1871 German Empire proclaimed at Versailles; Alsace-Lorraine awarded to Germany in peace treaty ending the Franco-Prussian War.
1873 Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary conclude the Three Emperors’ Alliance (Dreikaiserbund).
1877–78 Russo-Turkish War
1878 Congress of Berlin limits Russian gains in the Balkans.
1882 Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy conclude the Triple Alliance.
1883 Dreikaiserbund expires.
1887 Germany concludes Reinsurance Treaty with Russia.
1890 Bismarck resigns as chancellor of Germany; Reinsurance Treaty with Russia is allowed to lapse.
1892 France concludes alliance with Russia.
1898 Germany begins construction of a world-class battle fleet.
1899–1902 Britain fights Boer War against Dutch settlers in South Africa.
1904 Britain and France conclude the Entente Cordiale.
1905 First Moroccan Crisis
1906 Algeciras Conference settles First Moroccan Crisis in France’s favor.
1907 Britain and Russia conclude the Anglo-Russian Convention, thus completing the Triple Entente.
1908 “Young Turk” Revolution in Constantinople; Austria-Hungary annexes Bosnia-Herzegovina.
1911 Agadir Crisis (a.k.a., Second Moroccan Crisis)
1911–12 Italo-Turkish War
1912–13 First Balkan War
1913 “Three Pashas” take power in Constantinople; First Balkan War ends in Treaty of London; Bulgaria attacks Serbia and loses most of its gains in the Second Balkan War; General Liman von Sanders arrives in Constantinople.
1914 Irish “home rule” bill passes Britain’s Parliament; Zabern Affair in Alsace-Lorraine; murder of Gaston Calmette by Henriette Caillaux in France.
At the time of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, Europe had not experienced a general war—that is, one that involved all of the great powers—since the final defeat of Napoleon nearly a century before. This is not to say that the period 1815–1914 was entirely peaceful; there were at least a dozen wars fought in Europe (depending on how “war” is defined), and many more waged by individual European powers in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. However, they all involved fewer than four of the great powers, and tended to be low in intensity and brief in duration. The smallest of these, the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, lasted only thirty days. The largest, the Crimean War, was fought between Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire on one side, and Russia on the other. It lasted two years and four months, but the fighting was almost entirely limited to the Crimean Peninsula, and the vast majority of losses were the result of disease rather than combat.
The nineteenth century was certainly peaceful compared with those that came before and after, but it was not—particularly in its later years—without international animosities. Two very deep antagonisms, in fact, dominated the international politics by 1900. The first was between Germany and France. This was a hatred that went back many years, to a time before there was a Germany, when there was only a highly decentralized Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation that had by turns been aggressor against and victim of encroachment by the French monarchy. It is not surprising, then, that Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck saw a war with France as the best means of completing the unification of Germany. In 1870 he got his wish, cleverly goading Paris into declaring war. After defeating the French armies on the battlefield, the German-speaking states of central Europe joined together to form the new German Empire—proclaimed, significantly, at Versailles, the magnificent palace of the French Sun King, Louis XIV.
But what gave the Franco-German animosity special urgency was that in the treaty that ended the Franco-Prussian War, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine passed from France to the new Germany. France’s historic claims to these territories were not particularly strong; the armies of Louis XIV had taken Alsace from the Holy Roman Empire in the late seventeenth century, and his grandson Louis XV seized Lorraine in the mid-eighteenth. However, the French-speaking population of the two provinces grew rapidly in the subsequent years, so that by 1871 they were, at least linguistically, solidly French.
This was a matter of particular importance, since the nineteenth century was the great age of European nationalism. Intellectual, cultural, and political figures across the continent believed that language and ethnicity provided individuals with their strongest ties to one another. By the same token, linguistic and cultural differences—believed to be rooted in blood rather than custom—were regarded as creating natural boundaries between peoples. The nation, then, was thought to be a natural entity that was logically prior to, and hence more important than, superficial political entities. In the eyes of nationalists, Europe’s political boundaries should correspond with national ones. Nothing, they believed, was more unnatural than for people of the same ethnicity to live in separate states, or for the people of one nation to be ruled by those of another. Support for nationalism among Europe’s educated middle classes was critical to the unification of Italy in 1859–60, and Germany in 1870–71. By the same token, French nationalists would never reconcile themselves to German rule over Alsace-Lorraine.
