Tannenberg: Clash of Empires, 1914 (Cornerstones of Military History)
Page 9
III
Strategy did not yet determine policy in either France or Russia. By November, Poincaré was complaining that Izvolsky was misrepresenting his position, and insisting that France would support Russia militarily only should Austria and Germany attack her first.49 Sazonov for his part dispatched a series of stern warnings to the Balkan capitals that Russia was not prepared to make war in defense of small-state pretensions. As much to the point, he was increasingly receptive to suggestions that a great-power conference discuss the Balkan question in general, and the Austro-Serbian dispute in particular.50
Sazanov’s behavior was particularly welcome to Bethmann. It was clear that Germany could not afford simply to follow Austria’s lead in the Balkans.51 At the same time direct attempts at mediating between Russia and Austria were likely to do more harm than good. Austria’s growing weakness relative to her eastern neighbor might force Germany to throw enough extra weight on the Habsburg side of the scale to make her objectivity suspect. On the other hand Russian indecisiveness might generate a repetition of conditions leading to the March, 1909, démarche. Given these undesirable alternatives, Bethmann turned to London, pressing for direct cooperation on the Balkan issue—cooperation in organizing an international conference.52
Britain was distant and dubious. Cooperation on specific issues, according to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, was welcome. It must not, however, become the first step in “a political understanding with Germany which would separate us from Russia and France, and leave us isolated while the rest of Europe would be obliged to look to Germany.” In particular the foreign office feared that a Russia again overcommitted in the Balkans might this time abandon the entente for good and all.53
Despite these reservations, through the fall and early winter British and German diplomats cooperated more or less effectively in preparing for a Balkan peace conference. Then Bethmann played to another gallery. On December 2, he informed the Reichstag in ringing tones that should Austria be attacked by a third party, Germany would fight.
The reference to Russia was unmistakable, and in a German context hardly surprising. A little over a month earlier, on October 28, State Secretary Alfred von Kiderlin-Wächter had been even more open in a speech to the Bundesrat. Austria-Hungary, he declared, must be held responsible for defending her own interests in the Balkans. But should she be faced with a Russian attack, Germany had no choice but to provide assistance. This was not “fighting for Durazzo.” Germany’s ultimate purpose in the Dual Alliance was to sustain Austria’s position as a great power. Otherwise the Reich would be isolated, trapped between France and Russia.54
Germany’s position was by no means as obvious across the English Channel. The British government was both alarmed at what seemed unnecessary saber-rattling and concerned at the possibility of facing a continental war for which Britain was completely unprepared. In diplomacy as in poker, a good way of winning with a second-rate hand is to overbet it. On successive days Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane and Grey himself informed the German ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, that Britain would not tolerate a single power dominating the continent. Should Austria invade Serbia, Britain would not remain neutral in any resulting continental war.55 William flew into a rage. In October he had argued that hostilities in the Balkans were no bad thing even if they led to general war. Such a conflict was inevitable sooner or later, and Germany was in a favorable position relative to her potential enemies.56 Now, on December 8, he summoned his military and naval advisors and demanded immediate consideration of the consequences of an Anglo-German war.
