1. No War between Vienna and Belgrade

If only wise and peace-loving statesmen in St. Petersburg had de-escalated tension by advising the Serbian government to yield to the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum of 23 July, telling them that the Tsar was not willing to support a state that harboured accomplices to terrorist assassination. Had not their own Prime Minister, Peter Stolypin, been assassinated in 1911, and their own Tsar Alexander killed by a terrorist bomb in 1881? After all, what would have happened if, in 1913, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sazonov had urged Serbia to yield to an Austrian ultimatum and end its invasion of Albania, whereupon Serbian soldiers had left the disputed areas? We still find it difficult to understand why the Tsar wanted to side with the regicides. Further, one must remember that Russia was not bound by any treaty to assist Serbia during a war. Without Russian support, Serbia had no chance of defeating Austria, so that the Serbian government was ready to yield to the Austrian ultimatum of 23 July 1914 when, on 25 July, news came from St. Petersburg that Russia would take Serbia under its protection, encouraging Belgrade to resist and go to war.

Moreover, if wise and peace-loving statesmen in Berlin had told Vienna that it could not count on German support to start a war with Serbia, as it was unreasonable at that time to attack a sovereign state because some of its nationals were engaged in a political crime, Vienna would have refrained from the invasion. As a matter of fact, in a conversation with the Austrian ambassador in Paris on 4 July, the French President, Poincaré, spoke of Sarajevo as an act of an aberrant individual for which no political agency, and certainly no sovereign state, could be considered to be liable. Thus, Pasič, the Serbian Prime Minister, stated definitely that Sarajevo had nothing to do with ‘official Serbia’. In fact, Pasič had warned Vienna of a terrorist danger in early June. In addition, Dr Friedrich von Wiesener, who had been sent to Belgrade by the Austrian government, concluded on 13 July, after a scrupulous investigation, that there was no evidence to prove the responsibility or complicity of the Belgrade government yet. In present-day terms, declaring war on Belgrade because of the role of Serbian nationals, would be the same as if the British government declared war on the Irish Republic because of the involvement of some Irishmen in IRA activities in Ulster.

The lack of German support of Austria and no Russian support of Serbia would have meant that there was no war, and that the wise men in Berlin and St. Petersburg had won the day. But, in fact, as we all know, on 28 July the war did finally break out.

So, why should we speculate on what would have happened if events had taken a different course? Why shall we engage in an exercise of counterfactual history, i.e. the study not of what happened, but what would probably have taken place if the people in control had chosen a different course of action? Counterfactual history is no idle pastime, but a serious technique of historical research, because it shows the alternative options that were open and illustrates the importance of the decisions that were, in fact, taken at one point. It also shows that the past was not pre-ordained by ‘the laws of history’, but the result of choices made by groups of people. So, continuing along this line of thought, let us ask what peaceful settlement might have come about within the Austrian–Serbian conflict. There presumably would have been a four-power conference to work out an Austrian–Serbian modus vivendi, attended by Austria, Germany, Russia and Serbia, and possibly presided over by the peace-loving Hungarian Prime Minister, Count Stefan Tisza. On the one hand, the Serbian Government would have solemnly denied any involvement in the Sarajevo assassination and declared its determination to be a good neighbour to Austria, thus believing in conversation rather than violence and promising to prosecute those nationals who were involved in nationalist plotting. In fact, Major Tankositch, whose apprehension for helping the plotters was demanded by the Austrian ultimatum of 23 July, was already under arrest.

On the other hand, the Austrians would have recognized the real grievances of the Bosnian Serbs – some 43% of the population – admitted that they had been discriminated against, and would have promised them considerable autonomy in order to preserve their language and religion in accordance with the plans for decentralization of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, who was a protector of the minorities in the Habsburg Empire. The Austrians might even have given the Bosnian Serbs the right to organize a referendum about the question of whether they wanted to stay in Austria or join the Kingdom of Serbia. Vienna would accept the Serbian assurances and promise mutual friendship and good neighbourliness. Therefore, a Balkan war and a European war would have been avoided to the delight of the pacifists in the European capitals – Tisza in Budapest, Bethmann-Hollweg in Berlin, Viviani and Jean Jaurès in Paris, and Lord Morley in London – while the bellicose statesmen – Berchtold in Vienna and Churchill in London – would have been disappointed, as well as the generals – Conrad von Hötzendorf in Vienna and Helmut von Moltke in Berlin – who would have dreamed of leading their armies to battle and victory.

2. Vienna’s War Aim

Leaving behind historical fiction, we now enter the world of hard facts, asking the question of what exactly was Vienna’s war aim when the hostilities arose.

