Although the preamble described the Triple Alliance as ‘essentially conservative and defensive’, it contributed to the division of Europe as much as the Triple Entente of later years did. Alliances, like weapons, may be categorised as defensive but in practice their use may well be offensive. The Triple Alliance, like the Triple Entente, had the effect of encouraging its members to work together in the international arena and during the increasing number of crises; it established links of cooperation and friendship and created expectations of support in the future; and it led to shared planning and strategies particularly between Germany and Austria-Hungary. Arrangements meant to provide security were in 1914 to put pressure on their members to remain true to their alliance partners and so turn a local conflict into a more general one. Italy, the weakest of the European powers, in the end proved to be the only one willing to stand aside in 1914.
Italy had joined the Triple Alliance partly because its monarch, King Umberto, liked the idea of conservative support at a time when his country was experiencing social and political upheavals which looked far too much like revolutions and partly for protection against France. The Italians could not forgive the French for seizing the port of Tunis, which had long been an object of Italian interest, or for extracting territory from Italy in return for France’s support in the Italian wars of unification. Moreover, being part of an alliance with Germany, the dominant power on the Continent, satisfied Italy’s longing to be considered among the great powers.
The Triple Alliance, however, also brought Italy and Austria-Hungary together which was never going to go smoothly. Both sides were well aware that there was the potential for conflict along their common frontiers. Austria-Hungary, which had already lost the rich provinces of Lombardy and Venetia to Italy, had the deepest suspicions of Italian designs on its own territory including the Italian-speaking areas in South Tyrol and the Adriatic port of Trieste, what had once been Venetian territories at the top of the Adriatic and down Austria-Hungary’s Dalmatian coast as well as what Italian patriots called Italy’s ‘natural boundaries’ up to the highest points along the Alps. The crumbling of the Ottoman Empire opened up new vistas for Italian expansion just across the Adriatic. Ottoman Albania and the independent state of Montenegro offered what Italy as a naval power badly needed – ports. Nature, as the Italians were fond of complaining, had made the western side of the Adriatic flat and muddy with only a few harbours and no natural defences while the eastern side had deep, clear seas, and good natural harbours. The Austrians were not pleased when Italy allowed an Albanian National Congress to be held in Naples in 1903 or when King Umberto’s heir married one of the many daughters of the king of Montenegro or when the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi opened the first telegraph station there.47 Italians for their part saw Austria-Hungary as the enemy which had blocked unification and continued to stand in the way of the completion of the Italian national project and was hostile to Italian ambitions in the Balkans. Some Italian politicians argued, though, that the Triple Alliance could be useful in putting pressure on Austria-Hungary to concede territory. As one said in 1910: ‘All efforts must unite to preserve the Austrian alliance until the day when we are ready for war. That day is still far off.’48 It was closer than he realised.
For Austria-Hungary, its key relationship was with Germany. Memories of defeat by Prussia in the 1860s had faded with time, especially since Bismarck had wisely offered generous peace terms. On both sides public opinion shifted significantly towards friendly feelings, and, as Russia’s power grew again after 1905, a feeling that Teutons needed to stick together against Slavs. At the highest levels of society, the bureaucracy, and the officer corps were dominated by German speakers who tended to feel an affinity with Germany rather than with Russia. Franz Joseph and Franz Ferdinand both got on well with Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand was particularly grateful to him for treating his wife, Sophie, with full honours. The old emperor liked Wilhelm from the first because he had dismissed the hated Bismarck, but he also came to regard him as a friend, something that was increasingly rare in his life. Wilhelm made a point of visiting Franz Joseph frequently, every year in the period immediately before the Great War, and the younger man was deferential and charming. Wilhelm made repeated declarations of his friendship for Austria-Hungary. ‘For whatever reason you mobilize,’ he assured Franz Joseph and his chief of staff in 1889, ‘the day of your mobilization is also the day of mobilization for my army, and the Chancellors can say what they want.’ The Austrians were delighted, especially since the Germans were to repeat their promise in the crises which lay ahead. Franz Joseph sometimes worried that Wilhelm was too impulsive but, as he told his daughter after a visit in 1906, he trusted in his peaceful intentions. ‘It has done me good to shake hands once more with the emperor: in the present times, peaceful on the surface but stormy below, we cannot meet too often to assure each other, eye to eye, how sincerely we both desire peace and peace alone. In this endeavour we can indeed rely on mutual loyalty. He would no more think of leaving me in the lurch than I him.’49
