Unless I missed it thr article neglects to mention that Barnes became a nazi apologist and was later discredited as a historian.
This is entirely reasonable, but WWI is a good example that a country can be responsible for a conflict escalating massively into a major war between powers without intending to.
IMO this is the most likely reason Germany went to war with France and Russia. The disjointed leadership didn’t understand that they had burned the bridge behind them until it was too late. Political leadership was trying to keep the war limited to the balkans but at the first sign of any escalation the military leadership were forced by their own planning to opt for a preemptive strike with no reasonable off ramp. The Kaiser asked his generals to change the mobilization to not preemptively invade Belgium or France and von Moltke told him it was impossible and it was already too late.
The only nuance I would add is that, while (as Chronos puts it) “all of the European powers had a hand in creating the ‘powder keg’” and the “blank cheque” was an aspect of that, Germany’s most disastrous contribution to the Great War itself IMO was not per se encouraging Austria-Hungary’s maximalist aims in Serbia. Had a flailing Vienna lashed out at Serbia immediately following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, even if compelled by the Kaiser, there’s an alternate history where the whole event becomes just another crisis that eventually resolves without a greater European war.
Germany’s most disastrous contribution was encouraging Austria-Hungary’s maximalist aims in Serbia after everyone had time to calm down. Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf (chief of the Austro-Hungarian general staff) was a believer in “preventative war” in the abstract, and of making war on Serbia in particular; per Hew Strachan, “between 1 January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed a Serbian war twenty-five times.”
So Conrad doubtless wanted to act sooner, as Germany desired, but the glacial pace of mobilization ensured that others who might be threatened by a wider war—chiefly Russia, of course, who knew Austria-Hungary’s designs on them and were aware of their specific plans following the Alfred Redl affair—understood that neither Vienna nor Berlin had any sincere desire for a negotiated resolution, and that their increasingly hollow protests to the contrary implied they were committed to something larger than merely avenging the archduke.
Conrad had to know his army was not ready. At least, as Austria-Hungary’s foreign policy became more belligerent over the course of July, and the more he grew to understand that the political leadership was willing to embark on a major war, the less hawkish he grew himself. This was the man who, only a few months earlier in March, had floated the idea of declaring war on Russia to the German ambassador, and had to be brought back to reality about the wisdom of such a decision at that time.
That is all to say—if you follow my slight narrowing of your contention: it was not just offering the “blank cheque,” it was that Germany did not withdraw it even after the assassination had become transparent pretext. Austria-Hungary had few friends, a veritable buffet of potential enemies, and an underfunded army still in the process of being transformed. If acting alone, this reality checked their ambitions. German pressure served as a backstop that mollified Conrad and encouraged Vienna to keep pushing once a limited war was no longer the most likely outcome.
Which both stemmed from and reinforced their own sort of paranoia. David Fromkin, writing in Europe’s Last Summer, puts it this way:
Encirclement was Germany’s nightmare, and Germany had brought it upon itself. Located in the heart of Europe, the country had so effectively terrified its neighbors that they had banded together in self-defense. In turn, what its neighbors had been driven to do had further reinforced Germany’s paranoia. What had started as a dark fantasy was converted by Germany’s own actions into a reality. France, England, and Russia had no intention of attacking Germany, but they were making contingency plans for combining against the Kaiser’s empire if and when it attacked them.
Culturally, in every way the most and best educated population in Europe—that of Germany—was telling itself that it was being suffocated by a European civilization that was pressing in on it from all sides. It was not evident then nor is it now why the Germans felt that way, but it is clear that they did.
The accompanying question, to me, is the extent to which German decision-makers had managed to completely delude themselves either about this paranoia or about how it would be taken beyond the boundaries of the Empire. When Germany told Belgium that France had mounted a dirigible bombing raid on Nuremberg, for instance, did they expect the Belgians to believe that the French had done this, were capable of doing this, or—as Berlin specifically alleged—were embarking on it as a prelude to attacking Belgium, as well?
