The Sleepwalkers (50 page)

Vienna also insisted – in keeping with its established policy – that Albania must be founded and maintained as an independent state. Publicized under the slogan ‘the Balkans for the Balkan peoples', this policy offered back-up for the interdiction of a Serbian land-grab on the Adriatic, since any port that Belgrade acquired would of necessity lie in the midst of Albanian-inhabited country.
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The announcement of this policy prompted cries of protest from pro-Belgrade elements within the monarchy – at a meeting of the Bosnian Diet at Sarajevo in November 1912, Serb deputies adopted a resolution to the effect that ‘the sacrifices and victories' of the Serbian armies ‘justified the “restoration” of Albania to Serbia' and expressed bitterness at the fact that the Austro-Hungarian monarchy continued to contest the ‘autonomous rights' of its South Slavs while advocating the cause of the ‘uncultured Albanians'.
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To the European powers, however, the Berchtold programme looked like a moderate response to the dramatic changes unfolding in the Balkans. Even Sazonov eventually fell in behind the consensus in favour of Albanian independence.

The wild card in the pack was Serbia. By the end of October 1912, the Serbian armies were already pushing towards the coast, cutting down savagely all resistance from the Albanians in their path. A series of minor provocations further soured relations: the Serbs intercepted Austrian consular mail and disrupted other consular communications, and there were reports that consuls had been arrested or abducted. Was the Austro-Hungarian consul in Mitrovitza, for example, placed under four-day house arrest by the Serbian army for his own protection, as the Serbian authorities claimed, or ‘so that he would not witness the “removal” of the local Albanian population', as the consul himself maintained? In the midst of all the panic, the Austro-Hungarian foreign ministry made another attempt to spin the news in its favour. When it proved impossible to make contact with Oskar Prochaska, the Austro-Hungarian consul in Prizren, rumours circulated in Vienna that he had been abducted and castrated by his Serbian captors. The ministry investigated and discovered that while he had indeed been illegally detained (on trumped-up charges of encouraging Turkish resistance), the rumour of castration was false. Instead of quashing the rumour, the ministry allowed it to persist for a week or two in order to extract the maximum in propaganda capital from the alleged outrage. Prochaska turned up a few weeks later with his sexual parts still attached. The trick backfired, and there was much adverse comment. The Prochaska affair was a modest but inept exercise in media manipulation that provided further ammunition for those who claimed that Austria always argued with forged documents and false accusations.
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For a time it seemed that the Albanian Question might ignite a broader European conflict. By the middle of November 1912, Montenegrin and Serbian forces occupied a swathe of northern Albania, including Alessio (Lezhë), and the harbour cities San Giovanni di Medua (Medva) and Durazzo (Durrës). A largely Montenegrin force lay in siege around the city of Scutari (Shkodër), home to 30,000 Albanians. The invasion threatened to create
faits accomplis
that would undermine Vienna's policy. Berchtold continued to insist on the creation of an independent Albania and the removal of the occupying forces. But the Montenegrins and Serbians refused to relinquish their Albanian footholds. Vienna was determined, if it became absolutely necessary, to dislodge the invaders by force. But the Russian trial mobilization and raised Russian troop strengths in the border areas adjoining Austria-Hungary suggested that St Petersburg might also be willing to support its clients by military means. On 22 November, King Nikola of Montenegro informed the Austrian minister in Cetinje that ‘if the Monarchy tries to drive me out with force, I will fight to the last goat and the last cartridge'.
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The Albanian Question continued to unsettle European politics throughout the winter and spring of 1912–13. On 17 December 1912, the issue was raised at the first meeting of the conference of great power ambassadors convened in London under the chairmanship of Edward Grey to resolve the issues arising from the Balkan War. The ambassadors agreed that a neutral, autonomous Albanian state should be established under the joint guarantee of the powers. Sazonov – after some wobbling – accepted the case for Albanian autonomy. But drawing the frontiers of the new state proved a contentious business. The Russians demanded that the towns of Prizren, Peć, Dibra, Djakovica and Scutari be assigned to their Serbo-Montenegrin clients, while Austria wished to see them incorporated in the new Albania. Vienna eventually mollified St Petersburg by approving the concession to Serbia of most of the contested areas along the Albanian border – a policy initially driven not by Berchtold, but by his ambassador in London, Count Mensdorff, who, together with his Russian colleague, Count Benckendorff, did much to reconcile opposing standpoints during the conference.
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By March 1913, the issue of the Albanian–Serbian border was – in theory, at least – largely resolved.

