The Sleepwalkers (21 page)

The most consistent and influential opponent of Conrad and his war policy was Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, the man whose death at Sarajevo would precipitate the July Crisis of 1914. Franz Ferdinand occupied a complex but crucial position within the Habsburg leadership structure. At court, he was an isolated figure. His relations with the Emperor were not warm. His nomination as heir to the throne had come about only because the Emperor's son, Crown Prince Rudolf, had committed suicide in January 1889. The memory of this gifted and brooding prince doubtless overshadowed the Emperor's relationship with the abrasive and temperamental man who replaced him. Not until five years after his son's death was the Emperor prepared to appoint Franz Ferdinand his presumptive successor and only two years later, in 1896, did the archduke become the definitive heir to the throne. But even then, the Emperor's meetings with his nephew tended to be conducted in a tone of wounding condescension and it was said that the archduke went to imperial audiences trembling like a schoolboy on his way to the headmaster's office.

Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria-Este

The scandal of Franz Ferdinand's marriage to the Czech noblewoman Sophie Chotek in July 1900 was a further burden on his relationship with the Emperor. This was a marriage of love contracted against the wishes of the Emperor and the Habsburg royal family. Though descended from an elevated Bohemian lineage, Countess Sophie Chotek von Chotkova and Wognin did not meet the exacting genealogical criteria of the House of Habsburg. Franz Ferdinand had to wage a long campaign, enlisting the support of archbishops and ministers and ultimately of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Pope Leo XIII, in order to secure permission for the union. Franz Joseph eventually gave in, but he remained unreconciled to the marriage until the couple's violent death in 1914.
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His heir was obliged to swear an oath excluding the as yet unborn children of his marriage from the line of succession to the Habsburg throne. After the wedding, the couple continued to endure the slights of a Habsburg court protocol that regulated nearly every facet of dynastic public life: Sophie, forbidden ever to carry the title archduchess, was styled first princess and later Duchess of Hohenberg. She was not permitted to join her husband in the royal box at the opera, sit near him at gala dinners, or accompany him in the splendid royal carriage with its golden wheels. Her chief tormentor was the Emperor's chamberlain, Prince Montenuovo, himself the illegitimate offspring of one of Napoleon's wives, who enforced the rules of etiquette at every opportunity with exquisite precision.

After 1906, when the Emperor appointed his nephew inspector-general of the army, Franz Ferdinand compensated for the long years of isolation at court by building a power base of his own within the rickety executive structure of the double monarchy. In addition to securing a number of key appointments (Aehrenthal and Conrad, among others), the archduke expanded the activities of his Military Chancellery, which was housed near his residence in the Lower Belvedere. Under the energetic supervision of a gifted head of personal staff, Major Alexander Brosch von Aarenau, the Military Chancellery was reorganized along ministerial lines; its ostensibly military information channels served as a cover for political data-gathering and a network of friendly journalists managed from the Belvedere promulgated the archduke's ideas, pummelled political opponents and attempted to shape public debates. Processing over 10,000 pieces of correspondence per year, the Chancellery matured into an imperial think-tank, a power-centre within the system that some saw as a ‘shadow government'.
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Like all think-tanks, this one had its axes to grind. An internal study of its operations concluded that its chief political objective was to hinder any ‘possible mishaps' that could accelerate the ‘national-federal fragmentation' of the Habsburg Empire.
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At the heart of this concern about political fragmentation was a deep-seated hostility to the Hungarian elites who controlled the eastern half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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The archduke and his advisers were outspoken critics of the dualist political system forged in the aftermath of Austria's defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1866.This arrangement had, in Franz Ferdinand's eyes, one fatal flaw: it concentrated power in the hands of an arrogant and politically disloyal Magyar elite, while at the same time marginalizing and alienating the other nine official Habsburg nationalities. Once installed with his staff at the Lower Belvedere, Captain Brosch von Aarenau built up a network of disaffected non-Magyar intellectuals and experts and the Military Chancellery became a clearing house for Slav and Romanian opposition to the oppressive minority policies of the Kingdom of Hungary.
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The archduke made no secret of the fact that he intended to restructure the imperial system after his accession to the throne. The key objective was to break or diminish the Hungarian hegemony in the eastern part of the monarchy. For a time, Franz Ferdinand favoured strengthening the Slavic element in the monarchy by creating a Croat- (and thus Catholic-) dominated ‘Yugoslavia' within the empire. It was his association with this idea that so aroused the hatred of his orthodox Serbian enemies. By 1914, however, it appears he had dropped this plan in favour of a far-reaching transformation by which the empire would become a ‘United States of Great Austria', comprising fifteen member states, many of which would have Slav majorities.
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By diminishing the status of the Hungarians, the archduke and his advisers hoped to reinforce the authority of the Habsburg dynasty while at same time rekindling the loyalties of the lesser nationalities. Whatever one thought of this programme, and obviously Hungarians didn't think much of it, it did identify the archduke as a man of radical intentions whose accession to the throne would bring an end to the habit of muddling through that seemed to paralyse Austrian policy in the last decades before 1914. It also placed the heir to the throne in direct political opposition to the reigning sovereign. The Emperor refused to countenance any tampering with the dualist Compromise of 1867, which he regarded as the most enduring achievement of his own early years in office.