There were, inevitably, strains in the relationship over the years. Although Germany was Austria-Hungary’s biggest trading partner, German tariffs, for example to protect its own farmers, hurt producers in the empire. And Germany’s economy was simply more expansive and dynamic; in the Balkans, where Austria-Hungary had been used to being the dominant economic power, German competition was increasingly sharp. When newspapers in Germany attacked Czechs or when the Prussian government treated its Polish minority badly, that caused repercussions across the border in Austria-Hungary. Germany’s handling of its foreign policy also worried its ally. Gołuchowski expressed a common view in 1902 when he wrote to Austria-Hungary’s ambassador in Berlin:
Altogether, the ways that German policy has been going of late give indeed great cause for concern. The ever-increasing arrogance, the desire to play the schoolmaster everywhere, the lack of consideration with which Berlin often proceeds, are things which create a highly uncomfortable atmosphere in the field of foreign affairs, and cannot but have harmful repercussions on our own relationship with Germany in the long run.50
Yet in the long run the relationship remained strong because each needed the other and, increasingly, as the divisions in Europe deepened, their leaders felt that they had no alternatives.
While Austria-Hungary continued to reach out to one member, Russia, of the Triple Entente, it allowed its relations with France and Great Britain to attenuate, like, said a young diplomat, a good wife who is so loyal that she will not go out to see old friends if her husband does not approve. And, to be fair, the old friends were not always welcoming. France and Austria-Hungary had moved in different directions politically since the Third Republic was established in 1871. The Establishment in Vienna, monarchical, aristocratic, and Catholic, disliked what it saw as a France dominated by anti-clericals, Freemasons, and radicals. In foreign relations France was tied to Russia and would not do anything that would upset its crucial alliance. French money markets were therefore closed to Austria-Hungary. In the Balkans French diplomats tried to win over Serbia and Rumania to the Triple Entente while French investment and businesses were cutting into Austria-Hungary’s markets. The French armaments firm of Schneider, for example, was winning new orders in the Balkans by the first decade of the twentieth century while firms from Austria-Hungary were losing out. From time to time French statesmen such as Delcassé worried about the future collapse of Austria-Hungary and the emergence of a massive German state in the centre of Europe, but they took no steps to improve relations.51
Austria-Hungary’s relations with Britain over the years had been closer and more cordial than with France. Although Britain had its own radical traditions, it was seen from Vienna as a more stable and conservative society than France and one where the aristocracy, quite properly, still dominated politics and the civil service. The appointment of Count Albert Mensdorff in 1904 as Austria-Hungary’s ambassador was seen as a clever mov
e since he was closely related to the British royal family and welcome in British aristocratic circles. And there were no colonial rivalries as there were between Britain and Russia, for example, to drive Austria-Hungary and Britain apart. Even in the Mediterranean where the two were both naval powers, they shared an interest in keeping things calm, especially at its eastern end. For both the other was a convenient counterweight against Russia. During the Boer War, Austria-Hungary was one of the few powers that supported Britain. ‘Dans cette guerre je suis complètement Anglais,’ said Franz Joseph in 1900 to the British ambassador in the hearing of the French and Russian ambassadors.52
Nevertheless relations gradually cooled. The agreements on maintaining the status quo in the Mediterranean, which was partly about blocking Russian control over the Straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, were effectively dead by 1903 as each country moved to make its own accommodation with Russia. From London, Austria-Hungary was increasingly seen as being under the dominance of Germany. As the naval race heated up, for example, the British feared that every new ship built by Austria-Hungary would simply add to German naval strength. And once Britain came to an understanding with Russia in 1907, it did its best to avoid anything, such as supporting Austria-Hungary in the Balkans or the Mediterranean, that would disrupt an important relationship. As Austria-Hungary’s own relationship with Russia frayed, its relations with Britain grew even cooler.53
Austria-Hungary found it increasingly difficult to remain on good terms with both Germany and Russia as those latter two drifted further apart. Although Franz Joseph and his Foreign Ministers regretted the trend, Austria-Hungary found its relations with Russia more difficult than those with Germany. The awakening of Slav nationalism in Austria-Hungary stirred Russian interest and sympathy but for the empire that only added a layer of complication to its internal troubles. Even if Russia did not appoint itself protector for Europe’s Slavs, its existence was enough to make its neighbour wary of its intentions.
