The last Common Ministerial Council of peace met discreetly at Berchtold’s home on 19 July. The ministers came in unmarked vehicles, just one of many precautions they had taken to preserve secrecy. Already five days earlier, Conrad and War Minister Krobatin had ostentatiously taken leave in order to present the impression that no military action was planned. The Viennese and Budapest press, whose sharp exchanges with Serbian papers gloating over the royal murders had increased tension, had been asked to avoid discussion of Serbia. The ministers wanted to take Europe by surprise and forestall any attempt at mediation or deterrence.22 At this meeting, the ministers approved the ultimatum, which had been painstakingly drafted by Berchtold’s young advisers in the Foreign Ministry. The tone of this document was dignified but wrathful, its demands were firm. The preamble gravely accused the Serbian state of tolerating ‘a subversive movement . . . whose ultimate aim is to disjoin certain portions from the territory of Austria-Hungary’. The state thus bore moral guilt, for its inaction had permitted ‘a series of attempts at murder and . . . murders’, culminating in the assassinations of 28 June. The ultimatum demanded that the Serb government should publish in the official press verbatim a humiliating repudiation of all strivings aimed at the separation of territory from Austria-Hungary, and a warning that officials and others who persisted with this policy would be punished with ‘great severity.’ It then elaborated ten further points on which action was required. The first four ordered the suppression of purveyors of propaganda against the Empire, including the Serb nationalist society Narodna Odbrana (Serbian National Defence) to which the assassins were linked. Points 7 and 8 insisted on the arrest of Serbian officials who had aided them and point 9 insisted that the Serb government explain why some of its functionaries had spoken ‘in hostile terms’ about Austria-Hungary after the murders of 28 June. Point 10 was merely a command that Serbia confirm promptly that all the other demands had been met. The most controversial points were 5 and 6, which broke a taboo by impinging on Serb sovereignty. Point 5 wanted consent for Austrian officials to participate in the suppression of Serbian conspiratorial movements. Point 6, which had been added specifically to make the memorandum unacceptable, insisted that Austrian officials would take part in a judicial inquiry on Serbian territory against all the co-conspirators of the assassins. The Serbs were permitted just forty-eight hours to respond, and Ambassador Giesl was instructed verbally to demand unconditional acceptance, with the threat that any other answer would lead to an immediate break in relations.23
The ultimatum was a tool designed solely to provoke war. True, it can be argued that Austria-Hungary could ensure Serbia’s full compliance only by imposing its own officials and that there were good reasons not to trust the troublesome Balkan state.24 Yet Berchtold had repeatedly made clear during July that the ultimatum was written to be rejected. Giesl in Belgrade was sent strict instructions on how to break off relations. In an attempt to localize the coming conflict, an official explanation of the Habsburg standpoint was drawn up for the other great powers.25 How effective this would be, however, was already cast into doubt on 21 July, the day that the Emperor approved the ultimatum, the last step needed before its delivery. Despite all precautions, rumour that a harsh note was in preparation had leaked and reached first the Russians and through them French statesmen’s ears. That evening, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in St Petersburg telegrammed Berchtold that France’s President Poincaré had asked what Austria-Hungary’s demands to Serbia would be and warned that a government could be held responsible for an action only if hard proof could be provided. If Austria-Hungary had no such proof, he had admonished menacingly, it should remember that Serbia ‘has friends’ and that ‘through this would arise a dangerous situation for peace’.26 The information was of no consequence; the Habsburg Foreign Minister was not to be intimidated or diverted from his course. Yet at 6 p.m. on 23 July 1914, when the Serb government was finally confronted with the ultimatum, it was already likely that Austria-Hungary would get a war, but one much larger than that for which its leaders had hoped or planned.
