In this week’s Nation, Tara Zahra reviews three books about what caused the outbreak of World War I. She disagrees with their consensus, which pins blame for the war on a handful of diplomats and military men, because she feels that it slights the broader factors that alone can explain the explosive public enthusiasm that immediately preceded the gunfire. Zahra is also uncomfortable with the three writers’ insistence that the war was not inevitable.

I’m inclined to agree with her, now that I’ve finished The Transylvanian Trilogy, which ends at that moment, the rush to the front. Miklós Bánffy, a Hungarian statesman as well as a writer, is not shy about interpolating a good deal of political discussion into the three novels that comprise the Trilogy, and while these passages are not a substitute for conventional historical accounting, they capture an atmosphere in which powerful men interact with interest groups and more or less robust popular movements. Set in the ten years before the war, they repeatedly illuminate the opportunism, the distraction, the wishful thinking, and above all the moral inertia of a country that no longer exists, but the fact that the Dual Monarchy has long disappeared, and Hungarian Transylvania with it, does nothing to diminish the pungent familiarity of the political vices on which so many of Bánffy’s characters are hooked.

I believe that the “great men,” in Vienna, Berlin, and St Petersburg, were directly responsible for the chain reaction that set off the war. But their “success” capped years of experiment. Their objective was never the stagnating death swamp that spread across the Western Front for four years. Nobody imagined that — which is certainly a way of saying that no one was directly responsible for the war that played out in reality. Something quick, dashing, and decisive was envisioned, a move so bold that rivals would have no choice but to assent. The great men played with military flourishes for years before 1914, many of them in the Balkans, where the withdrawal of the Ottomans engendered shimmering colonial dreams in the neighboring Christian empires. A local skirmish — between the Albanians and the Montenegrins, say — might invite the participation of the great powers, or a great power might indulge in belligerent gestures — as Germany did in Morocco in 1911 — but in each case the contestants quailed.

I still believe that World War I resulted from this troublemaking climate, but Bánffy has persuaded me (implicitly; he never argues this) that the event that sparked it was quite different from the earlier near misses, and not just because an Austrian grandee was the victim of an assassination. In The Transylvanian Trilogy, Franz Ferdinand is usually referred to as “the Heir,” meaning not just that he was next in line to succeed the very old Franz Josef but that he had policy objectives of his own, not necessarily congruent with the Emperor’s, and that he planned to implement these objectives as soon as he took the throne. (Bánffy regards the Heir and his objectives as malignant, and claims that the Heir openly disliked Hungarians). In Bánffy’s nutshell, the Heir planned to emasculate representative government wherever he found it, and in fact had neutralized the Hungarian parliament well before his death. He also planned to divide the Balkans, as well as the Austrian possessions that bordered on Russia, into petty kingdoms; he would replace the Dual Monarchy (in which the Austrian ruler was also King of Hungary) with a genuine empire, with local princes reporting to the emperor. This, in any case, is what emerges from Bánffy’s account. Never having given Franz Ferdinand much thought, I’m now on the lookout for a good biography.

If what Bánffy says is correct, then the death of the archduke was more than an insult. It was a successful attack on the future envisioned by the Heir and his lieutenants — like him, vigorous men in their prime. These true believers had no attractive option but to wrest an advance of their dream from the death of their leader, by subjugating the kingdom of Serbia to Austrian influence. They must attempt this even though Serbia was affiliated with the rival Russian empire. In 1914, the great men who had been itching for a chance to show their mettle, and who had toyed with opportunities in a series of foreign sideshows, found themselves with internal wounds that obviated the possibility of peace.

And suddenly, the citizens and subjects of the European sovereignties, most of them enfranchised within living memory, had the simplest of reasons to identify with their homelands, and to rush to their defense. The everyday realities of representative government meant very little to most people — they still do, unfortunately — but war was not rocket science.

Until it was. World War I was inevitable, because no one imagined anything like it.

***

In the middle of the third book of the Trilogy, Emperor Franz Josef threatens to abdicate, partly from old age, partly from frustration with Hungarian intransigence. Our hero, Balint Abady, has a long discussion with an old diplomatic colleague, Count Slawata, whom Balint has long known to be the Heir’s point man in Budapest. Balint is appalled to learn that the Heir’s immediate plans are those of a demagogue.

“The monarch who turns demagogue and who puts himself at the head of popular revolutionary movements may fancy that he’s featheering his own nest, but what he’s really doing is preparing the way for a republic, or for the ruin of his country!”

Slawata smiled ironically and said, “All that is sheer Montesquieu — esprit des lois!“

“Of course! But it is no less true, however long ago it was written. Anyway, we are only guessing. All this is purely hypothetical and I, for one, don’t believe His Majesty has any intention of abdicating… so all this talk is really about nothing, at least for the moment. Khuen-Hedervary will resign and a new government will be formed which will reform the suffrage laws, which in my opinion should have been done long ago. I hear that Justh is quite ready, at least for a year, to drop all that tiresome obstructionism, especially as regards the army estimates. So, if the army question is out of the way, the other reforms the Heir wants to see could well be presented without upsetting anyone.”

Slawata’s reply took Balint by surprise.

“But we don’t want anything while Franz-Josef is still on throne. Indeed we’ll make quite sure that no real reform is possible. Perhaps some little concession here and there, but only if it proves unavoidable. His Highness wants to do it all after he succeeds to the throne, and until then he’ll do everything in his power to prevent any changes. If Laszlo Lukacs becomes Minister-President, which seems likely, he’ll forbid it outright!”

“Even if that means holding up the defence proposals?” marvelled Balint.

“Even that!”

The cynicism of the Heir and his minions chills and disgusts me as much as anything on this earth can. It is not so much power as the prospect of more power that leads men to evil.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, November 18th, 2013 at 12:53 pm.