July 1914: Countdown to War Read Online Free

Pašić almost certainly did not approve of the plot when he learned of it, but he made only an ineffectual, halfhearted effort to foil the assassination, whether because he feared a coup or the reaction from Vienna if he revealed what the Black Hand was up to. The only things we know for certain are that high Serbian officials were complicit in the crime and that Pašić neither prevented it nor gave the Austrians any genuine help in investigating it. 4
    The Austrians must stand next in the dock of judgment. It was clearly the intention of Conrad, Berchtold, and every other imperial minister except Tisza to use the Sarajevo outrage as a pretext for a punitive war against Serbia. Emperor Franz Josef I, as ultimate arbiter and signator of all key decisions, also bears a grave responsibility, although he did not design the policies—he merely confirmed them. One could easily argue, of course, that the crime committed in Sarajevo was sufficient legal casus belli for war with Serbia: the war launched by the United States and her allies against Afghanistan in 2001 (if not also the Iraq war of 2003) was justified in very similar terms (the “harboring of terrorists”). There are significant differences between the two cases, however. The Serbian government, unlike Osama bin Laden, did not confess to (much less publicly boast about) committing the crime, and she did agree to arrest at least some of the conspirators, such as Major Tankositch, whereas the Taliban refused outright to hand over bin Laden (although Serbia did similarly shelter Apis).
    More significantly, the United States received broad (if not quite universal) international support for her action in Afghanistan. No Great Power made clear her stout opposition toa United States punitive strike in 2001, as at least Russia clearly did to an Austrian one in 1914. True, Berchtold and Conrad did not know, at the beginning of July, what Russia’s reaction would be. By the end of the month, they did, and they proceeded against Serbia anyway. The Austrian sin was therefore one of both intention and commission, although with the caveat that the goal in Vienna was a local war with Serbia, not a European war involving Russia, much less France, Britain, and all the other ultimate belligerents. This was made dramatically clear when Austria, despite having catalyzed the July crisis in the first place, refused to declare war on Russia until August 6—two days after even Britain went in. While this anticlimactic declaration of war has sometimes been seen as implicating Germany in “war guilt”—as it was clearly the Germans who pressured the Austrians into it—what it really reveals is just how little desire there was in Vienna to fight Russia. Considering the Austrians’ poor performance against Russian troops in Galicia at the start of the war, one can easily see why.
    Tisza, for his part, bears significant responsibility for the final shape of the July crisis: its back-ended timing. Owing to the harvest leave issue, the two weeks Austria “lost” after the Ministerial Council of 7 July may not have been as important as historians have claimed. Conrad probably would have had to wait before mobilizing, anyway. It was, rather, at the very beginning that Tisza’s opposition mattered. Had Austria-Hungary mobilized on 1 July (as Conrad wanted to), or after only a few more days of diplomatic spadework (as Berchtold and the emperor would have preferred), it is possible that the Austrians would have caught Europe by surprise with a fait accompli—an occupation of Belgrade, at least, conveniently located as the capital was right on the Austrian border.
    True—in light of Austria’s indecisiveness during the Balkan Wars and her notoriously incompetent military performance in1914—one should regard this counterfactual with skepticism. And yet part of the reason why Conrad fared so badly in Galicia is that his real goal—shared by everyone in Vienna—was to crush Serbia, not to