The Sleepwalkers (23 page)

In the meanwhile, there were signs of improvement – on the surface at least – in diplomatic relations with Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarian government owned a 51 per cent share of the Oriental Railway Company, an international concern operating on an initially Turkish concession in Macedonia. Now that most of its track had passed under Serbian control, Vienna and Belgrade needed to agree on who owned the track, who should be responsible for the cost of repairing war damage and how and whether work on it should continue. Since Belgrade insisted on full Serbian ownership, negotiations began in spring 1914 to agree a price and conditions of transfer. The discussions were complex, difficult and occasionally rancorous, especially when arbitrary interventions by Pašić on minor points disrupted the flow of negotiations, but they received some positive coverage in the Austrian and Serbian press, and they were still underway when the archduke travelled to Sarajevo.
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A further encouraging development was an agreement at the end of May 1914, after months of official wrangling, to exchange a small number of prisoners held by both states on charges of espionage. These were modest but hopeful indications that Austria-Hungary and Serbia might in time learn to live as good neighbours.

If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia in Persia and Central Asia. France was determined to reverse the verdict of the German victory of 1870. Conflicting interests in the Balkans gave rise to tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Italy and Austria were rivals in the Adriatic and quarrelled intermittently over the status of Italophone communities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while there were tensions between Italy and France over the latter's policy in northern Africa. All these pressures were held in check by the patchwork of the 1887 system. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy (20 May 1882) prevented the tensions between Rome and Vienna from breaking into open conflict. The defensive Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia (18 June 1887) contained articles deterring either power from seeking its fortunes in war with another continental state and insulated the Russo-German relationship against the fallout from Austro-Russian tensions.
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The Russo-German link also ensured that France would be unable to build an anti-German coalition with Russia. And Britain was loosely tied into the continental system through the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria – an exchange of notes rather than a treaty – whose purpose was to thwart French challenges in the Mediterranean and Russian ones in the Balkans or the Turkish Straits.

The European System 1887

1907 Alliance Systems

Move forward twenty years to a diagram of the European alliances in 1907, and the picture has changed utterly. You see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems. The Triple Alliance is still in place (though Italy's loyalty to it is increasingly questionable). France and Russia are conjoined in the Franco-Russian Alliance (drafted in 1892 and ratified in 1894), which stipulates that if any member of the Triple Alliance should mobilize, the two signatories will ‘at the first news of this event and without any previous agreement being necessary' mobilize immediately the whole of their forces and deploy them ‘with such speed that Germany shall be forced to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West'.
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Britain is linked to the Franco-Russian Alliance through the Entente Cordiale with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. It will be some years before these loose alignments tauten into the coalitions that will fight the First World War in Europe, but the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible.

The polarization of Europe's geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914. It is almost impossible to see how a crisis in Austro-Serbian relations, however grave, could have dragged the Europe of 1887 into a continental war. The bifurcation into two alliance blocs did not
cause
the war; indeed it did as much to mute as to escalate conflict in the pre-war years. Yet without the two blocs, the war could not have broken out in the way that it did. The bipolar system structured the environment in which the crucial decisions were made. To understand how that polarization came about, it is necessary to answer four interlinked questions. Why did Russia and France form an alliance against Germany in the 1890s? Why did Britain opt to throw in its lot with that alliance? What role did Germany play in bringing about its own encirclement by a hostile coalition? And to what extent can the structural transformation of the alliance system account for the events that brought war to Europe and the world in 1914?

The roots of the Franco-Russian Alliance lie in the situation created in Europe by the formation of the German Empire in 1870. For centuries, the German centre of Europe had been fragmented and weak; now it was united and strong. The war of 1870 placed the relationship between Germany and France on a permanently difficult footing. The sheer scale of the German victory over France – a victory most contemporaries had not predicted – traumatized the French elites, triggering a crisis that reached deep into French culture, while the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine – strongly advocated by the military and reluctantly accepted by German chancellor Otto von Bismarck – imposed a lasting burden on Franco-German relations.
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Alsace-Lorraine became the holy grail of the French cult of
revanche
, providing the focus for successive waves of chauvinist agitation. The lost provinces were never the sole driving force behind French policy. Yet they periodically inflamed public opinion and exerted a stealthy pressure on the policy-makers in Paris. Even without the annexation, however, the very existence of the new German Empire would have transformed the relationship with France, whose security had traditionally been underwritten by the political fragmentation of German Europe.
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After 1871, France was bound to seek every possible opportunity to contain the new and formidable power on its eastern border. A lasting enmity between France and Germany was thus to some extent programmed into the European international system.
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It is hard to overstate the world-historical impact of this transformation. Relations among the European states would henceforth be driven by a new and unfamiliar dynamic.