The Germans knew that France was not going to violate Belgian neutrality. We can guess this because Germans, being literate and able to read newspapers, had witnessed the spring 1914 elections in which, despite rising tensions, the SFIO and its staunch opposition to “bourgeois war” had performed well—Viviani’s coalition entered into the July Crisis knowing they could not act aggressively.
We don’t have to guess, though. We know this because their war plans worked from the assumption that France would not deploy along the Belgian frontier. Nothing in late July 1914, with German troops positioned right up to the border and well aware that the French military had withdrawn to their self-imposed 10-kilometer demilitarized zone, changed this calculation. Or, as perhaps the pre-eminent contemporary scholar of German military planning Dr. Annika Mombauer puts it:
For his strategy to succeed, Moltke explained, it was necessary to march through neutral Belgium and into France. It mattered little to either Moltke or Schlieffen whether France was planning to do the same (and it is worth noting that a possible French invasion of Belgium was never cited as an “excuse” by Schlieffen or Moltke for their plans).
(in this case, from War Planning: 1914, edited by Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig; Mombauer provides the section on Germany.)
So did the Germans actually expect anyone to believe that they invaded Belgium and Luxembourg out of necessity and to preempt the French from doing the same? It seems incredible, but they at least acted like they thought it might be believed.
Which is honestly more of the same bullheadedness from the Kaiser, and an inability of either the civilian government or the general staff to think strategically while constantly patting themselves on the back for their strategic genius. For all that certain people, or maybe at least tabletop wargamers, really admire the Schlieffen Plan, it gave the Germans zero options. Not just in terms of having no flexibility to respond to a diplomatic crisis in Serbia by doing anything other than “invade France through Belgium,” but also in that—having responded to a diplomatic crisis in Serbia by invading France through Belgium—they had no fallback options if and when that plan failed.
To some extent I think this is also a cause of the Great War, in that the Germans highly overestimated their ability to predict the future, and compensated by… not compensating. Poor, innocent Belgium failed to immediately capitulate, turned out to have six times more soldiers guarding Liège than Moltke was expecting, and delayed the operational plan by two days (until, indeed, the British Army they largely ignored had a chance to land). The general staff may have found this stressful, but they did not recognize its significance.
In the east, Russia was able to mobilize faster than expected, forcing an acceleration of the schedule by which soldiers were to be transferred to that front. Germany was saved from immediate defeat by a masterful victory at Tannenberg—but strokes of luck were not something they could count on. When their advance was checked and then reversed at the Marne, irrevocably destroying the German timetable, they did not have an answer.
Germany exhausted its troops and outran its ability to supply them. They failed to account for communications, putting Moltke out of contact with his forces for 48 hours as the Battle of the Marne developed. His decision to retain the 6th and 7th Armies in the south rather than trying to shore up his (ultimately crucial) right flank has been blamed, but Belgian resistance had destroyed the rail infrastructure needed to transport them and it is not clear that they could’ve been moved in time anyway.
None of these complications—which were, unlike the Russian experience at Tannenberg, not surprising reverses but inevitable outcomes—had been accounted for, and even after the Marne the leadership did not immediately realize that the war had been lost. In retrospect it was a bad plan that was only dubiously viable in June and July, and they could have known this, but they managed to convince their partners in Vienna to go down with them.
No, this is factually incorrect. The British treaty with Poland in 1939 specifically said it was invoked if Germany attacked Poland. It was not a general defensive treaty involving attacks by other countries such as the Soviet Union.
Wait - you previously told us that Germany only got a tiny toehold in France, just two days’ march, so that claims of France suffering due to WWI were vastly overblown and the Versailles Treaty was a big overreaction.
But now, you see France as having been devastated by the German invasion and occupation.
