Please stop your killing me
I can't help the fact that Wikipedia was written chiefly by people employing the tendentious and largely biased accounts of earlier historians, instead of more sober and modern approaches. Any fool can mine quotes to prove her point about a crisis. What matters are the
actions that the states took.
---
It is true that some leaders in the German General Staff wanted to fight a war over Serbia. This was a constant refrain in military circles in Germany. German officers believed that the combination of Russia, France, and Britain was only growing stronger with time and that if a war with the entente powers was inevitable - a view that many subscribed to - it would be better if that war came sooner, rather than later, because a later war would see Germany confronted by many times its strength as the Russian-initiated arms race reached its culmination.
The most important aspect of the crisis, though, is that at every turn the militaries of
each country, save Serbia itself, were no more than advisers and agents of the political leadership. They did not force the pace. The fact that the Saxon ambassador reported pro-war sentiment among some members of the German officer corps, therefore, means very little. As it happens, despite this ostensibly aggressive intent, Germany's military mobilized
last of all the major continental belligerents. It got to the point that the General Staff had to browbeat the kaiser and the chancellor with hard evidence of Russian and French secret mobilization - which was true - in order to secure agreement to any military preparations at all. For a country like Germany, whose military strategy in any war depended on early and rapid mobilization, these actions are
not compatible in any way with a planned war of aggression.
---
Germany's kaiser repeatedly vacillated on the subject of war between any states. Perhaps the best analysis of his personality is that he was willing to talk big when the danger of war was far, but when you bit down to the gristle, the kaiser was deeply afraid of the consequences of war and unwilling to go over the brink. He made excuses to put off fighting, he exhibited willingness to back down in most crises, and in the words of Luigi Albertini, one of the finest and earliest historians of the July Crisis, "[he] was full of bluster when danger was a long way off but piped down when he saw a real threat of war approaching."
So yes, Wilhelm talked a big game about defeating Serbia. He also, on the same day (6 July) stated that he believed that "the situation would be cleared up within a week because of Serbia's backing down" in a comment to Franz Josef, while in another discussion with Erich von Falkenhayn, Prussia's minister of war, the kaiser suggested that the period of tension in the crisis could last as long as three weeks before things died down. In narratives of the July Crisis, one is in fact persistently struck by the German political leadership's unwillingness to, well, engage in the actual crisis, and by the unrealistically pacific expectations that leadership had of things.
Ententiste historians explained this as a combination of German incompetence and aggression: the Germans thought that the Serbs, Russians, and French would allow them to 'walk all over them' and were shocked to find out that this was not the reality of the situation. Fritz Fischer went so far as to account for the fact that many German leaders, especially in the military, took vacations at the beginning and middle of July 1914 with a deliberate deception plan to lull the rest of the world into a false sense of security. This explanation is, as I said earlier, extraordinarily tendentious and does not account for the facts. It fails to account for the diplomatic structure of Europe at the time, and fails to seat German actions in their proper context, namely: one of a more or less unending sequence of aggressive moves by France, Russia, and even Britain, combined with an insistent refusal among the most powerful leaders of those countries to see any Austrian or German actions, whether taken in defense or aggression, as legitimate responses to their policy.
---
The first few parts of the Wikipedia quote can be accounted for with selective and biased use of sources. The final segment, on Russian and French actions, is simply out-and-out wrong. It is either born of extraordinary ignorance of the facts, or it is a deliberate lie. The most basic, fundamental reason is this: Russia and France mobilized before Germany. In Russia's case, mobilization came
before Austria even dispatched the ultimatum to Serbia. Russian mobilization was secret, deliberately designed to be accomplished as early as possible in a given crisis to afford Russia's military the crucial head start that the enormous extent of its territory and the dispersion of its forces required. The extent of Russian military preparations was always suspected, but gained firm empirical evidence with Sean McMeekin's work on Russian mobilization over the last several years, in which he laid out Russia's now-infamous so-called "Period Preparatory to War". Ignoring this crucial fact is inexplicable; it is like discussing the American Civil War without noting that the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter
first.
Here's a quote from one of the entente's main statesmen during the crisis, Maurice Paléologue, the French ambassador to Russia. The Russians had briefly recalled their own ambassador to France, Aleksandr Izvolsky, to consult with him; he headed back home on the evening of 25 July, coterminous with the expiry of the Austrian ultimatum against Serbia. Paléologue went with him to the Petersburg train station, and produced this remarkable quote:
Maurice Paléologue said:
There was great bustle on the platforms. The trains were packed with officers and men. This looked like mobilization. We rapidly exchanged impressions and came to the same conclusion: 'It's war this time.'
The ambassador was correct: it did not merely
look like mobilization, it
was mobilization. In postwar documentation, the French made the effort to try to hide the extent of Russia's early preparations for war by censoring documents, conveniently disposing of diary pages, and the like. Even Russia, during the war, altered its date of formal mobilization to make it appear as though Germany started first, and made no mention of the Period Preparatory to War. But it was impossible to hide the movement of millions of men. German military intelligence already knew of the existence of the Period Preparatory to War - it had been debated in the Russian Council of Ministers, which meant that its existence was a matter of public record - and correctly identified it as taking place in the last days of July. Germany's chancellor and kaiser, however, clung to the fact that Russia had not formally declared mobilization as a last defense against making military preparations of their own. A German agent had to smuggle a Russian mobilization placard out of Poland across the German border in order to convince Potsdam that war was at hand.
