The Sleepwalkers (62 page)

We need to draw an important distinction: at no point did the French or the Russian strategists involved plan to launch a war of aggression against the central powers. We are dealing here with scenarios, not plans as such. But it is striking, nonetheless, how little thought the policy-makers gave to the effect that their actions were likely to have on Germany. French policy-makers were aware of the extent to which the balance of military threat had tilted against Germany – a French General Staff report of June 1914 noted with satisfaction that ‘the military situation has altered to Germany's detriment', and British military assessments reported much the same. But since they viewed their own actions as entirely defensive and ascribed aggressive intentions solely to the enemy, the key policy-makers never took seriously the possibility that the measures they were themselves enacting might be narrowing the options available to Berlin. It was a striking example of what international relations theorists call the ‘security dilemma', in which the steps taken by one state to enhance its security ‘render the others more insecure and compel them to prepare for the worst'.
¹⁴⁰

Were the British aware of the risks posed by the Balkanization of Entente security policy? British policy-makers saw clearly enough that the drift in European geopolitics had created a mechanism that might, if triggered in the right way, transform a Balkan quarrel into a European war. And they viewed this possibility – as they viewed virtually every aspect of the European situation – with ambivalence. Even the most Russophile British policy-makers were not uncritical of St Petersburg's Balkan policy: in March 1912, when he learned of the role of the Russians in brokering a Serbo-Bulgarian treaty, Arthur Nicolson deplored the latest Russian initiative, ‘as it shows that the Russian government have no intention to work hand in hand with the Austrian government in Balkan affairs, and this, personally, I much regret'.
¹⁴¹
When he met with leading British statesmen in London and Balmoral in September 1912, Sazonov was struck by the ‘exaggerated prudence' of British views on the Balkans and their suspicion of any Russian move that seemed calculated to apply pressure to the Ottoman government.
¹⁴²
In November 1912, as the Serbian army pushed across Albania to the Adriatic coast, Viscount Bertie, the British ambassador in Paris, warned the French foreign minister that Britain would not go to war in order to secure an Adriatic seaport for Belgrade.
¹⁴³

Yet only a few days later, on 4 December, Edward Grey summoned the German ambassador Count Lichnowsky and issued a stark warning:

If a European war were to arise through Austria's attacking Serbia, and Russia, compelled by public opinion, were to march into Galicia rather than again put up with a humiliation like that of 1909, thus forcing Germany to come to the aid of Austria, France would inevitably be drawn in
and no one could foretell what further developments might follow
.
¹⁴⁴

The pretext for this exchange, it should be recalled, was Chancellor Bethmann's ten-minute speech to the German parliament, in which he had warned that if, against all expectation, Austria were to be attacked by another great power (the reference was clearly to Russia, whose military measures along the Galician border had triggered the war scare), Germany would intervene to protect its ally. Lichnowsky read Grey's comment as a ‘hint that cannot be misunderstood'; it meant that ‘it was for England of vital necessity
to prevent [France] from being crushed by Germany
'.
¹⁴⁵
Reading Lichnowsky's summary a few days later Wilhelm II panicked, seeing in it a ‘moral declaration of war' against Germany. This was the warning that had triggered the Potsdam war council of 8 December 1912. And it is clear from the French documents that Grey subsequently – on the day of the warning itself – relayed the content of his conversation with Count Lichnowsky to Ambassador Paul Cambon, who in turn passed the details to Poincaré.
¹⁴⁶

