Stealing Horses to Great Applause, page 44
31 DDF, vol. 1, nos. 373, 376.
32 Ibid., vol. 2, nos. 218–19.
33 Ibid., vol. 3, nos. 264, 314, 359; D. R. Mathieu, “The Role of Russia in French Foreign Policy, 1908–1914” (PhD dissertation, Stanford, 1968), 143–63. Evidence of France’s anti-Austrian policy in 1913 is plentiful in Isvolski’s Briefwechsel; see, for example, vol. 3, nos. 658, 666, 1080, 1082–3, 1093, 1095, 1101, 1107, 1111, 1114–15, 1118–19.
34 Isvolski’s Briefwechsel, vol. 3, nos. 659–60.
35 DDF, vol. 7, no. 54.
36 Ibid., nos. 68, 73, 135, 149, 165, 195, 220, 253, 267, 268.
37 Ibid., nos. 103, 115, 194.
38 Ibid., nos. 280, 288, 293, 324, 333, 364; vol. 9, nos. 13, 15, 62, 109, 179, 181, 356; vol. 10, nos. 6, 238, 397, 416; Mathieu, “Role of Russia,” 164–7; Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, 616–22; Raymond Poidevin, Les relations économiques et financières entre la France et l’Allemagne de 1898 à 1914 (Paris, 1969), 671–5, and “Note sur les ententes et les rivalités financières franco-allemandes en Roumaine 1900–1914,” Bulletin de la Faculté des Lettres de Strasbourg 46 (1968): 589–93.
39 In this the Austrians perhaps gave Grey somewhat more than his due; he meant to be fair and impartial, but above all had to keep on good terms with Russia. See F. R. Bridge, Great Britain and Austria-Hungary, 1906–1914 (London, 1972).
40 See, for example, Buchanan to Nicolson, October 31, 1912, PRO, FO 800/359, and Nicolson to Sir Fairfax Cartwright, ambassador to Austria, April 2, 1913, FO 800/364.
41 For illustrations of these British attitudes, see Nicolson to Cartwright, July 8, 1913, FO 800/368; Nicolson to Marling, chargé at Constantinople, July 9, 1913, ibid.; Goschen, ambassador to Germany, to Nicolson, October 9 and 17, 1913, and January 21, 1914, FO 800/370 and 372; and Nicolson to Bax-Ironside, minister at Sofia, May 25, 1914, FO 800/374.
42 For examples of the attitudes mentioned, see BD, vol. 9, pt. 2, no. 287, and vol. 10, pt. 1, nos. 358 and 374; memorandum by Bertie, June 23, 1913, PRO, FO 800/161; Bax-Ironside to Nicolson, April 8, 1912, and July 11, 1913, PRO, FO 800/356 and 368; Cartwright to Nicolson, June 20, 1912, FO 800/357; Nicolson to Bunsen, ambassador to Austria, March 2 and 16, 1914, and Nicolson to Bax-Ironside, May 25, 1914, and Bax-Ironside to Nicolson, June 17, 1914, FO 800/373.
43 A good example of this conviction is found in a private letter of Nicolson to Sir Charles Hardinge, former Permanent Undersecretary and then Viceroy of India, on July 2, 1913. After discussing Austria’s understandable dismay at the Tsar’s proclamation of a virtual protectorate over all the Slavs, Nicolson remarked: “My own idea is that whatever developments the present situation may assume there is little doubt that sooner or later all these Slav States will feel it necessary to come into the orbit of Russia and not remain in an attitude of hostility towards her. Moreover, Austria is far too weak a reed for them to rely upon. Pessimistic prophets predict that the next Empire which will go to pieces will be that of Austria-Hungary” (FO 800/367).
44 E.g., see Hardinge to Nicolson, Simla, May 16, 1913, ibid; “I devoutly hope that Russia may be preoccupied for some years to come in the Near East with the interests of the Slav races, so that those who favour a forward policy in Asia may receive no encouragement.”
45 See Nicolson to Bunsen, March 30, 1914, and Bunsen to Nicolson, April 10, FO 800/373.
6 Prudence vs Recklessness: Assessing Responsibility for World War I
1 Samuel R Williamson Jr. and Ernest R. May, “An Identity of Opinion: Historians and July 1914,” Journal of Modern History 79, no. 2 (2007): 335–87.
