The Sleepwalkers (95 page)

In this sense, the men of 1914 are our contemporaries. But the differences are as significant as the commonalities. At least the government ministers charged with solving the Eurozone crisis agreed in general terms on what the problem
was
– in 1914, by contrast, a profound sundering of ethical and political perspectives eroded consensus and sapped trust. The powerful supranational institutions that today provide a framework for defining tasks, mediating conflicts and identifying remedies were conspicuously absent in 1914. Moreover, the complexity of the 1914 crisis arose not from the diffusion of powers and responsibilities across a single politico-financial framework, but from rapid-fire interactions among heavily armed autonomous power-centres confronting different and swiftly changing threats and operating under conditions of high risk and low trust and transparency.

Gavrilo Princip's footsteps, Sarajevo (a photo from 1955)

Crucial to the complexity of the events of 1914 were rapid changes in the international system: the sudden emergence of an Albanian territorial state, the Turco-Russian naval arms race in the Black Sea, or the reorientation of Russian policy away from Sofia to Belgrade, to name just a few. These were not long-term historical transitions, but short-range realignments. Their consequences were amplified by the fluidity of the power relations within the European executives: Grey's struggle to contain the threat posed by the liberal radicals, the fragile ascendancy of Poincaré and his alliance policy, or the campaign waged by Sukhomlinov against Kokovtsov. After Vladimir Kokovtsov's fall from office in January 1914, according to the unpublished memoir of a political insider, Tsar Nicholas II offered his post in the first instance to the deeply conservative Pyotr N. Durnovo, a forceful and determined man who was adamantly opposed to Balkan entanglements of any kind. But Durnovo turned the post down and it passed instead to Goremykin, whose weakness allowed Krivoshein and the military command to wield disproportionate influence in the councils of July 1914.
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It would be a mistake to hang too much on this detail, but it draws our attention to the place of short-range, contingent realignments in shaping the conditions under which the crisis of 1914 unfolded.

This in turn made the system as a whole more opaque and unpredictable, feeding a pervasive mood of mutual distrust, even within the respective alliances, a development that was dangerous for peace. Levels of trust between the Russian and British leaderships were relatively low by 1914 and they were getting lower, but this did not diminish the readiness of the British Foreign Office to accept a European war on terms set by Russia; on the contrary, it reinforced the case for intervention. The same can be said for the Franco-Russian Alliance: doubts about its future had the effect on both sides of heightening, rather than muting the readiness to risk conflict. Fluctuations in power relations within each government – coupled with swiftly changing objective conditions – in turn produced the policy oscillations and ambiguous messaging that were such a crucial feature of the pre-war crises. Indeed it is not clear that the term ‘policy' is always appropriate in the pre-1914 context, given the looseness and ambiguity of many of the commitments involved. Whether Russia or Germany had a Balkan policy in the years 1912–14 is questionable – what we see instead is a multiplicity of initiatives, scenarios and attitudes whose overall trend is sometimes hard to discern. Within the respective state executives, the changeability of power relations also meant that those entrusted with formulating policy did so under considerable domestic pressure, not so much from the press or public opinion or industrial or financial lobbies, as from adversaries within their own elites and governments. And this, too, heightened the sense of urgency besetting decision-makers in the summer of 1914.

We need to distinguish between the objective factors acting on the decision-makers and the stories they told themselves and each other about what they thought they were doing and why they were doing it. All the key actors in our story filtered the world through narratives that were built from pieces of experience glued together with fears, projections and interests masquerading as maxims. In Austria, the story of a nation of youthful bandits and regicides endlessly provoking and goading a patient elderly neighbour got in the way of a cool-headed assessment of how to manage relations with Belgrade. In Serbia, fantasies of victimhood and oppression by a rapacious, all-powerful Habsburg Empire did the same in reverse. In Germany, a dark vision of future invasions and partitions bedevilled decision-making in the summer of 1914. And the Russian saga of repeated humiliations at the hands of the central powers had a similar impact, at once distorting the past and clarifying the present. Most important of all was the widely trafficked narrative of Austria-Hungary's historically necessary decline, which, having gradually replaced an older set of assumptions about Austria's role as a fulcrum of stability in Central and Eastern Europe, disinhibited Vienna's enemies, undermining the notion that Austria-Hungary, like every other great power, possessed interests that it had the right robustly to defend.

That the Balkan setting was central to the outbreak of war may seem self-evident, given the location of the assassinations that started the crisis. But two points in particular deserve emphasis. The first is that the Balkan Wars recalibrated the relationships among the greater and lesser powers in dangerous ways. In the eyes of both the Austrian and the Russian leaderships, the struggle to control events on the Balkan peninsula took on a new and more threatening aspect, especially during the winter crisis of 1912–13. One consequence was the Balkanization of the Franco-Russian Alliance. France and Russia, at different paces and for different reasons, constructed a geopolitical trigger along the Austro-Serbian frontier. The Balkan inception scenario was not a policy or a plan or plot that steadily matured over time, nor was there any necessary or linear relationship between the positions adopted in 1912 and 1913 and the outbreak of war in the following year. It was not that the Balkan inception scenario – which was in effect a Serbian inception scenario – drove Europe forwards towards the war that actually happened in 1914, but rather the other way round, that it supplied the conceptual framework within which the crisis was interpreted, once it had broken out. Russia and France thereby tied the fortunes of two of the world's greatest powers in highly asymmetrical fashion to the uncertain destiny of a turbulent and intermittently violent state.

