To Arms

by Hew Strachan

  Nonetheless, by late 1912 the heat had gone out of the Anglo-German naval arms race. This was due primarily neither to Churchill’s determined response nor to Bethmann Hollweg’s pursuit of détente. The core explanation was the implosion of Sammlungspolitik itself. By 1912 the latter had become more of a vehicle by which to drive Germany’s armaments policies than an end in itself.54 Arms spending in 1913 accounted for only 4.7 per cent of Gemany’s net social product, and it was therefore too small to have any stabilizing effect in the economy as a whole; much of it was spent on personnel rather than plant, and its consequences were to reduce the capital available for further investment while driving up interest rates. Bethmann Hollweg’s response was contradictory. On the one hand he publicly rejected international competition over arms, while on the other he espoused the army’s case against that of the navy.55 The latter was the ultimate loser. Crucially, the Kaiser withdrew his support for Tirpitz, and at the same time elements within the navy itself demanded that manning and training should take priority over matériel. On 6 February 1913 Tirpitz announced to the Reichstag’s budget committee that he now found Churchill’s proposed 16 : 10 Dreadnought ratio acceptable. Germany’s renunciation of the Anglo-German naval arms race was effectively unilateral.56

  The other bridge to détente open to Bethmann Hollweg was through colonial policy. Here Bethmann enjoyed greater success. Neither France nor Britain was opposed to German colonialism per se, provided it did not clash with their own interests. In the Moroccan agreement France accepted German ambitions in Central Africa; so did Britain in its negotiations with Germany over the Portuguese colonies, and specifically Angola. Between 1912 and 1914 Britain and Germany found that their interests in the Baghdad railway could, by dividing the line at Basra, be rendered complementary rather than contradictory: simultaneously Germany—short of capital because of the demands of its own rapid industrialization—welcomed French finance and involvement in the project. Within France the formation of the radical-socialist bloc in October 1913 forced Poincaré to appoint a radical, Doumergue, as prime minister, and Doumergue brought back Caillaux as his finance minister. By late 1913 both Poincaré’s orientation of French foreign policy and even his status as president looked less secure, and when in January 1914 Germany and Russia argued over their respective interests in Turkey, French support for Russia was more cautious than Russia might have expected. Furthermore, the question of the three-year law was reopened for debate. Bethmann’s hope, that extra-European interests carefully played would show more points of contact between France and Germany and would reveal the underlying tensions between the imperial ambitions of the Entente powers, seemed to be well founded. Certainly it provided the basis for much of the optimism with which many Europeans greeted 1914. But Bethmann’s policy worked because it was limited. It was effective in certain geographical areas where tensions were already low; it did not push any of the Entente powers into breaking with its allies. And it came too late. Colonial antagonisms had already shaped European alliances; it would take a long time and considerable patience before colonial agreements could loosen those alliances.

  Bethmann Hollweg had come to share Bülow’s position, to recognize that Germany’s economic strength and great-power status made expansionist pretensions legitimate. To that extent détente was his version of Weltpolitik. Furthermore, it was clear that in Bethmann’s hands, even more than in Bülow’s, Weltpolitik could be accommodated in international politics. The events of 1905–14 showed that Franco-German and Anglo-German disputes could be settled without war. Even the naval rivalry had become institutionalized to the point where Churchill could claim, admittedly after the event, that it was increasingly irrelevant to Anglo-German controversies.57 Bethmann’s confidant the youthful Kurt Riezler, in his pseudonymous work of 1913, Grundzüge der Weltpolitik (the fundamentals of world policy), concluded that the dangers of defeat were such that war had lost its utility and that, although it might occur through irrationality or dire necessity, it would not occur through calculation. In particular, he saw the alliance system as a restraint, since in no one crisis would all allies simultaneously view their interests as so threatened that they would support each other to the point of war.58