WAR OF EXISTENCE
The actions of Austro-Hungarian rulers in the summer of 1914, although secretive and aggressive, were motivated less by belligerence than a profound sense of weakness, fear and even despair. Their multi-ethnic Empire had a history stretching over nearly four hundred years. It had seen off the Ottoman Sultan, outlasted Napoleon and survived religious struggle and revolution, but by the early twentieth century it appeared to many statesmen both inside and beyond that its days were numbered. Even Germany’s Foreign Secretary, Gottlieb von Jagow, a man representing the only solid friend that the Empire had in the world, referred to it unflatteringly in July 1914 as ‘that ever increasingly disintegrating composition of nations beside the Danube’.27 As Habsburg leaders well knew, others were much less kind. A strong warning about the sort of comments being passed in diplomatic circles had been sent to them by their ambassador in their ally Romania, Count Ottokar Czernin, just six days before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. ‘The firm conviction has grown here, as in many other parts of Europe, that the Monarchy is an entity doomed to downfall and dissolution,’ the ambassador observed. The chatter was that ‘in the near future the Habsburg Monarchy will be put up to European auction’.28
Why did Austria-Hungary’s situation appear so grim in 1914? And why were Habsburg leaders so determined to cow their small, troublesome neighbour Serbia, even at the cost of unleashing a disastrous European conflagration? The Empire’s domestic troubles provide part of the answer. Franz Joseph’s multi-ethnic realm, home to eleven recognized nationalities, had last undergone major reorganization in 1867, when in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions and two lost wars in 1859 and 1866 the Emperor had finally succumbed to pressure and agreed a new ‘Dualist’ system. Under what became known as the ‘Compromise’ between the Crown, Austrian German and Hungarian Liberals, the Empire had been divided into two largely autonomous states, Austria in the west and Hungary in the east, held together both constitutionally and in personal union through Franz Joseph, who was King of Hungary and Emperor of Austria. The Monarch appointed three Common Ministers, one for War, another for Foreign Affairs and the third for Finance, to manage areas of joint interest. The separate Austrian and Hungarian governments were each headed by a Minister President, who was also named by the Monarch but could rule only with the cooperation of the states’ elected legislative assemblies, the Austrian Reichsrat and the Hungarian House of Representatives. Once a year, the assemblies sent executive committees, the Delegations, to confer with each other and with the Common Ministers. Every ten years, major negotiations took place to set the ‘quota’, the percentage that each state would pay towards common expenses, to agree on economic matters of shared interest, such as tariffs and some indirect taxes, and to settle on the percentage of recruits that each would provide to the Common Army. The three Common Ministers and two Minister Presidents, as well as the heir to the throne before his assassination, all had seats in the Common Ministerial Council, which met periodically to discuss important issues pertaining to the whole Empire and which had plotted war in July 1914.29
This structure was designed to keep Crown control in the key areas of foreign policy and the army while satisfying the political aspirations of the two most influential and assertive peoples in the Empire, the Austrian Germans and the Magyars. Both had become the largest groups in their respective halves through the reorganization (see Table 1).
In addition, an Ottoman territory, Bosnia-Herzegovina, had fallen under Habsburg administration in 1878 and had been permanently annexed in 1908. In order not to upset the delicate ethnic balance, it was kept outside the main Dualist structure of the Empire and run by the Common Finance Minister. It was effectively a colony, in which the Habsburgs pursued what they regarded as a cultural mission. By introducing professional administration, education and improvements in the land and infrastructure, they intended not only to civilize and moderniz
e the region but also to absorb it into the core of the Empire.30
Table 1. Peoples in the Habsburg Empire (by territory), 1910
Source: A. Sked, The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918, 2nd edn (Harlow and London, 2001), pp. 278–9, and A. Wandruszka and P. Urbanitsch (eds.), Die Habsburgermonarchie 1848–1918. Die Völker des Reiches (Vienna, 1980), iii.1, insert between pp. 38–9.
