The Sleepwalkers (78 page)

The note and the ultimatum were drafted by Baron Musulin von Gomirje, a relatively junior figure, counsellor from 1910 in the sections for church policy and East Asia. Musulin was tasked with drafting the ultimatum because he had a reputation as an excellent stylist. He was, as Lewis Namier later put it, ‘one of those average, personally honest, well-meaning men whom a dark fate had chosen for pawns in the game that was to result in the greatest disaster of European history'.
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Musulin filed away at his text like a jeweller with a precious stone.
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The covering note to the ultimatum opened by recalling that Serbia had promised in the aftermath of the Bosnian annexation crisis to get along ‘on a footing of good neighbourliness' with Austria-Hungary. Despite this undertaking, the letter went on, the Serbian government had continued to tolerate the existence on its territory of a ‘subversive movement' which had sponsored ‘acts of terrorism, by a series of outrages and by murders' – a somewhat histrionic reference to the dozen or so abortive South Slav terrorist plots that had preceded the assassinations at Sarajevo. Far from attempting to suppress such activity, the letter claimed, the Serbian government had ‘tolerated the criminal machinations of various societies and associations' and ‘tolerated all the manifestations of a nature to inculcate in the Serbian population hatred for the monarchy and its institutions'.
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The preliminary investigation into the plot to slay the archduke had revealed that it was planned and supplied in Belgrade, and that the passage of the killers into Bosnia had been expedited by officials of the Serbian frontier service. The time was therefore over for the atttitude of ‘forbearance' that the monarchy had hitherto shown in its relations with Serbia. The last part of the letter stipulated that the Belgrade government must post a public notice across the kingdom (the text was provided) repudiating pan-Serbian irredentism.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of this text, which provided the raw material for the letter that would be circulated to the other powers when Austria declared war on Belgrade five days later, is that it does not assert direct complicity on the part of the Serbian state in the murders at Sarajevo. Instead, it makes the more modest claim that the Serbian authorities had ‘tolerated' the organizations and activities that gave rise to the assassinations. This careful wording was in part simply a reflection of what the Austrians knew and did not know. The ministry of foreign affairs in Vienna had sent Section Counsellor Dr Friedrich von Wiesner to Sarajevo to collate and analyse all the available evidence on the background to the plot. On 13 July, after a scrupulous investigation, Wiesner dispatched a report concluding that there was as yet no evidence to prove the responsibility or complicity of the Belgrade government.
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This report would later be cited by those who claimed that Austria, being determined to wage war, had merely used Sarajevo as a pretext. But the situation at the time was more complex. As Wiesner later explained to the American historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt, his telegram had been ‘widely misunderstood'.

Personally [Wiesner recalled], he was at the time quite convinced by the evidence secured at the investigation of the moral culpability of the Serbian government for the Sarajevo crime, but as the evidence was not of the kind which a court of law would accept, he had been unwilling to have it used in the formal case against Serbia. He had, he said, made this clear on his return to Vienna.
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Since the Austrians were determined to make their case as legally tight as possible, there could be no question of alleging direct culpability on the part of the Serbian state in the murders at Sarajevo. There was enough, in the evidence relating to the preparation and training of the boys and of their passage across the Serbian border, only to confirm the involvement of various subordinate state agencies. In chasing the nebulous structures of the Narodna Odbrana, moreover, the Austrians had missed the much more important Black Hand, whose networks reached deep into the Serbian state. They had not been able to trace the trail to Apis, nor had they been able to nail down the question of Serbian government foreknowledge of the conspiracy, perhaps because Biliński, embarrassed by his own failure to report to Berchtold his brief conversation with the Serbian ambassador, subsequently kept a lid on the entire episode. Had they possessed fuller knowledge, the Austrians would doubtless have felt even more justified in the measures they planned to undertake. For the moment, the opprobrium of the Friedjung trial, which was already being brandished by the Russians and the French as an argument against accepting Vienna's claims, obliged the drafters of the ultimatum to trim their language to what could be proven beyond doubt on the basis of the information that had already emerged from the investigation in Sarajevo.