Yet the situation remained tense, because over 100,000 Serbian troops remained in Albania. Only on 11 April did the Belgrade government announce that it would withdraw its troops from the country. International attention now focused on the Montenegrins, who were still besieging Scutari and refused to move. King Nikola declared that he might be willing to climb down if the great powers mounted a direct attack on Montenegrin territory and thereby provided him with the pretext for an ‘honourable withdrawal' – whether he was in earnest or simply thumbing his nose at the international community was impossible to say.
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On the night of 22–23 April, Essad Pasha Toptani, the Albanian-born commandant of Scutari, capitulated and withdrew his garrison from the city. Montenegrin flags were hoisted over the town and its fortress and there was exultation across Montenegro and Serbia. According to the Dutch minister in Belgrade, the news of the fall of Scutari met with ‘indescribable jubilation' in the Serbian capital; the city was hung with flags, all businesses were closed and a crowd of 20,000 revellers raised ovations outside the Russian embassy.
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When further joint notes from London demanding Montenegro's withdrawal were ignored, it was agreed that the next meeting of the Ambassadors' Conference (scheduled for 5 May) would resolve a joint response by the powers. The Austrians began in the meantime to prepare for a unilateral action against the Montenegrin invaders, should diplomacy fail. How the Russians would respond to Austrian military action was unclear. By late January 1913, the Russian court and foreign office were wearying of the impetuous Montenegrin king. Nikola may have believed that he was acting in the Slavic interest and thus merited Russia's wholehearted support – in reality, the foreign ministry in St Petersburg viewed him as a loose cannon, whose chief objective was to burnish his domestic reputation.
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In April 1913, the foreign ministry in St Petersburg took the highly unusual step of issuing a declaration publicly disavowing Nikola and his designs on Scutari. In it, Sazonov (who was not named but acknowledged authorship) rebuked the press for its ignorant handling of the issues and stated that Nikola had no right to Scutari, which was a ‘purely Albanian' town.
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Russia was thus prepared to accept a joint initiative by the powers. But as the Scutari crisis came to a head, Sazonov also warned that Russian popular opinion might force him to intervene militarily if the Austrians acted on their own. ‘The political outlook,' Buchanan reported from St Petersburg, ‘is blacker than at any other period of the crisis.'
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After months of international nailbiting, the problem suddenly went away. On 4 May, the day before the ambassadors were to meet in London, King Nikola announced that he was placing ‘the destiny of the city of Scutari in the hands of the powers'. The city was subsequently assigned to the Albanian state. A peace treaty signed in London on 30 May 1913 brought the First Balkan War formally to a close. On 29 July, at the fifty-fourth session of the conference, the ambassadors confirmed that Albania would become an independent sovereign state, notwithstanding the fact that nearly half of all Albanian-settled areas (notably Kosovo) lay outside the boundaries agreed in London.
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The ink was scarcely dry on the Peace of London when war broke out again in the Balkans, this time over the distribution of the spoils from the first conflict. The Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913 assigned to Serbia new areas in south-eastern Macedonia, thereby confirming an increase in the kingdom's territorial extent – compared with the pre-1912 status quo – by close to 100 per cent and an enlargement of its population by just over 64 per cent. Confusion broke out in Vienna about how to respond to the new situation. Berchtold was still attempting to regain political control amid a cacophony of competing policy proposals when reports reached Vienna during the summer of 1913 of renewed unrest on the Albanian–Serbian frontier. Despite repeated rebukes and warnings, Belgrade still refused to evacuate its troops from certain areas on the Albanian side of the border agreed at the London conference. Their ostensible purpose was to protect Serbia from Albanian banditry; the reality was that the misbehaviour of the Serbian troops was itself the main reason for the trouble along the border. In July, Vienna requested a withdrawal, but to no avail. Then a concert of great powers, coordinated by Edward Grey, presented a collective demand for evacuation, but that, too, failed to have an effect. France and Russia blocked a further collective protest in early September; when individual protests were presented to Belgrade by Austria, Germany and Britain, the response was an announcement from the acting foreign minister, Miroslav Spalajković, denying that there were any Serbian troops in the contested area, followed somewhat inconsistently by a statement some days later that the troops in question had now been withdrawn behind the Drin river line. But this still left Serbian troops well inside the London boundary. Reports on 17 September that Belgrade was about to establish customs offices in several of the invaded areas caused further consternation in Vienna.
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This arduous sequence of cat-and-mouse encounters between Vienna and Belgrade helps explain why Austrian decision-makers gradually lost confidence in the efficacy of the standard diplomatic procedures in handling interest conflicts with Serbia. When Albanians near the frontier responded to Serbian provocations (the denial, for example, in contravention of the London agreement, of access to major Albanian market towns across the Serbian border) with a resumption of guerrilla activity, Serbian units pushed back even further into Albanian territory. The Serbian minister in Vienna, Jovanović, provoked alarm when he stated in an interview with a Viennese newspaper on 26 September that in view of the difficulty of finding any constituted Albanian body which could be made responsible for border disturbances, Serbia might be ‘forced to take measures on her own account'. Pašić compounded the problem on 30 September by announcing that Serbia intended, ‘for its own protection' to occupy ‘strategic points' inside Albanian territory.
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An Austrian note to the Pašić government on 1 October requesting clarification elicited an evasive reply.

