An Improbable War?

The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914

Holger Afflerbach, David Stevenson, Holger Afflerbach, David Stevenson

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780857455963
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

The First World War has been described as the "primordial catastrophe of the twentieth century." Arguably, Italian Fascism, German National Socialism and Soviet Leninism and Stalinism would not have emerged without the cultural and political shock of World War I. The question why this catastrophe happened therefore preoccupies historians to this day. The focus of this volume is not on the consequences, but rather on the connection between the Great War and the long 19th century, the short- and long-term causes of World War I. This approach results in the questioning of many received ideas about the war's causes, especially the notion of "inevitability."

Part I

EUROPEAN STATESCRAFT AND THE QUESTION OF WAR AND PEACE BEFORE 1914

Chapter 1

STEALING HORSES TO GREAT APPLAUSE

Austria-Hungary’s Decision in 1914 in Systemic Perspective

Paul W Schroeder

This essay does not present new research or attempt to revise the many recent and earlier accounts of the immediate origins of the war in 1914 and Austria-Hungary’s role in it. On these scores, as will be seen, it basically agrees with the reigning view. It instead proposes a reinterpretation of the general causes of the war and the nature of Austria’s decision, mainly by using well-known facts from familiar chapters of history, but viewing them and the international system from a different perspective. It therefore emphasizes not what Austria-Hungary did in 1914 and how its actions affected the international system, but rather what happened in the international system in the quarter-century before 1914 and how this affected all the actors, Austria-Hungary in particular.¹ The cryptic reference in the title to stealing horses, as will be seen, applies to the international system rather than to Austria-Hungary.

The reinterpretation must begin with two methodological views or working principles almost universally accepted by international historians. The first is that foreign and domestic policy are inextricably interwoven and interdependent. One cannot analyze the foreign policy of a state or government without factoring in the economic, domestic-political, social, ideological, cultural, and other internal factors that influence it. From these emerge the interests and aims that the government and its leaders seek to protect and advance in its foreign policy. Endorsing this principle does not mean asserting the primacy of domestic politics or subordinating other strategic, military, and diplomatic factors in foreign policy to it, but simply accepting that these elements are interwoven and inseparable. The second working principle is that the central task in international history involves analyzing the foreign policy decision-making process, explaining above all how and why statesmen, governments, and ruling elites made the decisions they did.

These two principles, self-evidently true, seem to apply with particular force to Austria-Hungary before 1914. Nowhere else do domestic conditions, above all the multi national composition of the state and the resultant nationalities conflicts within it, seem more obviously the decisive determinants of foreign policy. In Austria’s case, the very distinction between foreign policy and domestic issues and interests proves artificial and unworkable. Every question of domestic politics, constitutional authority, economic interest, and above all national identity turned in some important respect into a foreign policy question directly affecting its security, strategy, alliances, and international prestige. Equally plainly, the question of who actually made and influenced foreign policy decisions in Austria-Hungary and how they did so becomes especially crucial and complicated, given the peculiar constitution of the Dual Monarchy and the way its two autonomous halves worked together, or failed to do so.

Therefore most historians addressing the question, “What led Austria-Hungary to decide and act as it did in 1914?” point to these two areas: the juncture between its foreign policy and its domestic situation, and the workings of its particular foreign policy decision-making process. Most would say that the Austro-Hungarian government decided to act as it did in 1914 because the Monarchy’s ruling elite came to believe that the Monarchy’s interwoven external and internal problems and challenges, especially those in its South Slav regions and those emanating from Serbia, Rumania, Russia, and Italy, had become unmanageable and intolerable, calling for drastic action to change Austria-Hungary’s situation, and that the special nature, composition, and interests of this elite strongly influenced both this conclusion and the choice of a violent rather than peaceful solution.

I agree in general with both this approach and this verdict, so far as they go. Yet these two methods of studying international politics (in this case, Austria-Hungary’s decision), i.e., interweaving the interdependent factors of foreign and domestic policy and analyzing the foreign policy decision-making process, important though they are, are not exhaustive or sufficient. The results and conclusions they yield represent at best penultimate truths, and penultimate truths, taken as final, have a way of hiding and obstructing deeper ones, especially in history. A deeper answer to the questions of what caused Austria to choose the policy it did in 1914 and how that choice should be interpreted, I contend, comes not simply from studying Austria’s foreign and domestic situation and its decision-making process, vital though this is, but from also looking carefully at the prevailing rules of the European system. When that is done, one sees that in choosing to act as it did, Austria was not breaking those rules or overturning the prevailing system, but finally following it.