  Riezler’s analysis, however, also revealed exactly how destructive Weltpolitik had been to the tenor of west European relations. All nations, he thought, conceived of coexistence ‘as a preparation for hostility, as a postponement of hostility’; armaments were therefore a form of that postponement and were an essential component of the bluff necessary in diplomacy. Weltpolitik had militarized international relations. The naval arms race had assumed a momentum of its own, with ship construction planned up to a decade ahead, and with national budgets and patterns of employment shaped round it. The alliances had been given substance and direction by staff talks and war plans. Despite the very great level of economic interdependence between France, Britain, and Germany in 1914, and the genuine need of most businessmen and industrialists for peace, economic rivalry was increasingly expressed in national terms. Most important of all, the effect of the two Moroccan crises was to subordinate colonial questions to European. They had shown that, geographically, the division between Europe and the rest of the world was not as neat as the populations of north-west Europe sometimes seemed to imagine. The problems of the North African coastline, the balance of power in the Mediterranean, could not but affect the other powers on the Mediterranean littoral—Turkey, which was simultaneously of Europe and Asia, and Italy and Austria-Hungary. Nor had Weltpolitik succeeded in resolving Germany’s domestic tensions: at best it had postponed them. Germany did not in the end go to war in pursuit of its Weltpolitik. But the conduct of Weltpolitik, and the setbacks which it entailed, contributed to its sense of humiliation, beleaguerment, and fatalism in 1914. And, once war was declared, the continuity of Weltpolitik—both in terms of Germany’s war aims and in terms of Germany’s domestic political and social pressures—was to become all too evident.

  AUSTRIA–HUNGARY AND THE BALKANS

  In both the major crises triggered by Germany in the pursuit of Weltpolitik, the two Moroccan confrontations of 1905 and 1911, Germany enjoyed less than fulsome support from its major ally, Austria-Hungary.59 During the war German generals were apt to cite Nibelung loyalty when referring to the Austro-German alliance, but they did so between clenched teeth. The shared Germanic traditions to which such comparisons appealed suggested a common identity that was in practice largely superficial—or, if real, was subscribed to only by a minority (since in 1910 Germans constituted a quarter of the total) of the Austro-Hungarian population. The more recent history of the two countries suggested division rather than fusion. In 1866 Prussia had summarily ended Austria’s leadership of the Germanic states on the battlefield, and although the memory of that war seems to have rankled remarkably little, the subsequent thrust of Germany’s development highlighted differences as much as points of contact. German unification elevated the idea of nationalism, but Austria-Hungary—as a multinational empire—had perforce relied for its continued integrity throughout the nineteenth century on supra-nationalism. In order to consolidate its legitimacy as a government, Austria-Hungary had used the networks of international relations, the authority of treaties, to buttress the domestic status quo; the creation of Germany, the cuckoo in the European nest, had upset the Concert system and the balance of power. Most important of all, economic development had transformed these otherwise implicit distinctions into direct and overt competition. Although the growth rate in industry in Austria-Hungary was impressive between 1890 and 1914, it started from a low point and its effect was patchy. Over that period railway construction in the empire all but matched that of Germany, but by 1913 the density of track per square kilometre of territory was only a third that of its ally. In Hungary the number of industrial workers rose by 76 per cent between 1898 and 1913, but industrial workers only constituted 17 per cent of the working population. In Austria industrial productivity incr
eased 50 per cent between 1900 and 1910, but in that latter year 56.5 per cent of the workforce of Austria-Hungary were still in agriculture. Agricultural productivity had risen, but remained low relative to other states and, even in those years when yields were sufficient, protectionism acted as a block to food exports.60 The dual monarchy was therefore in no position to compete with Germany, which used its productive capacity as an arm of its foreign policy. Throughout the decade before the First World War Austria-Hungary saw its Balkan markets fall to its ally. In 1901–5 Romania drew 28.5 per cent of its imports from Austria-Hungary and 27.1 per cent from Germany; by 1913 these figures were 23.4 and 40.3 per cent.61 Most galling of all was the outcome of Austria-Hungary’s decision to impose economic sanctions on Serbia in 1906. In retaliation for Serbia’s decision not to order arms from the Skoda works in Bohemia but from the French, Austria-Hungary refused to import Serbian livestock, in particular pigs. Serbia’s response was to find alternative markets, including Germany: by 1910, when Austro-Serb commercial relations were resumed, Germany had replaced Austria-Hungary as one of Serbia’s principal trading partners.62

