The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (68 page)

14. Although Africa and much of the Pacific had been divided up by 1900, the declining Ottoman Empire on Europe’s doorstep offered increasing temptations. Here the weak Ottoman ruler, Abdul Hamid II, watches helplessly while Austria-Hungary in the shape of its emperor Franz Ferdinand seizes the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 and Ferdinand I of Bulgaria takes the opportunity to proclaim the independence of his kingdom, which was still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire. The resulting crisis heightened the tensions in Europe.

The Ottoman Empire was, so most observers thought, doomed. It was nearly bankrupt with foreign interests holding most of its debt; its subjects were restive; and its administration was incompetent and corrupt. It was a sad ending to an empire which had been one of the greatest the world had ever seen. The Ottoman Turks had come out of Central Asia in the thirteenth century and had advanced inexorably westward across Turkey. In 1453 their armies took Constantinople. The last Byzantine emperor had sought death in battle – and found it – and so what had been the heart of Orthodox Christianity became a Muslim city. The Ottomans had kept moving, north into the Balkans in the south-eastern corner of Europe, into the Middle East and along the southern coast of the Mediterranean into Egypt and beyond. Rulers who tried to stand in their way were swept aside and their peoples subjugated. By the end of the fifteenth century the Ottoman Empire controlled most of the Balkans and by 1529 Ottoman armies had reached Vienna, which managed, only just, to withstand their siege. A decade later Budapest fell and most of Hungary became part of the Ottoman Empire. By the middle of the seventeenth century, at its greatest extent the Ottoman Empire in Europe included all or parts of the present-day countries of Hungary, Bulgaria, Rumania, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Macedonia and Greece. The Ottomans also took over a big piece of what is today Ukraine and the southern Caucasus (where later the countries of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan would emerge). In addition the empire included Turkey, the Arab Middle East as far as the border with Persia down to the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, and much of North Africa as far west as Morocco.

As empires went, Ottoman rule had been relatively mild. The Ottomans, who were largely Sunni Muslims, had allowed their subjects, which included many varieties of Christians and Jews, as well as Shia Muslims, to follow their own religious practices and within limits its many ethnicities, which ranged from Kurds to Serbs to Hungarians,
were allowed to keep their languages and culture. Over the centuries, though, the empire had started to decline. Its fleets were defeated on the Mediterranean and on land its great rival, the Austrian Empire gradually pushed it back southwards, taking the prize of Hungary in 1699. In the course of the next century both Austria and Russia stripped yet more territory from the Ottoman Empire and in the nineteenth century France and Britain joined in the scavenging with the French taking Algeria and Tunis and the British Egypt and Cyprus. What was also destroying the Ottoman Empire was not just the passage of time and the resurgence of its enemies but the growth of nationalism throughout its territories, first in the European part. Greece won its independence in 1832 while Serbia, Rumania and Bulgaria moved from autonomy within the Ottoman Empire towards full independence.

When the long-expected final disintegration of the Ottoman Empire occurred, its remaining territories, huge in the Middle East and still considerable in the Balkans, would be up for grabs. While the competing ambitions between Germany, France, Russia, and Britain in the Middle East and North Africa fed tensions back into Europe, it was the rivalry between Austria-Hungary and Russia that in the end posed the greatest threat to Europe’s long peace. The two powers had vital and incompatible interests at stake. While Austria-Hungary had little interest in the Ottomans’ Asian territories, it was bound to care about what happened on its southern doorstep in the Balkans. It could not calmly contemplate an enlarged Serbia or Bulgaria, both of which were likely to seize any chance to enlarge their territory, which would in turn block Austria-Hungary’s trading routes southwards to Constantinople and the Aegean ports, or, in the case of Serbia, threaten its Adriatic possessions along the Dalmatian coast. One or more large South Slav states, moreover, would act as a solvent on Austria-Hungary itself, arousing the national hopes of its own South Slavs in Croatia, Slovenia, and southern Hungary. And if the Balkan states gravitated, as they well might, towards Russia, Austria-Hungary would face a formidable coalition.