In the short term, however, there was nothing that Paris could do to alter this situation, as skillful diplomacy by Bismarck (now chancellor not just of Prussia, but all of Germany) succeeded in keeping France isolated. The new German Empire joined with Russia and Austria-Hungary to form the Three Emperors’ Alliance (Dreikaiserbund) in 1873, and concluded the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Italy in 1882. With Great Britain enjoying “splendid isolation” from European affairs—and, in fact, repeatedly coming into conflict with France as the two powers sought to colonize Africa—there was not a single major power in Europe willing to align itself with Paris for nearly two decades.
The fact that this state of affairs did not last stems almost entirely from Europe’s other great animosity, between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Russia had long regarded itself as the protector of the Eastern Orthodox peoples (often, but not always, of Slavic descent) of the Balkan peninsula, who had for centuries lived under Islamic rule in the form of the Ottoman Empire (based on modern-day Turkey). This had led to a series of Russo-Turkish wars in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Early on, these had not generated much tension with Austria; indeed, the two countries on several occasions fought as allies against the Ottoman Turks. But by the early nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was in obvious decline, opening up the possibility of significant Russian gains in the region.
From the perspective of Austria (Austria-Hungary from 1867) and its Habsburg emperors, Russian expansion in southeastern Europe was threatening for two reasons. First, they believed that it jeopardized one of the most important principles of international relations during this period, the balance of power. It was an idea that was first articulated in the early eighteenth century, but its theorists claimed to see it in play even in the days of Ancient Greece. According to balance-of-power thinking, peace was best preserved when no state became so powerful that it could menace the independence of the others; any monarch who tried to do so had to be resisted by a coalition of enemies dedicated to restoring the equilibrium. This, they argued, was precisely what happened when Louis XVI and Napoleon tried to achieve dominance over Europe. Belief in a balance of power naturally led governments to eye their neighbors warily, looking for any sign that they might be growing too powerful. It encouraged the formation of alliances, in which countries sought to counterbalance their rivals. In addition, whenever one state defeated another in a war, it became common for third powers to intervene in an effort to limit the victor’s territorial gains, or to seek compensation elsewhere. As Ottoman control over the Balkans receded, then, the Habsburgs worried that Russia would become the dominant force in the region.
Austria was also concerned about Russian policy in southeastern Europe because St. Petersburg was actively encouraging nationalism in that region. As Ottoman power retreated, independent Greek, Serbian, Romanian, and Bulgarian states emerged over the course of the century. Some of these states came to view Russia as their natural protector, as many Russian nationalists embraced the idea of pan-Slavism: that is, the belief that all the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe should be united in a single confederation.
Russian support for pan-Slavism was deeply worrying to the Habsburgs because of all the great powers, the Habsburg Empire was the only one not built on the national principle. To be sure, Germany had significant Polish, Danish, and (thanks to its control of Alsace-Lorraine) French minorities, and a great many non-Russians lived within the borders of the Russian Empire. The Habsburg Monarchy, however, had formed over centuries as diverse territories gradually came under the control of Vienna. The empire’s ruling family may have been German, but its population consisted of a bewildering array of peoples—Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, Romanians, Slovenians, and Italians, just to name the largest. No single ethnic group possessed anything close to a majority. Therefore, unlike in places such as France or Germany, where the national principle served as a source of unity and strength, nationalism in Austria could only promote fragmentation. Indeed, the Habsburgs had managed to keep the Hungarians from leaving the empire altogether only by forging a compromise (Ausgleich) in 1867, in which the Austrian Empire became the Austro-Hungarian Empire—two separate “nations,” each with its own parliament, united only in the person of the emperor. If other ethnic groups were to assert themselves in the same way, the empire might dissolve entirely.