  It was therefore necessity rather than affection which fuelled the Nibelung compact. For Germany, Austria-Hungary was better than no ally at all. The dual monarchy broke the ring of encircling and seemingly hostile powers; more positively, and increasingly more importantly, Austria-Hungary was the land bridge not merely to the Balkans but to Asia Minor. For the Habsburg monarchy the Austro-German alliance replaced the Concert of Europe as the bulwark behind its fragile identity. For Germans within Austria the alliance removed any possible conflict of loyalty: 1866 had seemingly sundered them from Germany proper, but the alliance and its potentialities had reunited them. Moreover, Germany’s support also extended to the Magyars, whose landowning aristocracy dominated Hungary in power if not in numbers, and whom the Kaiser portrayed as honorary Teutons in their battle against the Slav. The alliance therefore provided the Ausgleich of 1867 with an external validation which its parlous domestic condition made indispensable.63

  Although in 1815 and again in 1848 the Habsburgs had evaded the threat of nationalism, in 1867 they had struck a compromise with Hungary. Franz Joseph became simultaneously emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. Each state had its own assembly, the Austrian Reichsrat and the Hungarian Diet. Delegations of the two convened once a year, albeit in separate buildings, to approve common expenditure. Ministers for the two nations were answerable to the emperor. The two national ministers president, plus the three joint ministers—the foreign minister, the minister of war, and the common minister of finance—together constituted the common ministerial council. The foreign minister set the agenda for the common council and thus became the de facto chancellor of the dual monarchy. The army itself was also common to both parts of the empire, and in many ways the most effective embodiment of its supra-national and multinational status, although in addition Austria and Hungary each had a separate territorial army. The Ausgleich was a pragmatic and sensible response which lasted until 1918. Its strength rested on its application of internal imperialism: the Germans, albeit in a somewhat more liberal and enlightened clothing, were left free to dominate Austria, while Hungary was consigned—by virtue of a very restrictive franchise—to the Magyars. Its weaknesses were twofold. First, the Ausgleich was renewable every ten years: Austria-Hungary was therefore on perpetual notice as to its future. Secondly, it was a compromise that commended itself to only one group, the Magyars. For everybody else it was a halfway house. A few wanted a return to centralism. More saw the relative independence achieved by the Magyars as an indication that comparable devolution might be possible for the other ethnic groups. Of the 20 million inhabitants of Hungary, less than half were Magyars and the remainder included Romanians (nearly 3 million), Slovaks and Croats (nearly 2 million of each), and Serbs (less than a million). Austria was even more variegated: 10 million Germans formed the largest group in the total population of 28 million, but 4.9 million Poles and 3.2 million Ruthenes lived in Galicia, 6.5 million Czechs in Bohemia, and there were smaller groupings of Slovenes, Italians, Serbs, and Croats. For many of these the Ausgleich became not a stopping point, but an intermediate stage to trialism (a third, Slav, component in the empire) or even federalism.64