In Vienna and Berlin, everyone agreed that ‘Serbia should be taught a lesson’ and even ‘eliminated as a political power factor in the Balkans’, as Berchtold wrote to the German Kaiser on 3 July.Reference McMeekin ¹ Already, on the day after Sarajevo, Count Tisza complained in a letter to Franz Josef that the Austrian Minister of Foreign Affairs was keen on ‘a settlement of accounts with Serbia’ – a view shared by the otherwise peace-loving Austrian emperor who had decided, as Berchtold told the German ambassador in Vienna on 8 July, that ‘the time had come for a reckoning with Serbia’ (Ref. Reference McMeekin1, p. 19).

But what did ‘teaching Serbia a lesson’ – a rather vague and emotional phrase – mean in practical terms? In this case, everyone seemed to disagree, as several plans were mooted, and each one was more unrealistic than the others. On 6 July, Count Alexander Hoyos, Berchtold’s secretary, for example, told Arthur Zimmermann, German undersecretary of state, that an Austrian attack on Serbia would lead – as had happened to Poland in the eighteenth century – to a partition of its territory, with as beneficiaries Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and even Albania. This may be seen as an ironic idea if one remembers that only a year before Serbia had tried to occupy parts of Albania, as has already been pointed out. However, on 7 July, Count Tisza made it clear that he opposed any kind of partition and would only agree to an eventual reduction in the size of Serbian territory. He was equally opposed to the plans for an annexation of Serbia, as Bosnia-Herzegovina had been annexed by Austria in 1908, for he wanted no more unruly Serbs in the Dual Monarchy. On his part, Berchtold seemed to want a compromise between these two approaches when he advocated reducing Serbia’s size by forcing it to cede as large parts of its territory as possible. Following a yet different line of thought, Count Stürgkh, the Austrian Prime Minister, said on 19 July that Serbia might be put in a relation of dependence on Vienna ‘by means of the deposition of the ruling Austraphobic dynasty’ (Ref. Reference McMeekin1, p. 110), but nobody could think of a possible successor. It can be said that Stürgkh’s idea was not very helpful and that explains why some members of his cabinet, on the same 19 July, claimed that a temporary military ‘occupation of parts of Serbia might be necessary’ (Ref. Reference McMeekin1, p. 140). Then, the question would be: why not the whole country, installing a Militärbefehlshaber in Belgrade? Was the prospect of a guerrilla with Serbian partisans too frightening?

Even more extreme were the words, on 28 July, of the Austrian ambassador in London to the effect that his country was resolved on war, so that Serbia could be ‘flattened’ and – afterwards? – carved up by the Balkan states. On 28 July, the occupation idea resurfaced when Bethmann-Hollweg asked the German ambassador in Vienna to assure Sazonov that Austria’s military measures were aimed purely at a temporary occupation of Belgrade so as to force it ‘to comply with Austria’s demands’ (Ref. Reference McMeekin1, p. 242). But what could this ‘occupation’ entail and what did ‘temporary’ mean? All those – sometimes extravagant and discordant – statements make it clear that Vienna had no definite and concrete war aim in mind when it started another Balkan, and eventually a European, armed conflict. For a cool and detached observer at a distance of 100 years, all these issues may seem obvious, but in the hectic days of July 1914 coolness and detachment were not the order of the day.

3. Britain’s War Aim

Unlike Austria, Britain had a definite and clear war aim, well-argued by leading statesmen. Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey wrote in his Memoirs that his instinctive feeling was that his country ought to try to help France. Indeed, he maintained that if Britain had stood aside when the German army overran France in the West and repelled the Russian army in the East, ‘Germany… would then [have been] supreme over all the Continent of Europe’.Reference Ferguson ² It was felt that it was in Britain’s interest to counter the consolidation of Europe under one potentially hostile regime.

For centuries Britain had supported the weaker states of Europe in order to avoid the domination of the Continent by one superpower. Grey’s arguments were steeped in history. He evoked the spectre of Napoleon when he told the Cabinet that German policy was that of the great European aggressor. William Pitt’s similar argument for fighting France was also quoted, and even the Holy Roman Empire was mentioned, when Lord Balfour in 1912 accused the German government of planning to resurrect it. In fact, this was a quaint phrase if one realizes that the German–Roman Empire had led a rather nebulous and powerless existence. Is it possible that Balfour was thinking of the Habsburgs, who had produced several German–Roman emperors, or of King Philip II of Spain, a notorious enemy of England?

In his decisive speech to the Commons on 3 August, Grey said that England’s position ‘would be gone if Germany were thus permitted to dominate Europe’ (Ref. Reference Ferguson2, p. 163). Nowadays, the idea that a country should declare war on another because the latter might one day become a competitor for world domination strikes the cool and detached observer as disconcerting, but at the time Britannia had been ruling the waves for so long that it felt like a God-given British birthright to continue to do so.