Habsburg worries over Russian power and Balkan nationalism manifested themselves as early as the middle of the century. During the Crimean War, the Austrian emperor, the young Franz Josef I, earned Russian enmity by threatening to intervene on the side of the French and British if Russian troops were not withdrawn from the Black Sea provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia (modern-day Romania). Nearly fifty years later, when Tsar Alexander II sought to create a huge (pro-Russian) Kingdom of Bulgaria in the Balkans after the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78, Austria-Hungary joined with Britain and France to demand that the tsar moderate his gains. Bismarck, declaring Germany to be nothing more than an “honest broker,” hosted an international congress in Berlin in which Russia was obliged to accept a smaller Bulgaria, and Austria-Hungary, as compensation for Russian gains, was granted the right to occupy and administer the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The tensions between Austria-Hungary and Russia ultimately doomed Bismarck’s Dreikaiserbund, which was finally allowed to lapse in 1887. Germany remained allied to Austria-Hungary via the Triple Alliance, but Bismarck still attempted to maintain the relationship with Russia through a three-year Reinsurance Treaty, in which each power promised to remain neutral if the other became involved in a war with a third party. However, the chancellor resigned in 1890, and when Russia soon afterward sought to renew the treaty, the young German emperor (kaiser), Wilhelm II, said no. The immediate beneficiary of this decision was France, which was finally able to end its diplomatic isolation by concluding an alliance with Russia in August 1892. This alignment seemed unlikely, inasmuch as it bound together Europe’s largest republic with its most autocratic monarchy. It certainly came as a shock to Wilhelm II, a believer in absolute monarchy who never imagined that the archconservative Alexander III of Russia would ever make common cause with the French Republic. Nevertheless, from the standpoint of the balance of power, it made perfect sense, as it provided an effective counterweight to the Triple Alliance.
The conclusion of the Franco-Russian military convention left Great Britain as the only major power that did not belong to an alliance. For most of the century, this had not struck the successive governments in power as a problem; indeed, the country’s “splendid isolation” from European entanglements was a point of national pride. London had tended to focus instead on its massive global empire. However, it became increasingly difficult to divorce European from colonial affairs in the period after 1880, when the European powers began to help themselves to great chunks of Africa. The so-called “scramble” for Africa placed Britain on a collision course with France, which had long possessed colonial interests in Africa, as well as with Germany, which was just getting into the game. At the same time, the British regarded Russian expansion in Central Asia—deemed all the more important in St. Petersburg after the tsar’s Balkan ambitions had been checked at the Congress of Berlin—as a serious threat to their empire in India. When in 1899–1902 the Crown fought a bloody war against the Boers (the descendants of Dutch settlers in South Africa), it briefly appeared as though the French, Germans, and Russians might forget their differences and form a common front against Britain. The Foreign Office concluded that “splendid isolation” was now a liability; the Empire had to find friends on the Continent, and fast.
But to which side should the British turn? Originally there seemed to be a strong argument for aligning with Germany. Historically England had a tradition of siding with the German states against France, which had been a frequent enemy since the Middle Ages; indeed, in the days of Napoleon, the United Kingdom was continuously at war with France for twelve years. Relations with Russia were at least as bad; as mentioned earlier, St. Petersburg’s efforts to expand in Central Asia were regarded as dangerous to India, the “jewel in the crown” of the British Empire. There were also cultural ties between the two countries: the current and previous dynasties of the monarchy (the House of Hanover and the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) both came from the German states. For this reason, the two powers engaged in negotiations between 1898 and 1901 for an alliance.
However, such a relationship was not to be. Much of the reason for this was that the dramatic, mercurial Wilhelm II sought to make Germany, already the most powerful country on the European continent, into a world power. Bursting onto the global scene at a time when much of the underdeveloped world had already been colonized, German politicians, diplomats, business leaders, and journalists loudly demanded a “place in the sun.” With a large and growing industrial economy, German manufactured goods competed effectively with British products on world markets. The hallmark of a truly great nation, Germans argued, was the possession of colonies, so Germany must receive its share. Even more threatening from the British perspective was Berlin’s decision in 1898 to start building a world-class battle fleet. For the British, who were accustomed to having the Royal Navy rule the waves, this seemed like a direct challenge. Soon Germany and Britain were locked in a naval race, and officials in the British Foreign Office were arguing that Germany was a threat to the hallowed balance of power. The logical move, they argued, was to put aside ancient animosities and throw Britain’s weight on the side of Russia and France.
In April 1904 Britain and France concluded the Entente Cordiale. It was not an alliance, for it committed neither side to come to the other’s aid in time of war. However, it did clear up a number of long-standing colonial disputes between the two powers, most notably in Egypt (where France agreed to recognize British domination) and Morocco (where Britain acknowledged French preponderance). Soon the agreement produced an international crisis, when France attempted to establish a protectorate1 over Morocco. German firms had significant commercial interests in that country, Wilhelm II personally came to Tangiers to offer his support to the sultan, and for a few days Germany and France seemed poised on the brink of war. The First Moroccan Crisis (as we will see, a second followed in 1911) was settled through an international conference, held at Algeciras, Spain, in early 1906. The assembled great powers (including the United States) voted in France’s favor, with only Austria-Hungary siding with Germany. French administrators and financiers would be permitted to exercise practical control over the country, although the Moroccan police—and not French troops—would have responsibility for maintaining law and order in the country.
