by | 8 November 2026 · 5:19 am

Sleepwalking into War, 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 560-561:

The outbreak of war in 1914 is not an Agatha Christie drama at the end of which we will discover the culprit standing over a corpse in the conservatory with a smoking pistol. There is no smoking gun in this story; or, rather, there is one in the hands of every major character. Viewed in this light, the outbreak of war was a tragedy, not a crime. Acknowledging this does not mean that we should minimize the belligerence and imperialist paranoia of the Austrian and German policy-makers that rightly absorbed the attention of Fritz Fischer and his historiographical allies. But the Germans were not the only imperialists and not the only ones to succumb to paranoia. The crisis that brought war in 1914 was the fruit of a shared political culture. But it was also multipolar and genuinely interactive – that is what makes it the most complex event of modern times and that is why the debate over the origins of the First World War continues, one century after Gavrilo Princip fired those two fatal shots on Franz Joseph Street.

One thing is clear: none of the prizes for which the politicians of 1914 contended was worth the cataclysm that followed. Did the protagonists understand how high the stakes were? It used to be thought that Europeans subscribed to the deluded belief that the next continental conflict would be a short, sharp cabinet war of the eighteenth-century type; the men would be ‘home before Christmas’, as the saying went. More recently, the prevalence of this ‘short-war illusion’ has been called into question. The German Schlieffen Plan was predicated on a massive, lightning-fast strike into France, but even within Schlieffen’s own staff there were voices warning that the next war would bring not quick victories but rather a ‘tedious and bloody crawling forward step-by-step’. Helmuth von Moltke hoped that a European war, if it broke out, would be resolved swiftly, but he also conceded that it might drag on for years, wreaking immeasurable ruin. British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith wrote of the approach of ‘Armageddon’ in the fourth week of July 1914. French and Russian generals spoke of a ‘war of extermination’ and the ‘extinction of civilisation’.

They knew it, but did they really feel it? This is perhaps one of the differences between the years before 1914 and the years after 1945. In the 1950s and 60s, decision-makers and the general public alike grasped in a visceral way the meaning of nuclear war – images of the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki entered the nightmares of ordinary citizens. As a consequence, the greatest arms race in human history never culminated in nuclear war between the superpowers. It was different before 1914. In the minds of many statesmen, the hope for a short war and the fear of a long one seem, as it were, to have cancelled each other out, holding at bay a fuller appreciation of the risks. In March 1913, a journalist writing for the Figaro reported on a series of lectures recently given in Paris by the leading lights of French military medicine. Among the speakers was Professor Jacques-Ambroise Monprofit [see fellow surgeon Peter Herzen], who had just returned from a special mission to the military hospitals of Greece and Serbia, where he had helped to establish better standards of military surgery. Monprofit observed that ‘the wounds caused by the French cannon [sold to Balkan states before the outbreak of the First Balkan War] were not merely the most numerous, but also horrifically grave, with crushed bones, lacerated tissues, and shattered chests and skulls’. So terrible was the resulting suffering that one prominent expert in military surgery, Professor Antoine Depage, proposed an international embargo on the future use of such arms in battle. ‘We understand the generosity of his motivation,’ the journalist commented, ‘but if we must expect to be outnumbered one day on the field of battle, then it is as well that our enemies know that we have such weapons to defend ourselves with, weapons that are to be feared . . .’ The article closed with the declaration that France should congratulate herself both on the horrific force of her arms and on possessing ‘a medical organisation that we may confidently describe as marvellous’. We can find such glib reflections wherever we look in pre-war Europe. In this sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.

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by | 7 November 2026 · 5:26 am

The Second Sick Man of Europe, 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 287-290:

For Austria-Hungary, the Balkan Wars changed everything. Above all, they revealed how isolated Vienna was and how little understanding there was at the foreign chancelleries for its view of Balkan events. St Petersburg’s hostility to the empire and its utter disregard for Vienna’s interests in the region could be taken for granted. More worrying was the indifference of the other powers. The reluctance of the international community to see that Austria faced genuine security threats on its southern periphery and had the right to counteract them reflected a broader shift in attitudes. The western powers had traditionally viewed Austria as the fulcrum of stability in central and eastern Europe and thus as a power that must be preserved at all costs. But by 1913, this maxim no longer appeared so compelling. It was undermined by the tendency – which swiftly gained ground among the Entente states after 1907 – to think of Europe in terms of alliance blocs, rather than as a continental geopolitical ecosystem in which every power had a role to play. The anti-Austrian animus of much political reportage in Britain and France during the last pre-war years reinforced this tendency by spreading the view that Austria-Hungary was an anachronistic and doomed entity, or, as the Serbian papers put it, the ‘second sick man of Europe’ (after the Ottoman Empire, to which this epithet was more commonly applied).