By 1914 the state structure brokered in the 1867 ‘Compromise’ was coming under severe strain. German and Hungarian nationalists felt that it failed to meet their aspirations, while the peoples cut out of the deal, mostly Slavs but also Italians and Romanians, resented its manifest unfairness. By the last decade of peace, the representative institutions on both sides of the Empire had become dysfunctional or ceased to work altogether. In Hungary, the Liberals who dominated the House of Representatives had only ever considered the Compromise to be a starting point for the acquisition of new national powers, while the opposition revered the memory of the revolution of 1848–49 against the Habsburgs and desired independence. A highly restrictive franchise encompassing just 6 per cent of the population excluded workers and most non-Magyars, leaving the Hungarian gentry, who alone could satisfy its property qualifications, in charge. A particular bugbear of this group, which spanned both sides of the House of Representatives, was Franz Joseph’s refusal to permit a Hungarian national army, or at least the use of the Hungarian language in the Empire’s Common Army, and in 1903 this issue sparked a decade-long parliamentary crisis. The tension became acute after the 1905 election returned a pro-independence ‘Coalition of National Parties’, breaking the Liberals’ long hold on political power. A standoff with the Monarch, whose prerogative it was to appoint the government, ensued. The parliament was at first dissolved and only in 1906, after the Crown had threatened the pro-independence nationalists with the introduction of universal suffrage, and through this extorted a secret promise not to challenge the Dualist arrangement, were they permitted to rule. Unable to fulfil the manifesto of nationally advantageous reform of the Habsburg state and army on which it had been elected, the new government instead played to its constituents’ chauvinism and provoked resentment in the peripheries by harrying Hungary’s Slav and Romanian minorities. In May 1910 elections were rigged to return the Liberals, now renamed the Party of Work, under Count István Tisza. It was Tisza, at that time the parliamentary speaker, who finally imposed order upon Hungary. By overawing the unruly parliament with troops in 1912, he forced through a ban on filibustering and passed a much-needed army bill. However, his unconstitutional methods were greatly resented. One enraged deputy took out a gun in one session and fired three shots at Tisza, which missed, before then turning the weapon on himself.31
The Hungarian parliament may have been full of rancour and drama, but it appeared a model of order compared with the lower house of the other half of the Empire, the Austrian Reichsrat. Here, the German Liberals had lost their dominance in 1879, when the Czechs, the real losers of the 1867 system, had ended a self-defeating boycott and started to attend. From the 1890s, bitter disputes about language rights in ethnically mixed areas increasingly paralyzed the institution. A crisis erupted in 1897, when Minister President Count Badeni decreed that officials in Bohemia and Moravia should learn both Czech and German within three years, so they could communicate with all the peoples of these lands. Parliamentary sessions descended into farce as in protest German deputies obstructed legislation with speeches that lasted hours while the Czechs, who favoured the measure, tried to drown them out by shouting, banging on desks or playing musical instruments. When, by sleight of hand, the rowdiest behaviour was banned and the police ejected ten deputies, there was rioting in the German-populated cities of the Empire. The protests forced the withdrawal of the measure and the dismissal of the Minister President. Thereafter, however, there was no stopping the Czechs from using the same methods to halt any legislation of which they disapproved. The government resorted to forcing through laws by decree under the emergency Article 14 of Austria’s Basic Law: this had been invoked on average once per year before 1897, but in the seven subsequent years it was used seventy-five times. Even the introduction of universal suffrage in 1907, a measure implemented not out of any democratic idealism but in the hope that social allegiances would replace the national obstruction blocking parliament’s work, failed. In March 1914 Minister President Stürgkh finally closed the Reichsrat – an explicit acknowledgement of Austrian parliamentarianism’s bankruptcy.32