What is remarkable about Grey's warning is how forcefully the causal linkages of the Balkan inception scenario were set out and how many assumptions were built into it. Grey aligned himself, firstly, with Sazonov's and Izvolsky's view of the ‘humiliation' of 1909, seemingly forgetting that it was Britain's refusal to do business with Izvolsky over the Straits that had prompted the then Russian foreign minister to kick up the crisis by claiming that he had been duped by his Austrian colleague. The notion that Russia had suffered repeated humiliations at the hands of the central powers was dubious, to say the least – the truth was the contrary, namely that the Russians were lucky to have escaped so lightly from dangers of their own making.
¹⁴⁷
Then there was the highly questionable notion that Russian decision-makers would have no choice but to attack Austria if a conflict between Austria and Serbia inflamed Russian domestic opinion. In fact it was not at all clear that Russian opinion demanded precipitate action over Serbia; some nationalist papers did, of course, but there were others, such as the conservative
Grazhdanin
of Prince Meshchersky, that denounced the ‘impotent romanticism' of the Slavophiles and attacked the notion that Russia must inevitably take the side of Serbia in an Austro-Serbian conflict. In February 1913, at the height of the Balkan winter crisis, the former Russian prime minister Sergei Witte estimated that perhaps 10 per cent of the Russian population were in favour of war and 90 per cent against.
¹⁴⁸
Equally remarkable was Grey's supposition that this intervention by Russia, though it would involve aggression against a state whose actions posed no direct threat to Russian security, must ‘inevitably' bring in France – a point of view that essentially endorsed, or at least implicitly accepted, Poincaré's scaling up of the treaty commitment to cover the possibility of a Russian attack on another European great power. And this, Grey implied, would oblige Britain at some point to intervene on the side of France. Grey may have felt discomfort – he certainly expressed it intermittently – about the prospect of ‘fighting for Serbia', but he had understood and legitimized the Balkan inception scenario and absorbed it into his thinking. And this scenario, it is important to remember, was not a neutral feature of the international system. It did not embody an impersonal necessity; rather, it was a fabric of partisan attitudes, commitments and threats. It revealed the extent to which Grey had forsaken a pure balance of power policy in favour of a policy oriented towards maximizing the security of the Entente.
¹⁴⁹
In sketching the scenario for Lichnowsky, Grey was not foretelling a preordained future, but himself articulating part of a set of understandings that made that future possible.

A crucial precondition for all these calculations was the refusal – whether explicit or implicit – to grant Austria-Hungary the right to defend its close-range interests in the manner of a European power. The French and British decision-makers were tantalizingly vague about the precise conditions under which an Austro-Serbian quarrel might arise. Poincaré made no effort to define criteria in his conversations with Izvolsky and the French minister of war and senior military commanders pressed for aggressive action in the winter of 1912–13, although there had as yet been no Austrian assault on Serbia. Grey was a little more ambivalent and sought to differentiate: in a note to Bertie in Paris written on 4 December 1912, the same day as he had issued the warning to Lichnowsky, the British foreign minister suggested that British reactions to a Balkan conflict would depend upon ‘how the war broke out':

If Servia provoked Austria and gave her just cause of resentment, feeling would be different from what it would be if Austria was clearly aggressive.
¹⁵⁰

But what would constitute a ‘just cause of resentment'? In an environment as polarized as Europe in 1912–14, it was going to be difficult to agree what degree of provocation justified an armed response. And the reluctance to integrate Austro-Hungarian security imperatives into the calculation was further evidence of how indifferent the powers had become to the future integrity of the dual monarchy, either because they viewed it as the lapdog of Germany with no autonomous geopolitical identity, or because they suspected it of aggressive designs on the Balkan peninsula, or because they accepted the view that the monarchy had run out of time and must soon make way for younger and better successor states. One irony of this situation was that it made no difference whether the Habsburg foreign minister was a forceful character like Aehrenthal, or a more emollient figure like Berchtold: the former was suspected of aggression, the latter of subservience to Berlin.
¹⁵¹

A supportive codicil to this death warrant for the Habsburg state was a rose-tinted view of Serbia as a nation of freedom-fighters to whom the future had already been vouchsafed. We can discern this tendency not just where we would most expect it, in Hartwig's enthusiastic reporting from Belgrade, but in the warmly supportive dispatches filed by Descos, the French minister stationed in the Serbian capital. The long-standing policy of French financial assistance continued. In January 1914, another large French loan (amounting to twice the entire Serbian state budget for 1912) arrived to cover Belgrade's immense military expenditures, and Pašić negotiated with St Petersburg a military aid package comprising 120,000 rifles, twenty-four howitzers, thirty-six cannon ‘of the newest system' and appropriate munitions, claiming – falsely, as it happens – that Austria-Hungary was delivering similar goods to Bulgaria.
¹⁵²

