The Sleepwalkers (41 page)

It remained unclear how the public opinion within articulate elites with direct access to the press related to the attitudes prevailing among the masses of the population. War scares and jingo campaigns made good newspaper copy, but how socially deep were they? It was a grave mistake, the German consul-general in Moscow warned in December 1912, to assume that the belligerence and Germanophobia of the Russian ‘war party' and the Slavophile press were characteristic of the mood in the country, for these circles entertained only ‘the loosest connection with the actual tendencies of Russian life'. The problem with German newspaper coverage of these issues, the consul argued, was that it tended to be written by journalists with little experience of Russia and a very narrow range of elite social contacts.
¹⁷⁵
In May 1913, the Belgian minister in Paris, Baron Guillaume, acknowledged the efflorescence of ‘a certain chauvinism' in France. It could be observed not just in the nationalist papers, but also in the theatres, reviews and café-concerts, where numerous performances offered jingoist fare that was ‘calculated to over-excite spirits'. But, he added, ‘the true people of France do not approve of these manifestations . . .'
¹⁷⁶

All the governments, with the exception of Britain, maintained press offices whose purpose was both to monitor and, where possible, to shape press coverage of issues touching on security and international relations. In Britain, the foreign secretary appears to have felt little need to convince (or even inform) the public of the merits of his policies and there were no official efforts to influence the press; many of the major newspapers received handsome subsidies, but these came from private or party-political sources, rather than from government. This did not, of course, prevent a dense network of informal relationships from developing between Whitehall officials and key journalists.
¹⁷⁷
The picture in Italy was rather different. Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister (for the fourth time) in 1911–14, made regular payments to at least thirty journalists in return for supportive coverage of his policies.
¹⁷⁸
The Russian foreign ministry acquired a press department in 1906, and from 1910 Sazonov orchestrated regular tea-time meetings at the ministry with the most important editors and Duma leaders.
¹⁷⁹
Relations between the Russian diplomats and some favoured newspapers were so close, one journalist reported in 1911, that the ministry of foreign affairs in St Petersburg ‘often seemed a mere branch office of the
Novoye Vremya
'. The newspaper's editor, Jegorov, was often to be seen in the ministry's press bureau, and Nelidov, chief of the bureau and himself a former journalist, was a frequent visitor to the paper's editorial offices.
¹⁸⁰
In France, the relationship between diplomats and journalists was especially intimate: nearly half of the foreign ministers of the Third Republic were former writers or journalists and the ‘lines of communication' between foreign ministers and the press were ‘almost always open'.
¹⁸¹
In December 1912, when he was prime minister of France, Raymond Poincaré even launched a new journal,
La Politique Étrangère
, to promote his views on foreign policy across the French political elite.

Semi-official newspapers and ‘inspired' articles planted in the domestic press to test the climate of opinion were familiar tools of continental diplomacy. Inspired journalism masqueraded as the autonomous expression of an independent press, but its effectiveness depended precisely on the suspicion among readers that it emanated from the seat of power. It was universally understood in Serbia, for example, that
Samouprava
represented the views of the government; the
Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung
was considered the official organ of the German Foreign Office; in Russia, the government made its views known through its own semi-official journal,
Rossiya
, but also ran occasional inspired campaigns in other more popular papers, like
Novoye Vremya
.
¹⁸²
The French foreign ministry, like the German, disbursed cash to journalists from a secret fund and maintained close ties with
Le Temps
and the
Agence Havas
, while using the less serious-minded
Le Matin
to launch ‘trial balloons'.
¹⁸³

Interventions of this kind could go wrong. Once it was known that a particular newspaper often carried inspired pieces, there was the risk that indiscreet, tendentious or erroneous reports by the same paper would be mistaken for intentional signals from the government, as happened, for example, in February 1913, when
Le Temps
ran an article based on
unauthorized
leaks from an unnamed source disclosing some of the details of recent government deliberations on French rearmament – furious official denials followed.
¹⁸⁴
Russian foreign minister Izvolsky's efforts in 1908 to ‘prepare [Russian] public opinion and the press' for the news that Russia had approved the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina proved totally inadequate to the force of the public response.
¹⁸⁵
And in 1914,
Novoye Vremya
, despite its previously intimate relationship with the ministry of foreign affairs, turned against Sazonov, accusing him of excessive timidity in the defence of Russian interests, possibly because it was now under the influence of the ministry of war.
¹⁸⁶
In the aftermath of the Friedjung Affair of 1909, when Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal threw his weight behind a press campaign based on false allegations of treason against prominent Serbian politicians, the government was forced to sacrifice the head of the foreign ministry's Literary Bureau; his successor was sacked amid a storm of press and parliamentary criticism over the bungled ‘Prochaska affair' of the winter of 1912, when allegations of Serbian mistreatment of an Austrian consular official were likewise found to be bogus.
¹⁸⁷

Official manipulations of the press also took place across national borders. Early in 1905, the Russians were distributing around £8,000 a month to the Parisian press, in the hope of stimulating public support for a massive French loan. The French government subsidized pro-French newspapers in Italy (and Spain during the conference at Algeciras), and during the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars the Russians handed out huge bribes to French journalists.
¹⁸⁸
The Germans maintained a very modest fund for supporting friendly journalists in St Petersburg and plied newspaper editors in London with subsidies in the hope, mostly disappointed, of obtaining more positive coverage of Germany.
¹⁸⁹