While we’re on the subject, this is a bit wrong. Belgium did not establish a colony in the Congo. Belgium’s government resisted establishing colonies anywhere. So King Leopold established the Congo colony as his own private property, with no connection to Belgium - all the money went to Leopold, the person, not to Belgium or the Belgian people:
Although Leopold expressed interest in acquiring lands in Abyssinia, Egypt, or Argentina, his proposals found little traction in Belgian politics, where colonial ventures were widely treated as costly, high-risk projects with unclear national benefit.[6] Many Belgian politicians, such as Émile Vandervelde, campaigned against an overseas colony for economic and moral reasons.[7] Leopold thus pursued the idea of a Congo colony largely as a personal enterprise rather than a state program.[3]
Leopold exercised total personal control over the state’s administration without much delegation to subordinates.[18] African chiefs played an important role by implementing government orders within their communities.[19]
Amazingly, the Congo is one of the few cases where things got better when an actual colonial power took over (in place of Leopold) - taking the situation from the kind of Hell that Conrad described in “Heart of Darkness,” to something only just as horrible as all the other horrible European colonies (imagine - Leopold was so bad that ordinary European colonial horribleness was a marked improvement:
In 1908, as a direct result of this campaign, Belgium formally annexed the territory, creating the Belgian Congo.[115] Conditions for the indigenous population improved dramatically with the partial suppression of forced labour, although many officials who had formerly worked for the Free State were retained in their posts long after annexation.
Yeah, if AH had immediately marched into Serbia, that might have just cause yet another Balkan war. But the Kaiser wrote the blank Check and Russia mobilized, and it was then gonna be war.
The French were hoping, that if they needed to, Belgium would allow them in.
I would not make that claim.
.
..in the event of any action which clearly threatened Polish independence, and which the Polish Government accordingly considered it vital to resist with their national forces, His Majesty’s Government would feel themselves bound at once to lend the Polish Government all support in their power. They have given the Polish Government an assurance to this effect. I may add that the French Government have authorised me to make it plain that they stand in the same position in this matter as do His Majesty’s Government.[7]
1. (a) By the expression “a European Power” employed in the Agreement is to be understood Germany. (b) In the event of action within the meaning of Article 1 or 2 of the Agreement by a European Power other than Germany, the Contracting Parties will consult together on the measures to be taken in common.
And since Britain’s response to the Soviet invasion of Finland has come up, note that Britain and France did make plans for supporting Finland against the USSR, but this would involve invading neutral Sweden and Norway, since they refused passage of British and France troops. As it was, Britain and France sent military supplies. None of this seems like they “casually ignored” Finland’s invasion.
At any rate, it’s rather ahistorical to say that Britain should have ignored Belgium’s invasion because 30 years later they wouldn’t respond quite as effectively to Finland’s.
If anything, the shock and horror of WWI would have militated against an armed response to such an invasion thirty years later. If we were to extend the ahistorical hypothetical. Even historically, an aversion to a repeat of WWI arguably contributed to Britain (and France’s) appeasement of Germany prior to the invasion of Poland.
This is not wrong, but it’s also incomplete. To circle back to the title of the OP, the critical issue, and a major reason why Germany has shouldered the lion’s share of the “blame” for the Great War, is that they were the loudest, and at critical junctures sometimes the only, voice agitating for war.
Germany’s immediate response to the assassination was urging Austria-Hungary to steamroll Serbia. Austria-Hungary did not actually need any urging in this regard, of course, but they were never so committed to war as Germany was.
Austrian Foreign Minister Berchtold was aware of this disparity in desire, and of how it compromised his negotiating position. He desired, of course, evidence that Serbia had undertaken to assassinate the archduke as official policy. Unfortunately, by the middle of July, his investigators were telling him:
There is nothing to prove or even to suppose that the Serbian government is accessory to the inducement for the crime, its preparation, or the furnishing of weapons. On the contrary, there are reasons to believe that this is altogether out of the question.
Nor was the army ready. To put all the pieces together would require waiting until possibly the middle of August. By that point, negotiations might have prevailed. Instead, Austria faced increasing pressure from Germany demanding to know when they were going to take action. They were not contending with Russia, publicly urging Serbian intransigence, or France guaranteeing Serbian independence, or England or Italy or Greece.