This crown council has become a key event in interpretations of Germany’s foreign policy in the immediate prewar years. It has been presented as the beginning of the last stage of a coherent, goal-oriented policy designed to create favorable opportunities for a war of conquest that would destroy the status quo internationally while preserving it at home, giving Germany hegemony in Europe and a correspondingly strong basis for a drive to world power. It has also been described as no more than one of a series of limited responses to immediate situations, an opportunity for an incompetent kaiser and his feckless entourage to discharge their more juvenile emotions without addressing the real problems of a Germany so badly divided against itself that pursuit of any coherent foreign policy was ultimately impossible. In one case the appropriate imperial symbol is a vulture. In the other it becomes a turkey.57
The direct consequences of the December 8 meeting were marginal. The press was instructed to prepare public opinion for a possible war resulting from an Austro-Serbian conflict. Some general military and economic steps for mobilization were initiated, none of them on the level Russia had pursued in the previous two months. This behavior, however, suggests less about Germany’s intentions than does Kiderlin-Wächter’s memorandum of December 6 to the embassy in London. Its author insisted that no one in Germany was thinking of forcing Russia to retreat, to sacrifice her interests or prestige. Austria-Hungary’s rights vis-à-vis Serbia, Kiderlin argued, were the same in essence as those of France in Algeria or Britain in Egypt. Had Russia committed herself to support Serbia’s demands, one might be able to speak of a backdown, but Russia herself staunchly denied that that was the case.58
German hostility to south Slav aspirations is frequently described by its critics as an explosive mixture of economic imperialism and self-defeating paranoia. German industrialists and capitalists, according to this interpretation, saw southeastern Europe as both a source of increasingly scarce raw materials and a field for investment and exploitation. At the same time, German publicists and diplomats mistook Russia’s emotional and intellectual sympathy towards fellow Slavs for a developed political position. Slavic identity was for Russia little more than a means of mobilizing and focussing domestic support in crisis situations. A German foreign policy sincerely oriented towards peace should have recognized and avoided the risks of igniting that particular tinder. Germany, however, had never really stabilized its own nationalist forces, much less developed any sympathy for self-determination on the part of peoples viewed as inferior in any case. Instead of getting behind this modern and progressive force, or at least standing out of its way, German policy makers chose to back reaction as embodied in Austria-Hungary, giving the high moral and political ground to Russia with predictable and tragic results.59
German and Austrian statesmen and opinion makers all too frequently demonstrated regrettable arrogance towards Slavs in general and Serbs in particular. Simplicissimus, that European model of a satiric journal, delighted in portraying the Balkan peoples as vermin-infested barbarians. Serbs never surrender, asserted one cartoon, because they can never find a white flag clean enough to be convincing. Moltke the Younger’s comparison of Serbian aspirations to an abscess, threatening to poison the body of Europe and best cauterized with a red-hot iron, reflected an even more significant lack of empathy.60
Such insensitivities obscure, but do not negate, the argument that successive attempts to restructure eastern and central Europe along ethnic lines caused far more problems than they solved. The only stable order that unfortunate region has known in this century has been order imposed by outside forces, most recently the USSR. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 set new standards for horror and violence, both on the battlefields and against noncombatants. An international commission surveying the conflict concluded that the fighting had been “as desperate as though extermination were the end sought.”61 As for Serbia’s self-proclaimed role as liberator and integrator, growing Albanian resistance to Serb occupation was only the most obvious contemporary indication that Serbia was no less imperialistic than her larger contemporaries. She had merely lacked opportunity to indulge her ambitions.62
This perspective remains uncommon in an academic world that has tended since World War II to legitimate uncritically almost any political expression of nationalism. Joachim Remak, for all his sympathy to the Habsburg Empire, tacitly accepts a balance of rights between Austria’s wish to survive
and Serbia’s desire to expand. The author of a distinguished general history of the Balkans describes the Serbian government before 1914 as having three options: a “greater Serbia” built largely on lands taken from the Habsburgs; a Balkan federation, again incorporating the Slavs of Austria-Hungary “should that state dissolve”; and a Yugoslav program incorporating “all” Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a single nation. It is noteworthy that a scholar of Barbara Jelavich’s stature seems victimized by the tendency of Eastern European peoples to romanticize and aggrandize their national past. She does not even consider a fourth possibility: renouncing these vaulting ambitions and living in relative peace with her neighbor, either willingly or under duress.63
National consciousness, particularly in the Balkans, has been to a significant degree the product of cultivation. The transformation of social groups into what Benedict Anderson aptly calls “imagined communities” depends heavily on intellectuals. Writers, academicians, and politicians set the style in which these communities are conceived. In practice this style has emphasized alleged genetically or, more recently, culturally based differences among peoples at the expense of historic ties, economic interests, and geopolitical realities.64 Whatever the legitimate claims of national identity, they do not and cannot include an absolute right to secede and regroup at will. Self-determination remains subject to limitation by the claims of other rights and principles, including the principle of stability. Nor does self-determination confer moral or physical immunity from the consequences of acts committed in its name.
