Decisions For War, 1914

F.H. Hinsley, Keith Wilson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781857280975
• eBook ISBN: 9781134213177
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Keith Wilson is Lecturer in International History at the University of Leeds.; This book is intended for undergraduate history courses: broad 20th century European history, First World War, military history, war studies, international and diplomatice history, school libraries.

Chapter One

Austria-Hungary

Fritz Fellner

In the summer of 1974, in a conference held on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, I spoke about the responsibility of the Austrian government for unleashing the war, and explained, in analysing the so-called “Hoyos mission”, how readily people in Vienna and Budapest seized on the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand as a welcome opportunity to set in motion the long-discussed necessity of settling accounts with Serbia. I started by pointing out “that the fact that the controversy in Germany over Fritz Fischer’s theses necessitates a critical assessment, at least, of Austro-German co-operation in preparing the war against Serbia, has had no impact on the historically-conscious public in Austria”.¹

Twenty years later this statement is still true. Individual professional researchers in Austria have accepted my arguments about the deliberate unleashing of war against Serbia in full knowledge of the risk that this might start a European war, but the question of responsibility for the crisis of July 1914 has never been the subject of an academic debate in Austria, nor has it been taken up in the public press or been articulated and debated as a problem of Austrian historical consciousness.² Since the Anglo-Saxons discovered in the Viennese fin de siècle the birthplace of the Modern World,³ people in Austria have been basking in the rôle of protagonists of progressive art and thought; they are so delighted by Anglo-Saxon interest in Mahler, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schnitzler and Schönberg that they pass over the fact that the Anglo-Saxons are also aware of other, less “modern” elements in the history of the Habsburg Monarchy in the first decade of the twentieth century, and that the fin d’empire is equally well known, investigated and open to question.

Professional historians know the works of Samuel Williamson,⁴ James Joll,⁵ Zara Steiner,⁶ and Norman Stone,⁷ but the results of their research have not made an impact on the wider public and the general historical consciousness. All the same, we are greatly indebted to Anglo-Saxon research for insights into the problems of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy and the outbreak of the war; and it was, above all, a British historian, John Leslie, whose work was so tragically ended by his death in 1993, who provided us with the documentation on the ideological and intellectual background to policy in 1914 which reveals to us the political and ideological attitudes from which the fateful decisions of those days emerged.⁸ In a contribution to the Festschrift for Othmar Baron von Aretin, Leslie published a memorandum by the Austrian diplomat Leopold Baron von Andrian⁹ which, in addition to the memoranda by Count Hoyos that I have edited, must be regarded as a key document for the investigation of the responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War. In his last work, “The antecedents of Austria-Hungary’s war aims”, published only a few weeks before his death, Leslie assigned a central importance to further extremely informative source materials which provide definitive evidence on “policies and policy-makers in Vienna and Budapest before and during 1914”.¹⁰ Over the years Leslie investigated archive materials and private papers with such thoroughness that it can be said that there are few documents he did not know about. Nobody who wishes today to write a history of Austro-Hungarian policy can really say much more than Leslie has produced in his research. Leslie’s last work appeared in a series Wiener Beiträge, and has probably not yet received its due appreciation in the Anglo-Saxon world. But any new work on Austria-Hungary’s rôle in the crisis of July 1914 must take as its starting point the results of Leslie’s new research.

If, in what follows, I paraphrase and present the conclusions of a good deal of Leslie’s last two works, this must be seen in the light of what I have just said. I should also like this presentation of the results of Leslie’s research to be seen as a tribute to a scholar whose work was cut short all too soon, whose broad concept of an account of Austro-Hungarian war aims and the history of the Polish question in the First World War was not completed, but who, in the fragments he has left behind, and in the many suggestions he made in innumerable private and public historical discussions, has made such a rich contribution to our knowledge of the history of these years. We are all most deeply indebted to him for all that he achieved – even when he was stricken by serious illness – and I should like, in presenting here the results of his research, to offer homage and thanks to John Leslie.