In the Empire’s localities, as well as at its centre, disgruntled nationalism was proving troublesome. Nationalist activists eyed each other suspiciously, squabbled over rights and jealously guarded their privileges. Petty issues provoked violent reaction. The opening of an Italian-language Law Faculty at Innsbruck University in 1904, for example, prompted riots by German students which forced its closure.33 In Trieste, political competition between Italians clinging onto their traditional dominance of local governing institutions and Slovenes, whose numbers in the city had expanded rapidly in the early twentieth century, frequently spilled over into street clashes.34 In Bohemia, another centre of national conflict, political tensions prompted Czechs and Germans to boycott each other’s shops and businesses in 1898, 1908 and 1910. The extreme Czech National Socialist Party organized the Czech boycotters, nationalist newspapers stirred up ill will, and in German areas even town councils intervened, posting placards admonishing ‘Buy only from Germans!’35 Protests by Czech troops about the army’s use of German as its language of command in 1898, after the Badeni crisis, and the mutiny of some Bohemian units during mobilizations in 1908 and 1912, raised fears that the nationality disputes were affecting the army and undermining its reliability.36
In the last years before the war, there was also particular concern about conditions in Galicia, in the north-east of the Empire. This Crownland (as the Austrians called their provinces) was run by the Polish nobility, and it had exceptional autonomy. Its administrative language had been Polish since 1869, not German as in the rest of Austria, and a Polish Minister without Portfolio sat in the Austrian cabinet to guard Polish Galician interests. Poles also dominated the provincial parliament, the Sejm, as a result of a suffrage that covered just 10 per cent of the population. Poles numbered only 3.8 million of 8 million inhabitants, however. There were also 3.2 million Ruthenes (who today would be called Ukrainians) concentrated in the east of the Crownland, as well as 872,000 Jews and 90,000 Germans.37 Among the Ruthenes, Ukrainian nationalists comprised the most powerful political force, with twenty-eight deputies in the Vienna Reichsrat in 1911. They were loyal to the Habsburgs but intensely hostile towards the Polish administration, which discriminated against them in education and political representation. Tensions peaked in April 1908 when Count Alfred Potocki, the Polish Statthalter, head of the Galician administration, was killed by a Ukrainian nationalist student.
The other important group among Galicia’s Ukrainian speakers were the Russophiles, who were identified as ‘Little Russians’. They had less popular support, attracting around one-third of the votes of the nationalists and winning just two Reichsrat seats in 1911. However, they were prominent, not only because they received funding from Russia but also because the Polish administration saw them as the lesser threat to its own interests and tended to support them over their nationalist competitors. Their leaders had carried out subversive and disloyal activities in the last years of peace. The conversion of hundreds of Ruthenes from the pro-Habsburg Catholic Uniate Church to Russian Orthodoxy caused great concern in Vienna and exacerbated tensions with St Petersburg. So too did the Russophiles’ spying on behalf of the Tsarist state: the Austro-Hungarian General Staff estimated that between 1907 and 1913 spies operating in the Crownland multiplied more than tenfold. On the eve of the war, the Emperor and the Austrian government had prevailed upon the Poles to concede a limited reform of the Sejm and the promise of a Ukrainian-language university in order to avoid alienating t
he Ruthenes yet further.38
The South Slavs, and above all the Empire’s Serbs, provided the other major source of anxiety for the Habsburg administration. In the Kingdom of Croatia, a semi-autonomous region that lay within Hungary, Magyar leaders were deeply perturbed when in 1905 Serb and Croatian opposition deputies in the Croatian parliament, the Sabor, overcame their traditional hostility and declared themselves one nation. Two years later, their coalition won power in Agram (now Zagreb). The National Parties’ government in Budapest, frustrated in its programme by the deal with the Crown, quickly provoked a clash with them by ruling in May 1907 that all Croatian railway officials must learn Hungarian. In 1909, during the heightened political tension after the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, relations reached a new low when the Hungarians put the Serb leaders of the Sabor coalition on trial for high treason, claiming that they had received funds for agitation from Serbia and had conspired to separate Habsburg South Slav lands and join them to Serbia. The charges were proved to be based on fraudulent evidence and the trial was so manifestly unfairly conducted that its sentences were quashed. Austria-Hungary’s international reputation was severely damaged.39 Meanwhile, in Budapest’s House of Representatives, Croatian deputies retaliated for the railway language law by obstructing all business there with long speeches given in their own language. When the Ban, the Viceroy in Croatia, suspended its constitution in the Sabor as punishment, someone threw a bomb at him, injuring him badly.40
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