That is the flaw in the “well, everyone was really to blame” narrative. Germany, first and foremost, desired war. By the end of July, when Serbian accession to almost all of the July 23rd ultimatum made a diplomatic solution a real possibility on the part of England and Russia, Germany sabotaged those efforts. And at the very last, when Austro-Hungarian lines of communication with Russia threatened to localize and bring a premature end to the conflict, Germany delivered their midnight 12-hour ultimatum to Russia and ensured it could not be so ended with their sloppy declaration of war.
This is, as I noted, essentially the same way Germany dealt with the Ottoman Empire: concerned that the government might continue trying to remain neutral, and in concert with Ottoman hawks, they rendered the point moot. Using the erstwhile German warships Goeben and Breslau, now flying the Ottoman flag but operating under German commanders and crewed by German sailors, they opened hostilities by bombarding Russian ports, once again guaranteeing a declaration of war when it was not the only option.
So a secondary—and related—reason why Germany gets the blame is that they never really seem to have understood just how much a foreign policy based on belligerence and naked lying was going to hurt them. Germany feigned ignorance of, and even shock at, the July 23rd ultimatum to Serbia, although nobody did—or could—believe this. Jagow denied being aware of the document, seemingly unaware of how untrustworthy and unreliable this made any German diplomatic overtures.
The Austrian diplomatic codes having been broken, multiple parties knew that Berchtold had sought to learn when Poincaré and Viviani were embarking on the France, which in turn forewarned them that the timing of the ultimatum meant it was something serious enough that Austria-Hungary and her allies wanted France to be incapable of responding promptly. Was this necessary? Who can say.
The French leaders had come from conversations with the Czar and the Russian government. Poincaré’s policy from the outset had been to restrain Russia from doing anything that could provoke Germany. The President was keenly aware that France was in no military position to fight a war. There is no reason to believe that he said anything different during his stay in Russia.
(David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer)
But the possibility existed that the shocking nature of Austria-Hungary’s demands would change that calculus, so it was imperative that they be kept in the dark as long as possible. Thus did Jagow come to the rescue when he double-checked the departure times, realized the ultimatum would be delivered while the French were still in Saint Petersburg, and got the transmission delayed, and thus did Germany jam the ship’s wireless.
This also explained why the Germans began planting the seeds that “the settlement of differences which may arise between Austria-Hungary and Serbia” should “remain localized” as early as July 19th, and communicated this through diplomatic channels on the 21st. Once again, they don’t seem to have cottoned on to how absurd it would sound, two days later, to take a position that amounted to: “Hey, stay out of the fighting. What fighting? Oh, uh, I have no idea.”
German diplomats were smart enough to take the language out of their “proposal” to Belgium promising them French territory if they remained neutral, but not smart enough to realize that the ultimatum for free passage itself was an affront to Belgian sovereignty. Nor did they realize that Bethmann Hollweg deriding the Treaty of London as a “scrap of paper” was just an arrogant way of admitting that Germany felt entitled to do what it wanted and that nobody would stop them.
Nor, one supposes, did they even perceive that the idea of “benevolent neutrality,” as Bethmann Hollweg put it, was inherently contradictory. Belgium would, if accepting Germany’s demands, no longer be neutral, and to trade the 1839 Treaty of London for a singular German guarantee of their borders and independence.
And this is meaningless. France did not have any “need” to invade Belgium or Luxembourg, except in the sense that the “if” represents German occupation of Belgium or Luxembourg. It is not surprising that, on being invaded, you would “allow” an ally in to help repel the invader.
This is the problem of revisionist history when it crosses the line into conspiracy theory.
For example. You say:
This is incredibly disingenuous on the part of whatever Wikipedia editor threw that in. For a start, Mombauer’s book (The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus) is summarizing the revisionist viewpoint, not agreeing with it. We can surmise she does not agree with it because the passage is excerpted from Isabel Hull’s 2014 A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War, in Chapter 2, “Belgian Neutrality,” opening a section that specifically rejects that argument.