For Austria-Hungary, whose regional security arrangements were ruined by the Balkan Wars, the Sarajevo murders were not a pretext for a pre-existing policy of invasion and warfare. They were a transformative event, charged with real and symbolic menace. It is easy from the perspective of the twenty-first century to say that Vienna should have resolved the issues arising from the assassinations through calm bilateral negotiations with Belgrade, but in the setting of 1914 this was not a credible option. Nor, for that matter, was Sir Edward Grey's half-hearted proposal of ‘four-power mediation', which was founded upon a partisan indifference to the power-political realities of Austria-Hungary's situation. It was not just that the Serbian authorities were partly unwilling and partly unable to suppress the irredentist activity that had given rise to the assassinations in the first place; it was also that Serbia's friends did not concede to Vienna the right to incorporate in its demands on Belgrade a means of monitoring and enforcing compliance. They rejected such demands on the ground that they were irreconcilable with Serbian sovereignty. There are parallels here with the debate that took place within the UN Security Council in October 2011 over a proposal – favoured by the NATO states – that sanctions should be imposed on the Assad regime in Syria to prevent further massacres of that country's dissident citizens. Against this proposal the Russian representative argued that the idea reflected an inappropriately ‘confrontational approach' that was typical of the western powers, while the Chinese representative argued that sanctions were inappropriate because they were irreconcilable with Syrian ‘sovereignty'.

Where does this leave the question of culpability? By asserting that Germany and her allies were morally responsible for the outbreak of war, Article 231 of the Versailles Peace Treaty ensured that questions of culpability would remain at or near the centre of the debate over the war's origins. The blame game has never lost its appeal. The most influential articulation of this tradition is the ‘Fischer thesis' – shorthand for a bundle of arguments elaborated in the 1960s by Fritz Fischer, Imanuel Geiss and a score of younger German colleagues, who identified Germany as the power chiefly culpable in the outbreak of war. According to this view (leaving aside the many variations within the Fischer school), the Germans did not stumble or slither into war. They
chose
it – worse, they planned it in advance, in the hope of breaking out of their European isolation and launching a bid for world power. Recent studies of the resulting Fischer controversy have highlighted the links between this debate and the fraught process by which German intellectuals came to terms with the contaminating moral legacy of the Nazi era, and Fischer's arguments have been subjected to criticism on many points.
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Nonetheless, a diluted version of the Fischer thesis still dominates in studies of Germany's road to war.

Do we really need to make the case against a single guilty state, or to rank the states according to their respective share in responsibility for the outbreak of war? In one classical study from the origins literature, Paul Kennedy remarked that it is ‘flaccid' to dodge the search for a culprit by blaming all or none of the belligerent states.
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A stiffer approach, Kennedy implies, ought not to shrink from pointing the finger. The problem with a blame-centred account is not that one may end up blaming the wrong party. It is rather that accounts structured around blame come with built-in assumptions. They tend, firstly, to presume that in conflictual interactions one protagonist must ultimately be right and the other wrong. Were the Serbs wrong to seek to unify Serbdom? Were the Austrians wrong to insist on the independence of Albania? Was one of these enterprises more wrong than the other? The question is meaningless. A further drawback of prosecutorial narratives is that they narrow the field of vision by focusing on the political temperament and initiatives of one particular state rather than on multilateral processes of interaction. Then there is the problem that the quest for blame predisposes the investigator to construe the actions of decision-makers as planned and driven by a coherent intention. You have to show that someone willed war as well as caused it. In its extreme form, this mode of procedure produces conspiratorial narratives in which a coterie of powerful individuals, like velvet-jacketed Bond villains, controls events from behind the scene in accordance with a malevolent plan. There is no denying the moral satisfaction delivered by such narratives, and it is not, of course, logically impossible that war came about in this manner in the summer of 1914, but the view expounded in this book is that such arguments are not supported by the evidence.

The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime.
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Acknowledging this does not mean that we should minimize the belligerence and imperialist paranoia of the Austrian and German policy-makers that rightly absorbed the attention of Fritz Fischer and his historiographical allies. But the Germans were not the only imperialists and not the only ones to succumb to paranoia. The crisis that brought war in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture. But it was also multipolar and genuinely interactive – that is what makes it the most complex event of modern times and that is why the debate over the origins of the First World War continues, one century after Gavrilo Princip fired those two fatal shots on Franz Joseph Street.

One thing is clear: none of the prizes for which the politicians of 1914 contended was worth the cataclysm that followed. Did the protagonists understand how high the stakes were? It used to be thought that Europeans subscribed to the deluded belief that the next continental conflict would be a short, sharp cabinet war of the eighteenth-century type; the men would be ‘home before Christmas', as the saying went. More recently, the prevalence of this ‘short-war illusion' has been called into question.
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The German Schlieffen Plan was predicated on a massive, lightning-fast strike into France, but even within Schlieffen's own staff there were voices warning that the next war would bring not quick victories but rather a ‘tedious and bloody crawling forward step-bystep'.
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Helmuth von Moltke hoped that a European war, if it broke out, would be resolved swiftly, but he also conceded that it might drag on for years, wreaking immeasurable ruin. British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote of the approach of ‘Armageddon' in the fourth week of July 1914. French and Russian generals spoke of a ‘war of extermination' and the ‘extinction of civilisation'.