The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (44 page)

Finally, there remained the danger that failure to achieve diplomatic or territorial successes would affect the delicate internal politics of Wilhelmine Germany, whose Junker elite worried about the (relative) decline of the agricultural interest, the rise of organized labor, and the growing influence of Social Democracy in a period of industrial boom. It was true that after 1897 the pursuit of
Weltpolitik
was motivated to a considerable extent by the calculation that this would be politically popular and divert attention from Germany’s domestic-political fissures.
⁶³
But the regime in Berlin always ran the dual risk that if it backed down from a confrontation with a “foreign Jupiter,” German nationalist opinion might revile and denounce the Kaiser and his aides; whereas, if the country became engaged in an all-out war, it was not clear whether the natural patriotism of the masses of workers, soldiers, and sailors would outweigh their dislike of the archconservative Prusso-German state. While some observers felt that a war would unite the nation behind the emperor, others feared it would further strain the German sociopolitical fabric. Again, this needs to be placed in context—for example, German internal weaknesses were hardly as serious as those in Russia or Austria-Hungary, but they did exist, and they certainly could affect the country’s ability to engage in a lengthy “total” war.

It has been argued by many historians that imperial Germany was a “special case,” following a
Sonderweg
(“special path”) which would one day culminate in the excesses of National Socialism. Viewed solely in terms of political culture and rhetoric around 1900, this is a hard claim to detect: Russian and Austrian anti-Semitism was at least as strong as German, French chauvinism as marked as the German, Japan’s sense of cultural uniqueness and destiny as broadly held as Germany’s. Each of the powers examined here was “special,” and in an age of imperialism was all too eager to assert its specialness. From the criterion of power politics, however, Germany did possess unique features which were of great import. It was the one Great Power which combined the modern, industrialized strength of the western democracies with the autocratic (one is tempted to say irresponsible) decision-making features of the eastern monarchies.
⁶⁴
It was the one “newcomer” Great Power, with the exception of the United States, which really had the strength to challenge the existing order. And it was the one rising Great Power which, if it expanded its borders farther
to the east or to the west, could only do so at the expense of powerful neighbors: the one country whose future growth, in Calleo’s words, “directly” rather than “indirectly” undermined the European balance.
⁶⁵
This was an explosive combination for a nation which felt, in Tirpitz’s phrase, that it was “a life-and-death question … to make up the lost ground.”
⁶⁶

    It seemed a vital matter to the rising states to break through, but it was even more urgent for those established Great Powers now under pressure to try to hold their own. Here again, it will be necessary to point to the very significant differences between the three Powers in question, Austria-Hungary, France, and Britain—and perhaps especially between the first-named and the last. Nonetheless, the charts of their relative power in world affairs would show all of them distinctly weaker by the end of the nineteenth century than they had been fifty or sixty years earlier,
⁶⁷
even if their defense budgets were larger and their colonial empires more extensive, and if (in the case of France and Austria-Hungary) they still had territorial ambitions in Europe. Furthermore, it seems fair to claim that the leaderships within these nations
knew
the international scene had become more complicated and threatening than that which their predecessors had faced, and that such knowledge was forcing them to consider radical changes of policy in an effort to meet the new circumstances.

Although the Austro-Hungarian Empire was by far the weakest of the established Great Powers—and, in Taylor’s words, slipping out of their ranks
⁶⁸
—this is not obvious from a glance at the macroeconomic statistics. Despite considerable emigration, its population rose from 41 million in 1890 to 52 million in 1914, to go well clear of France and Italy, and some way ahead of Britain. The empire also underwent much industrialization in these decades, though the pace of change was perhaps swifter before 1900 than after. Its coal production by 1914 was a respectable 47 million tons, higher than either France’s or Russia’s, and even in its steel production and energy consumption it was not significantly inferior to either of the Dual Alliance powers. Its textile industry experienced a surge in output, brewing and sugar-beet production rose, the oilfields of Galicia were exploited, mechanization occurred on the estates of Hungary, the Skoda armaments works multiplied in size, electrification occurred in the major cities, and the state vigorously promoted railway construction.
⁶⁹
According to one of Bairodas calculations, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s GNP in 1913 was virtually the same as France’s,
⁷⁰
which looks a little suspect—as does Farrar’s claim that its share of “European power” rose from 4.0 percent in 1890 to 7.2 percent in 1910.
⁷¹
Nonetheless, it is clear that the empire’s
growth rates from 1870 to 1913 were among the highest in Europe, and that its “industrial potential” was growing faster even than Russia’s.
⁷²

Once one examines Austria-Hungary’s economy and society in more detail, however, significant flaws appear. Perhaps the most fundamental of these was the enormous regional differences in per capita income and output, which to a large degree mirrored socioeconomic and ethnic diversities in a territory stretching from the Swiss Alps to the Bukovina. It was not merely the fact that in 1910 73 percent of the population of Galicia and Bukovina were employed in agriculture compared with 55 percent for the empire as a whole; much more significant and alarming was the enormous disparity of wealth, with per capita income in Lower Austria (850 crowns) and Bohemia (761 crowns) being far in excess of those in Galicia (316 crowns), Bukovina (310 crowns), and Dalmatia (264 crowns).
⁷³
Yet while it was in the Austrian provinces and Czech lands that industrial “takeoff” was occurring, and in Hungary that agricultural improvements were under way, it was in those poverty-stricken Slavic regions that the population was increasing the fastest. In consequence, Austria-Hungary’s per capita level of industrialization remained well below that of the leading Great Powers, and despite all the absolute increases in output, its share of world manufacturing production hovered around a mere 4.5 percent in those decades. This was not a strong economic base on which a country with Austria-Hungary’s strategical tasks could rest.