Particularly alarming was the lukewarm nature of German support. Berlin firmly endorsed a policy of confrontation with Serbia in October 1913 – at a time when support could be offered at little risk of a broader conflict – but its record was otherwise patchy. In February 1913, when troop strengths on both sides of the Galician border were so elevated that war seemed imminent, even the military urged caution. Moltke wrote to his colleague Conrad von Hötzendorf, assuring him that while Germany would not hesitate to support Austria-Hungary against a Russian attack, ‘it would be difficult to legitimate German intervention in a war provoked by Austria, for which there would be no understanding in the German people’.

One of Vienna’s chief concerns was the attitude of the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Far from urging his government to solidarity with the Austrians, Wilhelm forbade the Foreign Office in Berlin to participate in any action that ‘might impede the Bulgars-Serbs-Greeks in their victorious progress’. The Balkan Wars, he argued, were part of a world-historical development that was going to drive Islam back out of Europe. If one allowed the Balkan states to consolidate themselves at the expense of Turkey, this would create the basis for a stable array of entities that in due course might form a confederation of some kind, the ‘United States of the Balkans’. Nothing could be better suited to the preservation of the peace, the buffering of Austro-Russian tensions and the emergence of a new regional market for German exports. And Wilhelm continued to expatiate in this vein. During the crisis of November 1912 over Serbian access to the Adriatic, Wilhelm explicitly rejected the notion that the German government had any obligation to support Vienna against Belgrade. To be sure, the current changes on the peninsula were ‘uncomfortable’ for Vienna, but he would ‘under no circumstances consider marching against Paris and Moscow for the sake of Albania and Durazzo’. On 9 November, he even proposed to the Foreign Office that it should urge Vienna to place Albania under the suzerainty of a Serbian prince.

There was little comfort in these quixotic speculations for the harassed decision-makers in Vienna. At a secret conference with his friend Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 22 November 1912, Wilhelm did express his readiness to support Austria’s position on the Serbian troop presence in Albania, even at the risk of war with Russia, but only if it were certain that neither Britain nor France would intervene; an isolated Russia, he added, would be extremely unlikely to risk such a conflict. Yet even these mildly encouraging signals were cancelled out three days later by official messages from Bethmann Hollweg and Kiderlen-Wächter to the effect that Germany would seek a multilateral solution. In February 1913, when the Balkan winter crisis was at its height, Wilhelm wrote a letter to Franz Ferdinand urging that he seek a negotiated de-escalation with Russia on the grounds that the matters at issue were not important enough to justify a continuation of the current armed stand-off. On 18 October, when the Albanian crisis was seething, Wilhelm conceded in a conversation with Conrad that the situation might ‘finally’ have arrived ‘in which a great power can no longer look on but must reach for the sword’. Yet only ten days later, he was telling the Austrian ambassador in Berlin that Vienna should mollify Belgrade by bribing the leadership with large cash gifts (‘from the king downwards they can all be had for money’), military exchange programmes and improved terms of trade. In December 1913, Wilhelm assured the Austrian envoy in Munich that ‘a few millions’ would suffice to buy Berchtold a firm foothold in Belgrade.

In a report dispatched on 25 April 1914, Fritz Count Szapáry, a foreign ministry high-flyer and specialist in Austro-German relations now serving as minister in St Petersburg, painted a bleak picture of recent German Balkan policy. The solid German backing that had helped to bring the Bosnian annexation crisis to a close in March 1909 was a thing of the past, Szapáry declared. What had replaced it was – Szapáry quoted the mealy-mouthed jargon of the decision-makers in Berlin – a ‘conflict-free dialogue directed towards the consolidation of economic-cultural activity zones’. All of Berlin’s forward positions vis-à-vis Russia had been abandoned, and Berlin took no steps whatsoever without first consulting St Petersburg. During the Balkan Wars, Germany had compromised the Austrian position by joining the chorus of support for déinteressement, pressing Vienna to accept Serbian conquests and provocations. It all amounted to the wholesale ‘sacrifice of Austria-Hungary’s Balkan interests’. This was a rather histrionic view of the matter, coloured by Szapáry’s Hungarian apprehensions at Russia’s deepening support for Romania, but it captured a widely felt mood of frustration at the failure of Berlin to deliver any real leverage on the Balkan peninsula. Especially galling was the haste with which Berlin had endorsed the Treaty of Bucharest, thereby depriving Austria of the opportunity to better the position of Bulgaria, which the Austrians, but not the Germans, viewed as a potential counterweight to Serbian power.

