) Henry Wickham Steed. In 1954, Steed declared in a letter to the
Times Literary Supplement
that when he had left the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1913, ‘it was with the feeling that I was escaping from a doomed edifice'. His words confirmed what was then the widely held view. Back in 1913, however, he had seen things differently. Though he was an outspoken critic of many features of Habsburg governance, he wrote in that year that he had been unable during ten years of ‘constant observation and experience' to perceive ‘any sufficient reason' why the Habsburg monarchy ‘should not retain its rightful place in the European Community'. ‘Its internal crises,' he concluded, ‘are often crises of growth rather than crises of decay.'
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It was only during the First World War that Steed became a propagandist for the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian state and an ardent defender of the post-war settlement in Central Europe. For the 1927 English translation of Tomáš Masaryk's Czech nationalist memoir
The Making of a State
, Steed supplied a foreword in which he declared that the name ‘Austria' was synonymous with ‘every device that could kill the soul of a people, corrupt it with a modicum of material well-being, deprive it of freedom of conscience and of thought, undermine its sturdiness, sap its steadfastness and turn it from the pursuit of its ideal'.
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Such reversals of polarity could occur in the other direction too. The Hungarian scholar Oszkár Jászi – one of the most profound experts on the Habsburg Empire – was sharply critical of the dualist system. In 1929, he concluded an ambitious study of the monarchy's dissolution with the observation that ‘the World War was not the cause, but only the final liquidation of the deep hatred and distrust of the various nations'.
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And yet in 1949, after a further world war and a calamitous period of dictatorship and genocide in his home country, Jászi, who had lived in American exile since 1919, struck a different note. In the old Habsburg monarchy, he wrote, ‘the rule of law was tolerably secure; individual liberties were more and more recognised; political rights continuously extended; the principle of national autonomy growingly respected. The free flow of persons and goods extended its benefits to the remotest parts of the monarchy'.
⁴⁶
While the euphoria of national independence disposed some who had once been loyal Habsburg citizens to impugn the old dual monarchy, others who were vigorous dissenters before 1914 later fell prey to nostalgia. In 1939, reflecting on the collapse of the monarchy, the Hungarian writer Mihály Babits wrote: ‘we now regret the loss and weep for the return of what we once hated. We are independent, but instead of feeling joy we can only tremble.'
⁴⁷

After the ejection of the Austrians from Italy in 1859 and Germany in 1866, the Balkan region became by default the pre-eminent focus of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy. Unfortunately, this narrowing of geopolitical range happened to coincide with an era of growing volatility across the Balkan peninsula. The underlying problem was the waning of Ottoman authority in south-eastern Europe, which created a zone of tension between the two great powers with a strategic interest in the region.
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Both Russia and Austria-Hungary felt historically entitled to exercise hegemony in those areas from which the Ottomans withdrew. The House of Habsburg had traditionally been the guardian of Europe's eastern gate against the Turks. In Russia, the ideology of pan-Slavism asserted a natural commonality of interest between the emergent Slavic (especially Orthodox) nations of the Balkan peninsula and the patron power in St Petersburg. Ottoman retreat also raised questions about future control of the Turkish Straits, an issue of acute strategic importance to Russian policy-makers. At the same time, ambitious new Balkan states emerged with conflicting interests and objectives of their own. Across this turbulent terrain, Austria and Russia manoeuvred like chess players hoping with each move to cancel out or diminish the opponent's advantage.

Until 1908, cooperation, self-restraint and the demarcation of informal spheres of influence ensured that the dangers implicit in this state of affairs were contained.
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In the revised Three Emperors' League treaty of 1881 between Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany, Russia undertook to ‘respect' the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina authorized in 1878 at the Treaty of Berlin and the three signatories agreed to ‘take account' of each other's ‘interests in the Balkan Peninsula'.
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Further Austro-Russian understandings in 1897 and 1903 reaffirmed the joint commitment to the Balkan status quo.

The complexity of Balkan politics was such, however, that maintaining good relations with the rival great power was not enough to ensure tranquillity. The lesser beasts of the peninsula also had to be placated and tamed. And the most important of these, from Vienna's standpoint, was the Kingdom of Serbia. During the long reign of the Austrophile Milan Obrenović, Serbia remained a docile partner in Vienna's designs, acquiescing in the empire's claim to regional hegemony. Vienna, in return, supported Belgrade's bid for elevation to the status of kingdom in 1882 and promised diplomatic support in the event that Serbia should seek to expand southwards into Ottoman Macedonia. As the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Gustav Count Kálnoky von Köröspatak, informed his Russian counterpart in the summer of 1883, good relations with Serbia were the keystone of the empire's Balkan policy.
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Though friendly, King Milan of Serbia could be an exasperating partner. In 1885 the king created a commotion in Vienna by proposing to abdicate, send his son to school in Austria and allow the empire to annex his kingdom. The Austrians were having none of this nonsense. At a meeting in Vienna the dejected monarch was reminded of his kingly duties and sent back to Belgrade. ‘A flourishing and independent Serbia,' Kálnoky explained to the Austrian prime minister, ‘suits our intentions [. . .] better than the possession of an unruly province.'
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On 14 November, however, only four months after appearing to lose his will to rule, Milan suddenly and unexpectedly invaded neighbouring Bulgaria, Russia's client state. The resulting conflict was shortlived, because the Serbian army was easily beaten back by the Bulgarians, but assiduous great power diplomacy was required to prevent this unexpected démarche from ruffling the feathers of the Austro-Russian détente.

