Stealing Horses to Great Applause, page 19
This historical comparison seems merely to make the problem of 1914 worse, requiring three apparently inexplicable decisions to be explained instead of one.4 A historian who looks for common features, however, will quickly find them. Here are some similar attitudes shown by Austria’s leaders in the three cases:
1.a perception of an intolerable, growing threat to Austria’s great-power security and status stemming not from the danger of immediate or direct attack by its enemies, but from the unrelenting pressure of encirclement, isolation, subversion, and exhaustion—death by a thousand cuts;
2.a keen awareness of Austria’s internal weaknesses, especially its political, national, financial, and military ones, and a recognition that a war, especially a long war, would heighten the dangers of revolution and the overthrow of the dynasty;
3.a widespread consensus reached on the eve of the decision that Austria’s foreign policy in the preceding years, which had been risk averse and directed at avoiding war by conciliation, had not merely failed but had made Austria’s position worse;
4.a strong show of resolve by certain political and military leaders, whose optimistic appraisals of Austria’s immediate military situation and its chances for success were not accompanied either by adequate military preparations or by clear ideas on how the planned preventive strike and quick victory would produce long-range security and advantages;
5.a similar short-term optimism in regard to the international political constellation—the hope that somehow quick successful action by Austria would break up the opposing alliance or produce allies for itself;
6.finally, a consensus that peaceful remedies were exhausted, leading former opponents of war to join the war party or fall silent.
Yet these parallels, even if they illuminate the background of the decisions and suggest that all three are instances of the familiar strategy of desperate flight forward, do not explain the particular choice in 1914.
Certain inadequate answers have been proffered. One, formerly common and still occasionally encountered, is that it was typical for nineteenth-century Austria to behave thus, reacting too slowly and too late to danger and then plunging ahead in headstrong, obstinate panic. Napoleon said this; Henry Kissinger suggests it.5 This is not to explain the problem, but to dismiss it. Another answer, earlier alluded to, is that this kind of action is not rare in international politics—many wars arise from attempts by a threatened declining power to reverse its decline through violence. Yet to show that something happens fairly frequently is not to explain why it does, or why the same power should commit the same suicidal blunder three times in a century.
The serious attempts to interpret and explain Austro-Hungarian policy in 1914 divide roughly into two camps, one primarily emphasizing internal factors and motives and the other primarily external ones. To summarize and oversimplify both positions, the first holds that the assassination of Franz Ferdinand coincided with an approaching crisis and breakdown in Austria-Hungary’s creaking, semi-paralyzed state machine, and thus served to bring to a climax the spiraling, converging problems that were making the Dual Monarchy progressively more and more ungovernable—the failure of the 1907 electoral reform, the breakdown of parliament in the Austrian half, the necessity of emergency rule, an unsatisfactory turn in a weak economy, the persistent unsolved problem of Austro-Hungarian relations, and above all critical nationalities problems, those with the South Slavs and Romanians in particular. The decision to provoke a war with Serbia therefore represents a policy of secondary integration and manipulated social imperialism in which a failed, bankrupt leadership and ruling elite sought to save itself, rally its loyal followers, and distract attention from its insoluble internal problems by a flight forward into war. The other view is that the 1914 decision was motivated primarily by traditional foreign policy considerations of security, military strategy, and the determination to remain an independent great power and act as one.
The latter view seems to me more satisfactory. True, Austria-Hungary did face the problems emphasized by the former interpretation and some leaders hoped if it came to war that a successful war would help solve and manage them. Yet these factors, though present, were not decisive in opting for war. The issue is not critical to this essay, however, because the aim is to show that a third reason was more basic than either.
It is interesting that these two lines of explanations (whose differences I have over-sharpened here—there is no reason why they cannot be reconciled) converge tacitly on one point: Austria-Hungary’s decision was wrong. Some judge it harshly as driven by class-bound prejudice, arrogance, and a determination to defend entrenched privilege and power. Others are more sympathetic, inclined to see it as a blunder understandable in view of the extreme pressures to which Austria-Hungary was subjected and the narrow choices available to it. Nonetheless, there is considerable agreement that other decisions and options were available, that this decision was a wrong, disastrous one, and that it had horrendous consequences for Austria and Europe. Which of the two labels for Austria-Hungary’s decision in 1914, crime or blunder, is more fair and accurate is again not important for this essay, for it argues that the decision in one important sense was neither—that, understood within the context of international history, it was the correct, right decision.
The term “correct” or “right” as used in this context must be carefully defined. It does not mean “morally and legally justifiable.” To reach any such conclusion would require delving into legal, philosophical, and ethical issues impossible to deal with here. Nor does “right” here mean “sensible, prudent, representing a rational choice of ends and reasonable correlation of means and ends.” One might well argue forcefully that Austria-Hungary’s policy was none of these things and point to its results as proof. Yet one could grant this and still contend that Austria-Hungary’s decision was right in this respect, that it made a correct, accurate assessment of the nature and direction of the prevailing international system and of Austria-Hungary’s position within it, and it recognized that some such course of action as it took in 1914 was the only serious choice left available to it.