Given the size and potential military capacity of the new German Empire, the chief objective of French policy had to be to contain Germany by forming an anti-German alliance. The most attractive candidate for such a partnership, despite its very different political system, was Russia. As J. B. Eustis, the former American ambassador to Paris, observed in 1897, France ‘had one of two courses open, either to be self-reliant and independent, falling back upon her own resources to brave every peril [. . .], or to seek to make an alliance with Russia, the only power accessible to her'.
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If this should happen, Germany would face the threat of a potentially hostile alliance on two separate fronts.
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Berlin could prevent this only by attaching Russia to an alliance system of its own. This was the rationale underpinning the Three Emperors' League signed by Germany with Austria and Russia in 1873. But any alliance system incorporating both Russia and Austria-Hungary was necessarily unstable, given the two powers' overlapping Balkan interests. Should it prove impossible to contain those tensions, Germany would be forced to choose between Austria-Hungary and Russia. If Germany chose Austria-Hungary, the barrier to a Franco-Russian partnership would fall away. The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, chief architect of the empire and the principal author of its foreign policy until his departure from office in March 1890, was fully aware of the problem and fashioned his policy accordingly. His objective, as he declared in the summer of 1877, was to create ‘an overall political situation in which all powers, except France, need us and are kept by virtue of their mutual relations as far as possible from forming coalitions against us'.
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Bismarck adopted a double-edged policy that aimed, on the one hand, to avoid direct confrontations between Germany and other major powers and, on the other, to exploit the discord among the other powers whenever possible for Germany's advantage.

Bismarck pursued these objectives with considerable success. He reduced the risk of British alienation by staying out of the rush for colonial possessions in Africa and the Pacific. He maintained a posture of scrupulous disinterest in Balkan affairs, declaring in a famous speech to the Reichstag in December 1876 that the Balkan Question was not worth ‘the healthy bones of one Pomeranian musketeer'.
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When Russia's war on the Ottoman Empire in 1877–8 triggered a major international crisis, Bismarck used the Berlin Congress to persuade the powers that Germany was capable of acting as the disinterested guardian of continental peace. By mediating in the conflict over the post-war territorial settlement without seeking any direct reward for Germany, the chancellor aimed to demonstrate that European peace and German security were in effect one and the same thing.
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In 1887, the heyday of the Bismarckian alliance system, Germany was tied by agreements of one kind or another to virtually every continental power. The Triple Alliance with Austria and Italy and the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia ensured that France remained frozen out and unable to found an anti-German coalition. The Mediterranean Agreement between Britain, Italy and Austria, settled through Bismarck's mediation, even linked Berlin indirectly (via the Triple Alliance) with London.

There were, however, limits to what Bismarckian diplomacy could achieve, especially in regard to Russia, whose Balkan commitments were difficult to accommodate within the fragile fabric of the Three Emperors' Alliance. The Bulgarian crisis of the mid-1880s is a case in point. In 1885, a Bulgarian irredentist movement seized control of neighbouring Ottoman-ruled Eastern Roumelia and announced the creation of a Greater Bulgaria.
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The Russian government opposed the annexation because it brought the Bulgarians worryingly close to the Bosphorus and Constantinople, the strategic apple of Russia's eye. By contrast, the British government, irritated by recent Russian provocations in Central Asia, ordered its consuls to recognize the new Bulgarian regime. Then King Milan of Serbia stirred things up by invading Bulgaria in November 1885. The Serbs were thrown back, and Austria had to intervene to prevent the Bulgarians from occupying Belgrade. In the compromise peace that followed, the Russians succeeded in blocking outright recognition of Greater Bulgaria, but were obliged to accept a form of personal union between the northern and southern (Ottoman) parts of the country. Further Russian interventions, including the kidnapping, intimidation and forced abdication of the Bulgarian prince, failed to bring the Bulgarian government into obedience to St Petersburg. In the spring of 1887, it seemed entirely possible that the Russians might invade Bulgaria and impose a puppet government, a move that Austria-Hungary and Britain were bound to oppose. The Russians ultimately decided against the incalculable risks of a war for Bulgaria, but a wave of intense anti-German feeling surged through the Russian press and public, because the pan-Slav press now viewed Germany as the guardian of Austria's Balkan interests and the chief impediment to the exercise of Russia's custodianship over the Balkan Slavs.

There was a lesson in all of this for Berlin. The Balkan problem remained. The Bulgarian crisis highlighted for a moment the immense danger latent in the instabilities of that region, namely that the activities of an unimportant lesser state might one day inveigle two great powers into a course of action tending towards war. How could this challenge be met? Bismarck's answer, once again, was to seek good relations with Russia and thereby mute conflicts of interest, keep St Petersburg away from Paris and exercise a moderating influence in the Balkans. The chancellor patched up relations with the Russian Empire by agreeing the Reinsurance Treaty of 1887 with the moderate and pro-German Russian foreign minister Nikolai Giers. Under the terms of this agreement, Berlin promised to support Russian objectives in the Turkish Straits and to remain neutral in the event of a war between Russia and a third power, except, of course, in the case of an unprovoked Russian attack upon Austria-Hungary, whereupon Germany would observe its treaty obligations under the Dual Alliance to aid the dual monarchy.