So broad an argument obviously has to be presented here in bare-bones fashion, without very much scholarly evidence or detail. It starts therefore with propositions that are widely accepted.

First, Austria-Hungary started the war, deciding in 1914 deliberately to provoke a local war with Serbia, in the knowledge that this risked a general war. Moreover, Vienna, not Berlin, was the main locus of this decision. This latter point is more controversial; many have argued that since Austria could not have acted without Germany and Germany could have stopped Austria but instead after 5 July urged it forward, Germany was therefore the real center of the decision. Furthermore, Germany had its own reasons for wanting at least a major shift in the balance of power and deliberately risking a general war to achieve it. This reasoning is not in the end persuasive, however. Austria made the original decision on its own and demanded rather than requested German support, and did so in the knowledge that Germany by denying it would do unacceptable damage to the alliance and thereby further imperil its own position. The question of German responsibility is really a separate one; the initiative for provoking a local war at the risk of general war came from Vienna and remained there.

Given Austria-Hungary’s notorious weakness and vulnerability, this decision in itself seems hard to explain. Other well-known facts make it still stranger. Before 1914, Vienna had repeatedly rejected this course. In the previous decade, it had had numerous opportunities for a local or a general war that in objective military-strategic terms offered much better chances of success. Yet when it took the plunge under unfavorable conditions in 1914, it did so at the urging of some who had actively opposed it earlier.

Austria-Hungary furthermore launched the war with no positive program of war aims. True, no great power government in 1914 had a set of aims for which it was ready or eager to fight, much less deliberately to start a war. Yet they all had given thought to what concrete gains they ought to seek once the Great War that had long been anticipated broke out. Hence, all the other original belligerents, including Serbia, quickly developed concrete war aims programs. So did later entrants—the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Japan, and China. Even neutral Belgium, brought into the war solely by the German invasion, soon developed extensive plans both for territorial changes in Europe (including claims on the neutral Netherlands going back to 1839) and for colonial gains. Austria-Hungary, however, started the war without such a program, and the program it did develop during the war in regard to Poland and the Balkans was mainly a reaction to military events and Germany’s actions rather than a set of concrete aims of its own, intended primarily to preserve Austria-Hungary’s status as an independent great power and to avoid becoming a dependent satellite of Germany. The lack of positive war aims is illustrated by the very aim for which it decided on war, eliminating Serbia as a political factor in the Balkans. Even among themselves Austrians could not define precisely what this phrase meant—annexing Serbia, dividing it, reducing it to satellite status, partitioning it with Bulgaria, or something else. The other major objective that other great powers and some lesser ones pursued before and during the war, that of gaining overseas colonies and improving their world position, though present in Austria-Hungary before the war to a lesser degree than in other great powers, almost disappeared once it started.

The obvious reply to these points is that Austria-Hungary’s war aim was not to make positive gains, but to eliminate threats. Yet this fact too has remarkable aspects. While opting for war against Serbia, Austria-Hungary neither intended nor expected thereby to eliminate the main military threat it faced, that from Russia, even if the war proved successful. The Monarchy’s decision makers, though they did not really expect Russia to accept a local Austro-Serbian war, hoped that Russia would do so and wished, if general war were avoided, to use the crisis to work out a new compromise with Russia over the Balkans and the Ukrainian question.² In other words, they expected to continue to have to coexist with Russia as a great power. This differs from the other great powers’ expectations. Britain, France, and Russia expected a victorious war to eliminate the main threat to their security by reducing Germany’s power, and developed their war plans accordingly. German leaders, at least in their optimistic moments, expected military victory to make Germany dominant on the Continent, ending the threat of encirclement and insecurity. The Russians expected war to end Austria-Hungary’s very existence as a major power. Austria, however, did not expect to eliminate Russia as a great power and potential rival. Even the Austrian Chief of Staff Conrad von Hötzendorff, a constant advocate of preventive war, much preferred to target lesser threats, Italy and Serbia, rather than Russia. In opting for a violent solution to their problems, Austrians seem to have accepted the permanence of the Russian threat and hoped to contain it by breaking up the Balkan League, ending the Serbian challenge, restoring Austria’s alliance with Rumania, and demonstrating that their alliance with Germany was unbreakable and invincible, so that Russia would go back to their previous mutually restraining relationship, and perhaps even to the old Three-Emperors League.