The son proved even more erratic than the father: Alexandar boasted intemperately of Austro-Hungarian support for his kingdom and declared publicly in 1899 that ‘the enemies of Serbia are the enemies of Austria-Hungary' – a
faux pas
that raised eyebrows in St Petersburg and caused considerable embarrassment in Vienna. But he was also tempted by the advantages of a Russophile policy; by 1902, after the death of King Father Milan, King Alexandar was energetically suing for Russian support; he even declared to a journalist in St Petersburg that the Habsburg monarchy was ‘the arch enemy of Serbia'.
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There was thus little regret in Vienna at the news of Alexandar's premature death, although the politicians there were as shocked as everyone else by the brutality with which he and his line were exterminated.

Only gradually did it become clear to the Austrians that the regicide of June 1903 marked a real break. The foreign ministry in Vienna hastened to establish good relations with the usurper Petar Karadjordjević, whom they optimistically viewed as Austrophile in temperament. Austria-Hungary became the first foreign state to recognize formally the new Serbian regime. But it soon became clear that the foundations no longer existed for a harmonious relationship between the two neighbours. The management of political affairs passed into the hands of men openly hostile to the dual monarchy and the policy-makers in Vienna studied with growing concern the nationalist expectorations of the Belgrade press, now freed from governmental restraints. In September 1903, Konstantin Dumba the Austrian minister in Belgrade reported that relations between the two countries were ‘as bad as possible'. Vienna rediscovered its moral outrage at the regicide and joined the British in imposing sanctions on the Karadjordjević court. Hoping to profit from this loosening of the Austro-Serbian bond, the Russians moved in, assuring the Belgrade government that Serbia's future lay in the west, on the Adriatic coastline, and urging them not to renew their long-standing commercial treaty with Vienna.
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At the end of 1905, these tensions broke out into open conflict with the discovery in Vienna that Serbia and Bulgaria had signed a ‘secret' customs union. Vienna's demand early in 1906 that Belgrade repudiate the union proved counter-productive; among other things, it transformed the Bulgarian union, which had been a matter of indifference to most Serbs, into the fetish (for a time at least) of Serbian national opinion.
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The general outlines of the 1906 crisis are set out in
chapter 1
, but one further point should be borne in mind, namely that what worried the politicians in Vienna was less the negligible commercial significance of the union with Bulgaria than the political logic underlying it. What if the Serbo-Bulgarian customs union were merely the first step in the direction of a ‘league' of Balkan states hostile to Austria-Hungary and receptive to promptings from St Petersburg?

It is easy to write this off as Austrian paranoia, but in reality, the policy-makers in Vienna were not far off the mark: the Serbian-Bulgarian customs agreement
was
in fact the third of a sequence of secret alliances between Serbia and Bulgaria, of which the first two were already clearly anti-Austrian in orientation. A Treaty of Friendship and a Treaty of Alliance had already been signed in Belgrade on 12 May 1904 in circumstances of the strictest secrecy. Dumba had done his utmost to find out what was going on between the Bulgarian delegates visiting the city and their Serbian interlocutors, but though his suspicions were raised, he had failed to penetrate the curtain of confidentiality surrounding the negotiations. Vienna's fear of Russian involvement, it turned out, was well founded. St Petersburg was indeed – notwithstanding the Austro-Russian détente and the immense effort of a disastrous war with Japan – working towards the creation of a Balkan alliance. A key figure in the negotiations was the Bulgarian diplomat Dimitar Rizov, sometime agent of the Russian Asiatic Department. On 15 September 1904 at eleven o'clock in the morning, the Russian ambassadors in Belgrade and Sofia were simultaneously (and secretly) presented with copies of the Serbian-Bulgarian Treaty of Alliance by the foreign ministers of Serbia and Bulgaria respectively.
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One difficult feature of Austro-Hungarian Balkan policy was the deepening interpenetration of foreign and domestic issues.
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For obvious reasons, domestic and international politics were most likely to become entangled in the case of those minorities for whom there existed an independent ‘motherland' outside the boundaries of the empire. The Czechs, Slovenes, Poles, Slovaks and Croats of the Habsburg lands possessed no such sovereign external nation-state. The 3 million Romanians in the Duchy of Transylvania, on the other hand, did. Thanks to the intricacies of the dualist system, there was little Vienna could do to prevent oppressive Hungarian cultural policies from alienating the neighbouring kingdom of Romania, a political partner of great strategic value in the region. Yet it proved possible, at least until around 1910, to insulate Austro-Romanian relations from the impact of domestic tensions, mainly because the government of Romania, an ally of Austria and Germany, made no effort to foment or exploit ethnic discord in Transylvania.