The Entente Cordiale cleared the way for improved relations with Russia as well. In 1907 the two countries signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, in which they settled their differences over Persia (which was divided into British and Russian spheres of influence) and Afghanistan. Again, there was no official alliance, but increasingly politicians and journalists began referring to the Triple Entente. Wilhelm II and German nationalists were both horrified and outraged, claiming that the three powers were seeking the encirclement (Einkreisung) of Germany.
Mere months after the conclusion of the Anglo-Russian Convention, a revolution took place in the Ottoman Empire. A group of Turkish nationalists, organized into a party called the Committee of Union and Progress (often referred to as the “Young Turks”), forced the sultan, Abdul Hamid II, to accept a constitution that significantly limited his powers. (The sultan was kept under house arrest until the following year, when he was deposed in favor of his younger brother, Mehmed V, who reigned as a figurehead.) The ensuing chaos tempted a whole range of countries to lay claims to parts of the crumbling empire, while others (in true balance-of-power fashion) sought to limit the gains of their rivals or to seek compensation elsewhere.
The first of these emerged that very summer, from a deal concluded between Russia and Austria-Hungary. At a secret meeting at Buchlau Castle (in the modern-day Czech Republic), the Russian foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, agreed to support a move by Austria-Hungary formally to annex the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. In return, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, promised to support the right of Russia to move warships through the strategically vital Turkish straits, which linked the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. However, the precise terms remain unclear. Izvolsky would later claim that he had only intended for these issues to be brought before an international congress. He expressed profound shock when, in early October 1908, Kaiser Franz Josef I officially proclaimed Bosnia-Herzegovina to be a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was also profoundly embarrassed when Aehrenthal announced that the Russian foreign minister had known about it all along.
If the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina embarrassed Izvolsky, it outraged Austria-Hungary’s neighbor to the south, Serbia. The Principality of Serbia (it became a kingdom in 1882) gained formal independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, but for the first twenty-five years of its existence, it had managed to remain on friendly terms with the Habsburg Monarchy. Bulgaria, which won its independence at the same time, was far more closely aligned with Russia. However, this changed with the brutal assassination of the Serbian king, Alexander I, in 1903. The new monarch, Peter I, came from a rival family and enjoyed the support of nationalists who believed that it was Serbia’s historical destiny to unite the so-called South Slavs—the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes—into a single state. Since most of the South Slavs lived within the borders of Austria-Hungary, this necessarily meant a reversal of Serbia’s traditional pro-Habsburg policy. King Peter quickly sought to align his country with Russia, where the growing pan-Slavist movement openly called for the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and the creation of a Slavic Federation in southeastern Europe. When Belgrade began to seek investment from France, Vienna retaliated by closing its borders to Serbian pork, the first shot in a trade war that would last for three years.
Because most of the people who lived in Bosnia-Herzegovina were Serbs and Croats, Serbian nationalists had expected that eventually the territories would come under Belgrade’s control. When Franz Josef announced that they would henceforth be Habsburg lands, therefore, Serbia erupted in outrage. Just two days after the announcement, Serbian nationalists formed an organization called Narodna Odbrana (Defense of the people), dedicated to the eventual liberation of South Slavs from Austro-Hungarian rule. Over the next six years, the group would wage an incessant propaganda campaign against Vienna, “our first and greatest enemy.”
The Bosnian Crisis of 1908–9 was the first of a series of incidents in the Balkans that might have resulted in a European war. Serbia mobilized its army, demanding either Bosnia-Herzegovina or compensation elsewhere, and Austria-Hungary followed suit. Belgrade appealed to Russia for support, and Izvolsky was inclined to grant it. However, Germany stood firmly behind its Habsburg allies, while France and Britain were understandably reluctant to back up the Russians over what seemed to them to be a relatively minor matter. Russia was in no position to fight—certainly not without allies—given that only three years earlier it had suffered a humiliating defeat in a war against Japan. Izvolski in late March 1909 reluctantly called on the Serbs to stand down.
