WW1 POSTERS

Prelude to World War One:
Crisis of 1914

At long last, in July 1914, the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente stood face to face. Was war the inevitable consequence of this schism of Europe into two groups of great powers, three on each side? Certainly there was no immediate prospect of such a calamity, at least as far as western Europe was concerned. Relations between Britain and Germany were much better than they had been for some years, thanks largely to an informal agreement for the construction of battleships in the ratio of 16 to 10 and to the cooperation between the two governments during the Balkan crisis. By the spring of 1914 they had negotiated and were ready to sign the two agreements concerning the future of the Portuguese colonies and the completion of the Baghdad Railway. The British government assumed that, in the event of a new Balkan crisis, it could count on German help to deal with it; the German government had come to the conclusion that, in the event of war, Britain would not necessarily take the side of France, although the German ambassador in London repeatedly warned to the contrary.

After the great crises of 1905 and 1911 over Morocco, Franco-German relations had also taken a turn for the better. In February 1914, an agreement analogous to the Anglo-German bargain was reached concerning railway projects and spheres of economic interest in the Ottoman Empire; subsequently the president of the republic, Raymond Poincare, who was later denounced in some quarters as a warmonger, broke the tradition of 40 years and dined at the German embassy. To be sure, Alsace-Lorraine had not been forgotten, but the German ambassador recognized that there was practically no sentiment for a war of revenge, and the elections of April-May 1914 gave a majority to the parties of the left, which were pledged to reverse the increase in military service from two to three years that had been effected in 1913; World War I broke out, however, before such action could be taken.

In midsummer 1914, then, both Anglo-German and Franco-German relations were more friendly than they had been for many years and contained no threat to peace. On the other hand, the Balkans and the Middle East were full of trouble. At the end of 1913 much tension had been produced between Russia and Germany by the dispatch of a German military mission under Gen. Otto Liman von Sanders to Constantinople for the purpose of rehabilitating the Turkish Army after the defeats of the Balkan Wars. For more than a century successive Russian governments had been fascinated by the problem of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, the straits which controlled the exit from the Black Sea to the Aegean. Several times Russia had succeeded in effecting an alliance with Turkey in order to send its warships through the straits, but in each instance it had been forced by circumstances to abandon the alliance, and in 1841 an international convention had closed the straits to the menof-war of all nations except Turkey. On various occasions the Russian government considered the seizure of Constantinople by military force, but it never actually attempted to do so. At the end of 1913 it decided that Russian interests would be served by the continued existence of a relatively weak Ottoman Empire. Since the Liman von Sanders mission had for its object the strengthening of that empire, Sazonov was greatly disturbed and, although this was not known until after the war, revived the idea of seizing Constantinople, only to have it rejected both by his colleagues in the government and by the General Staff. Happily, a compromise was reached about the German mission, but public opinion in both countries remained excited.

In Albania its creators, Austria-Hungary and Italy, were busy trying to thwart each other and making life difficult for the newly appointed king, the German prince William of Wied. Bulgaria was sullenly nursing its defeat at the hands of Greece, Rumania, and Serbia in 1913, and was courting the favor of Austria. Greece and Turkey were at loggerheads over certain islands of the Aegean. But the spark that set off the explosion in the Balkans was a completely unexpected incident, the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife on Sunday, June 28, 1914.

That tragedy was the culmination of an antagonism between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that had been growing for a generation. In 1859, Austria had faced the question of Italian unification, and had been driven out of Italy; in 1866 it had faced the same problem in Germany, again with disastrous results. Beginning in 1903, when there was a change of dynasty in Serbia, it was confronted by the Yugoslav problem, which was certainly not easy to solve. Historically, the Yugoslavs had never been united. They consisted of three branches: the Slovenes, Roman Catholics using the Latin alphabet, who lived under Austrian rule in Carinthia and Carniola and were often at odds with the Germans; the Croats, also Roman Catholics using the Latin alphabet, living mostly in Croatia, a province of Hungary, but also in Dalmatia, an Austrian province, in which the Italian element was favored by the Austrian authorities; and the Serbs, members of the Orthodox Eastern Church using the Cyrillic alphabet, living chiefly in independent Serbia and Montenegro, but also in Bosnia and Hercegovina under joint Austro-Hungarian rule, where many of them were Muslims, and in Old Serbia, which was still a part of Turkey. Serbo-Croat was one language, written in both alphabets; Slovene was a kindred language. By 1914 it was evident that a national movement in favor of uniting the various branches of Yugoslavs was getting under way within the Habsburg state because of their discontent with the shabby treatment they had received from the Austrian and Hungarian governments. At the same time, those Serbs who were independent began to dream of drawing their kinsmen under Habsburg rule into their own state. Naturally, the ruling groups in AustriaHungary hoped to prevent this, and they aspired to bring Serbia into the monarchy.

In 1881, Milan IV Obrenovich (Obrenovic), then prince of Serbia, had concluded a secret treaty with Austria-Hungary which placed his little country under the control of Vienna and paved the way for economic subjection. This situation lasted until 1903, when Milan's son and successor, King Alexander I, was murdered by a group of army officers who resented the humiliation of their country. Since Alexander had no heir, the throne passed to Peter Karageorgevich (Karadjordjevic), whose ancestor had organized the revolt of Serbia against Turkish rule in 1804. Abandoning the autocratic methods of Alexander, Peter became a constitutional monarch and allowed the Radical Party, under Nikola Pas"ic, to govern. The Radicals managed to free Serbia from the economic domination of Austria-Hungary and to acquire the goodwill of Russia, traditionally the opponent of Austria in Balkan affairs. The spectacle of little Serbia defying mighty Austria made a strong appeal to the Yugoslavs within the Dual Monarchy, who were unable to obtain concessions from Vienna and Budapest.

