The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  Italian foreign and military policy was cautious and defensive by necessity, but that did not stop Italian nationalists from dreaming that it might be different and that foreigners were wrong about Italy. They found some consolation in Social Darwinism: Italian soldiers because of the hardships of their lives were bound to be tougher than the decadent French or the soft Austrian-Hungarians.88 More importantly, nationalists were determined to show that unification had produced a country that worked and that counted in the world. Italian governments insisted that Italy be represented in all major foreign developments; Italy even sent a handful of soldiers to China to be part of the international force putting down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.89 And since powers in the world of 1900 had empires, Italy should continue to build its own. Italian public opinion, which as in other countries was becoming more important with the spread of newspapers and the growth of special-interest lobbies, was generally in favour. Even the socialists, whose rhetoric was anti-imperialist, were not completely opposed.

  During the summer of 1911, as the Morocco crisis intensified, there was increasing nationalist agitation in Italy. The press, colonial and nationalist societies, all talked about Libya. Since it also happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the last stage – so far – of Italy’s unification it seemed a good time to do something even more dramatic than building the gigantic Victor Emmanuel memorial in Rome. The Foreign Minister, Antonino di San Giuliano, found himself at the same hotel as the deputy chief of the naval staff and the two men discussed the logistics of the invasion. (The subtle and cynical San Giuliano, who came like so many of his colleagues from the Sicilian aristocracy, was there for his health; he blamed his many illnesses on his mother for leading too upright a life.)90 When he returned to Rome, San Giuliano told Giolitti that the best time to move against the Ottomans in Libya was the autumn or the spring. The two men decided on September, only bothering to tell the army itself at the last moment.91

  In what came to be nicknamed the ‘policy of the stiletto’, Italy delivered an impossible ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire on 28 September 1911 and announced that it would in any case have to go ahead and occupy the two provinces of Libya whatever the reply was. The Italian ships were already preparing to sail. Italy used the excuse of protecting Italian interests and Italian nationals with what can only be described as flimsy evidence. San Giuliano told the British ambassador in Rome, for example, that Italian flour mills in Tripoli were having trouble getting grain from local growers as a result of the machinations of the Ottoman authorities.92 The left in Italy called for strikes in protest but as the British ambassador reported to London: ‘even in the Socialist party opinions are divided and agitation is half-hearted’.93

  An ‘act of piracy’, speakers in the German Reichstag said of the Italian invasion, and opinion outside Italy largely agreed, especially as the war dragged on and the Italians resorted to increasingly brutal methods to put down widespread local resistance.94 The Second International condemned Italy but showed little sympathy for the Ottoman Empire, which it saw as backward and badly in need of civilisation.95 The other great powers were unwilling to intervene for fear of driving Italy away and towards their opponents. Grey, who had hopes of detaching Italy from the Triple Alliance, told the Italian ambassador that he hoped ‘Italy would so conduct affairs that the consequences might be as little far-reaching and embarrassing as possible’. When the Italian ambassador asked what Britain intended to do, Grey said he was speaking from ‘the point of view of non-intervention’.96 Even when the Italians seized Rhodes and the Dodecanese islands off the coast of Asia Minor the following spring, the powers did not react strongly. San Giuliano promised to give the islands up when the last Ottoman soldier left Libya but that day had not arrived before 1914.

  The Italians paid a heavy price for their conquest, with a huge budget deficit and some 8,000 soldiers killed or wounded in the first year. So did the inhabitants of Libya, then and later. Their resistance continued until the 1920s, when Italy’s new ruler, Benito Mussolini, ended it in the most brutal fashion at the cost of at least 50,000 Libyan deaths. Ottoman rule had been relatively mild and enlightened but under the Italians, Libya, which also came to include territories in the interior, went backwards. The different parts of the colony, which had their own histories and cultures, never truly came together as a country and Libya today is still paying the price for that in regional and tribal rivalries. Europe too paid a heavy price for Italy’s aggression. The unspoken agreement among the great powers that the Ottoman Empire should be maintained was now in question. As the Rumanian Prime Minister said to the ambassador of Austria-Hungary that autumn: ‘Two lead off the dance, but many are in it at the end.’97 Kaiser Wilhelm, who was at his favourite hunting lodge at Rominten when the Italians made their move, predicted that more countries would now take advantage of the Ottoman Empire’s weakness to reopen the issue of control over the Straits or in the Balkans to seek territory. It meant, he feared, ‘the beginning of a world war with all its terrors’.98 The first evidence that he was right came the following year as the Balkan nations joined forces against the Ottoman Empire.