Here is the full quote:
Instead, the role of Belgian neutrality is variously interpreted as an excuse to mobilize the public, to provide embarrassed radicals in the cabinet with a justification for abandoning their principled pacifism and thus for staying in office, or, in the more conspiratorial versions, to cover for naked imperial interests. Denigrating the importance of Belgian neutrality appeals particularly to those who believe that Britain should never have entered the war, or indeed that the war should never have been fought; the basis for this view is the belief that Imperial Germany was not a danger either to Britain’s security or to Europe’s. Significantly, specialists in German history do not generally share these views.
(emphasis mine)
Christopher Clark, not a specialist in German history, is such a revisionist. If you have gotten to this part in The Sleepwalkers yet, Clark alleges that the British cabinet concluded they were not obliged to oppose a German invasion of Belgium, and portrays French diplomat Paul Cambon as “distraught” over Britain’s opposition to intervention.
This is at best oversimplifying. The cabinet, on July 29th, punted on the question, which (as Hull notes) many of them regarded as purely hypothetical:
The meeting had begun with a clear warning from the prime minister that in the event of war Germany would surely violate Belgian neutrality. Those in the cabinet who either had reached this conclusion on their own or who now seriously entertained that possibility placed great weight on Belgian neutrality and on Britain’s obligation. But, as Hazlehurst writes, “there were those who did not want to believe.”
(Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper, p. 34)
Indeed, to Foreign Secretary Grey’s frustration, many British politicians considered it not worth considering:
In the last week of July, Bonar Law, the leader of the Conservative Party in the House, came daily to my room there at question time before I returned to the Foreign Office, to ask what the news of the crisis was. One day, about the middle of the week, as the news got more ominous, he said that it was not easy to be sure what the opinion of the whole of his party was. He doubted whether it would be unanimous or overwhelmingly in favour of war, unless Belgian neutrality were invaded; in that event, he said, it would be unanimous.
If Conservatives were not unanimous, Liberal opinion was still more uncertain. About the same time a very active Liberal member came up to me in the lobby and told me that he wished me to understand that under no circumstances whatever ought this country to take part in the war, if it came. […] “Suppose Germany violates the neutrality of Belgium?” For a moment he paused, like one who, running at speed, finds himself suddenly confronted with an obstacle, unexpected and unforeseen. Then he said with emphasis, “She won’t do it.” “I don’t say she will, but supposing she does?” “She won’t do it,” he repeated confidently, and with that assurance he left me.
(Edward Grey, Twenty Five Years: 1892-1916. Vol 1, p. 337-338)
Once again, Germany stepped in to prove everyone wrong in Berlin’s, as we might put it, haste to be “the aggressor against France in WW1.” Bethmann Hollweg’s message the next day, July 30th, promised that Germany would not annex French territory (but maybe a few colonies, as a treat) and that he couldn’t say what Germany thought of Belgian neutrality but that if they did not take sides, “her integrity would be respected after the conclusion of the war.”
At this point, the British government and the British public understood that Germany was openly agitating for war, that they would invade Belgium, and that Britain could not stay out of the conflict, despite its naïve support of a diplomatic resolution until realizing what German ‘diplomacy’ was like. Belgium was central to this pivot, which is Hull’s argument:
Nevertheless, the centrality of Belgium to this prerequisite for British entry into the war cannot be overestimated. After receiving Germany’s evasive reply on whether it would respect Belgium neutrality, the cabinet authorized Grey to warn German ambassador Karl Prince von Lichnowsky (July 31) that “our attitude would be determined largely by public opinion here, and the neutrality of Belgium would appeal very strongly to public opinion here.”
(Isabel Hull, A Scrap of Paper, p. 36; emphasis mine)
Clark adopts what Mombauer characterizes as the revisionist position, first espoused by Moltke of all people, that Britain is to blame for the Great War because her attempt at neutrality led Germany to believe that they could go to war with France and Russia without consequence. As I have said before, this nonsense obliges him to make very curious selections in his reading.