The changes in the Balkans brought Austria-Hungary fresh worries. As the Ottoman Empire receded, not willingly, from Europe, the new states – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Rumania – that appeared were potential friends for Russia. They had predominantly Slav populations (although Rumanians and Greeks would insist that they were different) who largely shared the Orthodox religion with Russia. And what about the remaining European territories of the Ottoman Empire such as Albania, Macedonia, and Thrace? Would they become the object of intrigues, rivalry and war? In 1877, the Dual Monarchy’s Foreign Minister, Julius Andrassy, observed that Austria and Russia ‘are immediate neighbours and must live with one another, either on terms of peace or of war. A war between the two Empires … would probably only end with the destruction or collapse of one of the belligerents.’54
By the end of the nineteenth century Russia also saw the dangers posed by the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. Since it could no longer count on German friendship after the lapse of the Reinsurance Treaty and was in any case turning its attention to the Far East, its rulers were amenable to a détente with Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. In April 1897 Franz Joseph and his Foreign Minister Gołuchowski received a warm welcome in St Petersburg. While military bands played the Austrian anthem and Austria’s yellow and black flag and Hungary’s red, white, and green one flew alongside the Russian one in the spring breeze, the tsar and his guests rode in open carriages along Nevsky Prospekt. That night the two emperors exchanged warm toasts at a state banquet and expressed their hopes for peace. In subsequent conversations, the two sides agreed to work together to keep the Ottoman Empire intact and to make it clear to the independent Balkan nations that they could no longer play off one of them against the other. Since the Ottomans might well lose their grip in their remaining Balkan territories, Russia and Austria-Hungary would work together on a division of the Balkans and then present a united front to the other powers. Russia got a promise that, whatever happened, the Straits would remain closed to foreign warships coming into the Black Sea and Austria-Hungary got, or thought it did, an understanding that it could annex the territories of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by its forces since 1878, at some future date. The Russians, however, later sent a note saying the annexation ‘would raise a more extensive question, which would require special scrutiny at the proper times and places’.55 In 1908 that question would indeed be raised in a particularly damaging way.
For the next few years, however, Russia and Austria-Hungary remained on relatively good terms. In the autumn of 1903 the tsar visited Franz Joseph at one of his hunting lodges and the two discussed the deteriorating situation in Macedonia, where the Christian population was in open rebellion against its Ottoman rulers (and also busy killing each other for being the wrong kind of Christian). They agreed they would present a common front on required reforms to the Ottoman government in Constantinople. The following year Austria-Hungary and Russia signed a Neutrality Treaty and there was even talk, which went nowhere, of reviving the Three Emperors League with Germany.
Nevertheless, all was not well in the relationship. Neither side entirely trusted the other, especially where the Balkans were concerned. If the Ottoman Empire was going to disappear, and that looked increasingly likely, each country wanted to be sure that its interests were protected. Austria-Hungary wanted a strong Albania to emerge to block South Slav access to the Adriatic (Albanians were, providentially, not Slavs); Russia did not. Quietly, and sometimes quite openly, the two vied for influence in Serbia, Montenegro, and Bulgaria. Even over Macedonia, the two disagreed over the details of the reforms. After its defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, when Russia turned its attention back to the west, the chances of a confrontation in the Balkans grew markedly. Moreover, once Russia had mended its relations with Great Britain in 1907, it no longer needed to rely as much on Austria-Hungary to help it in the Mediterranean and in dealing with the Ottoman Empire. And there had been a crucial change in the leadership in Austria-Hungary in 1906; Conrad became chief of staff and Aehrenthal, who wanted a more active foreign policy than Gołuchowski, had become Foreign Minister. As Europe entered into a series of crises, the two great conservative powers were moving further apart, dangerously so in the troubled Balkans which lay between them.
