The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (The Penguin History of Europe Book 7)
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In 1908 the advent of the Young Turk regime was taken in Serbia and the rest of the region as a further sign of Ottoman weakness and a signal for action.
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Nikola took advantage of Ottoman weakness to declare himself king of his impoverished country in 1910.
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It was at this point that the Italian government saw its chance to revive its ambition of an empire in north Africa and invaded Libya, declaring war on the territory’s nominal sovereign power, the Ottoman Empire. The war was notable for the first example of aerial reconnaissance and aerial bombardment, by the Italians, who also for the first time in history deployed armoured cars on the ground.
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Meanwhile a Greek force raced to Salonika, occupying the city just before the Bulgarians arrived. Relations between the two small states soon deteriorated sharply as a result.
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While the retreating Turks massacred civilians on their way out, the incoming Bulgarians burned down every mosque they found on their way in.
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Eventually Adrianople fell on 26 March 1913, leaving nearly 60,000 dead, many of them from cholera. On entering the city, the Bulgarians found the streets littered with decomposing corpses.
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Even the Ottomans managed to reoccupy part of eastern Thrace, retaking Adrianople in the process. When the Romanian forces were within seven miles of the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, the Bulgarians reluctantly brought the month-long conflict to an end.
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For Russia, however, the Balkan Wars were a catastrophe. Its carefully constructed system of Balkan alliances had collapsed in the most spectacular possible way. The most powerful state in the region, Bulgaria, was angry at the Russians’ failure to support it, and now looked to Germany as an ally. Russia’s only remaining friend was Serbia, and this gave the Serbs enormous leverage, which they were to use to the full in 1914.
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In the First Balkan War, when Montenegro in alliance with Serbia attacked northern Albania, where the inhabitants were mostly neither Serbs nor Montenegrins, Italy and Austria-Hungary demanded their withdrawal, Russia began to mobilize in support of the Serbs, and France declared its support for the Russians.
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Five years later he signed a secret Reinsurance Treaty with Russia, in an attempt to keep it within the German fold.
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Acutely aware of the risk that the turbulent politics of the Balkans could spark a European conflict, he warned repeatedly of the danger that Germany might have to fight a war on two fronts, and told the Reichstag in 1876 that Balkan conflicts were not ‘worth our risking – excuse my plain speaking – the healthy bones of one of our Pomeranian musketeers’.
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Moreover, after his departure from office in 1890, a younger generation of German politicians and statesmen came to power imbued with a self-confidence in Germany’s destiny and a disdain for the elaborate system of diplomatic alignments that Bismarck had erected to shield the young empire from its enemies.
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From this point onwards at the latest, the British government, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey included, regarded Germany, not Russia or France, as the main threat to British interests.
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The decisive factor here was the massive build-up of German naval power in the wake of the Navy Law of 1898 and its successors. Previously there had been no effective German navy at all. But Kaiser Wilhelm and the new State Secretary of the Imperial Naval Office, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, were determined to build one that would boost Germany’s prestige.
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In 1897 the British navy, the largest in the world, was described as ‘a drowsy, inefficient, moth-eaten organism’ manned by men trained to sail ships in a peaceful world. Admirals and captains took pride in the appearance of their ships, often paying for their adornment out of their own pockets. Sailors spent long hours polishing the brasswork and captains avoided gunnery practice because it dirtied the ships’ paint.
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In 1914 the Royal Navy still thought all that counted would be a single decisive encounter in the North Sea, between rows of Dreadnoughts, of boarding parties, of a quick, total victory: a modern Battle of Trafalgar. Tirpitz thought along similar lines. Such an event never materialized.
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restore movement to warfare. A few recognized these inconvenient facts. In Modern Weapons and Modern War (1900) the Polish banker Jan Bloch (1836–1902) argued that in the next major war ‘the spade will be as important as the rifle’. He predicted that the war of the future would be a stalemate. Cavalry charges would be obsolete. Entrenched men armed with machine guns would have at least a fourfold advantage over men coming towards them across open ground. Combatant nations would have to mobilize men in their millions, and the resultant stresses and strains would lead to ‘the break-up of the ...more
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Helmuth von Moltke (1848–1916), Chief of the German General Staff from 1906 to 1914, known generally as ‘Moltke the Younger’ in deference to his more famous uncle, declared in 1912 that war must come ‘and the sooner the better!’ However, when real war actually did come two years later, he had a nervous breakdown and had to be relieved of his duties.