There followed the ten demands of the ultimatum proper. The first three points focused on the suppression of irredentist organs and of the anti-Austrian propaganda they generated. Points 4, 6 and 8 addressed the need to take action against persons implicated in the Sarajevo outrage, including compromised military personnel and frontier officials and ‘accessories to the plot of 28 June who are on Serbian territory'. Point 7 was more specific: it demanded the arrest ‘without delay' of Major Voja Tankosić and Milan Ciganović. Tankosić was, unbeknown to the Austrians, a Black Hand operative close to Apis; it was he who had recruited the three youths who formed the core of the assassination team. Ciganović was known to the Austrians only as ‘a Serbian state employee implicated by the findings of the preliminary investigation at Sarajevo', but he was also, according to the later testimony of Ljuba Jovanović, a member of the Black Hand who doubled as an agent working secretly for Pašić.
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Point 9 requested that Belgrade furnish Vienna with explanations regarding the ‘unjustifiable utterances of high Serbian officials, both in Serbia and abroad, who notwithstanding their official position have not hesitated since the outrage of 28 June to express themselves in interviews in terms of hostility towards the Austro-Hungarian monarchy'. This point referred among other things to the interviews given by Spalajković in St Petersburg; it also reminds us of how deeply Austrian attitudes were affected by Serbian responses to the outrage. Point 10 simply requested official notification ‘without delay' of the measures undertaken to meet the preceding points.

The most controversial points were 5 and 6. Point 5 demanded that the Belgrade government ‘accept the collaboration in Serbia of organs of the Imperial and Royal Government [of Austria-Hungary] in the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of the monarchy' and point 6 stated that ‘organs delegated' by Austria-Hungary would ‘take part in the investigations' relating to accessories in the crime. As usual in Vienna, this text was composed by many hands, but it was Berchtold who had insisted on incorporating a reference to Austrian involvement.
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The reason is obvious enough: Vienna did not trust the Serbian authorities to press home the investigation without some form of Austrian supervision and verification. And it must be said that nothing the Serbian government did between 28 June and the presentation of the ultimatum gave them any reason to think otherwise.

This was the demand irreconcilable with Serbian sovereignty that had already been identified in Paris, St Petersburg and Belgrade as the prospective trigger for a broader confrontation. One can legitimately ask, of course, whether a state can be made responsible for the actions of private citizens planned on its territory. But framing the issue in terms of Serbia's inviolable sovereignty skewed the picture somewhat. First, there was the question of reciprocity. The Serbian state – or at least the statesmen who directed it – accepted responsibility for the eventual ‘reunion' of all Serbs, including those living within the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. This implied at best a limited acknowledgement of the empire's sovereign rights within the unredeemed lands of ‘Serbdom'. Then there was the fact that the Serbian state under Pašić could exercise only very limited control over the irredentist networks. The interpenetration of the conspiratorial networks with the Serbian state, and the transnational affiliations of ethnic irredentism made a nonsense of any attempt to understand the friction between Serbia and Austria-Hungary in terms of an interaction between sovereign territorial states. And of course the transnational organs and legal framework that today arbitrate in such conflicts and monitor their resolution were not in existence.

When Edward Grey saw the full text of the Austrian ultimatum, he described it famously as ‘the most formidable document he had ever seen addressed by one State to another that was independent'; in a letter to his wife, Winston Churchill described the note as ‘the most insolent document of its kind ever devised'.
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We do not know what comparators Grey and Churchill had in mind and the specificity of the historical situation created by the Sarajevo crimes makes comparative judgements difficult. But it would certainly be misleading to think of the Austrian note as an anomalous regression into a barbaric and bygone era before the rise of sovereign states. The Austrian note was a great deal milder, for example, than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the form of the Rambouillet Agreement drawn up in February and March 1999 to force the Serbs into complying with NATO policy in Kosovo. Its provisions included the following:

NATO personnel shall enjoy, together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft and equipment free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access through the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, including associated airspace and territorial waters. This shall include, but not be limited to, the right of bivouac, manoeuvre, billet and utilization of any areas or facilities as required for support, training, and operations.
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Henry Kissinger was doubtless right when he described Rambouillet as ‘a provocation, an excuse to start bombing', whose terms were unacceptable even to the most moderate Serbian.
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The demands of the Austrian note pale by comparison.

