MADE IN BELGRADE? RUSSIA, SERBIA AND THE FIRST WORLD WAR
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‘The Sleepwalkers’ Christopher
Clark Penguin Books 2013
It is an extraordinary fact that 100 years since the outbreak of the First World War the origins of the conflict are still the matter of extremely heated debate. Indeed in the week just gone Max Hastings and Nial Ferguson have presented television programmes arguing from different perspectives about the reasons Britain entered the war; whilst, as Clark states in his introduction to 'The Sleepwalkers' the debate ‘…has spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity.’
Clark’s book, and it is something of a doorstep at just under 700 pages, dissects the events leading up to the point the fighting commenced with immense forensic intelligence. He places, and as you read his account you feel rightly so, the Balkans in general and Serbia in particular centre stage. He also manages to convey a very modern feel to the unfolding events. As I read this book as the crisis in Ukraine developed I can testify to the degree in which these events from so long ago can feel both very real and contemporary. Of course there are very real dangers of ahistoricism in this approach, Sarajevo in 1914 is not 9/11, the infamous Apis not Osama Bin Laden. However if one treats such parallels with care it is clear that the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was an act of state sponsored terrorism[1] and Serbia was clearly a rogue state, seeking to destabilise the whole Balkan region in the name of Serb irredentism.
Clark turns the French and Russian narrative respecting Serbia as the weak victim of a malign Austro-Hungarian empire on its head. It was Austria that was being steadily goaded into taking military action by a shady Mafia working both within and in collusion with the Serb state, with tacit Russian approval in the form of Baron Nikolai Hartwig the fervently Serbophile Russian minister in Belgrade.
There has recently been much revisionist writing about the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even seeing it as a proto European Union. Whilst some of this is viewing the past through rose tinted glasses one does not have to read Joseph Roth to see that the empire represented a civilised and stable society that many of the new found citizens of unstable and ethnically divided states created after 1919 looked back on with deep nostalgia. Clark marshals some interesting facts to support his case that the Empire far from being on its last legs was still a vibrant and relatively healthy political entity, certainly in comparison with the Russian empire.[2] It is also worth noting that Franz Ferdinand was murdered not because he was a vicious old reactionary but precisely because he had plans to reform the Empire, placing all nationalities on an equal footing. This move the Serb terrorist group that plotted the murders, The Black Hand, feared much more than reaction, since it threatened to solidify Bosnia-Herzegovina firmly within the Austro-Hungarian state. Indeed already the citizens of the province were enjoying a higher standard of living than the citizens of neighboring Serbia, which wished of course to subsume them. Whilst the non Serb population of the province had reason to fear a union with Serbia given the treatment meted out to the non Serbian populations of Macedonia, Bulgarians, Greeks and Muslims in the freshly conquered territory.[3]
There are basically two schools of historical thought the cock-up and the conspiracy. Clark is very much in the cock-up camp. Certainly I think he eloquently demolishes the Fritz Fischer thesis that the war represented a long planned act of German aggression. In fact he demonstrates that if any nation ‘sleepwalked’ into war it was Germany. He also raises some fresh questions about Russian actions and shines a fierce spotlight on the machinations of the war party in St Petersburg. A book has recently been produced by Sean McMeekin ‘The Russian Origins of the First World War,’ which explores this topic in more detail, which I look forward to reading.
Clark also places a similar spotlight on role the British Foreign office played in the run up to war, particularly the part played by Edward Grey. The traditional British, primarily English, narrative has Grey as the honest broker, trying desperately to avoid war but in the end driven by the recklessness of continental allies and opponents alike, to ultimately conclude that we must intervene. This is very much the line taken by Vernon Bogdanor in his lecture of last year. For this particular reader this presentation now feels disingenuous. Grey played a double game, saying one thing in private to the French and another in public. He made promises of intervention to the French that constitutionally he was in no position to give. He was very much in the Liberal Imperialist camp and far from being neutral in the case of the Serbian Austro-Hungarian quarrel, did not really believe the Austrians had a case. (He was it is true no fan of the Serbs either, but this did not add up to neutrality).
For me if there are villains to be found here the French president Poincare would be firmly on the list. Without his constant intervention on the side of the hawks both at home in France and in Russia it is difficult to see how conflict could have broken out.
Not that the Germans were all peace loving hippies anxious to spread love and harmony. There was a strong war party in Berlin led by the chief of the German General Staff Helmuth von Moltke. Moltke overestimated the growing military capabilities of the Russians, as indeed did the French and British, and believed it was better to deal with them ‘now’ before they became even stronger. The Kaiser complicated matters and certainly at times worked against peace, though he was no Hitler, more a deeply psychologically flawed individual completely out of his depth.
The dog that did not bark was the international labour movement in general and the German Social Democrats in particular. Clark has little to say on this other than that the Social Democratic deputies in the Reichstag feared the Russians more than they feared war. I think the issue to be more complicated than this; however whatever the reasons the decision to back war credits in the Reichstag, only one deputy, Karl Liebknecht, declined to do so, was catastrophic for the Social Democrats and the international labour movement.
Long before Max Hastings or Michael Gove made their contribution to the debate I have felt that the Blackadder/Oh What a Lovely War narrative that has defined the war has become increasingly unhelpful. For those arguing that it mattered not one jot who won simply do not grasp that once Germany began fighting it became a different Germany, a Germany of the generals, for whom victory would have meant imposing a Prussian template upon the whole of Europe. Whilst Hitler was no more an 'inevitable' consequence of German defeat than the outbreak of the war itself. He came to power as a consequence of divisions on the left and the machinations of the right, he could have been stopped. Clark’s case, that no single nation was responsible for the outbreak of hostilities, is compelling.Though it seems clear to me that some actors bear more responsibility than others. What is really essential is to see the war in the wider context of Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century, which is what Clark achieves.
At the start of a recent BBC series about the war the presenter Jeremy Paxman more or less started the series by stating “…the German army was marching through Belgium, what was the British government supposed to do?” Well, part of my response was, as in the old joke about being asked directions, I wouldn't start from here. Put another way, as the historian AJP Taylor used to say, nothing is inevitable until it happens. The First World War was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century since without it is difficult to see any of the other even greater tragedies occurring. Human beings made it happen and looking at culpability is not now a purely academic exercise ,since, as events unfolding in the Ukraine demonstrate, we have much to learn by doing so.
[1] In a
lecture screened on the Parliamentary Channel last year the eminent historian
Vernon Bogdanor says that he can find no evidence for Serbian government
involvement in the assassinations. I can only conclude that he has not been
looking in the right places. See:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmqtWuZsX2M
[2] It is
interesting to the note the current agitation of the citizens of Galicia, once
part of the Austro –Hungarian empire and currently part of Ukraine, less they be swallowed up
again into a new Russian empire.
[3] See The
Other Balkan Wars 1993, Carnegie Endowment. The mass slaughter of civilians
occurred on all sides during the two Balkan Wars of 1912-13. In his recent TV
lecture Nial Ferguson seeks to present the First World War as the return to
barbarism on the European continent. In truth it never really went away,
particular in the Balkans. As victims themselves of Turkish massacres in the
1876 one would hope that the Bulgarians would behave better in the conflict
that broke out in 1912. They did not.
