Serbia’s increasing regional pretentions and Austria’s increasing regional focus put an unexpected strain on Germany’s continental visions. Most analyses of the July Crisis present the German chancellor as either a pessimistic fatalist who allowed events to take their course, or a willing initiator of a war designed to stabilize German society, confirm German military superiority and expand German influence throughout the world. At best he emerges as a man running a calculated risk, pursuing defensive ends with offensive means, his claims of supporting Germany’s last ally strongly contradicted by a dynamic, imperialist thrust towards European hegemony and eventual world domination.57
Without denying the existence of a strong will at official levels to extend Germany’s influence by force of arms, support for such an extension was rather negative than positive. Bethmann himself had argued for years that even threats of war were criminal unless Germany’s honor, security, and future were inextricably involved. On June 4 he informed the Bavarian minister in Berlin that a world war was not likely to improve Germany’s domestic position, and that the time for a preventive war, if it ever existed, had passed in 1905.58
Such statements cannot be dismissed out of hand as window-dressing. For a state dominated by the rhetoric of belligerence, a state constantly in diplomatic conflict with her neighbors, Germany in 1914 was surprisingly unready for the contingency of a major war. A. J. P. Taylor’s argument that the entente would have weakened over the next few years had war not occurred, that Germany in fact jumped the gun in 1914, is credible only in the context of the kind of cold, long-range calculations on general policy that were conspicuously absent in Berlin.59 Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, the generals and diplomats of the Second Reich were a long way from being unreconstructed warmongers. They accepted Germany’s capacity to win any future war. They accepted the fact that this victory would correspondingly enhance Germany’s continental and global position. But the moral and physical risks and costs were far too great to be accepted voluntarily, much less sought out or planned for.
Wilhelm Groener’s sarcastic postwar comment that national economics did not form part of the officers’ training curriculum was only partially accurate.60 That average stocks of raw materials were sufficient for no more than six months was also unimportant in the context of belief in a short war that would be decided in the enemy’s country. Supplies could be imported through neutral states and third parties, replenished through conquest, or seized as part of the postwar settlement. What was significant was the attitude behind the preparations. Consultation between the government on one hand, the captains of industry and agriculture on the other, was minimal. Cooperation among public and private agencies involved little more than vague debates about the best ways of storing forage, or how Germany might best be fed in case of a British naval blockade. Administrative routine dominated the discussions. Memoranda were passed from bureaucrat to bureaucrat and office to office with no particular urgency. The army itself seemed hardly interested in front-loading for the off-the-shelf war it expected. In 1912 the general staff and the war ministry finally responded to the massive consumption of material by both sides in the Russo-Japanese War by instituting an expanded program of shell production. Two years later, business as usual had left the program still unfulfilled.61
Among German policy makers this dissonance was perhaps most pronounced in Moltke. Moltke’s martial rhetoric in the context of his personality, the cello-playing dabbler in the occult, able to see four sides of every three-sided question, constantly doubting his fitness for the post he held, invites speculation along psychological lines: overcompensation through posturing.62 It seems more correct to assert that Moltke, along with many of his uniformed counterparts, expected war, perhaps even desired war—but not tomorrow and not next week. For years everywhere in Europe the time had not been quite right. Better to wait for the next arms bill, for the next round of negotiations, for something else in the future. It was the way of sustaining a dream whose risks were great, yet whose prospects were just alluring enough to inhibit any desperate efforts to preserve a peace whose preservation seemed in any case essentially beyond Germany’s control.
The nature of the July Crisis has also been obscured by the issue of British policies. Since 1911 Anglo-German relations had steadily improved. Cooperation in the Balkan crises of 1912–13 was only one in a series of events that led observers everywhere in Europe to talk of detente between states whose rivalries were as recent as they seemed artificial.63 Fritz Fischer, Gerhard Ritter, and Egmont Zechlin, their students, their critics, and their epigoni, have devoted miles of typescript to discussing whether or not Bethmann in fact expected that Britain would stay out of a continental war, and whether Germany proposed to take advantage of that fact to keep the war localized in order to execute a planned program of continental conquest.
Would a clear, early statement of British intention to intervene have deterred Germany? In 1914, the question was secondary in Berlin. Bethmann-Hollweg has been described as embarking in July on a diplomatic offensive testing the entente’s will for war. He interpreted his own actions as testing the entente’s, and specifically Russia’s, will for peace. Bethmann hoped for British cooperation in defusing the current Balkan crisis. He was shocked and upset when it failed to materialize. But ultimately he could not afford to depend on it.
In 1861 Abraham Lincoln carefully publicized his intention to send supplies to a beleaguered Fort Sumter, not so much to provoke the embryonic Confederacy into firing the first shot as to provide an opportunity for the displaying of its general intentions. Peace bought at the price of union, the president insisted, was meaningless.64 Bethmann-Hollweg was no Lincoln. But in the minds of German policy makers one salient point distinguished the Sarajevo incident from all the other crises that failed to escalate beyond the pages of now-unread diplomatic histories. This time Austria was insisting that not merely her prestige, not merely her “vital interests” as a negotiating abstraction, but her very existence as a power was part of the stake. If Germany from the beginning encouraged decisive action against Serbia, she was not winding the Habsburg clock.65 Bethmann had not abandoned hopes for the Concert of Europe. But to function effectively concert diplomacy required full participation by all its members. The politics of restraint are effective only when pursued from a position of strength; otherwise they impress no one. Given Austria’s already shaky standing in the community of nations, given the increasing tensions within the Dual Monarchy, who would believe that unilateral efforts at conciliation showed anything but the absence of any consequent will to survive?
At least as much to the point, what were the concrete prospects of entente restraint in this situation? Sazonov’s shocked response to the Austrian ultimatum, “C’est la guerre europèenne” reflected the position of a Russian government unable quite to believe what was happening. Hartwig, who died suddenly of a heart attack on July 10, and the Russian military attaché in Belgrade both had close and longstanding links with Serbia’s intelligence service—the agency most often mentioned in connection with possible government complicity in the assassination. Whatever the exact degree of information may have been in Belgrade, no evidence indicates Russian officials at any higher level had any foreknowledge of the deed. Russia was involved nevertheless. On July 24 Regent Peter of Serbia appealed personally to Nicholas, saying that Austria’s demands were unreasonable, and in any case Serbia could not defend herself against them. The tsar’s “generous Slav heart” must speak to him in this time of crisis.