2 Francis R. Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy among the Great Powers 1815–1918 (New York, 1990); Samuel R. Williamson Jr., Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (New York, 1991); Günther Kronenbitter, “Krieg im Frieden”: Die Führung der k.u.k. Armee und die Großmachtpolitik Österreich-Ungarns 1906–1914 (Munich, 2003).
3 Christopher Andrew, Théophile Delcassé and the Making of the Entente Cordiale: A Reappraisal of French Foreign Policy, 1898–1905 (New York, 1968); Roger Brown, Fashoda Reconsidered: The Impact of Domestic Politics on French Policy in Africa, 1893–1898 (Baltimore, 1970); Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism in the Dark Continent (New York, 1961).
4 Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy: The Least of the Great Powers (London, 1979); Richard J. B. Bosworth, Italy and the Approach of the First World War (New York, 1983).
5 Wolf D. Behschnitt, Nationalismus bei Serben und Kroaten 1830–1914: Analyse und Typologie der nationalen Ideologie (Munich, 1980); Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (Munich, 1996).
6 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford, 2007).
7 See the related discussion of prudence in James W. Davis, “The (Good) Person and the (Bad) Situation: Recapturing Innocence at the Expense of Responsibility?,” in James W. Davis, ed., Psychology, Strategy and Conflict: Perceptions of Insecurity in International Relations (London, 2013).
8 Walter T. K. Nugent, Habits of Empire: A History of American Expansionism (New York, 2009).
9 Robert Jervis, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, 1997).
10 Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wright, eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London, 1966), 147.
7 World War I: A Tragedy, Not a Pity
* Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York, 1999).
8 A. J. P. Taylor’s International System
1 Taylor’s other works, those on Prince Bismarck, the Habsburg Monarchy, the origins of the Second World War, the history of England 1914–45, and various lesser monographs and collections of essays, all contain considerable material on foreign policy and international history, and certain of them will be referred to here. But The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford, 1954) is undoubtedly his magnum opus in this field and his only detailed account of international politics over an extended period of time, and represents the right place to look for his system, if any.
2 A. J. P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1792–1939 (London, 1957), 17, 22–3.
3 To keep this from being a naked assertion, take just one passage, critical in Taylor’s account of the origins of the First World War: “Certainly, Russia would have been a more formidable Power by 1917, if her military plans had been carried through and if she had escaped internal disturbance—two formidable hypotheses. But it is unlikely that the three-year service would have been maintained in France; and, in any case, the Russians might well have used their strength against Great Britain in Asia rather than to attack Germany, if they had been left alone. In fact, peace must have brought Germany the mastery of Europe within a few years.” Here are five instances of counterfactual speculation in three sentences, each one more sweeping and more ungrounded in reasoning and evidence than the last (Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 528).
4 P. E. Tetlock and A. Belkin, eds., Counterfactual Thought Experiments in International Politics (Princeton, 1996), chap. 1.
5 K. Burk, Troublemaker: The Life and History of A. J. P. Taylor (New Haven, CT, 2001), 96–7. The quotations are from Taylor’s The Italian Problem in European Diplomacy, 1847–9 (Manchester, 1934), 1.
6 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, xix.
7 Ibid., xx.
8 Ibid., xxi.
9 Ibid., xxxvi.
10 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, xxxv–xxxvi.
11 P. W. Schroeder, “The Nineteenth Century System: Balance of Power or Political Equilibrium?,” Review of International Studies 15 (1989): 135–53.
12 E.g., E. B. Haas, “The Balance of Power: Prescription, Concept, or Propaganda,” World Politics 5 (1953): 442–77; M. Wight, “The Balance of Power,” in H. Butterfield and M. Wight, eds., Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London, 1966), 149–75.
13 Taylor, Trouble Makers, 13.
14 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 112.
15 Ibid., xxi, xxiii.
16 Ibid., 44.
17 Ibid., 85.
18 Ibid., 99.
19 Ibid., 156, 167.
20 Ibid., 200. This assertion, incidentally, together with Taylor’s previous one that “neither Russia, Great Britain, nor Austria-Hungary cared about South Germany,” (199) is true enough regarding Britain; mainly false regarding Russia; and quite wrong regarding Austria-Hungary. For the best of several major works showing that the Austrian government cared strongly in 1867–70 about preventing a war over the German question, which was bound to arouse German nationalism in Austria and thereby threaten the state, and about trying to preserve the 1866 status quo by strengthening the independence of the south German states, see H. Lutz, Österreichisch-Ungarn und die Gründung des Deutschen Reiches (Frankfurt am Main, 1979).