Vienna's ultimatum was, to be sure, drawn up on the assumption that the Serbs would probably not accept it. This was not a last-ditch attempt to save the peace between the two neighbours, but an uncompromising statement of the Austrian position. On the other hand, it was not, unlike Rambouillet, a demand for the complete prostration of the Serbian state; its terms were tightly focused on the threat posed by Serbian irredentism to Austrian security, and even points 5 and 6 reflected concerns about the reliability of Serbian compliance that the drafters had reason to believe were valid. Let us remember that as late as 16 July, when the British minister Dayrell Crackanthorpe put it to Slavko Gruić, secretary-general of the ministry of foreign affairs in Belgrade, that it might be a good idea to launch an independent Serbian investigation of the crimes, Gruić had insisted on the ‘impossibility of adopting any definite measures before learning the findings of the Sarajevo investigation'. Once the report was published, Gruić continued, the Serbian government would comply with ‘whatever request for further investigation the circumstances might call for and which would be compatible with international usage'. Should the worst come to the worst, Gruić added ominously, ‘Serbia would not stand alone. Russia would not remain quiet were Serbia wantonly attacked.'
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These obfuscating formulations suggested that the chances of compliance without coercion to the demands of a hostile neighbour were slim indeed. It was precisely the issues of enforcement and compliance that the Serbian government had addressed in its circular to the powers justifying the attack of the Balkan states on the Ottoman Empire in 1912. The repeated failure of the Ottomans to address the need for reforms in Macedonia, they argued, meant that their refusal to accept any form of ‘foreign participation' in such reforms and their promises ‘to apply serious reforms by themselves' were greeted ‘throughout the world' with ‘a deeply rooted distrust'.
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Whether anyone in Belgrade noticed the parallel in July 1914 is doubtful.

On the morning of 23 July, the Austrian minister Baron Giesl telephoned the ministry of foreign affairs in Belgrade to inform them that Vienna would be delivering an ‘important communication' for the Serbian prime minister that evening. Pašić was away from Belgrade, campaigning for the elections; the finance minister Lazar Paču had been appointed to replace him in his absence. On receiving the advance warning of the note, Paču managed to reach Pašić by telephone in Niš. Despite the pleas of the minister, Pašić refused to return to the capital. ‘Receive [Giesl] in my place' was his instruction. When Giesl appeared in person at the ministry at 6 p.m. (the deadline having been postponed by an hour), he was received by Paču and Gruić, who had been asked to attend the meeting because the finance minister did not speak French.

Giesl handed to Paču the ultimatum, a two-page annexe and a covering note addressed to Paču as acting prime minister and informed him that the time limit for a reply was exactly forty-eight hours. When that deadline expired, if there were an unsatisfactory reply or none at all, Giesl would break off diplomatic relations and return to Vienna with the entire legation staff. Without opening the dossier, Paču answered that as the elections were in full swing and many ministers were away from Belgrade, it might be physically impossible to assemble the responsible office-holders in time to deliver a decision. Giesl replied that ‘in the age of railways and telegraphs and in a country of this size the return of the ministers could only be a matter of a few hours'. In any case, he added, ‘this was an internal matter for the Serbian government, on which he [Giesl] need take no view'.
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Giesl's telegram dispatch to Vienna closes with the words: ‘there was no further discussion', but in post-war conversations with the Italian historian Luigi Albertini, the former Austrian minister recalled that Paču hesitated, saying he was unable to accept the note. Giesl responded that in that case he would place it on the table and ‘Paču could do what he liked with it'.
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