Just over two years later a new crisis erupted over Morocco. A rebellion broke out in the country, and insurgents quickly occupied most of the capital, Fez, and surrounded the sultan in his palace. In April 1911 France dispatched troops to Fez to protect the sultan (as well as French investments), leading to immediate protests from Berlin, which claimed that this was a violation of the agreement reached at Algeciras five years earlier. In an effort to assert German interests in the region, Wilhelm II dispatched a warship, which arrived at the Moroccan port of Agadir on July 1. German nationalists responded by calling for war, but it soon became clear that Britain would stand by France in any resulting conflict. Even Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who had a reputation for being pro-German, warned that “if Britain is treated badly where her interests are vitally affected, as if she is of no account in the cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.”2 Berlin, therefore, sought a diplomatic solution. In the resulting Treaty of Fez, signed in early November, France was granted a full protectorate over Morocco (including the right to station troops there indefinitely), while Germany was compensated with a small strip of territory in central Africa. All in all, the Agadir Crisis (sometimes called the Second Moroccan Crisis) demonstrated the strength of the Entente Cordiale, and was regarded by German nationalists as a humiliating retreat.
While the world’s attention was focused on Morocco, Italy took advantage of Ottoman weakness by launching an attack against Turkish territory in North Africa and the Dodecanese Islands. Following traditional balance-of-power logic, Rome was convinced that if Italy were to be regarded as a great power, it would need to make gains comparable to those made recently by France in Morocco and Austria-Hungary in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In many ways the Italo-Turkish War of 1911–12 was a foreshadowing of the kind of fighting that would be seen in World War I. Both sides resorted to trench warfare, and the conflict saw the first use in combat of armored cars and aircraft. By December the fighting had resulted in stalemate, but the Ottoman Empire was in no condition to wage a long war. In October 1912 the two sides concluded the Treaty of Lausanne, under which Libya became part of the Italian Empire. The Dodecanese Islands were to be returned to Turkish control, but three years later they were still occupied by Italian troops.
Perhaps the main reason why the Turks were willing to come to terms with Italians was the fact that they now had to deal with an attack from another direction. For years the Russian minister to Belgrade, Nicolas Hartwig, had been pushing for an alliance among the Balkan states. Hartwig, an ardent pan-Slavist, had taken up his post in the wake of the Bosnian Crisis, and he saw such an arrangement as a way to promote Russian interests in the region while undermining those of Austria-Hungary. His efforts bore fruit in March 1912, when Serbia and Bulgaria concluded an alliance, and in the next few months Montenegro and Greece joined as well. However, instead of targeting the Habsburgs, the new Balkan League cast its eyes on the Ottoman Empire’s remaining territory in Europe. With the government in Constantinople still embroiled in war with Italy, the countries of the league saw an opportunity for quick gains.
The First Balkan War began in early October 1912, and over the course of a few months the Balkan League succeeded in driving Ottoman forces from the peninsula. The Bulgarian Army defeated the main Turkish army and captured the city of Adrianople (Edirne), while the Serbians marched south into Macedonia, entering Skopje. The Greeks, meanwhile, occupied Salonika and Ioannina. These stunning defeats led to a coup in Constantinople, as a triumvirate of leading members of the Committee of Union and Progress—who would soon come to be known as the “Three Pashas”—ousted the reigning ministers and seized power for themselves. But the change of regime made no practical difference on the battlefield, and by early spring the Three Pashas were signaling their desire for peace. In the Treaty of London, signed on May 30, 1913, the Turks formally recognized the loss of all of their European territory, aside from Constantinople itself and a small strip of land to the west of the city. Almost immediately, however, the victorious allies began arguing over the division of the spoils, the Bulgarians arguing that their defeat of the main Ottoman army entitled them to a larger share. In June Serbia and Greece concluded a new alliance, and at the end of that month Bulgarian troops attacked Serbian forces in Macedonia. In this Second Balkan War the Bulgarians soon found themselves overmatched, as Romania joined the war on the Greco-Serbian side, and even the Turks took the opportunity to try to win back some of what they had lost by attacking Bulgaria from the east. In early August the belligerents came to terms, with Bulgaria forced to give up much of what it had claimed, and Greece and Serbia dividing Macedonia between themselves. Romania also gained some territory at Bulgaria’s expense, while the Ottoman Empire regained Adrianople.