This relative backwardness might have been compensated for by a high degree of national-cultural cohesion, such as existed in Japan or France; but, alas, Vienna controlled the most ethnically diverse cluster of peoples in Europe
⁷⁴
—when war came in 1914, for example, the mobilization order was given in fifteen different languages. The age-old tension between German speakers and Czech speakers in Bohemia was not the most serious of the problems facing Emperor Francis Joseph and his advisers, even if the “Young Czech” movement was making it sound so. The strained relations with Hungary, which despite its post-1867 status as an equal partner clashed with Vienna again and again over such issues as tariffs, treatment of ethnic minorities, “Magyarization” of the army, and so on, were such that by 1899, western observers feared the breakup of the entire empire and the French foreign minister, Delcassé, secretly renegotiated the terms of the Dual Alliance with Russia in order to prevent Germany from succeeding to the Austrian lands and access to the Adriatic coast. By 1905, indeed, the general staff in Vienna was quietly preparing a contingency plan for the military occupation of Hungary should the crisis worsen.
⁷⁵
Vienna’s list of nationality problems did not stop with the Czechs and the Magyars. The Italians in the south resented the stiff Germanization in their territories, and looked over the border for help from Rome—as
the captive Rumanians, to a lesser degree, looked eastward to Bucharest. The Poles, by contrast, were quiescent, in part because the rights they enjoyed under the Habsburg Empire were superior to those obtaining in the German- and Russian-dominated territories. But by far the largest danger to the unity of the empire came from the South Slavs, since dissident groups within seemed to be looking toward Serbia and, more distantly, toward Russia. Compromises with South Slav aspirations were urged from time to time, by more liberal circles in Vienna, but they were fiercely resisted by the Magyar gentry, who both opposed any diminution of Hungary’s special status and also kept up their strong discrimination of ethnic minorities within Hungary itself. Since a political solution of this issue was denied to the moderates, the door was open for Austro-German nationalists like the chief of staff, General Conrad, to argue that the Serbs and their sympathizers should be dealt with by force. Despite the restraint exercised by Emperor Francis Joseph himself, this always remained a last resort if the Empire’s survival did really seem to be threatened.

All of this undoubtedly effected Austria-Hungary’s power, and in a whole number of ways. It was not that multi-ethnicity inevitably meant military weakness. The army remained a unifying institution, and extraordinarily adept at using a whole array of languages of command; nor had its old skills of divide and rule been forgotten when it came to garrisons and deployments. But it was increasingly difficult to rely upon the wholehearted cooperation of the Czech or Hungarian regiments in certain circumstances, and even the traditional loyalty of the Croats (used for centuries along the “military border”) was eroded by Hungarian persecution. What was more, Vienna’s classic answer to all of these particularist grievances was to smother them with committees, with new jobs, tax concessions, additional railway branch lines, and so on. “There were, in 1914, well over 3,000,000 civil servants, running things as diverse as schools, hospitals, welfare, taxation, railways, posts, etc.… so … that there was not much money left for the army itself.”
⁷⁶
According to Wright’s figures, defense appropriations took a far smaller share of “national (i.e., central government) appropriations” in the Austria-Hungarian Empire than in any of the other Great Powers.
⁷⁷
In consequence, while its fleet never had enough funds to match even the Italian, let alone the French, navy in the Mediterranean, allocations to the army were between one-third and one-half of those which the Russian and Prussian armies enjoyed. The army’s weapons, especially artillery, were out-of-date and far too few. Because of lack of funds, only about 30 percent of the available manpower was conscripted, and many of them were sent on “permanent leave” or received only eight weeks training. It was not a system geared to produce masses of competent reserves in wartime.
⁷⁸

As the international tensions built up in the decade or so after 1900,
the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s strategical position appeared parlous indeed. Its internal divisions threatened to split the country asunder, and complicated relations with most of its neighbors. Its economic growth, although marked, was not allowing it to catch up with leading Great Powers such as Britain and Germany. It spent less per capita on defense than many of the other powers, and it conscripted a far smaller ratio of its eligible youth into the army than any of the continental nations. To cap it all, it seemed to have so many possible foes that its general staff had to plan for a whole variety of campaigns—a complication which very few of the other Great Powers were distracted with.

That the Austro-Hungarian Empire had so many potential enemies was itself due to its unique geographical and multinational situation. Despite the Triple Alliance, the tensions with Italy became greater after 1900, and on several occasions Conrad advocated a military blow against this southern neighbor; even if his proposal was firmly rejected by both the foreign ministry and the emperor, the garrisons and fortresses along the Italian frontier were steadily built up. Much farther afield, Vienna had to worry about Rumania, which by 1912 became a distinct threat as it moved into the opposite camp. But the country which attracted the most venom was Serbia, which, with Montenegro, seemed a magnet to the South Slavs within the empire and thus a cancerous growth which had to be eliminated. The only problem with that agreeable solution was that an attack upon Serbia could well provoke a military response from Austria-Hungary’s most formidable rival, czarist Russia, which would invade the northeastern front just as the bulk of the Austro-Hungarian army was pushing southward, past Belgrade. Although even the hyperbelligerent Conrad asserted that it was “up to the diplomats”
⁷⁹
to keep the empire from having to fight all these foes at once, his own pre-1914 war plans reveal the fantastic military juggling act for which the army had to prepare. While a main force
(A-Staffel)
of nine army corps would be prepared for deployment against either (!) Italy or Russia, a smaller group of three army corps would be mobilized against Serbia-Montenegro
(Minimalgruppe Balkan)
. In addition, a strategic reserve of four army corps
(B-Staffel)
would hold itself ready “either to reinforce
A-Staffel
and make it into a powerful offensive force, or, if there were no danger from either Italy or Russia, to join
Minimalgruppe Balkan
for an offensive against Serbia.”
⁸⁰