This sense of isolation, coupled with the repeated provocations of 1912–13, in turn heightened the readiness in Vienna to resort to unilateral measures. There were signs that the resistance to militant solutions among the key decision-makers in Vienna was waning. The most conspicuous sign of the change in mood was the decision to recall Conrad at the height of the Russian mobilization scare. ‘You must again become Chief of the General Staff,’ the Emperor wearily informed the general at an audience on 7 December 1912. After his reinstatement Conrad continued, of course, to counsel war, but that was nothing new. More worrying was the diminishing resistance to extreme measures among the other key actors. During the autumn of 1912, nearly everyone (including the Hungarian prime minister Tisza) at one point or another favoured a policy of confrontation backed up by the threat of military action. A notable exception was Franz Ferdinand, who warned Berchtold in a forceful letter of 12 October against allowing the monarchy to be dragged into Conrad’s ‘witches’ kitchen of war’. There was also Russia to think of, and Bulgaria, and the Germans, who would presumably shrink from any high-risk démarche. As for Belgrade, Franz Ferdinand added, the only people there who sought a conflict were the regicide war party (the party that, unbeknown to him, would slay him eight months later). He did not, he concluded, believe there ‘existed any necessity’ for war. The pressure to wage it came exclusively from those servants of the Austro-Hungarian crown who ‘consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy’. And yet, on 11 December 1912, during a meeting of senior officials with the Emperor at Schönbrunn palace, even Franz Ferdinand broke with his accustomed support for peace at any price to advocate a military confrontation with Serbia.

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by | 6 November 2026 · 6:35 am

Rapid Realignments in the Balkans

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 278-279:

The loan had become a dangerous tool wielded by the alliance blocs. This weaponization of international credit was nothing new, but its deployment in this instance locked Bulgaria into the policy of the Triple Alliance, just as Serbia had been integrated into the political system of the Entente.

What was happening in the Balkans was nothing less than the reversal of the old pattern of allegiances. In the past Russia had backed Bulgaria, while Austria-Hungary looked to Belgrade and Bucharest. By 1914, this arrangement had been turned inside out. Romania, too, was part of this process. By the early summer of 1913, Sazonov was inviting the government in Bucharest to help itself to a piece of Bulgaria in the event of a Serbo-Bulgarian war. The time was ripe for such an overture, because the Romanians resented what they saw as Vienna’s flirtations with Sofia; King Carol of Romania also resented Austrian opposition to the Treaty of Bucharest, which he saw as his personal diplomatic achievement. The deepening rapprochement between St Petersburg and Bucharest was formalized on 14 June 1914 when the Tsar visited King Carol at Constanţa, on Romania’s Black Sea coast. It was an occasion heavy with symbolic freight. The only foreign representative to receive a decoration from the hands of the Tsar was the French minister to Romania, Camille Blondel, who had, as it happened, only recently been awarded a high decoration by King Petar of Serbia. Present at the festivities was Ottokar Czernin, the Austro-Hungarian minister to Bucharest, who interpreted the day as the public consummation of Romania’s ‘realignment towards the Triple Entente’.

The consequence was a further drastic diminution of Austria-Hungary’s political influence on the peninsula. Romanian irredentism would now be deflected away from Bessarabia, where it conflicted with Russian interests, and oriented towards Transylvania, where it would threaten the integrity of the Habsburg monarchy. There were, of course, limits to Romania’s willingness to be coopted to Russian objectives. When Sazonov asked the Romanian premier and foreign minister Ion Brătianu what attitude Romania would adopt ‘in the event of an armed conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary, if Russia should find itself obliged by circumstances to commence hostilities’, the Romanian statesman, ‘visibly shocked’ by Sazonov’s question, gave an ‘evasive reply’. When pressed further, however, Brătianu conceded that Romania and St Petersburg had a common interest in preventing ‘any weakening of Serbia’. That was enough for Sazonov. The Russo-Romanian rapprochement thus constituted, as a French ministerial report observed, ‘a new means for Russia of applying pressure to Austria’. But perhaps the most striking feature of this restructuring of Balkan geopolitics was how quickly it came about. This was not a phenomenon of the longue durée, which would have taken years to undo, but rather a short-term adjustment to rapid changes in the geopolitical environment. In November 1913, Sazonov had told the Belgian minister in St Petersburg that he believed the current Bulgarian reorientation towards Vienna was likely to be shortlived – it was the work of one particular parliamentary faction, supported by the mercurial King Ferdinand, ‘for whom we have not one atom of respect’. Given time, the new Balkan alignment might just as quickly have made way for further adjustments and new systems. What matters is that this particular pattern of alignments was still in place in the summer of 1914.

Serbia was now Russia’s salient in the Balkans. There was nothing necessary or natural about this state of affairs.

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by | 5 November 2026 · 5:02 am

War on Ottomans Began World War I

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 243-244, 249-250:

The cascade of wars that brought mayhem to the Balkans began in Africa. It was the Italian attack on Libya in 1911 that flashed the green light for the all-out Balkan assault on the Ottoman periphery. Unlike Egypt (now British) and Morocco (now effectively French), the three vilayets later known as Libya were integral provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The totally unprovoked Italian attack on these last Ottoman African possessions ‘broke the ice’, as one contemporary British observer put it, for the Balkan states. There had been talk for some years of a joint campaign to drive the Turks out of the Balkans, but nothing in the way of practical measures. Only after Italy’s assault were the Balkan states emboldened to take up arms. Looking back on these events in 1924, Miroslav Spalajković, the former political head of the Serbian foreign ministry in Belgrade, recalled that it was the Italian attack on Tripoli that had inaugurated the process that had led to the war: ‘all subsequent events are nothing more than the evolution of that first aggression’.

