Sazonov was not making these overtures in a vacuum. Since 1912 Austria had been under steadily increasing economic and diplomatic pressure in the Near East from her ostensible ally. Throughout the Balkans and Asia Minor the business interests of the two empires clashed noisily. For all the kaiser’s rhetoric of fidelity and brotherhood, Bethmann-Hollweg’s consistent advocacy of restraint and compromise seemed in Vienna only to bind Austria’s hands in dealing with adversaries bent on her destruction. In Berlin, more and more policy makers were becoming more and more open in describing their Austrian connection as an alliance with a corpse. Bethmann-Hollweg’s speculations on the Dual Monarchy’s declining viability were paralleled by Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow’s description of the Habsburg dynasty as a House of Atreus, stumbling from catastrophe to catastrophe.18
Austria’s emerging role as the new Sick Man of Europe involved perceptions as well as realities. In an age still influenced by positivism, among men intellectually formed when scientific objectivity was gaining the status of a shibboleth, it was easy to accept diplomatic situations as given, unsusceptible to alteration by human efforts. In Britain, publicists like R. W. Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed predicted glorious futures for the young and vigorous Slavic peoples of southeastern Europe, once the Habsburg Empire should disappear. French graduates of the École Libre des Sciences Politiques, considering Austria’s demise imminent, were constructing alternate systems based on the soon-to-be-autonomous Czechs and Yugoslavs.
Arguments constantly repeated tend to acquire both a life of their own and a certain ascriptive credibility. Russia, France, and Britain individually were increasingly unwilling to run any significant risks to sustain Austria’s existence as a participant in the great-power political system. None of the three states trusted the other two deeply enough to risk alienating them by advocating policies of restraint and support towards Austria. France, over the protests of her ambassador to Vienna, bowed to Russian pressure in refusing the Austro-Hungarian government access to the Paris Bourse in 1909–10. France was also increasingly ready to develop Greece as a bridgehead for the penetration of the Balkan Peninsula and the Ottoman Empire. British policies in principle recognized Austria’s role as a counterweight to Russian ambitions in the Near East. In practice the foreign office followed a modification of the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill/ But need not strive/ Excessively to keep alive. Sir Edward Grey regarded British support for Austria as risking misinterpretation in Germany, as an attempt to detach her only ally. Proposed concessions to Austria were also carefully scrutinized for their possible impact in Paris and St. Petersburg—sometimes with a dose of cant gratuitously added. When in 1910 the foreign office thwarted the Hungarian government’s negotiations for a loan in London, it justified its decision by explaining that the money might be spent on armaments.19
None of the entente governments gave serious consideration on a policy-making level to what might happen should Austria not choose to disappear quietly. Perhaps this was another manifestation of the Age of Science. If Austria’s fate were objectively certain, she would disappear as the mastodon and the saber-tooth tiger had disappeared: without significantly disturbing the march of history.
But if other great powers might have little sympathy with Austria’s increasingly strident claims that her vital interests were being neglected, Germany could not ignore them. Apart from the possible consequences of the Dual Monarchy’s total collapse, Vienna’s growing concentration on the Balkans was a serious danger sign. Should Austria in effect relinquish her great-power role, resigning herself to regional status and pursuing regional interests, Germany would be thrown on her own resources, no longer one of three, as in Bismarck’s ideal, no longer even one of two, but one alone, too weak to stand for long, much less conduct a European concert.
Bethmann’s increasing doubts of Austria’s viability only encouraged his support for a policy of caution and circumspection in the Balkans, as opposed to forceful unilateral action the fragile empire might be unable to sustain. Germany’s insistence that the will of the powers in that region was best exercised collectively, through the Concert of Europe, was correspondingly designed to serve two interlocking ends. The Concert would solidify Anglo-German detente, but also underwrite Austria’s status and position. The Habsburg monarchy and the peace of Europe would be preserved; Germany’s prospects for becoming Europe’s new coachman would be correspondingly enhanced.
It can legitimately be argued that no system can long function if some of its great powers are in fact regional powers seeking to make the system resist change because their own weaknesses preclude flexibillity. But among the most serious gaps in entente diplomacy prior to 1914 was its failure to prepare consequently for Germany’s reaction to the disappearance of her only reliable major ally—perhaps even by engaging her in the process. To states already concerned with the steady accretion of German power, to statesmen unwilling to see themselves as cold-blooded heirs of Machiavelli, such an approach seemed a potentially explosive reversion to an earlier and more savage era of international relations. In 1772, a Russian tsarina had recognized the necessity of involving a Prussian king in the destruction of a weak neighbor. The lessons of the Polish partition were, however, lost on Nicholas II and his advisors.
At the turn of the century, the French military attaché submitted several memoranda on the Russian army’s planning for the contingency of a Habsburg collapse in the aftermath of Franz Josef’s death. Apparently the general staff planners expected the empire’s German provinces to seek admission to the Second Reich spontaneously—a development Russia would not oppose if suitably compensated with Galicia, a blank check in the Ottoman Empire, and possibly an independent Bohemia as well.20 But these and similar projections remained the stuff of operational planning rather than state policy. In April, 1913, Tsar Nicholas, in an interview with the British ambassador, described Austria as “a source of weakness for Germany and a danger to peace” whose breakup was only a question of time. He went on to sketch a future situation in which Bohemia and Hungary would become independent kingdoms and the south Slavs absorbed by Serbia and Rumania, with Germany acquiring the “German provinces.” Sir George Buchanan was one of the leading lights of the foreign office, with wide experience in both German and Slavic Europe. He had held his current post since 1910. He was highly regarded in London for his tact and skill. Yet he confessed himself “unable to follow the Emperor’s train of thought, or to understand how he arrived at this conclusion.” Buchanan was, however, perceptive enough to comment that such changes were not likely to be effected without a general war.21
In January, 1914, Sazonov echoed Buchanan, saying that the Austrian situation would end in either a federal solution along national lines, or a war for which Russia was in no way prepared. But on March 18, the nationalist and conservative St. Petersburg Novoye Vremya published the alleged comments of “a highly authoritative state official,” probably Sukhomlinov. The article repeated Nicholas’s line of argument almost verbatim, with the added provisions that Germany would sacrifice Alsace and Russia would annex Galicia. Sazonov was quick to deny that the war minister had anything at all to do with the story. The denial, however, becomes suspect in the context of Sukhomlinov’s statement to the French ambassador in May that Russia intended to have Galicia after Franz Josef’s death, and the tsar hoped Germany would accept this peacefully.22