When I investigated the Hoyos mission of 5 July 1914, I pointed out that the unleashing of the war could be attributed in no small part to the activities of younger diplomats in the Viennese foreign office.¹¹ The cast of mind of the younger generation of diplomats who in July 1914 formulated the anti-Serbian policy of Austria-Hungary – people such as János Count Forgách, Alexander Baron von Musulin and Alexander Count Hoyos – was marked by the dynamic-imperialist principles of the former Imperial and Royal foreign minister, Alois Count Lexa von Aehrenthal. The members of this group, who came from different social (and, above all, national) backgrounds, were held together – and here Leslie takes my suggestion further – by their pious memory of that minister (who had died in February 1912) and by their belief in the necessity of pursuing his long-term programme of Habsburg domination, direct or indirect, of the Balkans. They all belonged to the same generation, they had all joined the diplomatic service around the turn of the century, and after 1906 they had all participated in the formation of Aehrenthal’s expansionist Balkan policy, which culminated in the annexation crisis of October 1908. This group included Alexander Baron von Musulin (b. 1869), Alexander Count Hoyos (b. 1875), János Count Forgách, former minister in Belgrade (b. 1875), Friedrich Count Szápary, formerly Aehrenthal’s chef de cabinet and in the summer of 1914 ambassador in St Petersburg (b. 1869), Otto Count Czernin (b. 1875), Leopold Baron von Andrian-Werburg (b. 1875), Georg Baron von Franckenstein (b. 1878) and Emanuel Urbas (b. 1878). Their mentor Aehrenthal had taught them – so Leslie argues convincingly – that an active foreign policy directed towards expansion was the best cure for the internal stagnation that they all criticized, and would provide that unifying force with which the growing signs of social and national decomposition could be overcome. Now, under Aehrenthal’s successor, Leopold Count Berchtold, this “fronde of diplomatic cadets”, as Urbas called them in his memoirs,¹² played a much more important rôle than in Aehrenthal’s time: at that time, this group had been the executive organ of a programme thought out by their admired mentor; now, under Berchtold, they constituted a kind of “collective decision-making body” which was consulted more and more. During the crisis of July 1914, according to Macchio,¹³ this group of leading officials would meet the foreign minister late in the evenings, “when the events of the day would be discussed, the texts of dispatches finalised, and the mot d’ordre laid down for the following day… The evening conferences were always supposed to provide the final clarifications”. Macchio calls Forgách the initiator of Vienna’s policy in those days after Sarajevo, and as Forgách certainly had personal animosities against Serbian politicians dating back to his own unhappy time in Belgrade in the critical years before and after the annexation crisis (1907–11), his influence meant a decisive shift in Austro-Hungarian policy from dynamic intention to ruthlessly aggressive action. In his memoirs, Macchio lists, along with Forgách, above all Musulin and Hoyos as the driving forces in the Ballhausplatz,¹⁴ a judgement which is confirmed in Count Lützow’s notes and in the unpublished diaries of Josef Maria Baernreither and of Archive-Director Schiitter.¹⁵ In the light of the sources published by Leslie and myself one can define the rôles of these three diplomats in the crisis of July 1914 as follows: Forgách was the planner and theorist of the anti-Serbian policy; Hoyos the instrument for securing the endorsement of the anti-Serbian policy by the German Empire; and Musulin the draftsman who drew up the decisive documents that put the plan and the political conviction into action, namely the ultimatum and the declaration of war.

But the pupils and admirers of Aehrenthal, who were so fascinated by the dynamism of his foreign policy, and above all his Balkan policy, had in their enthusiasm for an active policy of expansion failed to recognize one important characteristic of these: Aehrenthal wanted expansion, but not war; he was ready to go to the brink of war, but he was not willing to plunge into the abyss. In the annexation crisis of 1908 he carried out a fait accompli which transferred the decision over war and peace to his opponents; but after this he was prepared to sit down at the negotiating table, at which his acquisition was conceded. His pupils and less able successors in July 1914 were not masters of this deftness of touch in imperialist policy. It was fateful for the Great Power position of Austria-Hungary that the statesman who had initiated the dynamic Balkan policy in 1908 should die of leukaemia in February 1912, because under his successor Berchtold the setting of active aims recommended by Aehrenthal turned into aggressive policy. Moreover, Serbia’s successes in the Balkan Wars had strengthened Austrian politicians in their conviction that the monarchy was threatened by this little state, and most diplomats, politicians and publicists of those days were convinced that only the overthrow of Serbia could resolve the tensions and remove the threat.