Italian diplomacy had been trying to secure an Italian sphere of interest in North Africa since before the turn of the century. In the summer of 1902, under the terms of the Prinetti–Barrère Accord, Rome and Paris had secretly agreed that in the event of a major redistribution of territory, France would take Morocco, while Italy would be granted a free hand in Libya. The agreement ratified a process of rapprochement with France, the arch-rival in northern Africa, that had been underway since 1898. A note from London in March 1902 helpfully promised that Britain would ensure that ‘any alteration in the status of Libya would be in conformity with Italian interests’. These agreements exemplify a policy of concessions that was designed to loosen the hold of the Triple Alliance on Italy, its most unreliable component. It was in keeping with this approach that Tsar Nicholas II agreed the ‘Racconigi Bargain’ of 1909 with King Victor Emmanuel III, in which Russia acknowledged Italy’s special interest in Libya in return for Italian support for Russian policy on access to the Turkish Straits.

Selling a policy of invasion and annexation to the politically active part of the Italian public was not difficult. Colonialism was on the march in Italy, as it was elsewhere, and the ‘memory’ of Roman Africa, when Libya had been the bread basket of the empire, assured Tripolitania a central place on the kingdom’s colonial horizons. In 1908, the modest Ufficio Coloniale in Rome was expanded and upgraded to the Direzione Centrale degli Affari Coloniali, a sign of the growing weight of African concerns within government. From 1909 onwards, the nationalist Enrico Corradini, supported by the nationalist organ L’Idea Nazionale, campaigned energetically for an imperialist enterprise focused on Libya; by the spring of 1911 he was openly demanding a policy of invasion and seizure. It was widely believed within the political elite that Italy needed somewhere ‘fruitful’ in which to plant her departing emigrants. Even the socialists were susceptible to these arguments, though they tended to shroud them in the language of economic necessity.

Until the summer of 1911, however, Italy’s leading statesmen remained faithful to the country’s ancient axiom that Italy must not provoke the break-up of the Ottoman Empire. As late as the summer of 1911, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti was still firmly rejecting calls to adopt a more aggressive position vis-à-vis Constantinople on a range of issues relating to the governance of Ottoman Albania. It was the French intervention in Morocco that changed everything. The Italian foreign ministry believed it had excellent grounds for demanding a quid pro quo in Libya. In view of France’s ‘radical modification’ of the situation in the Mediterranean, it would now be impossible, an Italian foreign ministry senior official pointed out, to ‘justify’ a policy of continuing inaction ‘before public opinion’.

It was Britain, France and Russia, the powers of the Entente, rather than Italy’s allies within the Triple Alliance, that encouraged Rome to take action.

…

Underlying the disarray of the Triple Alliance was a development of even more fundamental importance. In mounting her assault on Libya, Italy had the more or less reluctant support of most of Europe. This in itself was a noteworthy state of affairs, for it revealed how comprehensively the pro-Ottoman European coalition had dissolved. In the 1850s, a concert of powers had emerged to contain Russian predations against the Ottoman Empire – the result was the Crimean War. This grouping had reconstituted itself in different form after the Russo-Turkish War at the Conference of Berlin in 1878 and had regrouped during the Bulgarian crises of the mid-1880s. It was now nowhere to be seen. In the opening phase of the Italian war, the Ottoman Empire had sought an English alliance, but London, reluctant to alienate Italy, did not respond. The two Balkan Wars that followed then broke the concert beyond repair.

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by | 4 November 2026 · 5:31 am

War Powers in Europe Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 239-241:

Even if we were to assume that the foreign policies of the pre-war European powers were formulated and managed by compact executives animated by a unified and coherent purpose, reconstructing the relations among them would still be a daunting task, given that no relationship between any two powers can be fully understood without reference to relations with all of the others. But in the Europe of 1903–14, the reality was even more complex than the ‘international’ model would suggest. The chaotic interventions of monarchs, ambiguous relationships between civil and military, adversarial competition among key politicians in systems characterized by low levels of ministerial or cabinet solidarity, compounded by the agitations of a critical mass press against a background of intermittent crisis and heightened tension over security issues made this a period of unprecedented uncertainty in international relations. The policy oscillations and mixed signalling that resulted made it difficult, not just for historians, but for the statesmen of the last pre-war years to read the international environment.

It would be a mistake to push this observation too far. All complex political executives, even authoritarian ones, are subject to inner tensions and oscillations. The literature on twentieth-century US foreign relations dwells at length on intra-governmental power struggles and intrigues. In a brilliant study of the US entry into the Vietnam War, Andrew Preston shows that while Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy were reluctant to wage war and the State Department was largely opposed to intervention, the smaller and more nimble National Security Council, which strongly favoured war and operated beyond congressional oversight, narrowed down the president’s options on Vietnam until war was virtually unavoidable.