Seen against this background, the question of Belgian neutrality was only a sideline. Politicians and officials had made it clear that Britain was under no obligation to defend it manu militari under the 1839 treaty in which Britain, France, Prussia and Russia had guaranteed Belgium’s neutrality. In 1905, the Foreign Office expressed the view that this treaty did not bind Britain to uphold Belgian neutrality in any circumstances and at whatever risk.

On 1 August 1914, Grey was not prepared to give the Belgian ambassador a guarantee that, if Germany violated the neutrality of his country, Britain would come to its aid. On 29 July, the Cabinet had already decided to base any response to a German invasion of Belgium on policy rather than on legal obligations. And, already on 27 July, the Cabinet had adopted the view that, while Britain was indeed a signatory of the 1839 treaty, the obligation to uphold Belgian neutrality ‘fell on the signatories collectively, not on any one of them individually’ (Ref. Reference Ferguson2, p. 63). This got Britain nicely off the hook.

In the past it had even been suggested that Belgium could let the German army peacefully cross its territory on the way to France; as, in fact, happened when the Netherlands, in November 1918, allowed the retreating Germans to cross its territory to retreat from Belgium to Germany, and in the summer of 1941, when Sweden allowed German troops to transit from Norway to Finland across northern Sweden. In the Cabinet, Churchill expressed the view that Britain would not necessarily regard a German transit through Belgium as a casus belli as long as the Germans kept clear of the strategically sensitive region around Antwerp and the Scheldt estuary. In other words, the issue was not Belgian neutrality but Belgian geography. If the Germans occupied the whole of Belgium and marched on to the French Channel coast, things would look quite different, for the prospect of an unfriendly power occupying Calais, Dunkirk and Boulogne facing the South coast of England struck terror in British hearts. The German invasion of Belgium on 3 August was therefore a welcome trigger or pretext for the British government to declare war on Germany the following day. Fighting for little Belgium and the rule of law would go down much better with public opinion than turning a European conflict into a World War in order to save ‘England’s position as a world power’. And when news came about the German atrocities in Belgium, committed after the British declaration of war, anti-German feelings ran high and England’s war effort gained popular support. (For more detail see Ref. Reference Ferguson2, the chapter ‘Why Britain Fought,’ 1998, pp. 158–168).

4. What if Britain had Stayed Out of the War?

In August 1914, Britain could have kept out of the war. There was an Entente – literally understood as an understanding – with France, and British and French generals had held talks, yet there was no Treaty-obligation for Britain to join France militarily, and we have seen how Westminster could get round the 1839 Treaty. The decision to enter the European conflict was freely taken, not dictated by some ‘iron law of history’. Both Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey admitted as much in their Memoirs; as Asquith put it: ‘We kept ourselves free to decide … whether we should or should not go to war’ (Ref. Reference Ferguson2, p. 168) and Grey also confirmed that there had been a choice.

Therefore, the question is legitimate: what would have happened if Britain had opted for peace and let the continentals quarrel about Bosnia and Serbia and fight their own wars, as when Bismarck fought Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870? We are back on the counterfactual terrain of probability.

On the Western front, the Germans, unhindered by a British Expeditionary Force, might have won the battle of the Marne and reached and beleaguered Paris as in 1870. But on the Eastern front, Russia would still have forced the German command to divert troops from France, leaving the Kaiser’s army too weakened to crush the French and occupy the country. France, without English support, would have seen no prospect of beating and occupying Germany, so that a stalemate could have followed and an armistice, just as had happened after Sedan in 1870 and as would happen at Compiègne in 1940. In the East, Germany would still have booked important victories, at Tannenberg in 1914 and at Tarnov in 1915, but would have made no real headway against the massive Russian superiority in manpower.

Austria would have remained unsuccessful against Serbia in the first year of the war, but with German help would have managed to overrun the country in 1915. The Austrian-Russian war was mainly fought over the Austrian province of Galicia, an ethnically and religiously mixed area, and a historical bone of contention between Austria, Poland and Russia. In 1914, the expected Russian attack took place, when the Tsar’s army beat the Habsburg forces in the first and second battles of Lvov (Lemberg), but in 1915 the Austrians reconquered that city. So the front moved to and fro undecidedly. Meanwhile, the Dual Monarchy experienced trouble on the home front, as when prime-minister Count Stürgkh was murdered on 21 October 1916. By that time, it would have become clear that total victory on the Russian front was unlikely, with an armistice as the probable outcome. As, in fact, happened in 1918 at Brest-Litovsk, after the Russian soldiers had, in 1917, gone back to their farms. Consequently, as war-weariness and exhaustion set in, Europe would have been ripe for a great Peace Conference, held possibly in Vienna as had occurred in 1815, to assure lasting harmony and prosperity. This was a conference that would have been attended by the belligerents and, possibly, two neutral great powers, Britain and Italy. The Conference, inspired, inter alia, by the German September 1914 blueprint for a post-victory Continent, would have agreed on the following principles.

