Despite these reservations, through the fall and early winter British and German diplomats cooperated more or less effectively in preparing for a Balkan peace conference. Then Bethmann played to another gallery. On December 2, he informed the Reichstag in ringing tones that should Austria be attacked by a third party, Germany would fight.
The reference to Russia was unmistakable, and in a German context hardly surprising. A little over a month earlier, on October 28, State Secretary Alfred von Kiderlin-Wächter had been even more open in a speech to the Bundesrat. Austria-Hungary, he declared, must be held responsible for defending her own interests in the Balkans. But should she be faced with a Russian attack, Germany had no choice but to provide assistance. This was not “fighting for Durazzo.” Germany’s ultimate purpose in the Dual Alliance was to sustain Austria’s position as a great power. Otherwise the Reich would be isolated, trapped between France and Russia.54
Germany’s position was by no means as obvious across the English Channel. The British government was both alarmed at what seemed unnecessary saber-rattling and concerned at the possibility of facing a continental war for which Britain was completely unprepared. In diplomacy as in poker, a good way of winning with a second-rate hand is to overbet it. On successive days Lord Chancellor Richard Haldane and Grey himself informed the German ambassador, Prince Lichnowsky, that Britain would not tolerate a single power dominating the continent. Should Austria invade Serbia, Britain would not remain neutral in any resulting continental war.55 William flew into a rage. In October he had argued that hostilities in the Balkans were no bad thing even if they led to general war. Such a conflict was inevitable sooner or later, and Germany was in a favorable position relative to her potential enemies.56 Now, on December 8, he summoned his military and naval advisors and demanded immediate consideration of the consequences of an Anglo-German war.
This crown council has become a key event in interpretations of Germany’s foreign policy in the immediate prewar years. It has been presented as the beginning of the last stage of a coherent, goal-oriented policy designed to create favorable opportunities for a war of conquest that would destroy the status quo internationally while preserving it at home, giving Germany hegemony in Europe and a correspondingly strong basis for a drive to world power. It has also been described as no more than one of a series of limited responses to immediate situations, an opportunity for an incompetent kaiser and his feckless entourage to discharge their more juvenile emotions without addressing the real problems of a Germany so badly divided against itself that pursuit of any coherent foreign policy was ultimately impossible. In one case the appropriate imperial symbol is a vulture. In the other it becomes a turkey.57
The direct consequences of the December 8 meeting were marginal. The press was instructed to prepare public opinion for a possible war resulting from an Austro-Serbian conflict. Some general military and economic steps for mobilization were initiated, none of them on the level Russia had pursued in the previous two months. This behavior, however, suggests less about Germany’s intentions than does Kiderlin-Wächter’s memorandum of December 6 to the embassy in London. Its author insisted that no one in Germany was thinking of forcing Russia to retreat, to sacrifice her interests or prestige. Austria-Hungary’s rights vis-à-vis Serbia, Kiderlin argued, were the same in essence as those of France in Algeria or Britain in Egypt. Had Russia committed herself to support Serbia’s demands, one might be able to speak of a backdown, but Russia herself staunchly denied that that was the case.58
German hostility to south Slav aspirations is frequently described by its critics as an explosive mixture of economic imperialism and self-defeating paranoia. German industrialists and capitalists, according to this interpretation, saw southeastern Europe as both a source of increasingly scarce raw materials and a field for investment and exploitation. At the same time, German publicists and diplomats mistook Russia’s emotional and intellectual sympathy towards fellow Slavs for a developed political position. Slavic identity was for Russia little more than a means of mobilizing and focussing domestic support in crisis situations. A German foreign policy sincerely oriented towards peace should have recognized and avoided the risks of igniting that particular tinder. Germany, however, had never really stabilized its own nationalist forces, much less developed any sympathy for self-determination on the part of peoples viewed as inferior in any case. Instead of getting behind this modern and progressive force, or at least standing out of its way, German policy makers chose to back reaction as embodied in Austria-Hungary, giving the high moral and political ground to Russia with predictable and tragic results.59
German and Austrian statesmen and opinion makers all too frequently demonstrated regrettable arrogance towards Slavs in general and Serbs in particular. Simplicissimus, that European model of a satiric journal, delighted in portraying the Balkan peoples as vermin-infested barbarians. Serbs never surrender, asserted one cartoon, because they can never find a white flag clean enough to be convincing. Moltke the Younger’s comparison of Serbian aspirations to an abscess, threatening to poison the body of Europe and best cauterized with a red-hot iron, reflected an even more significant lack of empathy.60
Such insensitivities obscure, but do not negate, the argument that successive attempts to restructure eastern and central Europe along ethnic lines caused far more problems than they solved. The only stable order that unfortunate region has known in this century has been order imposed by outside forces, most recently the USSR. The Balkan Wars of 1912–13 set new standards for horror and violence, both on the battlefields and against noncombatants. An international commission surveying the conflict concluded that the fighting had been “as desperate as though extermination were the end sought.”61 As for Serbia’s self-proclaimed role as liberator and integrator, growing Albanian resistance to Serb occupation was only the most obvious contemporary indication that Serbia was no less imperialistic than her larger contemporaries. She had merely lacked opportunity to indulge her ambitions.62
This perspective remains uncommon in an academic world that has tended since World War II to legitimate uncritically almost any political expression of nationalism. Joachim Remak, for all his sympathy to the Habsburg Empire, tacitly accepts a balance of rights between Austria’s wish to survive and Serbia’s desire to expand. The author of a distinguished general history of the Balkans describes the Serbian government before 1914 as having three options: a “greater Serbia” built largely on lands taken from the Habsburgs; a Balkan federation, again incorporating the Slavs of Austria-Hungary “should that state dissolve”; and a Yugoslav program incorporating “all” Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes in a single nation. It is noteworthy that a scholar of Barbara Jelavich’s stature seems victimized by the tendency of Eastern European peoples to romanticize and aggrandize their national past. She does not even consider a fourth possibility: renouncing these vaulting ambitions and living in relative peace with her neighbor, either willingly or under duress.63
National consciousness, particularly in the Balkans, has been to a significant degree the product of cultivation. The transformation of social groups into what Benedict Anderson aptly calls “imagined communities” depends heavily on intellectuals. Writers, academicians, and politicians set the style in which these communities are conceived. In practice this style has emphasized alleged genetically or, more recently, culturally based differences among peoples at the expense of historic ties, economic interests, and geopolitical realities.64 Whatever the legitimate claims of national identity, they do not and cannot include an absolute right to secede and regroup at will. Self-determination remains subject to limitation by the claims of other rights and principles, including the principle of stability. Nor does self-determination confer moral or physical immunity from the consequences of acts committed in its name.