Yet the situation in pre-First World War Europe was different (and worse) in one important respect. For all the tensions that may evolve within it, the American executive is actually – in constitutional terms – a very tightly focused organization in which responsibility for executive decisions in foreign policy ultimately falls unambiguously upon the president. This was not the case for the pre-war European governments. There were perennial doubts about whether [Foreign Secretary] Grey had the right to commit himself as he did without consulting the cabinet or Parliament; indeed, these doubts were so pressing that they prevented him from making a clear and unequivocal statement of his intentions. The situation was even fuzzier in France, where the balance of initiative between the ministry of foreign affairs, the cabinet and the presidency remained unresolved, and even the masterful and determined [President] Poincaré faced efforts to shut him out of the decision-making process altogether in the spring of 1914. In Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent in Russia, the power to shape foreign policy flowed around a loose human circuitry within the hivelike structure of the political elite, concentrating at different parts of the system, depending upon who formed the more effective and determined alignments. In these cases, as in Germany, the presence of an ‘all-highest’ sovereign did not clarify, but rather blurred the power relations within the system.

It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia. The volatility inherent in such a constellation was heightened by the fluidity of power within each executive and its tendency to migrate from one node in the system to another. It may be true that dissent and polemics within the diplomatic services could have a salutary effect, in that they raised questions and objections that might have been suppressed in a more disciplined policy environment. But the risks surely outweighed the benefits: when hawks dominated the signalling process on both sides of a potentially conflictual interaction, as happened in the Agadir crisis and would happen again after 28 June 1914, swift and unpredictable escalations could be the result.

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by | 3 November 2026 · 5:44 am

European Presses Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 229-231:

It remained unclear how the public opinion within articulate elites with direct access to the press related to the attitudes prevailing among the masses of the population. War scares and jingo campaigns made good newspaper copy, but how socially deep were they? It was a grave mistake, the German consul-general in Moscow warned in December 1912, to assume that the belligerence and Germanophobia of the Russian ‘war party’ and the Slavophile press were characteristic of the mood in the country, for these circles entertained only ‘the loosest connection with the actual tendencies of Russian life’. The problem with German newspaper coverage of these issues, the consul argued, was that it tended to be written by journalists with little experience of Russia and a very narrow range of elite social contacts. In May 1913, the Belgian minister in Paris, Baron Guillaume, acknowledged the efflorescence of ‘a certain chauvinism’ in France. It could be observed not just in the nationalist papers, but also in the theatres, reviews and café-concerts, where numerous performances offered jingoist fare that was ‘calculated to over-excite spirits’. But, he added, ‘the true people of France do not approve of these manifestations . . .’

All the governments, with the exception of Britain, maintained press offices whose purpose was both to monitor and, where possible, to shape press coverage of issues touching on security and international relations. In Britain, the foreign secretary appears to have felt little need to convince (or even inform) the public of the merits of his policies and there were no official efforts to influence the press; many of the major newspapers received handsome subsidies, but these came from private or party-political sources, rather than from government. This did not, of course, prevent a dense network of informal relationships from developing between Whitehall officials and key journalists. The picture in Italy was rather different. Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister (for the fourth time) in 1911–14, made regular payments to at least thirty journalists in return for supportive coverage of his policies. The Russian foreign ministry acquired a press department in 1906, and from 1910 Sazonov orchestrated regular tea-time meetings at the ministry with the most important editors and Duma leaders. Relations between the Russian diplomats and some favoured newspapers were so close, one journalist reported in 1911, that the ministry of foreign affairs in St Petersburg ‘often seemed a mere branch office of the Novoye Vremya’. The newspaper’s editor, Jegorov, was often to be seen in the ministry’s press bureau, and Nelidov, chief of the bureau and himself a former journalist, was a frequent visitor to the paper’s editorial offices. In France, the relationship between diplomats and journalists was especially intimate: nearly half of the foreign ministers of the Third Republic were former writers or journalists and the ‘lines of communication’ between foreign ministers and the press were ‘almost always open’. In December 1912, when he was prime minister of France, Raymond Poincaré even launched a new journal, La Politique Étrangère, to promote his views on foreign policy across the French political elite.

Semi-official newspapers and ‘inspired’ articles planted in the domestic press to test the climate of opinion were familiar tools of continental diplomacy. Inspired journalism masqueraded as the autonomous expression of an independent press, but its effectiveness depended precisely on the suspicion among readers that it emanated from the seat of power. It was universally understood in Serbia, for example, that Samouprava represented the views of the government; the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was considered the official organ of the German Foreign Office; in Russia, the government made its views known through its own semi-official journal, Rossiya, but also ran occasional inspired campaigns in other more popular papers, like Novoye Vremya. The French foreign ministry, like the German, disbursed cash to journalists from a secret fund and maintained close ties with Le Temps and the Agence Havas, while using the less serious-minded Le Matin to launch ‘trial balloons’.

