WWI · CHAPTER 2 ·
Bosnian crisis and the Balkan Wars
Chapter 2 of The Great War, 1871–1923: “The Balkan Crises”
Three crises between 1908 and 1913 were settled without a great-power war, yet each left Europe more dangerous. When Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, Russia, pressed by Germany, backed down in 1909 and resolved never to retreat again. Germany’s gunboat at Agadir in 1911 hardened the western rivalry too.
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The map above is the world of Europe, August 1913 — The Treaty of Bucharest.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
This chapter asks why three international crises in six years, each settled without a war between the great powers, Europe’s strongest states, left Europe more likely to fight in 1914. The answer is that every settlement taught the losers a dangerous lesson. In 1908 Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna, annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, a province of the Turkish-ruled Ottoman Empire that it had run since 1878, turning an arrangement that resembled a long lease into outright ownership. Serbia, the small Slav kingdom next door, wanted Bosnia’s Serbs for itself and appealed to Russia, its protector. When Germany backed its ally and demanded that Russia accept the annexation, Russia, still weak after its defeat by Japan, gave way, and its leaders resolved never to retreat again. In 1911, as France took over Morocco, Germany sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir, hoping to split Britain from France, and instead taught them to rely on each other.
The third crisis did the most damage, because the Balkan Wars of 1912–13 removed the Ottoman Empire, which had held the Balkan peninsula of south-east Europe for centuries, almost entirely from Europe, and with it the buffer between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro, allied in the Balkan League, defeated the Ottomans within weeks and then fought one another over the spoils. Serbia nearly doubled in size and looked to Russia as its patron, while Austria-Hungary’s leaders concluded that only force would stop it. On the map the striped Ottoman Balkans disappear and Serbia turns blue. By 1913 each power was convinced that its next retreat would be fatal, so every new quarrel became a test that no one felt able to lose.
The full story
The Bosnian crisis began as a secret bargain and ended as a public humiliation, and its course explains why Russia behaved as it did in 1914. In July 1908 the Young Turks, reforming officers who forced the sultan, the Ottoman emperor, to restore a constitution, much like a military coup that promises democracy, raised the prospect that a revived Ottoman state might reclaim Bosnia-Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary had run the province since 1878 while it remained formally Ottoman, an arrangement like a long lease. Its foreign minister, Alois von Aehrenthal, met his Russian counterpart, Alexander Izvolsky, at Buchlau castle in September and won his consent to annexation. In return Austria-Hungary would support opening the Straits, the narrow waters between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, to Russian warships. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia in October before Russia had gained anything, and in March 1909 Germany demanded that Russia recognise the annexation, which Russia, unready for war, did. On the map Bosnia turns from tan to charcoal, and Russia’s leaders concluded that retreat only invited further humiliation.
The second Moroccan crisis of 1911 hardened the western half of the system in the same way. When French troops occupied Fez, the Moroccan capital, Germany sent the gunboat Panther to Agadir and demanded a large slice of French Africa as compensation. Britain feared a German naval base on the Atlantic, and its finance minister, David Lloyd George, warned Berlin publicly that Britain would not be pushed aside. Germany settled for part of the French Congo, and Morocco became a French protectorate, a state that kept its own ruler while France ran its defence and foreign affairs, much like a company placed under outside administration. Britain and France then agreed that the Royal Navy would guard the North Sea while the French fleet held the Mediterranean, which made each dependent on the other. The crisis left the Entente, the loose partnership of Britain, France and Russia, tighter and Germany more anxious than before.
