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SARAJEVO REVISITED

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confederate_commando [OP]

2004-07-04 23:06 | User Profile

SARAJEVO REVISITED

[more Chronicles Extra!]

July 2, 2004

SARAJEVO REVISITED by Srdja Trifkovic

It was 90 years ago this week that a young Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated Austrian-Hungarian heir to the throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and his morganatic wife Sophie, during their state visit to Sarajevo. This event triggered off a diplomatic chain reaction known as the July Crisis that culminated in the outbreak of the Great War, the most tragic event in the history of mankind. That war destroyed an imperfect but on the whole decent and well-ordered world, and opened the floodgates of hell. Bolshevism, Fascism, Nazism, the second round of 1939-1945, the Holocaust, and the ruins of civilization we now live in, are all the fruits of the summer of 1914.

It is fairly common for educated non-historians who think about such matters—a dying breed—to assume that the July crisis was the result of a series of blunders and miscalculations in various Great Power courts, foreign offices, and chancelleries. Nobody wanted the war, this view goes, but like in a Greek drama forces beyond their control and understanding drove everyone into it. Implicit in this description is that the European system was so inherently unstable that a single terrorist act could fatally disrupt it.

This view is wrong. As one of the most prominent German historians of the 20th century, Fritz Fischer, demonstrated in his Griff nach der Weltmacht, the Wilhelmine establishment welcomed the prospect of war as an opportunity to make Germany the undisputed master of Europe by defeating Russia and France, expanding its colonial empire, and achieving parity with Britain as a global power. To that end Germany encouraged Austria-Hungary to issue an impossible ultimatum to Serbia blaming it for the attentat and then to attack it, with both Central Powers knowing full well that this would lead to an all-out war unless Russia climbed down at the last minute and abdicated its role as a great power.

Austria’s policy, in the aftermath of the Balkan Wars (1912-1913), lacked coherence. It reflected Vienna’s inability to devise a strategy of legitimist defense against the pressures of nationalism. To try and contain Serbia, to curtail its potential to act as a would-be Piedmont for seven million South Slav subjects of the Dual Monarchy, was a rational objective; but to do so at the risk of causing an all-European war was not. It was assumed in Vienna that ultimately the only way to eliminate the threat from Belgrade was to defeat the troublesome little neighbor in a limited preventive war, and either incorporate Serbia into the Monarchy or else reduce it to the status of a semi-autonomous vassal principality in its pre-1912 boundaries. The policy of resolving nationalist tensions within the decaying Monarchy by absorbing ever more restless Slavs into it was self-defeating in the extreme.

Even Francis Ferdinand’s trip to Sarajevo was an act of deliberate provocation. It was scheduled for St. Vitus’ Day (June 28), the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo commemorated by all Serbs as the day of prayerful remembrance and pride. For the Hapsburg heir to the throne to come to the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina—only recently annexed to the Dual Monarchy and predominantly Serb-inhabited at that time—was as reckless as it would have been for the Prince of Wales to parade through Dublin in all state pomp on St. Patrick’s Day of that same year.

The Archduke’s death was a boon to the war party; within days the dead couple were seen as useful collateral damage in the broader design pursued by the Chief of the Imperial General Staff Konrad von Hoetzendorff, who claimed that the war against Serbia would amount to no more than “a punitive stroll to Nish.” Serbien muss sterbien became the favorite Viennese jingle. Teaching the Serbs a lesson would restore the monarchy’s shaken prestige—it had not fought a victorious war since 1815—and postpone the need for any internal re-alignment, of the “trialist” or any other variety. The Hapsburgs’ challenge was to bait the Serbs without provoking the Russians, until and unless Germany’s backing was assured.

It was not possible for German politicians and soldiers to declare the European system created by Bismarck null and void. They could not admit that they wanted to revise it by force in favor of an extended Mitteleuropa, dominated by Germany, with an emaciated France to its left and a humbled Russia—minus the Ukraine and the Baltic provinces—to its right. The Prussian elite needed a seemingly righteous cause, the latter-day Ems Telegram, to unite the nation and, in particular, to persuade its millions of Social Democrats and Roman Catholics that the coming war was just, its cause worth dying for. The scenario was simple, mendacious, and effective: encourage Austria to present Serbia with an outrageous ultimatum that had to be rejected; let Russia threaten Austria in Serbia’s defense; present Germany’s subsequent move against Russia as a gallant and selfless rescue of Germany’s aggrieved Danubian ally; and wait for France to join the fray as Russia’s ally.

The military strategy was to strike against France first by marching through neutral Belgium in a massive flanking movement (the Schlieffen Plan), take Paris and the Channel ports, then shift forces against Russia’s slowly-mobilizing army and defeat it by means of a series of offensives relying on rapid movement and concentration of vastly superior firepower in chosen locations. The plan also demanded wanton violation of Belgian neutrality that carried the risk of British intervention—Britain invariably went to war in order to prevent domination of any single power of the Continent in general, and its control of the Channel ports in particular—but it was believed in Berlin that this danger could be somehow averted, and that in any event the British could not field an army capable of affecting the outcome until it was too late.

Both military planning and the political rationale behind it reflected Berlin’s establishment’s obsession with the notion of “encirclement.” Just as the political paradigm was unduly pessimistic, its military “solution” was based on an optimistic scenario that had many elements that could, and did, go wrong. Dermined to break out of this self-imposed, intellectually wanting and largely imagined “encirclement” the Second Reich discarded Bismarck’s flexibility of external liaisons in favor of an implacable hostility to France, a sense of looming danger from Russia, and—perhaps worst of all—an alliance with Austria that was dangerous in its implications.