…

Official manipulations of the press also took place across national borders. Early in 1905, the Russians were distributing around £8,000 a month to the Parisian press, in the hope of stimulating public support for a massive French loan. The French government subsidized pro-French newspapers in Italy (and Spain during the conference at Algeciras), and during the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars the Russians handed out huge bribes to French journalists. The Germans maintained a very modest fund for supporting friendly journalists in St Petersburg and plied newspaper editors in London with subsidies in the hope, mostly disappointed, of obtaining more positive coverage of Germany.

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by | 2 November 2026 · 6:44 am

European Militarism Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 214-217:

‘The situation [in Europe] is extraordinary,’ Colonel Edward House reported to American President Woodrow Wilson after a trip to Europe in May 1914. ‘It is militarism run stark mad.’ House’s views may have been shaped in part by a personal experience: he was a ‘political colonel’ of the American type. He had been appointed to that rank in the Texas militia in return for political services there. But when Colonel House visited Berlin, the Germans took him to be a military man and always sat him with the generals at dinner. His views on the prevalence of militarism may have owed something to this unfortunate misunderstanding. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, viewed from across the Atlantic, pre-war Europe presented a curious spectacle. Senior statesmen, emperors and kings attended public occasions wearing military uniform; elaborate military reviews were an integral part of the public ceremonial of power; immense illuminated naval displays drew huge crowds and filled the pages of the illustrated journals; conscript armies grew in size until they became male microcosms of the nation; the cult of military display entered the public and the private life of even the smallest communities. In what ways did this ‘militarism’ shape the decisions that led Europe to war in 1914? Did the roots of the July Crisis lie, as some historians have argued, in an abdication of responsibility by civilian politicians and a usurpation of political power by the generals?

There was without doubt a struggle between the soldiers and the civilians within the pre-war executives: it was a struggle for money. Defence expenditure accounted for a substantial share of government spending. Military commanders keen to improve equipment, training and infrastructure had to contend (as they do today) with civilian politicians for access to government resources. Conversely, ministers of finance and their political allies fought to impose restraint in the name of fiscal rigour or domestic consolidation. Who prevailed in these contests depended on the structure of the institutional environment and the prevailing domestic and international political constellation.

Until 1908, the chaotic structure of the Russian military command made it difficult for the generals to lobby government effectively. But the balance began to shift from 1908, when reforms to the military administration created a more concentrated executive structure, establishing the minister of war as the pre-eminent defence official with the exclusive right to report to the Tsar on military matters. From 1909, a rivalry of epic bitterness evolved between the new war minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov (who was still in post in July 1914) and the strong-willed conservative finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Backed by the powerful premier Pyotr Stolypin, Kokovtsov, a champion of fiscal responsibility and domestic economic development, routinely blocked or curtailed Sukhomlinov’s draft budgets. Professional friction swiftly deepened into lively personal hatred.118 Sukhomlinov thought Kokovtsov ‘narrow, verbose and self-seeking’; Kokovtsov accused the minister of war (with more justice) of incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption.

…

We can discern analogous tensions in every European executive. In Britain, the Liberals campaigned (and won an absolute majority) in 1906 on the promise to cut back the vast military expenditure of the Boer War years under the slogan ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’. Budgetary constraints were a significant factor in the decision to seek an understanding with France and Russia. One consequence was that, while British naval budgets continued to soar (British naval spending was three times the German figure in 1904 and still more than double in 1913), army expenditure remained static throughout the pre-war years, forcing War Minister Haldane to focus on efficiency savings and reorganization rather than expansion. In Austria-Hungary, the tumultuous domestic politics of dualism virtually paralysed the monarchy’s military development after the turn of the century, as autonomist groups within the Hungarian parliament fought to starve the monarchy’s joint army of Hungarian tax revenues and recruits. In this environment, proposals for increased military allocations were worn down in endless legislative feuding, and the Habsburg military languished in a condition, as the Austrian staff chief put it, of ‘persistent stagnation’. This was one reason why, as late as 1912, Austria-Hungary spent only 2.6 per cent of its net national product on defence – a smaller proportion than any other European power and certainly far below what its economy could afford (the figures for Russia, France and Germany in that year were 4.5, 4.0 and 3.8 per cent respectively).

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by | 1 November 2026 · 5:44 am

Polish Zaduszki celebrations

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter previews All Souls’ Day in Poland in an article by Gabriel Stille from October 2025, when the Far Outliers were visiting historic Sandomierz, where we attended a large open-air mass in a large hilltop cemetery above the city that was filled with flowers and candle lamps. Here are some excerpts from the article.

One of the most important family holidays in Poland, Zaduszki sees people all over the country gather to visit the graves of their loved ones. Throughout Poland, cemeteries glow with lights. Travelling home is a must to celebrate Zaduszki. What once began as a set of traditions to please the spirits of the departed is now an occasion to gather the family and remember those no longer with us.