21 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 240.
22 A. J. P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1809–1918 (London, 1948).
23 An example is the remark Taylor makes about Bismarck’s elaborate tangle of balanced antagonisms that emerged from the crisis-ridden year of 1887: “The balance which Bismarck had created at the beginning of 1888 was a curious one” (325). Here “balance” would seem to mean any alignment of the powers or pattern of relations between them, however strange or artificial, that does not constitute empire or hegemony.
24 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 324.
25 Ibid., 427.
26 Ibid., 428.
27 Ibid., 438.
28 Ibid., 518.
29 Ibid., 519–20.
30 Ibid., 528.
31 An example: D. C. B. Lieven in his excellent work on Russia and the Origins of the First World War (London, 1983) argues that German fears before 1914 of Russia’s armaments program and of growing Pan-Slav and anti-German and anti-Austrian sentiment in Russia help explain Germany’s decision for war, but do not justify it because the Germans “should have realized both that Russia was still ill-placed to follow Prussia’s example [of 1866–71] and that should she attempt to do so the self-regulating mechanism of the Balance of Power would turn against her.” Since German fears of Russia centered, just like Russian, French, and British fears of Germany, not mainly on the danger of sudden attack, but on being ultimately dominated by militarily superior foes and thus losing one’s great-power independence, and since containing Germany and achieving a margin of military superiority over it in order to prevent this was precisely the shared goal (and the only shared one) of British, French, and Russian policy, and constituted their common definition of a satisfactory balance of power, the suggestion that Germany should have trusted in the self-regulating mechanism of the balance of power to prevent the Triple Entente powers from pursuing the very “balance of power” they were bent on achieving seems almost bizarre.
32 P. W. Schroeder, The Transformation of International Politics, 1763–1848 (Oxford, 1994), 800n.
33 See R. J. B. Bosworth, Italy: The Least of the Great Powers (Cambridge, UK, 1979).
34 K. N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, 1979); S. M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca, NY, 1987).
35 A. Hillgruber, Bismarcks Aussenpolitik (Freiburg, 1972).
36 S. Förster et al., eds., Bismarck, Europe, and Africa: The Berlin Africa Conference, 1884–5 and the Onset of Partition (New York, 1988).
37 See P. W. Schroeder, “Alliances, 1815–1945: Weapons of Power and Tools of Management,” in K. Knorr, ed., Historical Problems of National Security (Lawrence, KS, 1976), 247–86.
38 See R. Jervis, J. Gross Stein, and R. N. Lebow, Psychology and Deterrence (Baltimore, 1985).
39 Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, 89–90.
40 Ibid., 90.
41 Ibid., 105, 385.
42 Taylor’s account, incidentally, contains clearly incorrect statements on important points. For instance, he claims that Russia only wanted Serbia and Romania as neutral buffer states between it and Austria-Hungary. The facts are that Serbia had been Russia’s ally since 1912, that Russia and France were working hard to win Romania over to their alliance, and that Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire were also being wooed to join the anti-Austrian coalition.
43 E.g., N. Ferguson’s The Pity of War (London, 1999) has made a considerable stir by challenging prevailing views (including Taylor’s) on British prewar policy and on German responsibility for the First World War and by arguing that a German victory would have been better than the actual outcome. Virtually every critic has fastened on these arguments, mainly denouncing them and reaffirming the standard views about Germany. Few noticed that Ferguson largely ignores Austria-Hungary in his account and that what he does write closely follows Taylor.
9 World War I and the Vienna System: The Last Eighteenth-Century War and the First Modern Peace
1 Here again one might note a contrast between this and that of the eighteenth century prior to 1787, where many local disturbances and risings occurred but developed into major outbreaks of rebellion in particular countries—the Pugachev revolt in Russia, the Rákóczi rising in the Habsburg Monarchy, Serb insurrections in the Ottoman Empire, the movements partly revolutionary and partly traditional-patriotic in Holland, Poland, and Belgium, Irish revolt in Great Britain—only as connected to and in good part produced by international wars. In other words (another oversimplification), in the eighteenth century the serious rebellions and revolution grew mostly out of wars and international conflict, while during the Vienna system, serious rebellions and revolution grew spontaneously but failed to produce wars.
2 I will discuss in the book the contingent changes involved in this, as they always do, above all changes in leadership. For example, had Canning remained foreign secretary instead of being replaced by Castlereagh, it is hard to imagine how much of the evolution in British policy and attitudes could have happened.