  Shortly before the Christmas of 1911 Sir Edward Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, reported to London that he had dined with Bethmann. The two men had talked in a friendly way about the events of the past year. The ambassador asked Bethmann whether he had found time lately to play his usual Beethoven sonatas, as was his custom before he went to bed. ‘My dear friend,’ replied Bethmann, ‘you and I like classical music with its plain and straightforward harmonies; how can I play my beloved old music with the air full of modern discords?’ Goschen demurred, saying that ‘even the old composers used discords to lead to harmonies, and that the latter sounded all the sweeter for the discords which preceded them’. Bethmann agreed but added that ‘in modern music as in the present political atmosphere the discords predominated’.99 The New Year was to bring fresh discords to jangle Europe’s nerves, this time in Europe itself, in the first of a series of Balkan wars.

  CHAPTER 16

  The First Balkan Wars

  On New Year’s Day 1912 Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador in London, wrote to his brother in Berlin: ‘What does this year have in store for us? I hope that the big conflict will be avoided.’1 Jules also dreaded the coming months:

  the failing health of the Emperor of Austria, the far-reaching plans attributed to the Heir-Apparent, the Tripoli war, the desire of the Italian government to extricate itself from the difficulties it had brought upon itself by mixing the disputes of others with its own, Bulgarian ambitions, the threat of trouble in Macedonia, the difficulties in Persia, the shock to the credit of China, all pointed to serious disorders in the near future and the only hope was that the gravity of the danger might lead to its being averted.2

  He might have mentioned as well the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany or the mutual fear and hostility between Russia and Austria-Hungary. It was in the Balkans, however, that the greatest dangers were to arise: two wars among its nations, one in 1912 and a second in 1913, nearly pulled the great powers in. Diplomacy, bluff and brinkmanship in the end saved the peace but although Europeans could not know it, they had had a dress rehearsal for the summer of 1914. As they say in the theatre, if that last run-through goes well, the opening night will be a disaster.

  The Balkan states, from Greece in the south to Serbia, Bulgaria, and Rumania in the north, were the poor relations of Europe, with few natural resources, underdeveloped infrastructures and only the beginnings of modern industry and commerce. In 1912, Serbia’s capital, Belgrade, was a small provincial town, just starting to pave its main streets with wooden blocks, and with only one good hotel. In Rumania, where the national myth was that the inhabitants were a Latin people, descended from Roman legions, Bucharest aspired to be the Balkan Paris. The upper classes, who spoke French and wore the latest French fashions, particularly admired, said a sharp-eyed Russian journalist, ‘Paris-by-night’. Leon Trot
sky, in exile from Russia for his revolutionary activities, was there as a pseudonymous correspondent for a leading newspaper in Kiev. Elegant women and magnificently turned-out army officers glided along the boulevards of Bucharest, he went on, and at the crossroads, stood pissoirs, just like they had in Paris. Yet the differences were much greater than the similarities, from the eunuch cabmen (from a sect where the men were castrated after they had fathered two children) to the gypsies who played their violins in the nightclubs, or the barefoot children who begged on the streets.3 In Montenegro, the capital was merely an overgrown village and the new royal palace looked like a German boarding house. (The old palace, the Biljarda, was named after the billiard table which had been carried up the mountains from the coast.) The king, Nicholas II, often sat under one of the few trees in his mountainous country to dispense his own version of justice to his subjects. He was linked to Italy and Russia through family ties – one daughter had married the king of Italy and two others were the wives of Russian grand dukes – but his foreign policy usually reflected whichever European power had just paid him a subvention. ‘Your Majesty’, said Conrad to Franz Joseph in 1912, ‘King Nicholas reminds me of a candelabra.’ The emperor was amused by Conrad’s explanation: ‘Look, he stands always with his arms stretched out there, always waiting for someone to give him something.’4