This unusual Austrian attitude toward its main enemy was more than matched by its strange stance toward its ally Germany, both before and during the war. No other great power was more one-sidedly dependent on its main ally than Austria-Hungary, and none feared that ally as much. While differences, tensions, and suspicions certainly existed among the Entente powers, they did not privately refer to one another, as Austro-Hungarians did to Germany, as “the enemy to the North.” No other great power, furthermore, feared as much as Austria-Hungary did that a victory achieved in partnership with this ally might destroy its great power independence as surely as defeat.³

Two further facts: first, Austria-Hungary, along with Russia and Italy, had especially powerful reasons to fear that a great war, especially if it were prolonged or unsuccessful, would bring on revolution. Second, Austria more than any other great power had previously endeavored to maintain its position and status and to manage its many international threats and challenges mainly by defending the legal status quo, practicing peaceful diplomacy, seeking international support, and invoking the Concert of Europe to deal with international problems and defend Austrian interests. Provoking even a local war would therefore undermine these international assets and tools and starting a general war would surely destroy them.

Thus, a decision remarkable enough on its face becomes even more baffling on closer examination. The great power with the most to lose and least to gain from war, weaker than any other in terms of its resources in relation to its security needs and challenges, and most inclined by its character, position, and requirements to be conservative, pacific, and risk averse in foreign policy, deliberately started the very war it had been trying to avoid and thus willfully caused its own destruction. It appears, as it has often been described, a case of committing suicide out of fear of death.

A historical comparison may possibly be useful. This was not the first time in the nineteenth century Austria suddenly decided to precipitate a war it had been trying to avoid and thus brought disaster down on its head. One previous instance is obvious. In 1859 Austria, apparently on the point of winning a diplomatic victory in its conflict with Sardinia-Piedmont and Piedmont’s ally France, provoked a war by issuing a deliberately unacceptable ultimatum to Sardinia-Piedmont. The result was to isolate Austria, save Sardinia-Piedmont’s premier Count Camillo Cavour from defeat and resignation, and bring France, which had seemed about to defect from its alliance, into a war in which Austria was quickly defeated and set on the road to expulsion from Italy. The other instance, less obvious, seems even more suicidal than its decision in 1914. In 1809 Austria decided to go to war with Napoleon and his Empire—this despite the facts that Austria had already suffered disastrous defeat in three previous wars with France, Germany and Italy were wholly in Napoleon’s grip, Prussia had recently been crushed and Russia defeated in a war Austria had declined to join, Russia was now Napoleon’s ally, and the British, besides being remote from the continental theater, otherwise preoccupied, and unable to help, were basically indifferent to Austria’s fate. As a result, Austria suffered another crushing defeat and an even more humiliating peace treaty, and managed to avert the danger that Napoleon would extinguish the dynasty and divide the Austrian empire only at the cost of becoming Napoleon’s subservient ally.

This historical comparison seems merely to make the problem of 1914 worse, requiring three apparently inexplicable decisions to be explained instead of one.⁴ A historian who looks for common features, however, will quickly find them. Here are some similar attitudes shown by Austria’s leaders in the three cases:

1. a perception of an intolerable, growing threat to Austria’s great power security and status stemming not from the danger of immediate or direct attack by its enemies, but from the unrelenting pressure of encirclement, isolation, subversion, and exhaustion—death by a thousand cuts;

2. a keen awareness of Austria’s internal weaknesses, especially its political, national, financial, and military ones, and a recognition that a war, especially a long war, would heighten the dangers of revolution and the overthrow of the dynasty;

3. a widespread consensus reached on the eve of the decision that Austria’s foreign policy in the preceding years, which had been risk averse and directed at avoiding war by conciliation, had not merely failed but had made Austria’s position worse;

4. a strong show of resolve by certain political and military leaders, whose optimistic appraisals of Austria’s immediate military situation and its chances for success were not accompanied either by adequate military preparations or by clear ideas on how the planned preventive strike and quick victory would produce long-range security and advantages;

5. a similar short-term optimism in regard to the international political constellation—the hope that somehow quick successful action by Austria would break up the opposing alliance or produce allies for itself;

6. finally, a consensus that peaceful remedies were exhausted, leading former opponents of war to jo...