The Sleepwalkers (40 page)

Conversely, the demands of the Russians on their French allies had potentially far-reaching consequences for French domestic politics. In 1914, when the Russians warned that any reduction in the period of national military service would undermine the value of France as an ally, they locked the country's leading statesmen into supporting a measure (the recently adopted Three Year Law) which was controversial with the French electorate. Even the most technical details of operational planning could provide gunpowder for political explosions.
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In France, a small group of key policy-makers went to great pains to conceal the extent and nature of the strategic commitments of the alliance from those (mainly Radicals and Radical Socialists) who might object on political grounds. The need for discretion became especially acute in early 1914, when Poincaré cooperated with the military in concealing the essentially offensive character of French strategic planning from a cabinet, a chamber and a public increasingly committed to a
défenciste
approach. So secretive was Poincaré in his handling of these issues that he and Joffre even withheld the details of the new French deployment plans from the minister of war, Adolphe Messimy.
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By the spring of 1914, the French commitment to a coordinated Franco-Russian military strategy had become a potentially disuptive force in politics, because it obliged France to hold fast to a form of military planning and preparation whose public legitimacy was in question. How long Poincaré could have continued this balancing act we shall never know, because the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 made the question obsolete.

We can thus speak of two reciprocal processes – one in which a generous measure of initiative was ceded to a constitutionally subordinate military leadership, and another in which a praetorian military enjoying relative independence in constitutional terms was contained, steered or deflected by the statesmen. Moltke's demands for preventive war were blocked by the Kaiser and by the civilian leaders, just as Conrad's were by the Emperor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Leopold von Berchtold.
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Kokovtsov was, for a time at least, strikingly successful in blocking the war minister's more ambitious initiatives. At the end of 1913, when Sukhomlinov tried to have Kokovtsov – as prime minister and minister of finance – excluded entirely from deliberations on military budgeting, the Council of Ministers recognized that the imperious war minister had gone too far and turned down the request.
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In Russia, Germany and Austria, Britain and France, military policy remained ultimately subordinate to the political and strategic objectives of the civilian leaderships.
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Nevertheless: unanswered questions about the balance of power between civilian and military factions and their respective influence on decision-making continued to befog relations between the great power executives. The European powers all assumed the existence of a hawkish military faction within each prospective opponent's government and worked hard to establish how much influence it wielded. In a conversation with Count Pourtalès, the German ambassador in St Petersburg, at the beginning of February 1913, when Austro-Russian tensions over the Balkans were riding high, Foreign Minister Sazonov acknowledged that the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, whom he remembered from his St Petersburg days, was a man of peaceable intentions and outlook. But was he strong enough to resist the pressure from the chief of the General Staff, General Conrad von Hötzendorf, whose belligerent schemes were well known to Russian military intelligence? And even if Berchtold was still, for the moment, in control, might not power slip into the hands of the military as the dual monarchy grew weaker and looked for increasingly radical solutions?
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There was an element of projection in these speculations. Sazonov, who observed at first hand the power struggle between Sukhomlinov and Kokovtsov and had recently seen the staff chief push Russia to the brink of war with Austria-Hungary, knew better than most how labile the relationship between military and civilian decision-makers could be. In a subtle analysis of the mood in St Petersburg in March 1914, Pourtalès discerned a kind of equilibrium between belligerent and pacific elements: ‘Just as there are no personalities of whom one can say that they have
both
the desire
and
the influence to plunge Russia into a military adventure, so we lack men whose position and influence are strong enough to awaken confidence that they will be able to steer Russia on a peaceful course over a period of years . . .'
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Kokovtsov's analysis of the same problem was less sanguine. It seemed to him that the Tsar spent more and more of his time in the company of ‘military circles' whose ‘simplistic views' were ‘gathering more and more force'.
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The intrinsic difficulty of interpreting such relationships from an external vantage point was heightened by the fact that civilian politicians were not averse to exploiting (or even inventing) the existence of a ‘war party' to lend weight to their own arguments: thus, during the Haldane mission of 1912, the Germans encouraged the British to believe that the Berlin government was split between a dove and a hawk faction and that British concessions would strengthen Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg against belligerent elements in Berlin. They adopted the same tactic in May 1914, arguing (through a series of ‘inspired' press articles) that the continuation of Anglo-Russian naval talks would merely strengthen the hand of the militarists against the moderate civilian leadership.
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Here, as in other areas of inter-governmental communication, the mutability of civil-military relations within the respective systems was amplified by misperceptions and misrepresentations.

‘Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades,' the German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow declared before the German parliament in March 1909, ‘have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate agitation of public opinion, which through the press and parliament has swept along the executive.'
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Was there any truth in Bülow's claim? Did the power to shape foreign policy lie beyond the chancelleries and ministries in the world of the lobby groups and political print?