H.R. Trevor-Roper correctly observes that complete sovereignty for small states is a fiction, that “they are not free to conduct independent politics on a world scale.” The concept of an international order based on a community of sovereign states whose borders are inviolable by unilateral military action no matter what the provocation owes much to the propaganda campaigns of World War I and more to the academic legalisms of Woodrow Wilson. In its pursuit, instead of Europeanizing the Balkans, politicians and intellectuals have in the long run Balkanized Europe and the world.65
It was this process of Balkanization that concerned Bethmann-Hollweg. Like Bülow, he sought to put Germany at the center of Europe’s diplomacy, to restore that freedom of movement whose loss had been so painfully plain at Algeciras. In his approach to the Near East crisis, he hoped in the short run to dampen a crisis and in the long run to restore the Concert of Europe under German direction.66
In pursuing a policy of flexibility Bethmann recognized as clearly as Bismarck that a Europe divided into rigid alliance systems was both a second-best solution to the problem of national security, and a solution whose implications were becoming extremely dangerous for the continent as a whole. Statesmen whose academic training normally included firm grounding in the classics were hardly likely to have forgotten the Pelo-ponnesian Wars, in which hostile leagues beggared each other at the expense of common civilization for over a century. And while German fire-eaters were fond of referring to Britain as the modern Carthage, to be eclipsed by the allegedly Roman virtues of the Second Reich, the Punic Wars also suggested a more somber analogy. These wars had, after all, so changed the internal structure of the Roman Republic that its victory had amounted to a defeat—a point stressed in the familiar works of Theodor Mommsen.
Alliances, in short, had their shortcomings as guarantees of order. At the same time the experience of the previous half-century, and of three hundred years of diplomacy, indicated that the great-power structure that had evolved since the Thirty Years’ War was too complex and too dynamic to function without some form of guidance. Laissez-faire was no more viable as a principle of international relations than of domestic economics. On the other hand, any single power that attempted to be more than primus inter pares exhausted itself, either directly in fighting the enemies it generated or eventually by dissipating its power and influence in attempts to control a continent. The focus of German diplomacy since 1871 had been rather a desire to be at Europe’s center, the principal force shaping and directing events. The German Empire’s statesmen sought this pivot point with more system, and more consequence, than the Kehr/Wehler internal-crisis school of scholarship allows.
This desire cannot be directly equated with a search for hegemony. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was committed in a similar fashion in 1918 to directing the negotiations for ending the war and establishing the peace.67 Maintaining a central position did, however, depend heavily on possession of armed forces strong enough to discourage any direct challenges to that position. It is appropriate in this context to recognize that 1914–18 marked the beginning of a significant inversion of vocabularies. Since those years, the use of force has been increasingly described in the verbiage of peace. War departments become departments of defense. Towns are destroyed in order to save them. Military occupation of a neighbor becomes a process of liberating that neighbor from oppression. In the era of Bülow and Bethmann, nationalism, Darwinism, and militarism combined to legitimate, sometimes to demand, a reverse process: the description of conciliatory behavior in belligerent terms. Private conversations and public correspondence alike tended towards rhetorical blood-thirstiness shocking to later sensibilities.68
In 1912 as in 1905, however, fear of war and its consequences continued to restrict the actual spectrum of acceptable initiatives. In the complicated game of snakes and ladders that was European international relations, to stand still was perceived as regression. Germany lacked the self-confidence to accept that risk. Yet her generals, statesmen, and diplomats continued to refrain from striking even when the immediate military advantage might lie with Germany.