This new situation forced the ruling elements of the monarchy to consider the problem afresh. The military party, led by Conrad von Hotzendorf, urged war against Serbia, which would have led to direct annexation of the defiant little neighbor. The political leadership was more cautious, knowing that war might provoke Russian intervention, and contemplated a customs union or a change of dynasty, which might be accomplished by diplomacy, but it was just as eager as the soldiers to extinguish Serbian independence and thus beat down the restlessness of its own Yugoslav population. As a first step in this direction, Austria-Hungary in October 1908 proclaimed the annexation of Bosnia and Hercegovina, lands with a mixed population of Serbs and Croats which had been under Habsburg occupation and administration since 1878 but were nominally still parts of the Ottoman Empire (where the revolution of July 24, 1908, had overturned the absolute rule of Sultan Abdul Hamid II). This action precipitated a five months' crisis involving Austria's relations with Turkey, the great powers, and Serbia; it almost resulted in an Austrian attack on Serbia and came to an end only after Germany had sent its near-ultimatum to Russia, requiring it to recognize the annexation without reference to a European conference. The Russian foreign minister, Alexander Izvolski, accused the Austrian foreign minister, Baron (later Count) Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, of having tricked him, and he bitterly resented the intervention of Germany.

The echoes of this conflict had not died away in 1914. Although Austria compelled Serbia to recognize the annexation, it was another Pyrrhic victory, for the Serbs retaliated by forming two societies: one, Narodna Odbrana (National Defense), was public; the other, Ujedinjenje ili Smrt (Union or Death), popularly known as Crna Ruka (Black Hand), was secret and had been formed for propaganda and agitation in Bosnia against Habsburg rule. A revolutionary movement known as Mlada Bosna (Young Bosnia) also sprang into existence and inspired more than one attempt to assassinate Austro-Hungarian officials in Bosnia and Croatia. The ruling classes in the monarchy were deeply disturbed by this unrest, which they were unable to curb or to suppress.

In the plans of the Austro-Hungarian government for dealing with the Yugoslav problem, Archduke Francis Ferdinand played a peculiar role. He was convinced that the existing system of dualism, whereby Germans ruled in Austria and the Magyars in Hungary, although both were minorities, was driving the Habsburg state to destruction; in particular, he hated the Magyar ruling clique and hoped to break its power. He proposed to solve the Yugoslav problem by granting to the Yugoslavs within the monarchy, whether they lived in Austria, Hungary, or Bosnia, full autonomy and unity, which would mean the end of dual rule; he then hoped to bring Serbia into some kind of connection with the monarchy. No one can say whether the archduke would have been able to carry out his somewhat nebulous plans had he lived to succeed his uncle Francis Joseph in 1916. He was hotheaded, bigoted, avaricious, and disliked by large numbers of his future subjects, and any attempt to carry out his plans would have met with determined resistance by both Germans and Magyars. But his violent death at the hands of a man of Serbian stock, though a Habsburg subject, provided the forward party in the Austro-Hungarian government with an excuse for action against Serbia that was too tempting to neglect.

Many details of the crime at Sarajevo have never been revealed. That the assassins-Gavrilo Princip, who did the actual killing, and two others-came from Bosnia and hated Francis Ferdinand as the symbol of Habsburg oppression, were supplied with arms in Belgrade, and secretly passed across the frontier into Bosnia, became known in 1914 and was used by the Austro-Hungarian government as justification for its demands on Serbia. The person most often credited with inspiring the crime was the chief of the intelligence section of the Serbian General Staff, Col.Dragutin Dimitrijevic, but the evidence is not conclusive. How much the Serbian government knew about the plot in advance, and what steps, if any, it took to prevent the execution of the crime either by warning the Austrian government or by attempting to stop the assassins from crossing into Bosnia-these are questions to which no sure answer is possible; the present government of Yugoslavia, successor to the Serbian government of 1914, has not opened its archives, and there are many conflicts in the unofficial evidence that is available. Equally uncertain is the reason why the authorities in Sarajevo did not take proper precautions to protect the heir to the throne. Actually, the answers do not matter, for an official sent from Vienna to Sarajevo reported that the responsibility of the Serbian government was not established; nevertheless, the action of AustriaHungary could hardly have been more drastic if the official complicity of Serbia had been proved.

The situation in 1914 cannot be judged,however, exclusively in terms of Austro-Serbian relations. Serbia, though a small nation with a population of less than 5,000,000, enjoyed the friendship of Russia and occupied a key position in Europe. Rumania was the ally of AustriaHungary; Bulgaria was anxious to be admitted to the Triple Alliance; in Turkey; German political and military influence was stronger than that of any other power. If Serbia could be brought under Austrian control, then German-Austrian influence would prevail from Berlin to Baghdad. If, on the contrary, Serbia could be maintained -as an independent state, a wedge would be driven into the German-Austrian-Bulgarian-Turkish combination, and Constantinople would be susceptible to Russian, French, and British pressure. So the crisis of July 1914 was concerned with far more than the question whether, as Austria-Hungary demanded, Austrian officials should go into Serbia and investigate the details of the crime at Sarajevo. The issue was a test of strength between the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente; at stake was the balance of power in Europe for an incalculable time to come.