  The major block to change, and indeed the key element in domestic politics in the decade before the First World War, was the intransigence of the Magyars. Either trialism or federalism would diminish Hungary; the Magyar solution was one of repression and of Magyarization, particularly in relation to the use of the Hungarian language. In 1903 the Hungarian Diet declined to increase the recruit contingent for the army in line with the growth in population without the effective formation of a separate Hungarian army. Franz Joseph refused, a challenge to the unity of the army being a challenge to Habsburg authority itself. The Diet was twice dissolved in an effort to form a fresh government, and even the possibility of a military occupation mooted. However, the solution to the impasse most attractive to the monarchy was to widen the Hungarian franchise: the power of the Magyar aristocracy would be broken and at the same time sufficient national divisions created to allow the possibility of enhanced Habsburg influence. By the same token the major Magyar parties, and in particular Count Istvan Tisza, Hungary’s minister president in 1903–5 and again from 1913, were determined to block suffrage reform. Magyar compliance with Franz Joseph’s instructions was so minimal that in 1914 only 6 per cent of Hungary’s population enjoyed the vote and only fifty of the 453 deputies in the Diet were not Magyars.65 On the other hand, the threat of universal suffrage contributed to the renewal of the Ausgleich (albeit on terms which left the Austrians paying 63.6 per cent of the common expenses). Furthermore, Tisza forced through the army bill in 1912 and reformed the Diet so as to make its proceedings more workable. He also moderated policy towards the Croats, second only to the Romanians as the largest and most independent of the non-Magyar groupings in Hungary. Tisza was shrewd enough to realize that Magyar bloody-mindedness must not go so far as to make the Ausgleich unworkable: that would only hasten its demise. Hungary would maximize its power, he calculated, if it established itself as the key element in a continuing empire, and indeed if that empire remained a member of a major international alliance. The by-products of such policies—effective government and the enhancement of the army—pleased Franz Joseph, and were sufficient to persuade him to abandon the pursuit of real political reform.

  But the Magyars knew that the confrontation was only deferred. Franz Joseph had come to the throne in 1848, and his succession could not be long postponed. His heir, Franz Ferdinand, was notorious for his anti-Magyar views. Both trialism and federalism had been canvassed within Franz Ferdinand’s circle, although the heir apparent ultimately embraced centralism through the idea of a greater German Austria.66 Whatever the means, the Magyars could expect a renewed challenge to their position in the not too distant future and this alone was sufficient to confirm the precarious state of the Ausgleich.

  MAP 2. THE BALKAN PENINSULA IN 1914

  Franz Joseph’s espousal of a moderate liberalism did not proceed from any love of liberalism per se but from its attraction as a device to soften national opposition and thus indirectly to buttress Habsburg power. Within Austria liberalism of this sort was progressively applied, but without achieving the expected effects. South Slav and Czech culture and education received a considerable boost from ordinances in 1880 and 1881 which allowed official languages other than German. The suffrage of 1882 progressively enfranchised the lower middle class, the shopkeeper and the artisan. The Poles in Galicia became effectively self-governing. The final step, that of universal suffrage introduced in 1907, was in part the corollary of Franz Joseph’s attempt to carry through the same reform in Hungary. It was also prompted by an exaggerated fear of socialism, the 1905 Russian revolution having stimulated disturbances in Vienna and Prague. Socialism, if brought within the Reichsrat, might be channelled towards reformism, not revolution
; it might—as a supranational movement, committed to the benefits of large economic units— buttress the larger forum of the empire as a whole; and it was hoped that the clerical parties would react and organize a more conservatively inclined lower-class vote. In the 1907 elections the socialists duly increased their representation sixfold, to eighty-six seats out of 516. But socialism in Austria was not the threat or the force it was in western Europe: nationalism splintered it too, and the Czechs broke away from the Austrian socialists to form their own party. The 1907 franchise had been calculated on the basis of national groupings, and indeed had had to rest on the existence of the divisions which nationalism would create in order to prevent a Slav coalition outnumbering the German representation within the Reichsrat. Therefore, although party loyalties reflecting class and occupational factors were formed, ethnic division was preeminent. Czech obstruction was particularly vociferous. Only the Poles, driven into loyalty by their fear of the Russians and of the latter’s support for the Ruthenes in Galicia, could be counted on. Parliamentary government, even parliamentary debate, was rendered impossible, and in March 1914 Count Karl Sturgkh, Austria’s minister president since 1910, adjourned the Reichstag altogether. It was not to reconvene until 1917. The trappings of constitutionalism thus proved more resilient and more continuous in Hungary, where they were buttressed by a form of domestic colonialism, than they did in the more liberal conditions of Austria.