Grey adopted a latently pro-Serbian policy in the negotiations at the London Conference of 1913, favouring Belgrade's claims over those of the new Albanian state, not because he supported the Great Serbian cause as such, but because he viewed the appeasement of Serbia as a key to the durability of the Entente.
¹⁵³
The resulting borders left over half of the Albanian population outside the newly created Kingdom of Albania. Many of those who fell under Serb rule suffered persecution, deportation, mistreatment and massacres.
¹⁵⁴
Yet the British acting minister Crackanthorpe, who had many good friends in the Serbian political elite, at first suppressed and then downplayed the news of atrocities in the newly conquered areas. When the evidence of misdeeds mounted up, there were intermittent internal expressions of disgust, but nothing strong enough to modify a policy oriented towards keeping the Russians on side.

Two further factors heightened the sensitivity of the Balkan trigger. The first was Austria's growing determination to check Serbian territorial ambitions. We have seen that as the situation on the Balkan peninsula deteriorated, the decision-makers in Vienna gravitated towards more hawkish solutions. The mood continued to fluctuate as crises came and went, but there was a cumulative effect: at each point, more of the key policy-makers aligned themselves with aggressive positions. And the jumpiness of the politicians was reinforced by financial and domestic morale factors. As the money ran out for further peacetime mobilizations and anxieties grew about their effects on minority nationality recruits, Austria-Hungary's repertoire of options narrowed, its political outlook became less elastic. Yet we should not forget that the last pre-war strategic overview of the region by an Austrian functionary, the gloomy Matscheko memorandum prepared for Berchtold in June 1914, made no mention of military action as a means of resolving the many problems Austria faced on the peninsula.

Finally, there was the deepening German dependency on a ‘policy of strength'. The habit of seeking autonomy and security through the maximization of strength was a deeply established feature of German policy from Bismarck to Bülow to Bethmann Hollweg. That the pursuit of strength might antagonize Germany's neighbours and alienate potential alliance partners was a problem successive policy-makers failed to address. But as long as the policy continued to generate sufficient deterrent effect to exclude the possibility of a combined assault by the opposing camp, the threat of isolation, though serious, was not overwhelming. By 1912, the massive scaling up of Entente military preparedness undermined the longer-term feasibility of this approach.

Two questions preoccupied German strategists and policy-makers in the last years before the outbreak of war. The first, discussed above, was about how long Germany could be expected to remain in a position of sufficient relative strength to fight off its adversaries, should a war arise. The second preoccupation concerned Russian intentions. Was the Russia leadership actively preparing for a preventive war against Germany? The two questions were interlocked, because if one concluded that Russia really was
looking for a war
with Germany, then the arguments for avoiding one now by means of politically costly concessions appeared much weaker. If there was no question of avoiding war, but only of postponing it, then it made sense to accept the war offered by the antagonist now, rather than wait for a later reiteration of the same scenario under much less advantageous circumstances. These thoughts weighed heavily on the German decision-makers during the crisis that followed the assassinations at Sarajevo.

If we survey the European chancelleries in the spring and early summer of 1914, it is impossible not to be struck by the unfortunate configuration of personalities. From Castelnau and Joffre to Zhilinsky, Conrad von Hötzendorf, Wilson and Moltke, the senior military men were all exponents of the strategic offensive who wielded a fluctuating but important influence on the political decision-makers. In 1913–14 first Delcassé, then Paléologue, both hardliners, represented France in St Petersburg; Izvolsky, still determined to avenge the ‘humiliation' of 1909, officiated in Paris. The French minister in Sofia, André Panafieu, observed in December 1912 that Izvolsky was the ‘best ambassador in Paris', because he had ‘personal interests against Germany and Austria', and his Russian colleagues noticed that whenever he came to speak of Austrian policy vis-à-vis Belgrade his voice took on ‘a palpable tone of bitterness which had not left him since the times of the annexation'.
¹⁵⁵
The excitable Austrophobe Miroslav Spalajković was now at the Serbian ministry in St Petersburg – his old enemy Count Forgách was helping to formulate policy in Vienna. One is reminded of a Harold Pinter play where the characters know each other very well and like each other very little.