Vienna observed the events of the Balkan Wars with dismay. The willingness of the Balkan states to join together (if only temporarily) was upsetting enough; the fact that Serbia, mortal enemy of the Habsburgs, roughly doubled in size as a result of its conquests was even more troubling. During the peace negotiations in London, Austria-Hungary insisted on the creation of a new state of Albania, mainly so that Serbia would be denied some of its military gains (and access to the Adriatic Sea). Enraged, Belgrade for a time refused to withdraw its forces from the region and found a sympathetic ear among pan-Slavs at the court of Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg. Austria-Hungary mobilized its army, and Germany promised full support for Vienna. For a moment Europe stood on the brink of war; however, Russia was still recovering from its defeat by Japan in 1905–6, and neither Britain nor France had any desire to be drawn into the affair. Serbia, on orders from St. Petersburg, stood down a second time.
A few months later, still another crisis flared up in the East, this time occasioned by the announcement by the Ottoman government of the Three Pashas in early November that a retired German general, Otto Liman von Sanders, was to assume command of the Turkish First Army, charged with protecting Constantinople. While it was not unusual for foreign officers to serve as advisers to the Turks (indeed, a British admiral was at that time serving in that capacity in the Ottoman Navy), for such a person to be placed in actual charge of military forces was unprecedented. Russia immediately cried foul, with Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov warning that this would be regarded in St. Petersburg as an “openly hostile act.” Since so much of Russian trade moved through the Black Sea Straits, Constantinople was not merely a matter of Turkish concern; indeed, during the Italo-Turkish War the Ottomans had closed the straits to all foreign traffic, dealing a serious blow to the Russian economy. The Liman von Sanders Affair might have led to war between Germany and Russia had a face-saving solution not been found—the general, instead of being given command of the First Army Corps, was appointed inspector-general of the Turkish Army in January 1914.
At the same time when the Liman von Sanders Affair complicated Germany’s relations with Russia, a domestic political crisis increased tensions with France. In the small French-speaking town of Zabern (today Saverne) in Alsace-Lorraine (which, it will be recalled, was annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War), there was open hostility between the local populace and the German garrison. In late October a Prussian officer advised his men, “If you are attacked, use your weapon, and if you stab a Wackes in the process, then you’ll get ten marks from me,” and his words were promptly leaked to the local newspapers. The officer’s suggestion that violence be employed against the townsfolk was bad enough; that he used the ethnic slur Wackes (which roughly translates as “square head”) made it even worse, and from all over Alsace-Lorraine there came demands for disciplinary action. The Zabern Affair brought to the surface the deep-seated hostility between French and German nationalists, but it had a domestic component as well. Even the Reichstag (the German legislature) called for the officer to be punished, but the German Army’s refusal to comply suggested to the world that the armed forces were not subject to civilian authority.
Despite this series of events, in spring 1914 virtually no one believed in the likelihood of a general European war. Part of this lack of concern stemmed from the fact that foreign affairs rarely managed to capture the attention of either elites or the public the way that domestic matters did. Nearly all of the major powers in 1914 were in the midst of political crises that dominated the newspaper headlines. In Germany the Social Democratic Party, which openly embraced Marxism, had emerged in the 1912 Reichstag elections as the largest political party in the country. Some on the right responded by calling for a “national dictatorship” involving the imposition of martial law, bans on left-wing political organizations and newspapers, a closing of the Reichstag, and a purge of Jews from education, the civil service, and the army. By early 1914 the kaiser’s own son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, had emerged as the informal leader of these reactionary forces.3
Russia, meanwhile, was the scene of intense labor struggles in 1914, as workers and peasants alike expressed their dissatisfaction with their living and working conditions. The growing industrial sector was paralyzed by a series of strikes—roughly one million factory laborers walked off their jobs at some point during the first half of the year. In the countryside newspapers reported an upsurge in murders, assaults, plundering of crops, and burning of noble-owned manors. In times of crisis Russians were accustomed to looking to their tsar, who ruled as virtually an absolute monarch in an age in which the balance of political power in most countries (even Germany) was tipping in favor of elected legislatures. But the current occupant of the throne, Nicholas II, was widely believed to have come under the influence of a half-mad monk, a self-proclaimed “holy man” named Rasputin. “If I am not there to protect you,” the monk allegedly warned the terrified Tsarina, “you will lose your crown and your son within six months.”4
France was a deeply divided nation in 1914, and there were widespread concerns that the country was in decline. Its population had only grown from 37 million to 39 million since the Franco-Prussian War (by contrast, German’s population has surged from 42 million to 62 million), and the German economy had grown nearly twice as much as the French. Most worrying of all, however, was the chronic chaos that afflicted the French government. Disdainful monarchists were quick to point out that no fewer than eleven governments had come and gone since 1909, four in 1913 alone. Political life and society at large were divided between a traditionalist, aristocratic, deeply Catholic Right and a secular, socialist Left, both of which questioned at times whether the republic was worth defending. In the middle stood the bourgeoisie—the state’s only truly reliable defenders. These divisions came through in the 1890s and 1900s in the “Dreyfus Affair,” in which Alfred Dreyfus, an army officer of Jewish descent, was accused and convicted of selling military secrets to the Germans. Liberals rallied to his defense, and a subsequent investigation established Dreyfus’s innocence—as well as the fact that anti-Semitic officers of the French Army had falsified evidence in an effort to convict him.