The Balkan Wars changed the map most, because they destroyed the Ottoman buffer and enlarged the state Austria-Hungary feared most. Italy’s seizure of Libya from the Ottomans in 1911–12 exposed their weakness, and in October 1912 the Balkan League of Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece and Montenegro attacked. Bulgaria drove to within forty kilometres of Constantinople, Serbia won at Kumanovo and overran most of Macedonia, the mixed region all three Christian allies claimed, and Greece took Salonika. The great powers, meeting in London, created an independent Albania to keep Serbia from the sea. In the Second Balkan War of 1913 Bulgaria attacked its allies over Macedonia and lost most of its gains. Serbia ended nearly twice its former size, and in October 1913 Austria-Hungary sent it an ultimatum, a final demand backed by a deadline and the threat of war, which forced Serbian troops out of Albania within eight days. Austria-Hungary’s leaders now trusted ultimatums, Serbia’s trusted war, and Russia’s could not abandon their last Balkan client, so the next crisis would find all three less willing to yield.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
What each crisis taught
The most convincing way to connect these crises to 1914 is to follow what each government learned from them, because those lessons shaped behaviour in the July Crisis more directly than the crises themselves. Russian ministers concluded from 1909 that weakness invited bullying, and the outcome was remembered in St Petersburg as a “diplomatic Tsushima”, after the naval disaster of 1905. Dominic Lieven shows how that memory made a second retreat unthinkable for Sergei Sazonov, foreign minister from 1910. Austria-Hungary drew the opposite lesson from the same events. Its chief of staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, urged war on Serbia again and again, and the successful ultimatum of October 1913 suggested that firmness, backed by Germany, could solve the Serbian problem. Germany’s leaders concluded from Agadir that the Entente would hold together and that Austria-Hungary was the only ally they could count on, which made them readier to back Vienna without conditions. Samuel Williamson and Christopher Clark both stress that these positions reinforced one another, because each side expected its opponent to give way if it stood firm. The crises narrowed the range of choices that leaders believed they had, although none of them made war inevitable.
The Balkan states as actors
The Balkan Wars are often told as a story of great-power manoeuvre, yet the decisions that mattered most were taken in Belgrade, Sofia, Athens and Cetinje. The four kingdoms negotiated the Balkan League for their own purposes, above all the division of Macedonia, and Russia’s minister in Belgrade, Nicholas Hartwig, encouraged a pact that St Petersburg then could not control. When the League went to war in October 1912, the great powers had just warned it not to. Richard Hall and Edward Erickson show that the Ottoman defeat owed as much to a chaotic mobilisation, coming straight after the war with Italy, and to divided command as to Balkan strength. The Second Balkan War grew from Bulgaria’s gamble that it could take Macedonia from its allies by force. Mark Mazower adds that the violence against civilians, documented by the Carnegie Endowment’s international commission in 1914, set a pattern of building nations through expulsion that the region would see again. The Balkan states acted as independent players whose ambitions dragged their patrons after them, and that independence is exactly what made the Balkans dangerous to the whole European system.
Armies, alliances and the “war council” debate
The crises of 1911–13 fed an arms race on land that David Stevenson argues did more than the naval race to make war likely, because it changed the military balance on which every general staff based its plans. Germany passed army laws in 1912 and 1913, France extended conscription from two years to three in 1913, and Russia adopted its Great Programme, a plan to enlarge its peacetime army by more than a third by 1917, with French loans for strategic railways. German planners therefore came to believe that time was running against them. Historians still argue about a meeting Wilhelm II held with his service chiefs on 8 December 1912, after London warned that Britain would not stand aside if France were attacked. At that meeting the chief of the general staff, Helmuth von Moltke, said that war was unavoidable and the sooner the better. John Röhl reads the meeting as evidence that Germany was preparing for war, while others, surveyed by Annika Mombauer, note that it produced no decision beyond a new army bill and a press campaign. It is best read as evidence of a mood in Berlin, a growing belief that a war fought soon would be a war fought on better terms.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The Ottoman retreat. The Ottoman Empire had been losing Balkan land since the Congress of Berlin, and the Young Turk revolution of 1908 and the Italian war of 1911–12 convinced its neighbours that the moment to seize the rest had come. Each loss reopened the Eastern Question, the problem of who would inherit the Ottoman lands, and each answer brought Austria-Hungary and Russia closer to collision. These crises were the final settlement of that question, fought out while the great powers watched from either side.
Serbia’s turn toward Russia. Serbia changed sides in 1903, turning a client of Austria-Hungary into its rival. Its Obrenović kings had been bound to Vienna by a secret treaty of 1881, until army officers murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga that year and brought in a new dynasty that looked to Russia and to the dream of uniting the South Slavs. Austria-Hungary answered with a trade boycott, the “Pig War” of 1906–09, named after Serbia’s main export, which only pushed Serbia toward French loans and Russian protection. Economic pressure meant to bring Serbia to heel made it more defiant.
A Habsburg empire afraid for its South Slavs. Austria-Hungary, ruled by the Habsburg dynasty, governed about seven million South Slavs, the southern Slav peoples: Croats, Serbs, Slovenes and Bosnian Muslims. Its leaders feared that a successful Serbia would draw them away, much as the small kingdom of Piedmont had pulled Italians out of Habsburg rule when it united Italy in the 1860s. Annexing Bosnia was meant to end any Serbian claim to the province for good, yet it handed Serbian nationalists a grievance, and secret societies such as Unification or Death, the Black Hand, founded in 1911, recruited young Bosnian Serbs. The cure Vienna chose deepened the disease.