Suggesting that Russia acted as a brake on Serbia is a joke. If anything, the opposite is true. According to the work of the historian Luigi Magrini, the explanation that most accords with the facts from postwar interviews of key Serbian decision-makers is that the Serbian leadership was disposed to accept the ultimatum in its entirety on 23 July, because the Serbs felt as though no Russian support would be forthcoming. This was based, in part, on the sentiment expressed by the tsar in the quote you mined; like the kaiser, the tsar was deeply concerned about the problem of an actual war. It was news from Russia that compelled the Serbs to change this course. On the night of 24-25 July, the Serbian government took receipt of information regarding the deliberations of the Russian Council of Ministers; they found out about the Period Preparatory to War (or its effects), and learned that Russia would back Serbia with its full military force. According to Miroslav Spalajković, Serbia's ambassador to Russia, "in all circles without exception, the greatest resolve and jubilation reigns on account of the stance adopted by the tsar and his government."
The tsar vacillated, as the quote you found in Wikipedia bears out, but ultimately came down on the side of war, just like the kaiser. But when the kaiser made his decision to fight, he was confronted with a direct and imminent military threat. When the tsar made
his decision to fight, he was confronted with no such threat, and was in fact embarking on a military adventure in the Balkans in which Russia was not threatened by any state and in which no Russian 'vital interests' were at stake. We see many references to Germany's ostensible "blank check" to Austria-Hungary in your Wikipedia article, yet newer research has cast considerable doubt on the mechanics of that blank check and what it actually meant for the outbreak of the war. Yet we see no references to Russia's blank check to Serbia. This does not make for a particularly accurate historical narrative.
Why did Russia support Serbia? That other, rather fundamental question generally remains unanswered by
ententistes like those who wrote the Wikipedia article. This is probably because the answers to it tend to be fairly damning. Serbia was part and parcel of Russia's efforts to first freeze Austria-Hungary out of the Balkans, the country's sole and longtime sphere of influence and a region that was regarded by Habsburg decision-makers as vital to their security. Russia organized the Balkan League of 1912, the one that went to war with the Ottoman Empire over Macedonia, and its original - and enduring - purpose was as a weapon against Austria-Hungary as well.
Throughout the decade leading up to the war, the Serbian state constituted a threat to Austrian security, to the stability of its empire, and to the lives of its citizens. The Serbian government explicitly sponsored terrorism in Austrian territory up to 1909, and did so quietly afterwards. In the field of high politics and war, Serbian aggression in the years immediately before the war was wide-ranging and dramatic; Serbia invaded the Ottoman Empire and engaged in widespread massacres and war crimes during the fighting, precipitated a crisis with Bulgaria that led directly to war, and even engaged in an undeclared war with the new state of Albania before Austrian threats forced it to back down. It was the head of Serbian military intelligence that organized and directed the assassination of Franz Ferdinand; he did not do it under orders from the prime minister, but the prime minister knew about it beforehand and failed to take any actions of substance against it, then lied about his foreknowledge and prevented any retributive actions from being taken against his intelligence chief.
And yet, even with all of these black marks against Serbia, Russia backed that country to the hilt. In fact, Russian policy makers construed the 1914 crisis such that Serbia was
fully in the right and that Vienna deserved no concessions
whatsoever from Belgrade. This is why the Serbian government rejected the substance of the ultimatum in its technically brilliant note of 25 July. Considering that Serbia basically committed an act of war to start the crisis, this is eye-opening to say the least.
It would be going too far to suggest that the Russian government deliberately used Serbia's terrorism as a weapon against Austria-Hungary, and much too far to suggest that Russia itself plotted the assassination as an effort to lure Austria into war. That would be the sort of thing that Fischer would have said, if Fischer were on the other side of this historical debate. But while the Russian government did not know the particulars of the assassination plot, some Russian officials (like the military attaché in Belgrade) almost certainly had limited foreknowledge. More importantly, though, Russia supported Serbia in full knowledge of the
sorts of actions that the Serbian government was disposed to take. The men in Russia who made the decision to support Serbia and eventually to go to war for Serbia were basically in agreement with the overriding foreign policy initiative in Belgrade, namely: that Serbia deserved to have control of a 'Greater' Serbia; that this Frankenstein's monster of a country would be cobbled together from the territory of Serbia's neighboring states; and that that territory would have to be acquired through terrorism and war.
This was not a recipe for sound, sensible mutual negotiations. It demonstrates that claims of Russia's pacific intentions are laughable.