CHAPTER 9
What Were They Thinking? Hopes, Fears, Ideas, and Unspoken Assumptions
Writing at the start of the 1930s Count Harry Kessler, the son of an Anglo-Irish beauty and a rich German banker who was given a hereditary title by Wilhelm I, looked back across the Great War at the Europe of his youth:
Something very great, the old, cosmopolitan, still predominantly agrarian and feudal Europe, the world of beautiful women, gallant kings, and dynastic combinations, the Europe of the eighteenth century and the Holy Alliance was growing old and weak, dying out; and something new, young, energetic, and still unimaginable was in the offing. We felt it like a frost, like a spring in our limbs, the one with muffled pain, the other with a keen joy.1
Kessler was uniquely well placed to witness the hopes and fears, and to record the thinking of Europeans in those years before 1914. He was born in 1868, came of age in the last part of the century, and was still in the prime of life when the Great War broke out. (He died in 1937 as war was marching again towards Europe.) Educated at a British private school and a German Gymnasium, with family in Britain, Germany and France, a German grandee and snob who also longed to be an intellectual and an artist, and a homosexual who loved beautiful women as well as men, he moved easily across social, political, sexual, and national lines. His diaries, which he kept throughout his life, are filled with lunches, teas, dinners, cocktails, outings with Auguste Rodin, Pierre Bonnard, Hugo Hofmannsthal, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sergei Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Gustave Mahler. And when he is not in artists’ studios or at the ballet or the theatre, he is at court balls in Berlin or gentlemen’s clubs in London. He helps to draft the plot
and libretto for Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier; he also discusses Germany’s relations with Britain with Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, the Chancellor who succeeded Bülow.
9. The Zabern incident of 1913 started when a German officer in a small town in Alsace referred to local civilians in a disparaging way which set off popular protests. The military authorities over-reacted, raiding newspaper officers and arresting civilians on flimsy charges. While the German civil authorities were concerned to bring the military under control, the military closed ranks and refused to back down. It was for many in Germany and elsewhere a chilling example of the way in which the German army saw itself as outside civilian control.
Kessler moved in very special circles and what he saw and heard there was not necessarily representative of Europeans as a whole. (Since there were not public opinion polls in those days there are limitations on how full a picture we can ever get.) On the other hand, people who make it their business to think about society or try to portray it often have antennae out which sense undercurrents before they manifest themselves on the surface. In the period before 1914 artists, intellectuals, and scientists increasingly challenged older assumptions about rationality and reality. It was a time of intense experimentation in circles which were then avant garde but whose ideas were to enter the mainstream in succeeding decades. The cubism of Picasso and Braque, the attempts of the Italian constructivists such as Balla to capture movement, the free-flowing dance of Isadora Duncan, the deeply erotic ballets staged by Diaghilev and danced by Nijinsky, or the novels of Marcel Proust, all in their own ways were acts of rebellion. Art, so many in the new generation of artists held, should not be about upholding the values of society; it should be shocking and liberating. Gustav Klimt and the younger painters he led out of the establishment Association of Austrian Artists challenged the accepted wisdom that art should be realistic. One of the goals of the Viennese Secession was not to show the world as it actually was but to probe beneath the surface into the life of instinct and emotion.2 The Viennese composer Arnold Schoenberg freed himself from the accepted forms of European music with its rules about harmony and order to create works that were dissonant and disturbing. ‘Inside, where the man of instinct begins, there, fortunately, all theory breaks down.’3
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