The Iron Chancellor would never have allowed the worn-out Viennese tail to wag the dynamic German dog, and in the 1880s and 90s he repeatedly warned that the Balkans must never be allowed to release its potential as Europe’s proverbial powder keg. His successors of 1914 disregarded that advice on both counts, and on July 6 told Austria to deal with Serbia as it deemed fit. In this they encountered no effective opposition, and even the seemingly middle-of-the-road Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, joined the fray with an air of fatalistic determination, only once or twice interrupted by pangs of fearful lucidity. He belonged to an educated elite whose purpose in life should have been to contemplate, with seriousness and detachment, what action should be taken in pursuit of Germany’s state and national interest. But by 1914 the ruling stratum’s understanding of the State reason was fatally corrupted by ideological mantras of the Wilhelmine Germany’s equivalent of neoconservatives: the naval lobby, the colonial lobby, the annexationist lobby, the Voelkisch lobby, all beat the same drum. Like American neoconservatives today, they branded all moderation treason, and all doubt—treason. In Fischer’s assessment, Bethman could no more have resisted the war party than the Pope could have converted himself to Protestantism’ Germany’s criminal blunder of 1914 is a sinister precursor of its crime of 1939. As per Fischer, these are the “ideologies, values, and ambitions that led our country to destruction in the space of two generations.”

In addition to being gripped by a self-fulfilling Weltanschauung that demanded aggressively proactive policies, the Central Powers’ political elites were unable and unwilling to question the dictates of military planning. As per Fisher’s old foe Gerhard Ritter, a foolhardy and desperate gamble, “va-banque-Spiel,” replaced policy making: in Vienna Conrad presented the Cabinet with a rosy and unrealistic assessment of Austria’s military capabilities that were soon demolished in a series of humiliating defeats in Serbia, while the German plan of campaign—which relied on the great Austrian offensive in the East—suffered from an over-estimation of German capability. Mobilization schedules and railway timetables took over. The lights went out all over Europe, never to be lit again.

Four awful years later President Wilson’s Fourteen Points—the device that was allegedly meant to end the war—espoused the principle of self-determination. It threw a revolutionary doctrine thrown at an already exhausted Europe, a doctrine almost on par with Bolshevism in its destabilizing effect. It unleashed competing aspirations among the smaller nations of Central Europe and the Balkans that not only hastened the collapse of transnational empires, but also gave rise to a host of intractable ethnic conflicts and territorial disputes that remain unresolved to this day. Wilson’s notions of an “enlarging democracy” and “collective security” signaled the birth of a view of America’s role in world affairs which has created—and is still creating—endless problems for both America and the world. It is Wilson speaking through President George W. Bush who declared that America not only “created the conditions in which new democracies could flourish” but “also provided inspiration for oppressed peoples.”

Two decades after Wilson, burdened by Clemenceau’s untenable revenge of Versailles, Europe staggered into a belated Round Two of self-destruction. After 1918 it was badly wounded; after 1945 mortally so. The result is a civilization that is aborting and birth-controlling itself to death, that is morally bankrupt, culturally spent, and spiritually comatose. We are living—if life it is—with the consequences, and in the ruins, of Somme and Verdun. To have a hint of the human cost it is essential to visit the hecatombs of northern France and the Dolomites. To understand its cultural cost it is only necessary to look around us. As an Islamic deluge threatens to replace rapidly dying Europeans within a century, as America continues its futile quest for dominance abroad and its cultural self-destruction at home, the causes and meaning of the civilizational suicide of 1914 are more relevant to our present and to our future than at any time since Sarajevo.

Copyright 2004, [url]www.ChroniclesMagazine.org[/url]

[url]http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic04/NewsST070204.html[/url]

LlenLleawc

2004-07-06 00:14 | User Profile

An interesting but oversimplified account. First off, the comparison of the Archduke "provoking" the Serbs is wrong. To compare it with the Prince of Wales riding through Dublin on St. Patrick's day is a bad analogy given that the Battle of Kosovo was fought against the muslims, not the Austrians.

The Archduke was actually trying to build ties with the Serbs by showing his support of their culture; this is why the many Serbs liked him and why the Serbian nationalists disliked him. He had taken a slavic wife which many Austrians depsised him for. This made him popular with Serbs however. This is the reason the Serbian militants hated him: because he was too popular with their own people thus undermining their nationalist ambitions. They hated him because he was the only Austrian royal trying to befriend the Slavic peoples. This article very dishonestly implies the opposite.

Secondly it was a small cabal of elites in the German and Austrian governments that used fraud and outright deception to goad their governments into war. Namely Count Von Berchtold the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister and Austrian General Conrad von Hotzendorff. This article also fails to mention that Russia was deploying troops near the German border; Germany told Russia to withdraw these troops or it would declare war. Russia lied and claimed to withdraw the troops while continuing mobilisation; when Germany found out, it merely followed through on its threat(My source for this is S.L.A. Marshal's history of WWI.) The Germans also requested a corridor of Belgian land to transport troops into France but Belgium refused. Even after taking Belgium many German politicians favored returning it once the war was over(assuming Germany won.) German atrocities in Belgium were minor compared to those of the Cossacks in the East.

I will try to find some more information on the German historian that this article is based on, I am interested in his viewpoint. The Germans may have been more complicit in this than I was aware but this article's language is very suspicious to me. Notice it says, "Germany encouraged Austria-Hungary to issue an impossible ultimatum to Serbia..." Germany did encourage an ultimatum and the final delivered ultimatum was impossible, so technically this may be true, but it implies that Germany wanted the ultimatum to be "impossible", a claim I wouldn't believe unless I saw a source document.

Meanwhile some very good info on World War One can be found here:

[url]http://www.firstworldwar.com/origins/index.htm[/url]