The word zaduszki comes from dzień zaduszny, which could be translated as day of prayer for the souls. The eve of the holiday, November 1st, falls on what is also known as All Saints’ Day in Catholic communities. In the church calendar, that day is followed by All Souls’ Day, the official day to commemorate the departed faithful.

Polish Zaduszki celebrations begin with tending to family graves and surrounding graveyards on the first day, and then extends into the the next. November 1st is a bank holiday in Poland and remained free of work even during Communist times, while the following day is not. The Zaduszki custom of honouring the dead thus corresponds with All Souls’ Day celebrations in many parts of the world, but has a more profound meaning, and is much more observed in Poland than in most places in the West.

In the Polish calendar, Zaduszki is, along with Easter and Christmas, a requisite opportunity to meet with one’s extended family. In today’s society, that means travels can be long as as roads fill and traffic is usually exceptionally heavy. It is a sad and well known fact that that road accidents peak during this holiday.

Many of the folk traditions surrounding Zaduszki have ancient pagan roots. According to old beliefs, during this time the spirits of forefathers come to inhabit our world once more. Not disturbing or angering the forefathers was considered very important. For example, if water or waste had to be thrown on the ground, a word of warning had to be uttered to alert the invisible spirits. In general, not undertaking any work and going to bed early was preferable during this time so as to not interfere with the doings of the spirits. Instead, food and other items were prepared for the forefathers, and feasts were held among the living as well. The dead were said to attend a special mass during the night, where no living persons should allow themselves to be found.

Another tradition involved the baking of bread to be brought to the graveyards and distributed to the poor or the clergy, or to be left at the graves. This tradition served the purpose to please the spirits or to bring good fortune. In keeping with church practices of the times, this could also be a way to atone for the sins of the forefathers and thus relieve the suffering of their spirits in Purgatory.

The honouring of the dead during this holiday holds similar importance all over Central and Eastern Europe, and many of the Polish folk customs can be traced back to common old Slavic traditions. At certain times, those Slavic roots have been a strong source of national identity among the Polish people. During Romanticism and the period of the formation of national states in Europe, Adam Mickiewicz drew upon the legends of Dziady, a festival common to Slavic and Baltic peoples and early ancestor of Zaduszki, for his epic drama Forefathers’ Eve.

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Filed under family, Poland, religion, travel

by | 31 October 2026 · 8:45 am

Visiting Poland’s Cemeteries

In anticipation of All Saints’ Day, last week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes an article about Unusual Polish Cemeteries by Anna Cymer. Here are some excerpts.

We normally visit cemeteries to bury our nearest and dearest, but many notable graveyards in Poland also possess exceptional atmosphere, history and architecture.

Powązkowski Cemetery, Warsaw

The oldest cemetery in the capital opened in 1790, covering an area of two hectares, which has since grown to 44. Two years later, Dominik Merlini (court architect to King August III and Stanisław August Poniatowski, and creator of both the Palace on the Water in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park and the Królikarnia Palace) designed the Church of St Charles Borromeo, built on one side of the cemetery. Its decorated white towers still overlook the area today.

Around a million people lie buried in Powązkowski Cemetery. Its most famous section is the Avenue of the Heroes, the final resting place of many distinguished Polish historical, cultural and scientific figures. There are centuries-old tombs, for example those of Hugo Kołłątaj and soldiers from the time of the Kościuszko Uprising, as well as numerous graves of more recently deceased artistic celebrities, including Julia Hartwig and Wojciech Młynarski.

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Old Cemetery, Łódź

Built in 1855, this mixed-denomination cemetery perfectly reflects the formerly multiple cultures of Łódź. To this day, it contains Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox graveyards. Buried here are famous 19th-century Łódź industrialists, people who aided the city’s development, social activists, lawyers, doctors and cultural figures.

More than 200 of the cemetery’s headstones are listed monuments, and many of them are fine examples of sculpture and small-scale architecture. The cemetery’s grandest monument is the Karol Scheibler mausoleum, erected in 1888 in the form of an immense, neo-Gothic chapel designed by Edward Lilpop and Józef Dziekoński.

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Old Jewish Cemetery, Wrocław

Jewish cemeteries in Poland were forgotten and neglected for many decades. Fortunately, in recent years, some of them have been tidied up and are now not only final resting places of the dead, but also precious monuments. One of the most beautiful is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, which dates back to the latter half of the 19th century. Since affluent Jewish people (including some living outside Poland’s current borders) chose to be buried in this cemetery, many impressive monumental, decorative mausoleums and gravestones were erected. One can even find small-scale examples of Moorish and Egyptian architecture. The Old Jewish Cemetery, now a subsidiary of the City Museum of Wrocław, covers 4.6 hectares and contains around 12,000 headstones.