More recently, France’s political divisions reemerged in a spectacular “trial of the century”—that of Henriette Caillaux, wife of Joseph Caillaux, one of the most prominent left-wing (and antiwar) politicians in France. She stood accused of murdering Gaston Calmette, the deeply conservative and nationalistic editor of Le Figaro, one of the country’s biggest newspapers, in March 1914. Upon hearing of her arrest, Joseph resigned from his post as finance minister. By June all of France was buzzing about the upcoming trial. If Henriette were found guilty, her husband’s political career would be finished, but if she were exonerated, he would no doubt return to politics, where he would be a serious thorn in the side of Raymond Poincaré, the republic’s deeply conservative president.
There were signs of industrial discontent in Austria-Hungary as well, but the most pressing problems facing the Habsburg Monarchy in 1914 were those of ethnicity, not class. The multinational nature of the empire frequently paralyzed the legislature, and fistfights on the floor of the Reichsrat (Austria’s parliament) were far from uncommon. But the legislature had little real power. Nearly all the authority lay with the emperor and his ministers, and here it was the relationship between the Austrian and Hungarian halves of the monarchy that was most important. Under the Ausgleich (compromise) of 1867 the two sides operated very much like two separate governments, united only in the person of the monarch, Franz Josef. Every ten years the terms of the compromise had to be renewed, and each time the Magyars (the formal name for the ethnic group of Hungarians) threatened to dissolve the union if their demands were not met—and invariably those demands involved (1) limiting the Magyars’ contributions to the monarchy’s most important common institution, the armed forces, and (2) the Magyars’ ability to rule over the millions of non-Hungarians who lived within their borders. The Romanians of Transylvania were a particular target for Magyar suppression, so that just as the South Slavs of Bosnia looked toward Serbia for their salvation, the Romanians increasingly sought relief from the independent Romania that lay just beyond Hungary’s eastern border.5
It was likely the English who were paying the least attention to matters on the continent of Europe; their minds were instead riveted on Ireland. For much of the late nineteenth century the Liberal Party had been pressing for “home rule” for Ireland—that is, self-government within the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. In March 1914, thanks to the efforts of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, the goal seemed to be in reach, with Conservatives in the minority in Parliament and King George V expressing his full support. The stumbling block was the status of Ulster, Ireland’s six northernmost counties. While the rest of the country was overwhelmingly Catholic, and supportive of home rule, the counties of Ulster had narrow Protestant majorities, and bitterly resisted the thought of being part of an autonomous Catholic Ireland. A paramilitary organization calling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) threatened violence if Parliament passed the bill, and British army and navy officers stationed there calmly informed their superiors in London that they had no intention of doing anything to stop it. Catholics responded by forming their own paramilitary units, and by spring 1914 Ireland seemed on the brink of civil war.
But if most Europeans were more interested in domestic matters, neither did the relative few who dutifully followed foreign affairs expect a general war; it had, after all, been nearly a century since the last one. Of course, it was only to be expected that international crises would flare up now and again. But each time, whether the object was Morocco, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Libya, Macedonia, Albania, Constantinople, or little Zabern, the diplomats succeeded time and again in defusing the situation. There was no reason to think that they would not be capable of doing the same in the future. Moreover, there were reasons for optimism about the health of the international system. In particular, Anglo-German relations, soured by the naval race and trade rivalry between the two countries, seemed to be on the mend in the past few years. While the naval race had not exactly ended, German battleship production had been pushed aside in favor of other priorities. Moreover, the two countries cooperated on the question of an independent Albania and the construction of a German railroad connecting Berlin and Baghdad.