3 For example, Napoleon’s system for Europe, though never defined because Napoleon could not do it himself or confine his goals, was imperial in precisely this sense. His only real goal in invading Russia in 1812 was to impose his will on Russia as the last major independent power on the continent, not to acquire territory or other concrete performances and commitments.
4 I may want to draw a parallel here between his ideas and efforts and those of Gorbachev’s in wanting to end the Cold War with the USA in order to draw the USSR closer to Europe. I will certainly bring in at some point how this attempt and its breakdown fits not merely into the story of the origins of war in 1914, but also into the course of the war and of various German and especially Austrian attempts to end it.
Index
Aehrenthal, Baron Alois, xiv, xv, 146, 176, 177–8, 179–80, 187, 325–6, 329–30, 332–7, 335–6, 339, 349
Afflerbach, Holger, 180
Agadir Incident, 83–4
Albania, 101
Alexander I, Tsar, 323
Alexander II, Tsar, 63, 327, 335
Alexander III, Tsar, 66, 216
Algeciras, Act of, 28
Algeciras, Conference and Treaty of, 75, 240, 34
Alsace-Lorraine, 25, 28, 60–1, 62
American Revolution, War of the, 269
Anderson, M. S., 314
Angell, Norman, The Great Illusion, 124
Anglo-Boer War, xi
Anglo-French Entente Cordiale, 170
Anglo-German Agreement (1900), 13
Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 75
Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, 14, 26, 117, 209
Anglo-Russian Great Game, 160, 310–11, 332
Austria-Hungary, xi, xii–xiii, 6–7, 8, 22–35, 44–5, 54, 56–8, 65–6, 86–8, 89, 98–104, 107–12, 112–14, 119–20, 122, 126–31, 133–82, 185, 186–96, 200–1, 203–6, 207, 208, 216–17, 224, 236–8, 247, 252–3, 256–8, 280, 282–4, 300, 317, 325–47, 349
Action Plan, 333–4
Balkan Wars (1912–13), 84–5
Bosnian Crisis, 28, 80–3, 174–82, 187, 329–33, 338–41
Bulgarian Crisis, 66
Crimean War, 48–9
Eastern Crisis (1875–8), 62–5, 178
Greek-Ottoman conflict (1821–32), 322
Italian Crisis, 50–3
July Crisis, 318–21
Napoleonic Wars, 154–5
Russo-Japanese War, 172–4
War of the Bavarian Succession, 269
Austrian Succession, War of the, 327
Austro-Ottoman wars (1689–1739), 269
Austro-Prussian War (1866), 56–8, 62, 253
The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations, 1941 (Schroeder), v
Balkan League, 24–5, 26–7, 84, 84–5, 153, 170, 187, 188, 190, 196, 209, 218, 240, 240–1, 257
Balkan Wars (1912–13), 84–5, 101, 103, 170, 189–90, 196–7, 208, 209, 218, 240
Bavarian Succession, War of the (1778–9), 269
Behnen, Michael, 176, 177
Belkin, Aaron, 91, 93, 96
Belloc, Hilaire, 165
Berchtold, Leopold Graf, 7, 187–8, 190, 192, 194, 325–6, 339
Berlin, Treaty of, 81–2, 175, 178–9, 327, 340–1
Berlin Congo Conference, 164, 248
Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway, 69, 77, 109, 111n15, 170–1, 241
Bertie, Frances, 11
Bismarck, Otto von, x, 12–13, 54–5, 56–67, 119, 163–4, 165, 178, 179, 236–9, 247, 253, 254, 277–8, 326, 327, 335, 337, 342–3
Bismarckian system, 62–7, 179, 238–9
Boer Wars, xi, 9, 16, 21, 72–3, 76–7, 166, 170, 209
Bosnia-Herzegovina, xiv–xv, 63, 64
Bosnian Crisis (1908), 28, 80–3, 174–82, 187, 198, 208, 240, 329–33, 338–41, 343
Boxer Rebellion, xi, 73–4, 166
Bridge, F. R., 342–3
Bucharest, Treaty of, 84, 101, 190, 199
Budapest Accords, 164
Bulgaria, 64, 65, 84, 84–5, 188–9, 189–90, 192, 195, 196, 198
Bulgarian Crisis, 66, 136, 138, 179, 187–8, 238, 254
Bulgarian Horrors, the, 63