This is not the sort of conclusion historians readily embrace. Most, including international historians, are nominalist pragmatic empiricists, suspicious of abstract entities like “the system,” fond of historical contingency and averse to any hint of determinism. They work on the reasonable assumption that historical actors face an uncertain, undetermined or under-determined future in which they almost always have alternatives open and real choices to make. The claim therefore that Austria-Hungary did not have viable alternatives in 1914 faces major hurdles both in terms of the facts and evidence needed to back it and in regard to its assault on most historians’ working assumptions. To back it up would require two things. The first would be to show that the courses of action proposed as alternative ways which Austria-Hungary could have met its challenges peacefully, whether these involved internal reforms or a different diplomatic strategy or a combination of both, are at best specious and offered Austria-Hungary no real chance of success, and that its leaders were correct in finally recognizing this. I have tried to defend this position elsewhere and for reasons of time cannot present that case here.6 The second and more important task, central to this essay, is to show that those who argue for alternative possibilities and courses of action ignore or underrate the international system as a limiting factor and a determinant of outcomes in international politics, and thereby overestimate the possibilities of Austria-Hungary’s acting differently and solving or managing its problems largely on its own.
This argument, it must be conceded, cannot be made simply on the basis of objective facts and evidence, but involves certain definitions and assumptions that can at best only be rendered plausible in an essay like this. These are that in international politics the term “system” refers not merely to relationships of power and influence between the actors and the institutions through which power and influence are exerted, but also and importantly to a more intangible set of widely shared assumptions and expectations as to what rules and norms prevail and govern the shared practice of international politics. These “rules of the game” enter significantly into the calculations and decisions leaders and elites make, and constitute an incentives structure by indicating what kind of conduct is likely to have consequences of success or failure, reward, toleration, or punitive sanction. They rest in good part on a political culture always subject to changes, both subtle and violent. Despite an inevitable vagueness and uncertainty, one can detect and define a certain ethos or underlying spirit and code behind them, a governing collective mentality, set of reigning assumptions and expectations, and resultant prevailing rules and norms of the game.
This definition of “international system” may be vague and abstract, and I will not try to illustrate it here with historical examples, because the case of Austria-Hungary’s decision in 1914 is supposed to do so. But if it is accepted at least provisionally ex hypothesi, two further considerations follow. In international politics, domestic factors influence foreign policy decisions, and these decisions aim at certain outcomes, but in an important sense, while actors propose, the system finally disposes, that is, determines the outcomes by limiting the range of options and outcomes possible. That system, moreover, never involves a level playing field with clear rules and an impartial umpire, or a smooth billiard table where the outcome is determined by the mechanical interactions of the balls. The rules are made and changed as the games go on by the players themselves, especially the most powerful and successful ones. The table is thus always rigged. In 1914, I contend, the table was rigged to make Austria-Hungary lose. It was therefore a rational choice, though made too late and executed badly, to attempt something drastic to change the rules and alter the tilt of the table, even at the risk of knocking it over and ending the game.
First a brief statement of how the system was rigged to make Austria lose, followed by an argument to support it. A Spanish proverb says: “Some men steal horses to great applause, while others are hanged for looking over the fence.” The proverb can be read as an ironic observation on how unfairly the law, systems of justice, and life in general sometimes work. Here it is offered as an accurate summary of how the European international system actually was working by 1914. Its rules had been so fashioned and bent that certain states could steal horses to great applause while other states were hanged for looking over the fence. This result was not incidental, accidental, or unintended, but regular, structural, and intentional.
The name given to the horse-stealing game was imperialism (or its synonym, “world policy”). The best way briefly to envision the basic difference in the ethos and the attendant rules, norms, and incentives structure of the latter nineteenth-century European states system and those of imperialism is to see it as the difference between high-stakes poker played by heavily armed men out to win but nonetheless aware of conventional limits on their bets and in agreement on the importance of keeping all essential players in the game, and the board game Monopoly, in which players aim to maximize gains through the elimination of rivals.7
The imperialist game, to be sure, had been played for centuries, but in the earlier decades of the prewar era it remained what it had been most of the previous centuries, a game largely separate from the main game of European international politics, or attached but auxiliary to it. The Anglo-Russian Great Game in Asia and the Anglo-French competition for colonies during much of the nineteenth century illustrate this. They were played chiefly outside Europe, governments were initially less centrally involved in them than individuals, firms, or particular interests, and their stakes were not generally critical in the game of European politics. So long as imperialism remained an ancillary game, it did not destroy or directly undermine the European system and could even help preserve it by offering an outlet for European expansionist energies and material for profitable deals and combinations among various powers. This held true even though the game was always so constituted that some powers could steal more horses than others and some could only stand and look over the fence, since those whose horses were being stolen were non-Europeans and outside the states system.
