The Games of July: Explaining the Great War

Chapter Five: Vienna, Berlin, and the Blank Check

The great European war would come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans. otto von bismarck chapter five Vienna, Berlin, and the Blank Check Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. At 11:00 PM on August 4, Great Britain declared war on Germany. What transpired in between has come to be known as the July Crisis. It is something of a misnomer. The July Crisis should not be thought of as a singular event. During this interval, a number of distinct decisions were made—in Vienna and Berlin, in St. Petersburg and Paris, and ‹nally in London —and a series of important games were played out over several weeks. Taken together, these decisions and games brought about World War I, an allout con›ict that George Kennan (1979: 3) has described as “the great seminal catastrophe” of the twentieth century. From almost every vantage point, the Great War was an unmitigated disaster . In the years that followed the armistice that ended it, the participants, from the kaiser on down, sought to justify their behavior and to explain their actions . A tragedy of this magnitude, however, required much more than an explanation . A scapegoat was needed. Initially, and to some extent understandably , German leaders were ‹ngered. Eventually, however, as geopolitical considerations overtook sober analysis, all the participants were exonerated (Mombauer 2002: 123). The consensus that eventually emerged was that World War I was an accident for which no one in particular was responsible. As Britain’s prime minister David Lloyd George put it in his War Memoirs, the participants had simply “slithered” into the con›ict. Today, despite challenges from some historians, most notably F. Fischer (1967) and his disciples, the view that World War I had in some sense been accidental continues to hold sway, especially among strategic analysts and those political scientists who study interstate con›ict. After all, in 1914 the two lead90 ing coalitions were in rough balance, and if the conventional wisdom was correct , World War I had to be an aberration (Waltz 1993: 77). Rather than conceding the obvious, however, many realists blamed fate, dumb luck, or blundering decision makers for the failure of balance-of-power theory to correctly anticipate the onset of a major-power con›ict in 1914. Others traced the con›ict to cognitive, perceptual, or psychological de‹ciencies that presumably precluded rational decision making. Either way, the war was seen as one big mistake. There is, however, very little empirical support for the accidental war thesis (Trachtenberg 1991). Indeed, an overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that World War I came about as a consequence of a series of “conscious and calculated” decisions that surely had disastrous consequences but that were instrumentally rational decisions nonetheless (Tunstall 2003: 131; Williamson 1991: 213). Accordingly, in this and the next two chapters, I examine the interactive choices in three critical games that, collectively, capture the essentials of the crisis: (1) Germany and Austria-Hungary’s joint decision, reached early in July, to resolve the latter’s problems with Serbia; (2) the sequence of choices that brought about a general European war when Germany declared war on Russia and France in early August; and (3) the outbreak of a world war after the German invasion of Belgium and Great Britain’s entry into the war. Three important questions guide the analysis. Speci‹cally, why on July 5 did the kaiser give Austria-Hungary carte blanche to pressure Serbia? Why did the con›ict escalate to a European war shortly after the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia expired? And ‹nally, why did the British attempt at deterrence fail so spectacularly? To answer these questions, I begin with some historic context. 5.1. Background As chapter 4 shows, when German chancellor Otto von Bismarck ‹rst negotiated the Dual Alliance with Austria-Hungary in 1879, he had a long-term strategic purpose in mind. Bismarck’s goal was not simply to draw the Hapsburg monarchy closer to Imperial Germany to foreclose the possibility of a war between Austria-Hungary and Russia. Rather, the Dual Alliance was also viewed as a necessary ‹rst step toward the creation of a larger (blocking) coalition that would enable Bismarck to solidify the gains made in the wars of 1866 and 1870. Since by then Bismarck had announced that Germany was a “satiated ” power, his diplomacy was to be guided by his well-known aphorism:“All Vienna, Berlin, and...