Franz Ferdinand's domestic reform programme also had far-reaching implications for his views on foreign policy. He believed that the current structural weakness of the monarchy and the need for radical internal reform categorically ruled out an external policy focused on confrontation. Franz Ferdinand was thus adamantly opposed to the aggressive adventurism of Conrad. There was an irony in this, since it was Franz Ferdinand, in his role as chief inspector, who had hoisted Conrad into his General Staff post, promoting him over the heads of many formally better qualified officers – it was perhaps for this reason that the archduke was widely, and wrongly, seen as the head of the Austrian war party. The two men did agree on some questions: the egalitarian handling of the nationalities, for example, and the pensioning-off of elderly senior officers who seemed likely to disappoint in the event of war.
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Franz Ferdinand also liked Conrad personally, in part because the latter adopted a respectful and sympathetic attitude to his wife (the heir to the throne tended in general to judge people by how they treated the awkward fact of his marriage and Conrad, for obvious reasons, was inclined to indulge the archduke's unorthodox love-match). But in the sphere of security and diplomacy their views were worlds apart.

Conrad saw the army exclusively as an instrument of modern warfare and was fully committed to its modernization and preparation for the real conditions of the next major conflict; for Franz Ferdinand, by contrast, the army was above all a safeguard for domestic stability. Franz Ferdinand was a navalist determined to consolidate Austrian dominance in the Adriatic through the construction of a fleet of dreadnoughts; Conrad saw the navy as a drain on resources that would be better invested in the military: ‘the most beautiful naval victory', he told the archduke, ‘would not compensate for a defeat on land'.
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By contrast with Conrad, Franz Ferdinand opposed the annexation of Bosnia. ‘In view of our desolate domestic situation,' he told Aehrenthal in August 1908, ‘I am as a matter of principle against all such power-plays.'
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In mid-October, perturbed by the furious Serbian response to the annexation in Serbia he warned Aehrenthal not to let the crisis come to a war: ‘We would gain nothing from that and it rather looks as if these Balkan toads, egged on by England and perhaps Italy, want to goad us to a precipitate military step.'
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It was all very well to give the Serbs and Montenegrins a drubbing, he confided to Brosch, but of what use were these ‘cheap laurels' if they landed the empire with a general European escalation and ‘a fight on two or three fronts' that it was incapable of sustaining? Conrad, he warned, must be restrained. An open break came in December 1911, when Conrad demanded that Austria-Hungary seize the opportunity created by the Libyan War to attack Italy. It was largely because Franz Ferdinand abandoned him that Conrad was dismissed by the Emperor in December 1911.
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Franz Ferdinand's most influential ally was the new Habsburg foreign minister, Leopold Count Berchtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Fratting und Pullitz. Berchtold was a nobleman of immense wealth and fastidious taste, an urbane, patrician representative of that landed class that still held sway in the upper reaches of the Austro-Hungarian administration. By temperament cautious, even fearful, he was not an instinctive politician. His true passions were for the arts, literature and horse racing, all of which he pursued as vigorously as his wealth allowed. His willingness to follow a diplomatic career had more to do with personal loyalty to the Emperor and to Foreign Minister Aehrenthal than with an appetite for personal power or renown. The reluctance he professed when invited to accept posts of increasing seniority and responsibility was unquestionably genuine.

After transferring from the civil service to the Foreign Office, Berchtold served at the embassies in Paris and London before taking up a post at St Petersburg in 1903. There he became a close friend and ally of Aehrenthal, who had been ambassador to Russia since 1899. The St Petersburg posting appealed to Berchtold because he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Austro-Russian entente. He believed that harmonious relations with Russia, founded on cooperation in areas of potential conflict such as the Balkans, were crucial both to the empire's security and to European peace. He derived great professional satisfaction from the fact that he was able, as Aehrenthal's colleague in St Petersburg, to play a role in the consolidation of good relations between the two powers. When Aehrenthal departed for Vienna, Berchtold gladly accepted the ambassadorial post, confident in the knowledge that his own views of the Austro-Russian relationship were entirely in step with those of the new minister in Vienna.
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It was a shock, therefore, to find himself on the front line when Austro-Russian relations took a drastic turn for the worse in 1908. The first eighteen months of Berchtold's new posting had been relatively harmonious, despite signs that Izvolsky was drifting away from the entente with Austria towards a continental strategy founded on the new Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.
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But the Bosnian annexation crisis destroyed any prospect of further collaboration with the Russian foreign minister and undermined the policy of détente in whose name Berchtold had accepted office. Berchtold deeply regretted Aehrenthal's willingness to risk Russian goodwill for the sake of Austro-Hungarian prestige. In a letter to the minister of 19 November 1908, Berchtold offered an implicit critique of his former mentor's policy. In light of the ‘pathological escalation of pan-Slav-influenced Russian national sentiment', he wrote, the further continuation of ‘the active Balkan policy inaugurated by us' would inevitably have ‘a further negative impact on our relationship with Russia'. Recent events had made his work in St Petersburg ‘extremely difficult'. Another man would perhaps be able to find the charisma and warmth to restore good relations, ‘but for someone of my modest capabilities, this seems the equivalent of squaring the circle'. He closed with a request to be recalled from his post once the situation returned to normal.
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Berchtold would remain in St Petersburg until April 1911, but his posting had become a burden to him. The conspicuous display of wealth that was characteristic of social life among the oligarchs of early twentieth-century St Petersburg had begun to pall. In January 1910, he attended an immense ball at the palace of Countess Thekla Orlov-Davidov – a building designed by Boulanger on the model of Versailles – where the ballrooms and galleries were decked out with thousands of fresh flowers that had been shipped through the northern winter in a special train at huge expense from greenhouses on the French Riviera. Even for this wealthy art connoisseur and racing enthusiast, such profligacy was hard to stomach.
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It was with a sense of deep relief that Berchtold left St Petersburg and returned to his estate in Buchlau. The spell of recuperation was to last only ten months. On 19 February 1912, the Emperor summoned him to Vienna and appointed him Aehrenthal's successor as minister of foreign affairs.