Russia for its part could not stand by while control of the Ottoman Straits fell into the hands of another power. So much of Russia’s trade, some 40 per cent of its exports alone by 1912, went through those narrow waterways that any blockage could fatally weaken Russia’s economy. For historical and religious reasons, too, Constantinople had once been the
capital of the Byzantine Empire, to which Russia claimed to be the heir. The prospect of Austria-Hungary, a Catholic power, occupying it was almost as bad, at least to the devout Orthodox, as Muslims. Nor could the Russian Panslavs, an increasingly vociferous group, tolerate their fellow Slavs in the Balkans, the majority of whom were Orthodox like the Russians themselves, falling under the sway of Austria-Hungary.

In the nineteenth century, the great powers, led by Britain, had propped up the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ partly to prevent just such a dangerous scramble for territory. Russia’s attempt, after its victory over the Ottoman Empire in 1878, to strip away a good deal of the Ottomans’ European territory and create a big Bulgaria including the Macedonian territories, was stopped by the other powers, who handed Macedonia back to the Ottomans, leaving a smaller Bulgaria, nominally under Ottoman suzerainty. Macedonia, which had a large Christian population, was rapidly reduced to even greater misery than before through a combination of Ottoman incompetence and the activities of the different Balkan Christians outside the Ottoman Empire who did little but quarrel among themselves and fund different terrorist groups to stir up trouble among the Macedonians.

In the settlement of 1878 Austria-Hungary was compensated in the west by being allowed to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina, again under nominal Ottoman suzerainty. It was also allowed to keep troops in a small appendix, the Sanjak of Novi Bazar, which ran southwards from Bosnia-Herzegovina. This prevented Serbia from joining up with Montenegro to the west and allowed Austria-Hungary a narrow corridor through which it could run communications down into Macedonia, still Ottoman territory, and on southwards to the Aegean. The new territories were troublesome from the start; Austria-Hungary had to send a substantial force of troops in to put down an uprising by Bosnian Muslims who did not want to come under Christian rule.

By the end of the century, both Russia and Austria-Hungary had recognised the dangerous potential for conflict between them over the remains of the Ottoman Empire and, in 1897, came to an agreement to respect the territorial status quo in the Balkans. They also agreed that they would not interfere in the internal affairs of the existing Balkan states. Russia promised that it would respect Austria-Hungary’s rights in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Finally, the two powers would together oppose
any agitation against the principles they had just agreed. In 1900, Alois von Aehrenthal, an Austrian diplomat in St Petersburg, wrote optimistically to Gołuchowski, the Foreign Minister in Vienna, that Russia and Austria-Hungary were learning to trust each other: ‘Without trust, diplomatic developments in the Balkans are impossible. The important matter will be to intensify the process of trust.’
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It might be possible, he hoped, to come eventually to an agreement on spheres of influence in the Balkans with Austria-Hungary dominating the western part and Russia the eastern as well as the waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and Constantinople itself. The developments of the next few years appeared to bear out his hopes. ‘Gone are the days,’ said Lamsdorff, the Russian Foreign Minister in 1902, ‘when Russia and Austria-Hungary came to loggerheads only out of love for the Balkan peoples.’ In 1903, as the situation in Macedonia went from bad to worse, the two powers signed a further agreement to work together to put pressure on the Ottoman authorities to make much-needed reforms there. The following year, as Russia became embroiled in the war with Japan, it signed a neutrality agreement with Austria-Hungary which allowed Russia to move troops from their common border to the east.
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In 1906, however, under pressure from his nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, Franz Joseph made two important appointments which inaugurated new, more active policies for Austria-Hungary. Conrad took over as chief of the general staff and Aehrenthal became Foreign Minister. Many, especially in the younger generation of officers and officials, hoped that now the Dual Monarchy would stop its slow suicide and show that it was still vital and powerful, that successes domestically and in foreign affairs would feed each other to create a stronger state as achievements at home and abroad rallied the empire’s inhabitants to their multinational state and the dynasty itself. A revitalised Austria-Hungary could also shake itself free of its growing and humiliating dependency on Germany and show that it was an independent actor in the world. While the two men agreed on the overall goals, the Foreign Minister preferred to use diplomacy rather than war. Conrad, who urged war relentlessly, later characterised Aehrenthal as ‘a vain, self-indulgent ninny, who carried out his ambitions only in petty diplomatic ambiguities and things that were superficially successful’ and claimed that he saw the army as an umbrella to be left in the cupboard until it rained.
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This, like much of what Conrad said about his colleagues, was unfair. Aehrenthal was prepared to use war, but only if absolutely necessary.