Like. We know that he has read (German ambassador to Great Britain) Prince Max von Lichnowsky’s My Mission to London. This is a book in which Lichnowsky’s agony at having been betrayed by the aggression and bad faith of his government is painfully obvious; a book in which he laments: “I had to support in London a policy the heresy of which I recognized.”
It is a book in which he says that, if Germany was truly interested in a localized conflict, “a mere hint from Berlin” could have ended it after Serbia acceded to Austria’s demands, and that “this hint was not given.” It is a book in which he openly says:
The impression grew stronger and stronger that we wanted war under any circumstances. It was impossible to interpret our attitude, on a question which did not directly concern us, in any other way. The urgent requests and definite assurances of M. Sasonow, followed by the Czar’s positively humble telegrams, the repeated proposals of Sir E. Grey, the warnings of the Marquis San Giuliano and SIgnor Bollati, my urgent counsels, all were of no avail. Berlin persisted […] when at last Count Berchtold, who up till then had, at the behest of Berlin, played the strong man, decided to come round, we replied to the Russian mobilisation, after Russia had negotiated and waited for a whole week in vain, with the ultimatum and the declaration of war.
If one were genuinely interested in who was responsible for starting the Great War, the German ambassador to Great Britain saying “we started the war, and that sucks and makes me feel bad” might seem to be relevant. Instead, Clark extracts from this document the evidently crucial facts that:
Lichnowsky respected and was friendly with Edward Grey and his secretary William Tyrrell, and
Lichnowsky saw Prime Minister Asquith crying
With sufficiently motivated reasoning, you can certainly make the claim that Germany’s “look ma no touching ” mobilization didn’t count (because they didn’t say the magic word (in public (except for the one time they did))) and therefore they were merely reacting to Russian movements.
It is just, for several reasons—of the sort the boring “specialists in German history” are likely to credit, as opposed to Wikipedia editors—very silly to do so.
No, wrong. France was sending millions to Russia so Russia could build up effective rail lines to Russia could better and faster mobilize against Germany.
Other than the black check, is there a cite for this?
You are quoting something here, but no link?
Since Germany thought there was a good chance they were going to lose, this is crazy. France wanted revenge.
Cite?
The Turks welcomed the Germans, as the Turkish had bought and paid for two Battleships, but the British simply stole them instead.
On 28 July 1914, Winston Churchill asked for the requisition of two modern warships being built by British shipyards for the Ottoman navy. They were Sultân Osmân-ı Evvel, which had been completed and was making preparations to leave, and Reşadiye. Despite questions about the legality of such a seizure, the request was granted at a Cabinet meeting on 31 July, together with an offer to the Ottomans to pay for the ships. On 2 August, the British requisitioned them, which alienated pro-British elements in Constantinople.[29] Enver Pasha, knowing that the Ottomans would lose them, had offered to sell the ships to Germany in a renewed attempt at obtaining an alliance.[30] After Enver’s 22 July approach to Germany had been rejected, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered for an alliance to be reconsidered. Renewed negotiations started on 28 July, involving Enver, Talaat and Said Halim Pasha. In the resulting secret defensive treaty, signed on 1 August, Germany undertook to defend the Ottomans’ territory if it was threatened. The Ottomans would join with Germany if German treaty obligations with Austria-Hungary forced it into war but would not fight on Germany’s side unless Bulgaria also did so.[31]
On 28 September, the Ottoman government closed the Turkish Straits to international shipping in defiance of the 1841 London Straits Convention regulating the use of the Straits. This caused an immense blow to the Russian economy[43] since Straits were vital for Russian commerce and for communications between the Western Allies and Moscow.[44]
On 2 October, the British cabinet decided to drop its century-long support for the Ottomans against Russian threats. The decision was that the Russian alliance was more important. The decision was made in order to keep Russia out of Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia by giving it Constantinople after the Ottomans were defeated.
Note that last line! Britain was going to give Russia Constaninople!
