WWI · AUG 1913
Which pre-1914 crisis did most to make WWI likely?
The seminar question: “Which of the three crises of 1908–1913 did most to make a general European war likely in 1914?”
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 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 short answer
- 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.
The full answer, argued
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.
This is the study layer of Bosnian crisis and the Balkan Wars, chapter 2 of The Great War, 1871–1923; the full index of the atlas is here.
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