After 1890, however, this game with its imperialist ethos and rules not only became more ruthlessly competitive and involved higher stakes; it also gradually took over as the main game in European politics itself and increasingly involved stealing horses claimed by other Europeans. This development, emerging clearly about the turn of the century, made the game of European politics more competitive, dangerous, and likely to end in a great war. Even this heightened level of imperialist competition, however, did not of itself necessarily lead to general war. It was in fact sustained for a time without general war, and could have been sustained even longer, simply because of the high barriers holding back a general war between great powers in an age of mass politics, industrialization, major advances in military technology, and huge armies. But the next stage that occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, partly through natural development and partly by design, heightened the danger by transferring the imperialist game with its special ethos and rules to Europe itself. The contest over imperial prizes abroad was absorbed into, and instrumentalized for, a larger struggle for domination and control of the European system, and with it the world. Even that was not all. From 1907 on, this struggle to control the European balance came to focus, again partly through natural developments and partly by design, on the most explosive part of Europe, with its most intractable problems, the Balkan Peninsula. It thus targeted Europe’s most vulnerable and exposed great power, Austria-Hungary.
This completed the cycle of change in the nature of European politics over several decades. First an imperialist ethos accompanied European politics; then it invaded it and came to pervade it and replace the older one; then the game itself was transferred back to Europe, with control of the European system for security and survival becoming its essential stake; and finally that contest was concentrated on Europe’s most dangerous and vulnerable point. This long process, like a poisonous snake circling back upon itself and sinking its fangs into its own tail, made Austria-Hungary’s decision in 1914 a rational choice and response to its situation.
This, in brief, is the argument. Much of its particular content is familiar and conventional, but its conclusion is not. One can anticipate certain reactions—that this argument is selective in its use of facts and evidence and unrealistic in its approach to international politics. Moreover, it fails in particular to recognize that European imperialism is as old as the European system and integral to it, that European politics has always been driven by power and interests, not ideals, and that ruthless competition and survival of the fittest rather than normative rules and restraints have always governed it. The argument in addition is moralistic, applying inappropriate moral standards selectively to some actions and certain powers, and biased in favor of Austria and against some other states (Britain, Russia, Serbia).
The less serious charges, those of bias and moralism, can be met quickly. Both strictly speaking are irrelevant—a scholar may be subjectively biased and moralistic (in this case, pro-Habsburg) and still interpret the issues and evidence correctly. In any case, the issue here is not the character of the Habsburg Monarchy, or its alleged historic European mission and whether it was fulfilling or betraying it, or whether it could and should have survived with what results, or any other such questions. The issue here is solely how best to understand the Austro-Hungarian decision in 1914, and whether, as claimed here, this requires above all understanding the prevailing nature and rules of the European system.
As for the charge of moralism, this interpretation does suggest a moral view of the origins of World War I—that it is like a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. To go beyond that conclusion, to play the blame game further by apportioning blame to particular actors, is useless, distracting, and deceptive, because the game itself was to blame. But this moral judgment also is strictly speaking irrelevant to the question of causation.
A more serious charge is that this account of the changes in international politics and their impact on Austria-Hungary’s decision is unrealistic in failing to see that the developments briefly described earlier as perverting and undermining the normal European game and its rules actually represented normal Realpolitik and constituted no reason for Austria-Hungary to overthrow the game. The answer, drawing on basic international relations theory, is that the judgment that Austria-Hungary made a correct rational choice in 1914 under the conditions of the prevailing European system rests theoretically on a conventional realist approach to international politics, which starts with the rational actor model. It assumes that states are the primary actors in international politics, that they can for analytical purposes be considered unitary rational actors, and that they decide and act primarily on the basis of cost-benefit utility analysis. Their calculations therefore must include an appraisal of the incentives or payoff structure of the prevailing international system, and routinely do so. My claim is that over decades the incentives structure of the European international system was so warped by imperialist competition as systematically to reward conduct subversive of stability and peace and to penalize conduct designed to uphold them. I contend further that this process of distortion of the system led to the general crisis situation of 1914 focused on the Balkans and targeting Austria, and that the crisis produced by this process made Austria’s decision for preventive war a rational, appropriate one in terms of the prevailing rules and incentives of that system. Such an argument is therefore plainly, in terms of theory, an attempt to describe what happened in strictly realist terms. To refuse to take this factor of the systemic incentives structure into account, instead assuming that the decision must necessarily have been wrong or unjustified because it started a great war with horrendous results and that there must have been a better way for Austria-Hungary to seek its reasonable goals, is to be unrealistic and moralistic.