1. (1) There was to be lasting peace and prosperity on the Continent.

2. (2) To assure harmony and free trade a customs union or common market would be established.

3. (3) Germany, the industrial power-house, was the economic leader.

4. (4) A constitutional court and a court of justice would supervise law and order and practical stability.

5. (5) The map of Europe with its nation-states was basically unchanged, but Poland was resurrected as a sovereign republic, with Austria, Germany and Russia giving up the ancient Polish territories under their control.

6. (6) Belgian and Serbian independence was fully restored and the two countries were granted full reparation for the mayhem caused by the German and Austrian armies.

7. (7) On the home front, the long-suffering masses that clamoured for more democracy obtained general suffrage and governments that could be accountable to elected parliaments instead of hereditary rulers. More welfare was also deemed necessary, so that the social security introduced by Bismarck in Germany became international. And in the Habsburg Empire some form of federalism granted autonomy to the disgruntled minorities.

Britain, having suffered no material or human loss and having done business with the belligerents, would have come out of the turmoil richer and stronger than ever. Her Empire would have been intact and she would have nothing to fear from Germany, which would have kept concentrating on its continental ambitions and would not be in control of the French Channel ports. The British and continental economies would be healthily competing, but also complementary, and commercial treaties would be freely concluded.

Conclusion/Epilogue

Why, the present-day cool and detached observer may well ask, did the wise and peace-loving statesmen of 1914 not prevail? This was because coolness and detachment then were not available, as Europe was engulfed in a wave of nationalism, jingoism and war hysteria. So many nations hated each other that one is reminded of the verse of the psalmist (Psalm 2, Verse 1): ‘Why do the nations so furiously rage together and why do the people imagine a vain thing?’

Orthodox Russians and Serbs disliked Catholic Austrians, the Germans distrusted the Russians so much that Helmut von Moltke seriously talked of a pre-emptive strike. The Austrians despised the Serbs as an unruly and murderous lot, and the French hated the Germans because of Sedan and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. For example, when ambassador Delcassé was on his way to St. Petersburg via Berlin, he refused to leave the train in order to avoid setting foot on German soil.

The same nationalism that moved the assassin of the peace-loving Franz-Ferdinand at Sarajevo on 28 June moved the assassin of the pacifist Jean-Jaurès at Paris on 31 July. Therefore, excited crowds were jubilant when war broke out and acclaimed the soldiers leaving for the front. Some statesmen actually loved war, as did Winston Churchill who, on 22 February 1915, told Violet Asquith: ‘I think a curse should rest on me because I love war. I know it is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet – I can’t help it – I enjoy every second of it’ (Ref. Reference Ferguson2, pp. 177–178).

Suspicion reached ludicrous heights. When the Russian ambassador in Belgrade, on 10 July 1914, visited his Austrian colleague there, he died of a heart attack. At once the Serbian press alleged murder. It was even rumoured that Vienna had sent an electric chair to Belgrade for the Russian ambassador to sit down on and die instantly. In the days that preceded 4 August there was a hint of panic in London at the thought of possible German control of the French Channel ports. One may wonder why: what was relevant was not whether a possible enemy controlled the French coast, but whether they could cross the Channel. Of that, however, there was no real danger, as the Royal Navy still ruled the waves. Indeed, in 1905, the director of Naval Intelligence had described Britain’s maritime preponderance over Germany as overwhelming, and by 1912 Germany admitted having decisively lost the naval race with Britain. This caused Grand Admiral von Tirpitz to complain and ask why his country had not waited until he had completed his naval programme. British superiority was in fact demonstrated at the battle of Jutland in 1916, when the Hochseeflotte was forced back to Kiel, to remain there until the end of the war. After all, Napoleon had controlled the Channel ports for many years but he never managed to cross the Channel, and the same happened to the Germans between 1940 and 1944.

In conclusion, the statesmen who entered the armed conflict in 1914 had no idea how long and terrible it would be. They imagined a war won in a few great battles, as had been the case with Leipzig in 1813, Waterloo in 1815, and Sedan in 1870, and that, after a ‘frischer fröhlicher Krieg’, it would all be over by Christmas. Grey did not know that his country was about to enter the most murderous war in its history and that his son would fall in battle in France. Nor did Tsar Nicholas know, when he signed the order for a General Mobilization on 29 July 1914, that he was signing his own death-warrant and that, almost exactly four years later, on 16 July 1918, he and his wife and children would be murdered at Yekaterinburg. If only a clairvoyant had warned them… But would they have listened?