On 16 August, Cemal Pasha presided over the formal commissioning of the Goeben and the Breslau, which were renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim and Midilli respectively, and their officers and crews into the Ottoman Navy. The sailors put on the fez. In light of the British seizure of the Ottoman dreadnoughts, the “purchase” of the German ships was a propaganda victory for the Ottomans at home
On 22 October 1914 Enver issued a secret order to Souchon: "The Turkish fleet will secure naval mastery in the Black Sea. Seek the Russian navy and attack it without prior declaration of war
Ismail Enver Pasha was the Ottoman Empire’s Minister of War and chief military dictator.
There was a plan, on both sides- never utilized, that German would not go into Belgium, but fight along the French front, mostly defensively. if so, France would go throgh Belgium to outflank the Germans.
None of the major combatants in 1914 ever intended to play defense in the event of war, least of all Germany. There was never the remotest possibility that Germany would hunker down along “the French front”, wherever that might have been. The Germans couldn’t even accept temporary loss of territory in Alsace-Lorraine as the modified Schlieffen Plan dictated, weakening their main push to reinforce the left wing. It was supposed to give ground to draw the French into a costly prolonged offensive, but defense proved to be anathema to the German mindset.
Okay. Let me rephrase: in the period between the assassination of the archduke and the outbreak of open conflict, German voices were the consistent, and most influential, voices for confrontation.
There is nothing, in July 1914, that Great Britain could have done to stop the coming war. There is nothing, in July 1914, that France could have done to stop the coming war. Really, there is nothing, in July 1914, that Serbia could have done to stop it.
In theory, Russia could have “stopped” it by agreeing to let Austro-Hungary destroy Serbia, but the idea that this makes Russia complicit in the Great War displays such contempt for the international order that even Bethmann Holweg would tell you to slow your roll.
Other than Kaiser Wilhelm II’s infamous “The Serbs must be disposed of”? Heinrich von Tschirschky had been, allegedly, calling for retribution at once, saying that if Austria-Hungary did not respond, she could no longer be considered a great power.
(Christopher Clark does not find this believable, although Tschirshky was advocating for war as far back as 1907, at which point he was still Foreign Secretary and not yet Germany’s ambassador to Austria-Hungary, when he specifically noted his coordination with Moltke to that end)
On the record, however, he told his seniors that he was taking “every opportunity” to urge Austria to caution, leading to the kaiser’s equally infamous “who has authorized that? Utterly stupid!” and for Gottlieb von Jagow to direct Tschirschky to reverse course.
In this Jagow was 1. reflecting the prevailing opinion of the political and military establishment in Germany, and 2. communicating to Austria-Hungary what they already knew. Austria’s ambassador had telegraphed Berlin’s desire for “immediate war,” and Berchtold’s chief of staff had been told by Victor Naumann, closely connected to the German foreign office, that
This was the time “to annihilate Serbia”
(David Fromkin, Europe’s Last Summer, p. 155)
The sentiment of German expectations, and conditional support, is clear in this letter from Franz Freiherr von Haymerle, stationed at the Austro-Hungarian embassy, summarizing his and Count Hoyos’ meeting in Berlin on the 5th:
Here at the Foreign Office, we are being urged on all sides to take action. The feeling is excellent for us, if we were to go after Serbia. Otherwise, they will give up on us as hopeless—I almost said.
(als hoffnungslos, hätte ich fast gesagt)
I cannot imagine this is new or surprising; it also doesn’t represent any real change in German opinion over the course of the crisis. The only meaningful debate is whether the impetus came purely from the general staff or whether it was on balance shared by the civilian government as well. And, if so, what role the kaiser’s own erratic beliefs checked the initial German push for immediate conflict.
This is Friedrich von Wiesner’s report from Sarajevo.