  Rumania, then a much smaller country than the one of today, had a population of just under 7 million in 1910, Bulgaria some 4 million, and Serbia around 3 million. Montenegro had only 250,000 inhabitants. (‘This isolated wrinkle of the world’, said an unhappy Austrian-Hungarian diplomat who served in its capital, Cetinje, before the Great War.)5 Years of Ottoman rule had left societies that were still largely agricultural and deeply conservative although the landed upper classes and the tiny bourgeoisie increasingly aspired to be Western and modern. Political parties had emerged calling themselves Conservative, Liberal or Radical, even Socialist, but behind the labels lay a more old-fashioned network of family, regional and ethnic connections as well as simple autocracy. In Montenegro, whose mountains had saved it, alone among the Balkan states, from becoming part of the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas played with a constitution which he simply withdrew whenever he grew tired of politics; what opposition there was, and sometimes even his loyal supporters, went to jail or were executed as the mood took him. In Serbia, the Radicals and especially their leader Nikola Pašić, were fortunate enough to deal with a weak king, Peter, but in both Bulgaria and Rumania, stronger kings, German imports both, dominated politics.

  16. The Balkans were the trouble spot of Europe where the ambitions of the great powers mixed with the rivalries among the Balkan nations themselves. In 1912 the Balkan powers briefly united to seize much of the remaining territory of the Ottoman Empire but they immediately fell out over the spoils. The great powers tried almost for the last time to impose a peace but as the caption says ‘Unfortunately the united European fire brigade did not succeed in extinguishing the flames.’

  To the rest of Europe the Balkan states were something of a joke, the setting for tales of romance such as The Prisoner of Zenda or operettas (Montenegro was the inspiration for The Merry Widow), but their politics were deadly serious – and frequently deadly with terrorist plots, violence and assassinations. In 1903 King Peter’s unpopular predecessor as king of Serbia and his equally unpopular wife had been thrown from the windows of the palace and their corpses hacked to pieces. Nicholas of Montenegro hated Pašić and his fellow Radicals because he suspected, with good reason, that they had sent him assassins armed with bombs. The growth of national movements had welded peoples together but it had also divided Orthodox from Catholic or Muslim, Albanians from Slavs, and Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Bulgarians or Macedonians from each other. While the peoples of the Balkans had coexisted and intermingled, often for long periods of peace through the centuries, the establishment of national states in the nineteenth century had too often been accompanied by burning of villages, massacres, expulsions of minorities and lasting vendettas.

  Politicians who had ridden to power by playing on nationalism and with promises of national glory found they were in the grip of forces they could not always control. Secret societies, modelling themselves on an eclectic mix which included Freemasonry, the underground Carbonari, who had worked for Italian unity, the terrorists who more recently had frightened much of Europe, and old-style banditry, proliferated throughout the Balkans, weaving their way into civilian and military institutions of the states. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation (IMRO) talked about Macedonia for the Macedonians but was widely suspected of working with Bulgarian nationalists for a greater Bulgaria which would include Macedonia. In Serbia, the government and the army were riddled with supporters of Narodna Odbrana (National Defence), which had been set up during the Bosnian crisis, and its even more extremist offshoot the Black Hand. In the First Balkan War, officers disobeyed their own government on several occasions, seizing, for example, the town of Monastir (which Serbia had promised to Bulgaria in a secret treaty) in the hopes that it would then be impossible to hand it over.6 Although the Ottoman and Austrian-Hungarian authorities did their best to suppress all revolutionary and indeed most political activity among their own South Slav or Albanian subjects, they faced an uphill battle, especially since much of the home-grown conspiracies and terrorism were supported from outside. Bosnian students at the University of Vienna, for example, formed a secret society in reaction to the annexation of their homeland. ‘If Austria-Hungary wants to swallow us’, they declared, ‘we shall gnaw its stomach,’ and many of the students slipped over the border into Serbia for military training.7