Certainly, Pan-Serbian propaganda was a threat to the consolidation of the south Slav areas of the Habsburg Monarchy, and Serbia’s dynamic foreign policy in the era of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire made this small state a tiresome rival for the expansionist policy of the Ballhausplatz; but it is indeed a testimony to a lack of confidence in the monarchy’s own capacity for a constructive internal policy or a coherent foreign policy that the statesmen and diplomats of the great Habsburg state should not be able to conceive of any other counter to the Serbian “danger” than a warlike action aiming at the total annihilation of this small state. Those who did not believe a peaceful solution to Austro-Hungarian-Serbian rivalries to be possible represented the assassination at Sarajevo as proof of the correctness of their attitude, and they believed it to be so. Even before it was certain which circles were behind the deed, people in Vienna were already convinced “that the moment has come to solve the Serbian question”.¹⁶ On 30 June the German ambassador, Heinrich von Tschirschky und Bögendorff, had reported to Berlin: “Here I often hear even serious people expressing the wish that Serbia can be sorted out once and for all…”¹⁷ And only three days after the assassination, on 1 July 1914, the Hungarian prime minister, Count Istvan Tisza, expressed his anxiety to the Emperor, because he had heard from Count Berchtold of that minister’s intention to make the crime of Sarajevo the occasion for a settling of accounts with Serbia.¹⁸ The common finance minister, Ritter von Bilinksi, declared in a conversation he had in March 1917 with the journalist Heinrich Kanner: “We decided on war quite early, that was right at the start”.¹⁹ The notes that Leopold Baron von Andrian-Werburg made in December 1918 and early 1919 about the outbreak of the war, and which John Leslie published in the Festschrift for Aretin, confirm yet again the will to war on the part of the Austrian statesmen and military. Andrian’s notes start: “We started the war, not the Germans and even less the Entente – that I know.”²⁰ “I have the distinct impression”, he later adds, “that the war was decided on by that circle of younger talented diplomats who formed Berchtold’s political council, who influenced him strongly and who, if they were – as they were in this case – in agreement, decided things. Musulin, the impetuous chatterbox, who, when the prospects were good in the war, used to call himself ‘the man who caused the war’, Alec Hoyos, Fritz Szápary … they made the war. I myself was in lively agreement with the basic idea that only a war could save Austria. As the world situation was then, I am also quite sure that, two or three years later, war for Austria’s existence would have been forced on us by Serbia, Romania and Russia, and under conditions which would make a successful defence far more difficult than at that time … When the existence of his fatherland is at stake, every patriotic statesman, indeed, every patriot, must go to war.”²¹

It is this fateful conviction that a war was inevitable, that a preemptive strike, a Flucht nach Vorne, offered the only chance of securing the continued existence of the state, that forms the context that makes the decision for war, for war against Serbia, intelligible and explicable. The conviction was widespread – it was also prevalent in the Anglo-Saxon world vis-à-vis colonial peoples – that the superiority of one’s own culture and civilization provides not only a moral justification, but also a political obligation, to subdue lesser peoples – here the colonial peoples, there the Balkan peoples. And this belief in a moral right to rule was combined in the younger, cultivated generation – of both educated people and aristocrats – with the peculiarly German interpretation of Social Darwinism, an interpretation which saw in the testing and refining of the nation in the fire of war the criterion for the survival of a people. There was a fear that any yielding, any preparedness to accept a peaceful solution of a conflict, would be regarded as weakness; a belief that one must be “strong” and prove oneself in war. The common council of ministers of 7 July 1914 was full of expressions of these beliefs: Berchtold, the foreign minister, demanded a “radical solution”; Count Stürgkh, the Austrian minister-president, described the situation as “demanding a military conflict with Serbia as an absolute necessity”; the common finance minister Bilinksi declared that “the Serb responds only to force, a diplomatic success would make no impression in Bosnia and would be damaging rather than anything else”. Finally, all participants were agreed that the concrete demands on Serbia must be so formulated as to compel their rejection and thereby to “prepare the way for a radical solution by military means”.²² When the Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade, Vladimir Baron von Giesl, returning to his post on 7 July after a vacation in France, reported to Berchtold for instructions, he came away with the very decisive order: “However the Serbs react to the ultimatum, you must break off relations and it must come to war.”²³ In other words, by 7 July war against Serbia had been decided on in Vienna, and all discussions and further diplomatic steps until the declaration of war on 28 July were merely concerned with the implementation of this decision – consistently with regard to the rejection of the slightest indications of preparedness for a pacific solution, inconsistently with regard to military preparations and the transforming of a will to war into military action.

On 14 July the decisive meeting was held in Vienna, in which procedure against Serbia was finally agreed. A discussion between Count Berchtold and the two minister-presidents, Count Istvan Tisza and Count Stürgkh, fixed the details of the ultimatum, and even th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• The origins of the First World War
• 1 Austria-Hungary
• 2 Germany
• 3 Serbia
• 4 Russia
• 5 France
• 6 Belgium
• 7 Britain
• 8 Japan
• 9 Ottoman Empire
• Index