Since 1908 the army had been steadily reasserting its position vis-à-vis the navy as the guarantor of the empire’s power, the ultimate source of national existence in a Europe frantically preparing for the war everyone expected. Its continued acceptance of the “short-war illusion,” the belief that future conflicts must be quick and decisive, has been frequently described by military historians as wishful thinking. To scholars emphasizing the primacy of domestic politics, it becomes a manifestation of the generals’ unwillingness to risk destabilizing their society even further by overstraining national unity. It seems more accurate to suggest that the German army’s growing concern with decisive victories and battles of annihilation in the years before 1914 manifested a corresponding reluctance to see war become an end in itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, Prussian-German military theorists had been concerned with retaming Bellona, with avoiding the unlimited wars of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, because they were ultimately indecisive. By the end of his tenure as chief of staff, Moltke the Elder was suggesting that the army’s primary function lay in deterring wars rather than fighting them. Such contemporary prophets of total war as Friedrich von Bernhardi and Colmar von der Goltz were regarded as dreamers or extremists by their more sober contemporaries, the men who actually received the important staff and command appointments.69
The major challenge to both the diplomatic and the military aspects of German policy came from Russia. The tsar’s empire was in a position simultaneously to threaten the existence of Austria-Hungary and the balance of Europe, either by direct initiative in the Balkans or indirectly by supporting the increasingly powerful Slavic states of the peninsula. Bethmann’s overtures to Britain, while they certainly had the positive aim of enhancing Germany’s position, incorporated a negative element as well: the hope of restraining Russia, whether by British actions or through collective diplomacy. In the final analysis, however, Germany must ultimately depend on her own resources. Bethmann’s hopes for a reborn Concert of Europe were unlikely to bear fruit unless Germany should herself be capable of serving as its fulcrum. And in the context of the early Twentieth century, this meant developing and demonstrating the kind of military capacity that would make the risks of challenge too high to be undertaken except as a last, desperate resort.
Unfortunately for Bethmann’s vision, most of the desperation s
eemed to be felt by Germany’s soldiers. Schlieffen, in retirement the éminence grise of the general staff, had grown increasingly obsessed with the concept of a decisive battle in Belgium and northern France. His proposed modifications of the plan of 1905 developed corresponding tunnelvision, with schedules ever more rigid, with margins for error and friction reduced to the vanishing point. As chief of staff he had never felt able to ignore the Russian threat. As a theorist without responsibility, he was by 1913 advocating that the eastern theater be stripped of all save token garrison forces drawn primarily from the lowest categories of reservists. For support he turned no longer to the classical past, but to the campaigns of Frederick the Great. Frederick, he argued, could have crushed Austria in 1757 had he only possessed the moral courage to concentrate the Prussian army in Bohemia, instead of leaving detachments in Pomerania, East Prussia, and the Rhine provinces.70
Moltke the Younger was at once less sanguine and less abstract. In December, 1911, he observed that Germany’s chances in a war against Britain and France were good—if Russia remained neutral. Britain’s army was small. France lacked the manpower reserves to sustain a large-scale war. Russia, on the other hand, could use her vast spaces to prolong conflict indefinitely. Improved mobilization, new strategic railroads, and a revitalized officer corps combined to enhance Russia’s military potential. The countryside was still not pacified. Non-Russian peoples smarted under Great Russian chauvinism. But Russia was well able to resume its expansionist policies at least in the Middle and Far East.71
In view of the actual course of events in the east between 1914 and 1917, a question of increasing interest is why Russia’s power was so overrated in the years before 1914. Paul Kennedy suggests that Europe in general and Germany in particular were mesmerized by numbers in uniform. He goes on to demonstrate that despite the often-cited increases in Russia’s armed forces, her productive capacity was actually decreasing relative to Germany’s in the years before 1914. The military giant was an economic dwarf. Programs of military reform initiated after 1905 were frustrated by bureaucratic infighting and institutional inertia. The tsarist army’s inefficiency, other critics argue, was the systemic product of centuries, not to be overcome by technical innovations, new drill regulations, or shuffling of officers’ appointments. Russian generals themselves, when not speaking for public consumption, constantly questioned their army’s readiness for war.72