One thing is beyond doubt: the last decades before the outbreak of the war saw a dramatic expansion of the political public sphere and broader public discussion of issues linked to international relations. In Germany, an array of nationalist pressure groups emerged, dedicated to channelling popular sentiment and lobbying government. The consequence was a transformation in the substance and style of political critique, which became more demagogic and more diffuse and extreme in its objectives, so that governments often found themselves on the defensive, parrying charges that they had not been assertive enough in the pursuit of national aims.
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In Italy, too, we can discern the beginnings of a more assertive and demanding political public: under the influence of the ultra-nationalist Enrico Corradini and the demagogue Giovanni Papini, Italy's first nationalist party, the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, was founded in 1910; through its parliamentary deputies and its newspaper,
L'Idea Nazionale
, it demanded the immediate ‘repatriation' of the Italian-populated territories along the Adriatic coast of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was prepared to endorse war if no other means sufficed. By 1911, even more moderate papers, such as
La Tribuna
of Rome and
La Stampa
of Turin, were employing nationalist journalists.
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Here, even more than in Germany, there was ample potential for friction with a government obliged to balance conflicting priorities.
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In Russia, too, the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a mass press – by 1913, the
Russkoe Slovo
, Moscow's best-selling daily paper, was selling up to 800,000 copies per day. Although censorship was still operating, the authorities permitted fairly free discussion of foreign affairs (as long as they did not directly criticize the Tsar or his ministers) and many of the most important dailies engaged retired diplomats to write on foreign policy.
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In the aftermath of the Bosnian crisis, moreover, Russian public opinion grew more assertive – especially on Balkan issues – and more anti-governmental.
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In Britain, too, a burgeoning mass press fed its readers on a rich diet of jingoism, xenophobia, security scares and war fever. During the Boer War, the
Daily Mail
sold one million copies per day; in 1907, it was still averaging between 850,000 and 900,000.

Monarchs, ministers and senior officials thus had good reason to take the press seriously. In parliamentary systems, positive publicity might be expected to translate into votes, while negative coverage supplied grist for the mills of the opposition. In more authoritarian systems, public support was an indispensable ersatz for democratic legitimacy. Some monarchs and statesmen were positively obsessive about the press and spent hours each day poring through cuttings. Wilhelm II was an extreme case, but his sensitivity to public criticism was not in itself unusual.
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‘If we lose the confidence of public opinion in our foreign policy,' Tsar Alexander III had told Foreign Minister Lamzdorf, ‘then all is lost.'
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It is hard to find anyone in the executives of early twentieth-century Europe who did not acknowledge the importance of the press for the making of foreign policy. But were they swept along by it?

An ambivalence underlay the preoccupation with published opinion. On the one hand, ministers, officials and monarchs believed in and sometimes even feared the press as a mirror and channel for public sentiments and attitudes. All the foreign ministers knew what it was like to be exposed to a hostile domestic press campaign over which they had no control – Grey was the butt of the Liberal press in 1911, Kiderlen-Wächter was attacked in the nationalist papers after the Agadir crisis, the Kaiser was ridiculed for many reasons – among them for his supposedly timid and irresolute view of foreign policy. French politicians suspected of softness towards Germany could be hounded, like Joseph Caillaux, from office. In January 1914, Sazonov and his ministry were denounced for ‘pusillanimity' by the Russian nationalist press.
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Fear of negative publicity was one reason for the secretiveness of so many of the foreign ministries. As Charles Hardinge observed in a letter to Nicolson, then British ambassador in St Petersburg, in 1908, Edward Grey's policy of rapprochement with Russia was difficult to sell to the British public: ‘We have had to suppress the truth and resort to subterfuge at times to meet hostile public opinion . . .'
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In St Petersburg, the memory of the publicity storm that had ruined Izvolsky remained fresh throughout the pre-war years.
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Most policy-makers took an intelligent and differentiated view of the press. They saw that it was volatile – subject to short-term agitations and frenzies that quickly subsided. They understood that public sentiment was driven by contrary impulses, that the demands it made on government were seldom realistic; they saw, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, that public opinion usually combined ‘the unbridled tongue with the unready hand'.
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Public opinion was frenetic and panic-prone, but it was also highly mutable – witness the way in which the established Anglophobia of the French press melted away during Edward VII's visit to Paris in 1903: as the king drove with his entourage from the Porte Dauphine railway station down the Champs Élysées, there were shouts of ‘Vive Fashoda!', ‘Vivent les Boers!' and ‘Vive Jeanne d'Arc!', not to mention hostile headlines and insulting caricatures. Yet within a few days, the king won over his hosts with endearing speeches and charming remarks that were quickly taken up by the main newspapers.
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In Serbia, the wave of national outrage stirred by Austria's interdiction of the customs union with Bulgaria in 1906 soon died away as Serbian citizens woke up to the fact that the terms of the commercial treaty on offer from Austria-Hungary were in fact better for Serbian consumers than membership of the union with Sofia.
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There were sharp fluctuations in public sentiment in Germany during the Agadir crisis of 1911; at the beginning of September a peace demonstration in Berlin attracted 100,000 people, yet only a few weeks later, the mood was less emollient, as reflected in the decision at the Social Democratic Party's Jena Congress to reject calls for a general strike in the event of war.
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As late as the spring and summer of 1914, the French envoy in Belgrade noted sharp fluctuations in Serbian press coverage of relations with Austria-Hungary: whereas there had been energetic campaigns against Vienna in March and April, the first week of June brought an unexpected mood of détente and concilation on both sides of the Austro-Serbian border.
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As for those aggressive ultra-nationalist organizations whose voices could be heard in all the European capitals, most of them represented small, extremist constituencies. It was a striking feature of the most belligerent ultra-nationalist lobbies that their leaderships were undermined by constant infighting and schisms – the Pan-German League was riven by factional strife; even the much larger and more moderate Naval League suffered in the years 1905–8 from an internal ‘civil war' between pro-governmental and oppositional groups. The Union of the Russian People, a chauvinist, anti Semitic, ultra-nationalist organization founded in August 1906, with some 900 offices across the cities and towns of Russia, collapsed in 1908–9 after severe infighting into an array of smaller and mutually hostile groups.
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