---
I would advise you, instead of reading Wikipedia, to look at the books of actual historians on the crisis. Many good ones have come out lately, and most of these tend to back what I have said. First and foremost, Christopher Clark's
The Sleepwalkers, which has won near-universal academic acclaim, is a fantastic overview of both the July Crisis and the state of affairs that preceded and led to the war. Sean McMeekin has published on the subject as well, first in his
The Russian Origins of the First World War and later in
July 1914. These strands of scholarship are, however, not entirely new. They rely on evidence collected earlier, and expand on the conclusion of earlier historians. Luigi Albertini's multi-part history of the July Crisis, for example, was 'rediscovered' in the 1990s as historical consensus moved away from the bankrupt Fischer thesis of a German 'grab for world power' (
Griff nach der Weltmacht). Paul Schroeder's work on structural factors in European high politics led him to make similar conclusions as early as the 1970s, and in more detail in the 1990s. Even Norman Rich, who has written largely textbook-style works, summarized the state of the field in 1994 as being generally one in which general consensus was that the German government was effectively 'cornered into war'.
Fischer's claim that Germany started the war would not have been possible without the experience of the Second World War; by viewing the events of 1914 through the lens of 1939, he proposed that the kaiser was relying on the same basic megalomaniacal plan as Hitler was. The scholars who agreed with him in the 1960s were buttressed by a view of national self-determination as a basic, fundamental right, and a view of Austria-Hungary as a decrepit hulk whose collapse into nation-states was inevitable. Modern historians have their own lenses for these things. They have seen the horrors of self-determination taken to its logical conclusion in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. The massacres at Srebrenica and elsewhere spawned research into Serbian war crimes in the Balkan Wars. And the experience of international terrorism in the 1990s and 2000s has reinforced an understanding of how important non-state actors could be and the sorts of actions that they could inspire. Fischer and his ilk could not see one small terrorist plot as the sort of thing that could move continents and cause wars, and decided that Germany's government had to be at the bottom of it all. 9/11 truthers apart, we have a better understanding of terrorism and its effects now.
It's important to point out that Srebrenica or 9/11 did
not make Germany's decision to fight in 1914
right. We have gained perspective as to why it happened, and we can better explain it without resorting to Fischer's conspiracy theories, but either way, Germany's government opted to fight. The fact that this was essentially an 'acceptance' of Entente aggression rather than an aggressive war in and of itself does not make the slaughter of millions of human beings any more palatable. This is not about blame: all the governments of the belligerent powers of the First World War share in the blame for the war, because all of them made a
decision to fight. It is instead about causation, and recognizing that the primary factor that made war much more likely was the generally aggressive policy of the Entente powers, and specifically Russian efforts to expand influence and power in the Balkans, combined with French and British support of those efforts,
however far they went, for the sake of maintaining the alliance with Russia.
---
In 1915, thousands of Australian, New Zealander, British, and French soldiers poured out their blood at Gallipoli in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign against Constantinople. The sense that this battle was fought for British interests, and that these interests were
distinct from antipodean ones, is widely regarded as having contributed to Australian nationalism. Gallipoli was, on this reading, a British man's war and an Australian man's fight.
The reality is far more depressing. Gallipoli was, as it happened, not even a British man's war. The Empire and the Dominions - and France - sent their men to the Straits to die in support of Russian imperial goals, not even for their
own imperial goals. Russian imperialism and aggression played a main role in starting the war in the first place. But they continued to shape its conduct as the fighting wore on. Constantinople and the Straits were, as the British government knew, to be consigned to the Russian Empire if they were ever to be taken. What had started out as a plan for an amphibious attack by the Russian Black Sea Fleet turned into a multinational campaign, and then the Russians decided to just let the western allies do the fighting and to use their forces in Armenia and Poland instead. Not a single Russian soldier or sailor died at Gallipoli. They didn't even get within two hundred miles of the battlefield.
I don't know about you, but if I were Australian, that sort of thing would piss me off.
This, then, was the extent to which Britain and France were implicated in Russia. Not only did British and French investors pour funds into the country ostensibly for economic development when most people knew that the money was going to the military and to military infrastructure; not only did the British and French governments continue to cling to their alliance with Russia as the Russians made increasingly aggressive moves that aggravated the diplomatic situation in Europe; not only did Britain and France willingly support and join a war for a narrow set of Russian interests in southeastern Europe that had nothing whatsoever to do with either France or Britain. Those countries didn't just join that war for Russia's sake, they ended up
shouldering the burden of Russia's own planned conquests in that war.
---
Now, it's true that even these days, not all authors have given up Fischer's thesis. Most recently, Max Hastings, a British journalist and occasional dabbler in military pop-history, has published
Catastrophe 1914, a restatement of the claim that it was basically all Germany's fault. It is based on the same shaky logical foundation and the same tendentious misreadings of the sources that the Fischerite thesis has always been based on. If Clark's
Sleepwalkers is the equivalent of Christopher Browning's
Ordinary Men, then
Catastrophe 1914 is
Hitler's Willing Executioners: a morally despicable restatement and expansion of an increasingly discredited argument that is widely derided by the academic historical profession...yet enjoys wide circulation among the pop-history circuit and among people who were originally taught this way and who basically don't know any better.