Russia’s need to recover face. Defeat by Japan in 1905 and the revolution that followed left Russia unable to fight in 1909, and Germany’s demand that it accept the annexation was remembered in St Petersburg as a public humiliation. From 1910 Russia rebuilt its army with French money and turned its foreign policy back toward the Balkans, where it sponsored the Balkan League as a barrier to Austria-Hungary. A great power that believed it had been humiliated once was determined that the next crisis would prove it could not be ignored.
THE TURNING POINT
The Bosnian crisis, September 1908 – March 1909. The Bosnian crisis is the hinge of this chapter because it cast the main powers in the parts they would play in 1914. A private bargain at Buchlau went wrong when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia before Russia had won its prize at the Straits, and the dispute ended only when Germany insisted in March 1909 that Russia recognise the annexation. Austria-Hungary became the power that acted first, Germany the ally that backed it without conditions, Serbia the aggrieved client and Russia the patron that had retreated once. Five years later each played the same part, except that this time Russia refused to retreat.
What it changed
The July Crisis follows the script. The crises of 1908–13 wrote the script of July 1914. The assassination of June 1914 took place in Sarajevo, capital of the very province whose annexation had caused the first crisis, and young Bosnian Serbs armed through the Black Hand carried it out. Austria-Hungary reached for the method that had worked in October 1913, an ultimatum to Serbia, and Germany repeated its promise of support (Chapter 3), turning a political murder into a general war.
Bulgaria’s revenge. Defeat in 1913 gave Bulgaria a motive to join the world war. The Treaty of Bucharest that ended the Second Balkan War stripped it of most of Macedonia and of southern Dobruja, and in October 1915 it joined the Central Powers, Germany’s side, because they offered Macedonia. Its army helped to crush Serbia within weeks (Chapter 6), so for Bulgaria the world war was a second chance to win the Balkan war it had just lost.
An arms race on land. The crises of 1911–13 set off some of the largest peacetime increases in army size that Europe had seen, through Germany’s army laws of 1912 and 1913, France’s three-year service law and Russia’s Great Programme. Each general staff calculated when the balance would favour it, and German planners concluded that their advantage would disappear by about 1916 or 1917. That calculation, acted on when the armies moved in August 1914 (Chapter 4), helps explain why Berlin was ready to risk war while it still believed it could win.
Nation-building by expulsion. The Balkan Wars made the forced movement of people a normal sequel to new frontiers. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims fled toward Anatolia, the Turkish heartland in Asia, and Bulgarians, Greeks and Serbs were expelled from districts that changed hands. A Bulgarian–Ottoman agreement of 1913 even arranged a voluntary exchange of villagers along the new border, and the same logic produced the compulsory Greek–Turkish exchange of 1923 (Chapter 15), which turned the practice into international law.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Which of the three crises of 1908–1913 did most to make a general European war likely in 1914?
Each crisis has a strong claim. The Bosnian crisis created Russia’s determination never to retreat again and set the pattern of German support for Austria-Hungary, so it best explains how the eastern powers behaved in July 1914. Agadir explains the west, because it convinced British leaders that Germany sought to dominate Europe and tightened the naval links with France that made British neutrality unlikely. The Balkan Wars changed the situation on the ground, removing the Ottoman buffer, doubling Serbia and persuading Austria-Hungary’s leaders that only war would solve their South Slav problem, which is why many historians, Christopher Clark among them, give them the greatest weight. A strong answer weighs distance against intensity, since Bosnia shaped attitudes while the Balkan Wars created the situation in which those attitudes were acted out. It should also admit the limits of the argument, because each crisis ended peacefully and none made war inevitable. The wider point is that narrow escapes shape behaviour, and the conclusions drawn from a near miss can be more dangerous than the crisis itself.
An interesting fact
One of the sharpest reporters of the Balkan Wars was a Russian revolutionary living in exile in Vienna. Leon Trotsky covered the fighting of 1912–13 for the Kiev newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, writing under the pen name Antid Oto, and his dispatches reported much that the belligerents’ own newspapers kept quiet. Five years later the same man led the Bolshevik delegation at Brest-Litovsk, and soon afterwards, as commissar for war, he built the Red Army that marched on Warsaw in 1920. The small wars of 1912–13 trained journalists, soldiers and politicians for the far larger catastrophe that followed.
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