(Conspiracy theorists will claim that this was a fiction due to his belief that his messages would be intercepted, so the truth would have to wait until later. The implication—that Wiesner exonerated the Serbs because he knew that this would be viewed by other states, which would create the appearance that Austria-Hungary was simply fabricating a cause for war—is bizarre, and even Clark does not make this claim, saying only that it was “more complex.” Either way, “later” produced nothing more incendiary to be used in the ultimatum)
(emphasis mine)
It bears noting that this, which I take is your opinion, is at odds with the view of historians. Even Clark merely describes it as something that “periodically inflamed public opinion and exerted a stealthy pressure on the policy-makers in Paris.” It was, self-evidently, not doing so that summer. One is struck by the absence amongst those supposedly vengeful policy-makers and Teutophobe generals of someone like Falkenhayn, whose response to the outbreak of war was to declare:
Even if we perish over this, at least it will have been fun.
For a start, by forwarding Britain’s offer of mediation to Vienna while promising that they were only doing so out of obligation and that Germany had no intention of supporting them.
Far from being willing to accept British proposals for international mediation in the looming conflict, Bethmann Hollweg and Jagow advised the Austrians strongly against accepting them, while at the same time explaining – in the most revealing way – that they were compelled to pass on the British proposals to Vienna lest London (and for that matter the German people) should question Berlin’s sincerity in wishing to avoid war. As Bethmann Hollweg tellingly informed his ambassador in Vienna on 27 July 1914: “If we rejected every mediation proposal the whole world would hold us responsible for the conflagration and we would be represented as the ones really driving towards war. That would also make our own position at home an impossible one, where we must appear as the ones being forced into war”. Only a few days later, on 1 August 1914, Admiral von Müller was able to record triumphantly in his diary: “The mood is brilliant. The government has succeeded very well in making us appear as the attacked.”
(John C.G. Röhl, the author of the “Germany” chapter in Decisions for War, 1914, edited by Keith Wilson, p. 39; emphasis in the original text)
And, of course, Moltke was also working with his counterparts in the Austrian general staff to secure their immediate mobilization.
This, also, shouldn’t be surprising. If Germany did not want war, it had ways to stop it. Germany was aware, despite Jagow’s lies to the contrary, of the ultimatum, and could have dialed back their support. Instead, their reaction was to begin drafting their ultimatum to Belgium. The actions of the foreign office and the general staff were not orthogonal to a desire for a peaceful resolution, they were actively hostile to it. More bluntly:
The attitudes and policy of Great Britain and of Russia between 14 July (the day on which the decision to send the ultimatum was taken in Vienna) and 31 July (the reference to German aggression on France in the Kaiser’s telegram of that day) were directed towards mediation or, to put it more cautiously, towards delay. If the German Empire had wished to protect and support Austria-Hungary’s interests, it should have taken up these approaches and dragged them out by skilful tactics, until the Austro-Hungarian armies had had time to carry out the local campaign against Serbia […] Russia, Great Britain and France did not want war at that time, and were prepared to make concessions to Austria-Hungary’s anti-Serbian policy; the war could have been localized if the German Empire had not deliberately organized its escalation.
(Fritz Fellner, also in Decisions for War, 1914, in the chapter on Austria-Hungary; p. 19-21)
An order issued in consultation with the German government, and not the Ottoman one, I note you did not mention.
This was your link, not mine. The location given in it is accurate—page 33 in Isabel Hull’s book A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War. The person who added it to Wikipedia simply chose to end the excerpt deceptively, giving the impression Hull views these rationalizations as accurate (or at least, without commenting on them) instead of being quite clear about the salience of Belgian neutrality to British opinion and policy.
Maybe, if France had not came in, the War would have been more localized.
What “International Order?”- There was no such thing. Russia stood by during at least two Balkan wars, and three Austrian/Ottoman wars. In 1908 Austria-Hungary formally annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina- Russia did not attack. The whole Crimean war was to stop Russian Involvement in the area.
From WHERE? Where is the link/cite you are quoting from???
The Millions that France paid Russia so that Russia could mobilize faster vs Germany?
Wait, you are taking quotes out of books? How can we check these quotes to make sure they are correct and not out of context?
” mobilization didn’t count (because they didn’t say the magic word (in public (except for the one time they did))) and therefore they were merely reacting to Russian movements.