  The younger generation who were attracted to the secret societies were often more extreme than their elders and frequently at odds with them. ‘Our fathers, our tyrants,’ said a Bosnian radical nationalist, ‘have created this world on their model and are now forcing us to live in it.’8 The young members were in love with violence and prepared to destroy even their own traditional values and institutions in order to build the new Greater Serbia, Bulgaria or Greece. (Even if they had not read Nietzsche, which many of them had, they too had heard that God was dead and that European civilisation must be destroyed in order to free humankind.) In the last years before 1914, the authorities in the Balkan states either tolerated or were powerless to control the activities of their own young radicals who carried out assassinations and terrorist attacks on Ottoman or Austrian-Hungarian officials as oppressors of the Slavs, on their own leaders whom they judged to be insufficiently dedicated to the nationalist cause, or simply on ordinary citizens who happened to be the wrong religion or the wrong ethnicity in the wrong place. When Franz Joseph visited Bosnia in 1910, there was a plot to assassinate him; in Croatia, there were repeated attempts, some successful, on the lives of Habsburg officials.

  In the early stages of their independence, the Balkan states had been content, or at least obliged, to pay attention to the great European powers. And the powers, especially Russia and Austria-Hungary before they fell out over the annexation of Bosnia, wanted to keep the status quo in the Balkans with the Ottoman Empire continuing to rule over its remaining European territories. Over the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the obvious decline of the Ottomans had emboldened leaders across the Balkans to take matters into their own hands. In the name of protecting Christians still under Ottoman rule in Macedonia and elsewhere, Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece all sent money, weapons and agents to stir up resistance. The rise of the Young Turks and their policy of winning back control of Ottoman lands (and making them more Turkish) not surprisingly set off alarms throughout the Balkan states and among the Ottomans’ own Christian subjects. By 1910, Albanians, Christian and Muslim alike, who were traditionally loyal to their Ottoman rulers, were in open revolt. The following year the Albanian revolutionaries joined forces with their Macedonian counterparts. The Ottoman authorities cracked down savagely, which only fuelled further unrest and violence. In
the autumn of 1911 Italy’s war on the Ottoman Empire set off renewed uprisings by Christians. In Macedonia that December a series of explosions destroyed police stations and mosques. In retaliation Muslim crowds attacked local Bulgarians. Throughout the independent Balkan states there were protest meetings and demonstrations against the Ottomans.9

  Balkan leaders complained openly that they could no longer trust the great powers to protect the Christians under Ottoman rule and hinted that they might have to take action. Why maintain the status quo in the Balkans, a leading politician in Serbia asked Trotsky. ‘Where was the status quo when Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina? Why didn’t the powers defend the status quo when Italy seized Tripoli?’ And why should the Balkan states be treated as though they were somehow not European but like Morocco?10 There was the chance, the Foreign Minister of Serbia admitted to the British ambassador in Belgrade, that Austria-Hungary would intervene if any of the Balkan nations moved to seize Ottoman territory but, as far as he, Milovan Milovanović, was concerned, it was better for Serbia to die fighting. If Austria-Hungary itself expanded further southwards into the Balkans, Serbia was finished anyway as an independent kingdom.11

  Pride, nationalist ambitions, the temptations of a declining empire on their doorstep, the example of naked aggression set by Italy, and sheer recklessness, all brought the Balkan nations together – briefly, as it turned out – to drive the Ottoman Empire out of its remaining European possessions. From the autumn of 1911, emissaries were travelling secretly back and forth among the Balkan capitals or meeting as if by chance in one European city or another. Russia, and particularly the Russian ambassador in Constantinople, had long promoted the idea of a Balkan League to include the Ottoman Empire, which, so it was hoped, would both provide stability in the region and block the spread of German and Austrian-Hungarian influence south and eastwards. The Balkan states themselves, with visions of plundering the Ottoman Empire taking ever more solid shape, would have none of it. Sazonov, who succeeded Izvolsky in 1910 as Russian Foreign Minister, then tried to bring Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Greece into an alliance to act as a barrier against Austria-Hungary’s trying to move south if the Ottoman Empire collapsed.12