Inspired leader articles might also be formulated for the eyes of a foreign government. During the Morocco crisis of 1905, for example, Théophile Delcassé used thinly disguised press releases divulging the details of British military planning in order to intimidate the Germans. Here the inspired press functioned as a form of deniable, sub-diplomatic international communication that could achieve a deterrent or motivating effect without binding anyone to a specific commitment; had Delcassé himself issued a more explicit threat, he would have placed the British Foreign Office in an impossible position. In February 1912, the French ambassador in St Petersburg, Georges Louis, dispatched the translation of an article in the
Novoye Vremya
with a covering letter noting that it reflected ‘very accurately the opinion of Russian military circles'.
¹⁹⁰
In this case the inspired press enabled discrete organizations within the administration – here the ministry of war – to broadcast their views without officially compromising the government. But it did sometimes occur that different ministries briefed the press in opposed directions, as in March 1914 when the
Birzheviia Vedomosti
(Stock Exchange News) published a leader piece, widely assumed to have been ‘inspired' by Sukhomlinov, announcing that Russia was ‘ready for war' and had ‘abandoned' the idea of a purely defensive strategy. Sazonov responded with a conciliatory counter-piece in the semi-official
Rossiya
. This was a classic case of parallel signalling – Sukhomlinov was reassuring the French of Russia's readiness and determination to fulfil its alliance obligations, while Sazonov's response was intended for the German (and possibly British) foreign offices.

An article published in the
Kölnische Zeitung
at around the same time attributing aggressive intentions to St Petersburg on account of the most recent hike in Russian military expenditure was almost certainly planted by the German foreign ministry in the hope of eliciting a clarifying Russian response.
¹⁹¹
In areas where the European powers competed for local influence, the use of subsidized press organs to win friends and discredit the machinations of one's opponents was commonplace. The Germans worried about the immense influence of ‘English money' on the Russian press, and German envoys in Constantinople frequently complained of the dominance of the French-language press, whose subsidized leader-writers did ‘everything possible to incite [hostility] against us'.
¹⁹²

In these contexts, the press was the
instrument
of foreign policy, not its determinant. But this did not prevent policy-makers from taking the press seriously as an index of opinion. In the spring of 1912, Jules Cambon worried lest the chauvinism of the French press heighten the risk of conflict: ‘I wish that those Frenchmen whose profession it is to create or represent opinion would [exercise restraint] and that they would not amuse themselves in playing with fire by speaking of inevitable war. There is is nothing inevitable in this world . . .'
¹⁹³
Six months later, with the First Balkan War underway and pan-Slav feeling rising high in parts of the Russian press, the Russian ambassador in Berlin feared – or at least claimed to fear – that the ‘state of mind of the population of his country [might] dominate the conduct of his government'.
¹⁹⁴

Ministers and diplomats who were confident about the capacity of their own governments to shield the policy-making process from the vicissitudes of domestic published opinion often doubted the ability of foreign governments to do the same. In the aftermath of the Agadir crisis of 1911, the German military leadership feared that nationalist agitation and reviving confidence in France might pressure an otherwise peaceable government in Paris into launching a surprise atack on Germany.
¹⁹⁵
The fear that an essentially peaceable German leadership would be swept into a war on her neighbours by chauvinistic opinion leaders at home was in turn a frequently recurring theme in French policy discussions.
¹⁹⁶
The Russian government, in particular, was widely seen as susceptible to pressure from the public sphere – especially when this took the form of agitation on Balkan issues – and there was some truth in this view, as the course of the July Crisis would show. But the Russians also viewed the parliamentary western governments as acutely vulnerable to public pressure, precisely because they were democratically constituted, and the British encouraged this inference by suggesting, as Grey habitually did, that ‘the course of the English government in [. . .] a crisis must depend on the view taken by English public opinion'.
¹⁹⁷
Statesmen frequently hid behind the claim that they were acting under the constraints imposed by opinion in their own country: in 1908–9, the French cautioned the Russians against starting a war over the Balkans, for example, on the grounds that this region was not important to the French public; Izvolsky got his own back in 1911, when he urged Paris – without forgetting to remind his French interlocutors of their earlier advice – to settle with the Germans on the grounds that ‘Russia would have difficulty making its public opinion accept a war over Morocco'.
¹⁹⁸
The Serbian ambassador in Vienna claimed in November 1912 that Prime Minister Nikola Pašić had no choice but to pursue an irredentist policy on behalf of his country – if instead he attempted to conciliate Austria, the ‘war party' in Belgrade would sweep him from power and replace him with one of their own number, and Sazonov justified the Serbian leader's belligerent public postures by reference to the ‘somewhat overwrought' quality of Serbian opinion.
¹⁹⁹

Sazonov's claim to the German ambassador Pourtalès in November 1912 that concern for public opinion obliged him to defend Serbia's interests against Austria-Hungary was entirely characteristic. He used the same argument to persuade the Romanians not to initiate a conflict with Bulgaria in January 1913: ‘be very careful! If you wage war with Bulgaria, I will not be able to resist an over-excited public opinion.'
²⁰⁰
In reality, Sazonov had little respect for newspaper editors and leader-writers and believed that he understood Russian opinion better than the newspapers did. He was quite prepared, when necessary, to sail against the tide of press commentary, all the while exploiting jingoist campaigns at home to persuade the representatives of other powers that he was under pressure to take certain measures.
²⁰¹
The readers of dispatches often saw through these evasions: when reports reached Kaiser Wilhelm in 1908 and 1909 informing him that pro-Slav public opinion might push the Russian government into action over Bosnia-Herzegovina, he scribbled the word ‘Bluff' in the margins.
²⁰²
Nevertheless: the widespread assumption that
foreign
governments were under pressure to align themselves with their own domestic opinion meant that press reports were the bread and butter of diplomatic dispatches. Sheaves of newspaper cuttings and translations fattened the files flowing into foreign ministries from every European legation.