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Mennonite Cemetery, Sosnówka

In the late 16th century, the Mennonites – followers of a branch of Protestantism who had previously lived in the Netherlands – were forced to flee persecution in their country. Some settled in formerly tolerant Poland, particularly the Lower Vistula Valley. Sosnówka in the Grudziądz district has one of the few remaining Mennonite cemeteries in Poland. It probably came into use around 1690, and some remnants of 17th-century gravestones have survived. A sign by the cemetery gate lists its most noteworthy historical relics:

The original layout is clearly visible, as are numerous headstones of outstanding artistic value (the oldest dating from 1691, 1836, and 1861) and a relic of the main gate.

Muslim Cemetery, Kruszyniany

Over 600 years ago, a Muslim minority inhabited lands belonging to Poland. From the latter half of the 17th century onwards, the Tatar community had its own cemetery in Kruszyniany. Its oldest surviving gravestone dates from 1699. Interestingly, the site continues to be used for Muslim burials. In one section, next to an 18th-century wooden mosque, headstones over 300 years old stand alongside completely modern ones.

Lipowa Street Cemetery, Lublin

The history of the Lipowa Street Cemetery in Lublin dates back to 1794. From the outset, it always contained a range of nations and religions, and there are still Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox gravestones today. From a historical point of view, the latter section of the cemetery is particularly valuable. Apart from more than 500 ancient headstones, there is also the Church of the Holy Maidens Bearing Fragrances, built in the early 20th century – a two-storey, five-domed brick chapel in the Russian-Byzantine style that, despite its fairly small size, boasts all the major elements of Orthodox architecture.

Lemko Cemetery, Świerzowa Ruska

Świerzowa Ruska in the Low Beskids was a Lemko village, probably founded in the late 16th century. In the early 20th century, the village numbered almost 500 residents and had its own school and Orthodox church – but the villagers were resettled in 1947, and the abandoned buildings fell into disrepair. The former village later became part of Magurski National Park and was inaccessible for many years, even to tourists. But in 2015, paths were created, along with an eight-stop educational trail that allows one to discover the history of the Lemkos who lived there and visit the local cemetery, which has been preserved to some extent. Today, 20 gravestones (some from the 19th century), wooden crosses and sculptures are all that remain of the people who inhabited this area for several hundred years.

We visited many cemeteries among other historical sites in Poland during our year there, and one of the unheralded sections of any cemetery in eastern Poland (and even a little country cemetery in Transnistria that we visited) was a section for Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans, helping to “liberate” them. Lots of war dead are buried in Polish cemeteries from World War I and World War II, including many Unknown Soldiers. All Saints’ Day is the time of year when candles are lit and flowers are placed all over Polish grave markers.  The Jewish cemetery in Kielce, like many everywhere, was destroyed during World War II, and partially restored with the help of expatriate donors. Its gates remain locked and there is often a police car parked within sight of the entrance.

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Filed under Germany, military, nationalism, Poland, religion, USSR, war

by | 30 October 2026 · 5:14 am

Britain’s Foreign Secretary Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 199-202:

Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.

Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.

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There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’ Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’. Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’. And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.

Grey quickly secured unchallenged control over the policy-making process, ensuring that British policy focused primarily on the ‘German threat’. It would be going too far, of course, to view this reorientation of British policy as a function solely of Edward Grey’s power. Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Nicolson, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled closely on reports from Hardinge. The ascendancy of the Grey group was eased by recent structural reforms to the Foreign Office whose object had not been to reinforce the authority of the foreign secretary, but rather to parcel influence out more widely across a range of senior officials. Nevertheless, the energy and vigilance with which Grey maintained his ascendancy are impressive. It helped, of course, that he enjoyed the firm support of his former co-conspirator Herbert Asquith, prime minister from 1908 until 1916. The backing of a large part of the Conservative bloc in the House of Commons was another important asset – and Grey proved adept at maintaining his cross-party appeal.

But Grey’s plenitude of power and consistency of vision did not entirely protect British policy-making from the agitations characteristic of the European executives. The anti-German position adopted by the Grey group did not enjoy wide support outside the Foreign Office. It was not even backed by the majority of the British cabinet. The Liberal government, and the Liberal movement more generally, were polarized by the tension between liberal imperialist and radical elements. Many of the leading radicals, and they included some of the most venerable figures in the party, deplored the foreign secretary’s policy of alignment with Russia. They accused Grey and his associates of adopting a pose towards Germany that was unnecessarily provocative. They doubted whether the advantages of appeasing Russia outweighed the potential benefits of friendship with the German Empire. They worried whether the creation of a Triple Entente might not pressure Germany into adopting an ever more aggressive stance and they pressed for détente with Berlin. A further problem was the complexion of British public opinion, especially within the cultural and political elite, which, despite intermittent Anglo-German ‘press wars’, was drifting into a more pro-German mood during the last few years before the outbreak of war. Antagonism to Germany coexisted across the British elites with multi-layered cultural ties and a deep admiration of the country’s cultural, economic and scientific achievements.

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Filed under language, France, Europe, democracy, Russia, nationalism, Britain, education, Germany