The new Foreign Minister was tall and slightly stooped, with fine, regular features and hooded eyes from which he peered out shortsightedly. Aehrenthal always looked weary, said Bülow, who found him ‘reserved, indolent, almost apathetic’.
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Aehrenthal was in fact very hardworking and had devoted his life to furthering the foreign policy of Austria-Hungary, serving, among other things, as a successful and respected ambassador to Russia. Like most of his colleagues he came from the aristocracy. ‘Our diplomatic corps’, said a staff officer, ‘is like a Chinese wall. There is no entrance for people on the outside, people who don’t belong.’
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Aehrenthal’s family were Czech nobility who had risen socially as a result of their service to the state. (His enemies liked to point out that he had bourgeois ancestors, perhaps even a Jew somewhere.) He was far from being Czech in his loyalties, however; like many of his class, Aehrenthal was cosmopolitan and gave his primary allegiance to the dynasty and Austria-Hungary. In their service, he was dedicated, devious, duplicitous and ruthless. His weakness was that he tended to over-complicate matters. Nor was he good at taking advice. Count Leopold Berchtold, his colleague and later his successor, complained of his ‘frightful characteristic of overlooking facts that do not fit into his complicated house of cards’.
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Although Aehrenthal was deeply conservative and shared the antipathy of much of his class to liberalism and socialism, he believed that Austria-Hungary had to make reforms if it were to survive. Like his mentor, Franz Ferdinand, he hoped to create a South Slav bloc within the empire that would somehow blunt the endless tensions between the Austrian and the Hungarian halves. More, a new South Slav component of the empire would act as a magnet to the South Slavs in the Balkans, in Serbia, Montenegro or Bulgaria, and draw them into Austria-Hungary’s orbit, perhaps even bringing them inside the empire.
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In foreign affairs, he shared the firm assumption of his predecessors that the German alliance was crucial for the survival of Austria-Hungary yet he also hoped to reach across the growing dividing line in Europe and build a stronger relationship with Russia. He longed to see the Three Emperors League of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia reborn to promote the causes, which he saw as interrelated, of conservatism and
stability in Europe.
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His years in St Petersburg had gained him the reputation of being pro-Russian (aided, so Bülow claimed, by an affair he had with a beautiful leader of society
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) and he preferred, wherever possible, to work with the Russians.

Under Aehrenthal, however, Austria-Hungary and Russia were going to fall out badly and perhaps irredeemably over the fate of the small and poor Ottoman province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in the western part of the Balkans. The policy of moderation and co-operation in the Balkans which had existed between the two powers lay in shreds, to the ultimate ruin of both. What they had long feared, armed confrontation in the Balkans, nearly happened in 1908, again in 1912 and 1913, and finally broke out in 1914 and brought most of Europe down with it.

The downward spiral of the Ottoman Empire had made the temptations of picking up the spoils hard to resist for both powers. Austria-Hungary, too, which had never been a colonial power, had finally caught the prevailing infection of imperialism and some, including Conrad, were starting to think in terms of acquiring colonies, whether in the Balkans themselves or further afield in Ottoman Asia. Russia, for its part, was turning westward after its defeat at the hands of Japan in 1905 and Europe as well as real and potential allies in the Balkans were more important than they had once been. Influence there was a way of demonstrating that Russia was still a great power. By 1907, the understanding with Austria-Hungary to maintain the status quo in the Balkans was starting to fray as the two powers disagreed, for example over the reforms needed in the Ottoman territory of Macedonia.
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