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On 28 June 1914 the heir to the Habsburg throne, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was carrying out a military inspection and public visit in Sarajevo, in the province of Bosnia, annexed by Austria-Hungary six years earlier.
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The Emperor Franz Josef, who disapproved of Franz Ferdinand’s marriage, is said on hearing the news of the assassination to have commented ‘A Higher Power has restored the order I could not uphold’, and ordered a third-class funeral.
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Franz Ferdinand’s forcible removal made it easier for the war party in Vienna, led by army chief Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf (1852–1925), to follow its aggressive instincts.
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Colonel Apis seems to have approved of the project, and although he was not acting on behalf of the Serbian government, it was aware that an attempt might be made and even advised the archduke privately to call off his visit.
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Nobody at the meeting seems to have thought that the Russians would actually intervene if the Austrians took action against the Serbs.
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despite many allegations by later historians, there is no evidence for the claim that the Germans were using the crisis as an excuse for war with the Russians, still less with the British.
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Immediate action at the end of June would probably have won widespread international approval, but a month later the shock of the murder was no longer so present, and international sympathies for the Austrians had cooled.
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The ultimatum, therefore, no longer somehow seemed sincere. And indeed, it was not. It was intended by the Austro-Hungarian government not as a genuine set of conditions but as an excuse for war, which had already been determined on in Vienna at the outset of the crisis.
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Declaring the ultimatum to have been rejected, and spurning any further chance of negotiation, the Austro-Hungarian government declared war on Serbia on 28 July 1914. Within twenty-four hours Austrian shells were falling on Belgrade.
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The press considered it would be ridiculous to get involved in this obscure quarrel: the Daily News (in a leading article headed ‘Why We Must Not Fight’) declared that there was no conflict of interest between Germany and the United Kingdom.
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For his part, Moltke on 13 July expressed the view that Austria should strike against the Serbs immediately, then ‘make peace quickly’.
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However, Schlieffen was impressed by improvements in Russian fortifications during the 1890s, by the vastness of Russia’s territory, and by the growing size of the Russian Army. So he reversed the plan. A strong German army would invade Belgium. Passing round Paris, it would pin the French forces against their own fortifications on the border with Germany from the rear.
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The opinion of the Russian press was pro-Serb, naturally enough given the influence of feelings of Pan-Slav and Orthodox solidarity.
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The Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov (1860–1927), issued a press statement immediately after the publication of the Austrian ultimatum, stating that Russia would not ‘remain inactive’ if the ‘dignity and integrity of the Serb people, brothers in blood, were under threat’.
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On 23 July 1914, therefore, the governments of Russia and France, to whom the Austrian plan for an ultimatum had been leaked, formally agreed to defend Serbia in the face of the Austrian threat.
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British policy was still directed more by imperial considerations than by European ones.
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International socialist solidarity seemed on the cards as the leader of the French Socialists, Jean Jaurès, issued calls for a general strike and summoned a conference of the Second International for 9 August. But on 31 July a young French nationalist, Raoul Villain (1885–1936), approached an open window in the Le Croissant restaurant on the corner of the rue Montmartre and the rue de Croissant, where Jaurès was dining with friends, pulled out a revolver, and shot him twice in the head. (The assassin was subsequently acquitted by a jury that was convinced of the necessity of war.)
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In the entire crisis the crucial moment was most probably when Germany issued the ‘blank cheque’ to the Austrians to do with the Serbs what they wanted.
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The German, Russian and French governments never really took the idea of mediation seriously: they stood firm because they feared the consequences for their prestige and power in Europe. No serious proposal ever came anyway; the Great Power best placed to intervene, as had happened over the Balkan Wars the previous year, was Britain, but Britain did not take the crisis seriously enough until it was too late.
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Reactions in one Cossack settlement in Russia recorded by an English traveller were equally confused: proud of their military tradition, the men were keen to fight, but the announcement of the outbreak of war had omitted to say against whom; some thought the enemy was China, others England. Nobody believed it was Germany.
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The United States of America entered the world stage, tilting the balance of two world wars decisively towards the Allied Powers. By 1945 the USA had become a global superpower. American culture swept across the world.
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The last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI (1861–1926), departed to spend the autumn of his days on the Italian Riviera.
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Standing at the window of his room in the Foreign Office overlooking the Mall on the evening of 3 August 1914, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey turned to the friend who was visiting him. ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe,’ he said, ‘we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’
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