There was also a growing peace movement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as religious sects, women’s groups, and labor organizations opposed to war emerged in each of the great powers. Such organizations frequently corresponded across national lines, holding international congresses in which they pledged to work toward peaceful coexistence. Several left-wing parties, such as France’s Socialist Party and the German Social Democratic Party, pledged to resist any effort by their countries’ governments to wage war. And before his death in 1896 the Swedish industrialist and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel willed a portion of his vast inheritance to go toward an annual prize for the person who had “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The first Nobel Peace Prize was awarded in 1901.
Indeed, some Europeans had begun to believe that major wars had become a thing of the past. In 1909 Norman Angell wrote a small book titled The Great Illusion, in which he argued that the industrial economies of the great powers had become so interdependent that any such war would be futile. Because, for example, the German steel industry needed French iron ore, while the French steel industry required German coal, the disruption caused by a war between the two would bring only ruin to both sides. While it is important to note that he never claimed that war had become impossible, he certainly seemed to suggest that no far-seeing statesman would ever choose to start one.
It should be noted that not everyone saw this as a welcome development. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw the rise of militarism, the belief in not only the importance of a strong army and navy but the notion that the armed forces provided a model that the rest of society should emulate. War, militarists argued, brought out the best in young men; in the ranks, individuals sacrificed their selfish desires for the good of the nation as a whole. Long periods of peace, they claimed, caused men to lose their martial spirit and to care for only their own well-being. This point of view, unsurprisingly, was usually strongest among army and navy officers.
Many educated Europeans during this period also embraced the theory of social Darwinism, in which nationalism intersected with a particular interpretation of the ideas of the eminent English naturalist Charles Darwin. According to social Darwinism, differences among ethnic groups corresponded to the variations that emerged among the various species and subspecies of the animal kingdom. Such features made some peoples (or “races”) more “fit” than others; social Darwinists, in fact, believed in a strict hierarchy of races, inevitably placing their own nationalities among those at the top. Like militarism, social Darwinism explicitly sanctioned warfare. Since all of nature represented a struggle for survival in a world of limited resources, war was, in the words of the German general Friedrich von Bernhardi, “a biological necessity.” Without it there was no effective mechanism by which the weak would be killed off, leaving them to reproduce, thus causing the entire human race to degenerate.
Yet no matter how popular such ideologies might have been in the early twentieth century, most people were not clamoring for war in 1914. Nor did they expect it. When they learned at the end of June that the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne had been killed, most European statesmen did not even cancel their weekend plans. Assassinations of prominent figures were hardly uncommon during this time. In fact, since 1890 assassins had claimed the lives of an empress of Austria-Hungary, two prime ministers of Bulgaria, a governor general and an attorney general of Finland, a president of France, a prime minister and king of Greece, a king of Italy, a grand vizier of the Ottoman Empire, a king and crown prince of Portugal, two interior ministers and a prime minister of Russia, a king and queen of Serbia, two prime ministers of Spain, and a president of the United States. None of those instances produced a war, or even a serious international crisis. Moreover, if the Moroccan Crisis and the Balkan Wars had failed to trigger a European-wide conflict, there seemed little chance of one occurring over Franz Ferdinand.
Still, the great question remained—would governments and diplomats be able to calm the troubled waters of international politics, as they had so many times before? Or would the murder of the Archduke be the spark that would set Europe ablaze?
1. A “protectorate” exists when a country keeps—at least in name—its own government, but under the “protection” of another nation. The “protector” normally stations troops in that country, and for all practical purposes controls it.
2. “Agadir Crisis: Lloyd George’s Mansion House Speech, 21 July, 1911,” World War I Document Archive, http://
3. Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year the Great War Began (New York: Walker, 2012), 39.
4. Beatty, Lost History of 1914, 72–73.
5. Many observers believed that the current arrangement of Austria-Hungary was untenable. Some suggested as an alternative a federal union, in which each nationality of the monarchy would possess some level of autonomy in a “United States of Greater Austria.” The most determined enemies of such a scheme were the Magyars. Its staunchest advocate was the heir to the Habsburg throne—Archduke Franz Ferdinand.