Austro-Hungarian entry into World War I
[1] Others, most notably Christopher Clark, have argued that Austria-Hungary, confronted with a neighbor determined to incite continual unrest and ultimately acquire all of the Serb-inhabited lands of the empire (according to the Pan-Serb point of view, they included all of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Hercegovina and some of the southern counties of the Hungary (roughly corresponding to today's Vojvodina)) and had a military and government that were intertwined with the irredentist terrorist group known as "The Black Hand", saw no practical alternative to the use of force in ending what amounted to subversion from Serbia directed at a large chunk of its territories.
[4] At the very same time, the most important Russian decision-makers viewed any decisive Austrian response as necessarily dictated by and fomented in Berlin and therefore proof of an active German desire for war against Russia.
[11] The major decisions on military affairs in 1867 to 1895 were made by Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, the nephew of the Emperor Franz Joseph and his leading advisor.
According to the historians John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft: He was a firm conservative in all matters, military and civil, and took to writing pamphlets lamenting the state of the Army's morale as well as fighting a fierce rearguard action against all forms of innovation.... Much of the Austrian failure in the First World War can be traced back to his long period of power.... His power was that of the bureaucrat, not the fighting soldier, and his thirty years of command over the peacetime Habsburg Army made it a flabby instrument of war.
[13] Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff von Hötzendorf's repeated urgings of "preventative war" against nearly all of Austria's adversaries at one time or another had no rational basis in the actual balance of military power.
The far more realistic and cautious Franz Ferdinand, despite his deep personal affection for von Hötzendorf, realized that the rise of Pan-Slavism could rip the empire apart, and his solution was called "Trialism".
[14] Despite postwar accounts that attempted to make of the heir to the throne a convenient villain in favour of war, Franz Ferdinand, as well as the most public figures of note, supported improved status for the southern and the other Slavs in the empire, was adamantly opposed to annexing Serbia or to war in general and insisted that the monarchy was too fragile internally for foreign adventures.
Except for a few days in December 1912, the Archduke repeatedly intervened in government debates during the various Balkan crises of 1908, 1912 and 1913 before his own murder by insisting that advocates of war with Serbia, especially von Hötzendorf, were servants of the Crown who "consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy".
The controversy destroyed Izvolsky's career, embittered him and made him become an ardent advocate of war against Austria-Hungary after Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had dismissed him the following year, in 1910, and replaced him with Sergey Sazonov.
About an hour later, when Franz Ferdinand was on his way to visit the Sarajevo Hospital, his convoy took a wrong turn into a street on which Gavrilo Princip by coincidence stood.
Princip attempted to take the cyanide capsule that had been supplied to him in Belgrade, but he could not swallow all of it before the horrified crowd of Sarajevans attacked him (the police intervened to seize the suspect, who was on the verge of being lynched).
Both: Other than the Hötzendorf, Berchtold and other decision-makers were concerned to establish via the criminal investigation of the conspiracy against Franz Ferdinand that indeed elements within Serbia that were deep inside its military and government were complicit in the plot.
[25] While the civilian politicians and diplomats of the Dual Monarchy were kept in the dark, the intelligence catastrophe of the Redl Affair (Austria's head of counter-intelligence having been unmasked as a Russian mole in 1913)[26] ensured that Russia knew nearly every detail of the Chief of Staff's plans, as did Serbia.
[29] The rest of the participants debated about whether Austria should just launch an unprovoked attack or issue an ultimatum to Serbia with demands so stringent that it was bound to be rejected.
[27] Austrian Prime Minister Stürgkh warned Tisza that if Austria did not launch a war, its "policy of hesitation and weakness" would cause Germany to abandon Austria-Hungary as an ally.
[28] Starting 7 July, the German Ambassador to Austria-Hungary, Heinrich von Tschirschky, and Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Berchtold held almost daily meetings about how to co-ordinate the diplomatic action to justify a war against Serbia.
[31] On 7 July, Bethmann Hollweg told his aide and close friend Kurt Riezler that "action against Serbia can lead to a world war" and that such a "leap in the dark" was justified by the international situation.
[32] Riezler went to write in his diary that Bethmann Hollweg painted a "devastating picture" with Russia building rail-roads in Poland allowing Russian forces to mobilize faster once the Great Military Programme was finished in 1917.
[33] Such fears about Russia led Bethmann Hollweg to credit Anglo-Russian naval talks in May 1914 as the beginning of an "encirclement" policy against Germany that could only be broken through war.
"[31] On 9 July, Prince Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London was told by British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey that he "saw no reason for taking a pessimistic view of the situation".
[35] The German Ambassador reported that "Count Berchtold appeared to hope that Serbia would not agree to the Austro-Hungarian demands, as a mere diplomatic victory would put the country here again in a stagnant mood".
[37][b] On 12 July, Berchtold showed Tschirschky the contents of his ultimatum containing "unacceptable demands", and promised to present it to the Serbs after the Franco-Russian summit between President Poincaré and Nicholas II was over.
[42] The Chief of the German General Staff, Moltke, told Count Lerchenfeld, the Bavarian Minister in Berlin, that "a moment so favourable from the military point of view might never occur again".
[43] Moltke argued that due to the alleged superiority of German weaponry and training, combined with the recent change in the French Army from a two-year to a three-year period of service, Germany could easily defeat both France and Russia in 1914.
German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg had repeatedly rejected pleas from Britain and Russia to put pressure on Austria to compromise and erroneously believed the coming conflict would be contained in the Balkans.
Indeed, a Tsarist Russian general in 1921 who was looking back opined that by July 24 and 25, "the war was already a decided thing, and all the floods of telegrams between the governments of Russia and Germany were nothing but the staging for an historical drama".
On 22 August, he launched an even larger campaign to the east against Russia through Galicia, which led to catastrophic defeats in the loss of 500,000 Austro-Hungarian soldiers.
Austria acted like a great power making its own decisions based on its plan to dominate the Balkan region and hurl back the Serbian challenge.
[55][56][57] Even those who emphasize Vienna's strategic dilemma, facing activity that would be intolerable to any sovereign state now or then ("Before World War I, Serbia financed and armed Serbs within the Austrian Empire",[58] also point to Berlin's infamous "blank check" in early July that finally licensed "Austria-Hungary's mad determination to destroy Serbia in 1914" [59] as central to the ensuing catastrophe.
Even though some Austrian politicians embraced responsibility after the defeat ("We started the war, not the Germans, and even less the Entente"),[60] some contemporary historians have broken entirely with the conventional explanation of Austrian responsibility by finding that Russian and French encouragement of Serbia's provocative policies vis-à-vis Austria-Hungary were part of a knowing desire for war by Russia and its French ally.
