Two years into the centennial boom of books on World War I, the flood of new titles shows no signs of slowing down. So many publications have appeared that it is difficult to pick a single dominant trend. Nonetheless, if one had to, the rediscovery of the Balkans might be it, as represented by studies such as Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 and Geoff Wawro's Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire.

Dr. Marvin Fried's new book on Austro-Hungarian War Aims in the Balkans during World War I is a welcome addition to the genre, even if the novelty of the subject, in the wake of the centennial publishing boom, is not quite as great as the author and publisher seem to have wished.

Fried has done a substantial amount of new research in Austrian and particularly Hungarian archives, unearthing valuable new nuggets of information on the complex structure of policymaking in the Dual Monarchy, friction between the Habsburg Foreign Ministry (MdÄ) and army command (AOK) (33 and passim), along with little-known Balkan spats such as the Austro-Bulgarian clash in Kosovo following the defeat of Serbia in 1915 (144–45).

On these and other issues, Fried is consistently scholarly, well-informed, balanced, reliable, and fair. He demonstrates convincingly that, whereas in Berlin, the German General Staff overrode the Foreign Office on war aims, in Vienna it was the diplomats and not the army who determined Balkan foreign policy. Again and again, Fried shows how Conrad's goals of crushing the South Slav states, most significantly his aim of annexing Serbia “right down to the Greek border” (133), ran aground in the face of MdÄ opposition.

The author is less convincing, however, in his larger argument. Fried's goal, stated at the outset, is to restore the importance of Austro-Hungarian initiative vis-à-vis the prevailing view of the Habsburg empire as “a mere ‘corpse,’ shackled to its powerful German ally and entirely dependent on it for survival” (1). And yet, at every turn in his narrative, discussions in Vienna over Balkan war aims are upended or upstaged by battlefield events over which Austria-Hungary had little control, including the German breakthrough at Gorlice–Tarnów in May 1915 (60), the Turco-German victory at Gallipoli (73–74), the German- (and Bulgarian-)dominated crushing of Serbia (107), the Brusilov offensive of 1916 (171), and finally the February Revolution in Russia (198–200). As Fried himself concludes, honestly if self-defeatingly, in the end “the divergence between Germany and the Entente, rather than bits of land the Monarchy wanted in the Balkans, would make or break the prospects for peace” (197–98).

The Romanian question nicely illustrates the limits of Fried's approach. As readers follow the intense debates over Romanian intervention in Vienna, they will come to share Fried's view that “everything seemed to depend on the Rumanians” (176–77). They will share this view, that is, until the author reveals on the very next page that, within weeks of Romania's supposedly decisive intervention against the Central Powers on 27 August 1916, a German counteroffensive crushed Romania utterly. This episode in effect disproves two of the author's arguments simultaneously, showing both how irrelevant Romanian intervention was in the war, and how “entirely dependent” the Dual Monarchy was on Germany (178).

Fried might have avoided tying himself in knots like this had he paid closer attention to the secondary literature. Despite devoting a whole chapter to literature review on “War Aims Research” (6–16), Fried's bibliography entirely omits major recent studies such as Wawro's Mad Catastrophe and Alexander Watson's Ring of Steel: Austria-Hungary and Germany in World War I. Because these works came out during the past two years, the author may have missed them until it was too late to make his deadline; but this cannot be true of other missing works such as Frank Weber's Eagles on the Crescent: Germany, Austria, and the Diplomacy of the Turkish Alliance (1970), or the reviewer's own Russian Origins of the First World War (2011).

These flaws aside, Austro-Hungarian War Aims is still a worthy addition to the specialist literature on World War I. Fried has discovered a wealth of fascinating new information from the archives and assembled it carefully enough that readers may come to their own conclusions about the data.