Pašić's brief visit to Vienna on 3 October did nothing to improve the situation. Berchtold, disarmed by the Serbian leader's warm and affable manner, missed the opportunity to convey to him the seriousness of the situation in Austrian eyes. Pašić assured representatives of the press in Vienna that ‘he took a favourable view of future relations between Serbia and the Dual Monarchy' but he also spoke unsettlingly of the need for ‘boundary changes' on the Albanian frontier.
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Announcements from Belgrade that Serbia had no intention of ‘defying Europe' to seize Albanian territory, were reassuring, as were friendly noises from a senior foreign official in Belgrade who received the Austrian chargé d'affaires Ritter von Storck, ‘as warmly as if Pašić had just signed a defensive alliance in Vienna'.
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Yet attempts to enquire as to the precise state of policy on Albania met with courteous evasions. And at the same time, the advance of Serbian troops into Albania continued. On 9 October, when the Austrian chargé d'affaires insisted on seeing Pašić to discuss the matter, he found the premier once again in a most jovial mood, but still talking of a ‘provisional' Serbian occupation of Albanian territory.
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This was followed on 15 October by announcements in the semi-official newspaper
Samouprava
to the effect that Serbia did after all intend to occupy ‘strategic points' in Albania.
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After a further Austrian warning met with a defiant response, an ultimatum was presented to Belgrade on 17 October. Serbia was given eight days to vacate Albanian territory. If it failed to do so, Austria-Hungary would deploy ‘proper means to ensure the realization of its demands'.
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The ultimatum was a success. In the autumn of 1913 the great powers were in agreement that Serbia's demands for a chunk of Albania were illegitimate. Even Foreign Minister Sazonov in St Petersburg cleared his throat, conceded that ‘Serbia had been more to blame than was generally supposed in the events which led up to the recent ultimatum' and urged Belgrade to yield.
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Two days after receiving the ultimatum, Pašić announced that Serbian troops would be withdrawn. By 26 October they had vacated the disputed areas.

The October 1913 stand-off with Serbia established several precedents for Austrian handling of the crisis that blew up between the two states after Sarajevo. The first and most obvious was that it seemed to demonstrate the efficacy of an ultimatum. The Austrian note of 17 October received wide support in the press and the news that the Serbs had at last withdrawn their troops from Albania was greeted with euphoria in Vienna. Berchtold had been reviled for his supposed timidity during the Scutari crisis – now he was the man of the hour. The Serbian management of communications with Vienna also left a troubling impression: a sly civility verging on geniality masked a policy of carefully dosed provocations and non-compliance. There was a clash here not just of interests, but also of policy styles. Belgrade, it seemed, would retreat only as far as Vienna pushed, accepting with equanimity any humiliations that might result; when the Austrians relaxed, the probing and provocations would resume. The axiom that Serbia would only ever ultimately understand force acquired more weight.