Category Archives: Eastern Europe

by Joel | 10 November 2026 · 6:26 am

Poland on November 11, 1918

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes an article by Marek Kępa from 2018 (rev. 2026) that answers the question, Why Does Poland Celebrate Independence Day on 11th November? It recounts some of the events on the ground and in the streets on 11 Listopada 1918. Here are excerpts from the text, without the many interesting photos included in the full article.

On 11th November 1918, Poland regained its independence after 123 years of partitioning by Russia, Prussia and Austria. But what actually happened on that historic day? Culture.pl chronicles the events of what is now commemorated as Independence Day – explaining why they occurred peacefully despite the obvious tension and how these events brought back Poland’s freedom.

Out of the blue

How does a large country like Interwar Poland re-appear in Central Europe? What needs to happen on a particular day to make it ‘Independence Day?’ A somewhat humorous answer to that question was provided by Marshal Józef Piłsudski, the celebrated Polish leader amongst those largely credited with winning back Poland’s freedom:

Ladies and gentlemen, in 1918 – just like in the legionary song – ‘out of the blue there was a Poland anew’.

Although slightly facetious, the quote points to two important things. Firstly, that the 11th is an arbitrary date and as such is a bit ‘out of the blue’. Of course, it was an exceptionally important day to Poland’s independence – we’ll soon get into that – but you don’t reinstate a country in a single day. It’s a process which takes plenty of time. And that’s the second thing the quote points to, by mentioning the Polish Legions: a Polish force in World War I, led by Piłsudski.

The pro-independence stance of the Legions (originally created by the Austro-Hungarians to strengthen their own ranks) prompted many a Pole to believe that a free Poland was attainable. The Legions fought for years before Poland reappeared on the 11th.

In November 1918, the Great War was nearing its end, with the partitioning powers all weakened by it. Poland was already enjoying partial sovereignty: the Regency Council, a temporary Polish governmental body, was functioning in Warsaw and laying the grounds for independence. But there were still German troops in the city – historians estimate some 30,000 of them.

On 10th November 1918, Piłsudski comes to Warsaw, freed from Magdeburg by the Germans [he had been interned there after refusing to fight for Germany]. On the 11th, he takes control of the military. On the 14th, he receives full power. The discussion as to which date to recognise as the formal regaining of independence was a long one.
From an interview with Wiesław Wysocki, chairman of the Piłsudski Institute, published in ‘Niepodległość’, 2017, trans. MK

Despite the long debate, just a year later, in 1919, 11th November was being celebrated as the day when Poland reclaimed its independence. It gained the status of a national holiday in 1937.

Let them leave

Formally, Piłsudski became commander-in-chief of the Polish Army on the 11th by decision of the Regency Council. His first move in this capacity was to gain control of Warsaw, the former and prospective capital of an independent Poland. This was achieved by taking over key strategic places like police headquarters and arms warehouses from German troops. Naturally, such an operation would be a risky one and could easily lead to a fight. To avoid unnecessary bloodshed, Piłsudski addressed a committee of German soldiers that morning in front of the Presidential Palace on Krakowskie Przedmieście Street.

[He] guaranteed them safety and a peaceful evacuation. In return, he asked them to hand over control of the guarded objects, put down their arms and not to provoke the Poles. The same day the Command Centre of POW [a Polish underground, pro-independence, military organisation] issued the following order: ‘Avoid bloody fights with German soldiers. Raids on garrisons are out of the question. Let them peacefully leave for their country after they hand over their weapons and technical materials to the organisation’s units.’
From ‘Kto w Listopadzie Rozbroił Niemców’ (Who Disarmed The Germans in November), ‘Gazeta Wyborcza’, 2016, trans. MK

In the afternoon, Polish troops began taking over the city’s strategic objects. Understandably, the excitement among citizens was enormous and even ordinary civilians assisted the soldiers. Miraculously, the whole operation was carried out relatively peacefully – there were only a handful of casualties on both sides, unthinkable compared to how things had been up to that point. By the end of the day, most key places were in Polish hands, although Germans still remained in the Citadel in the Żoliborz district. That same day, Germany signed a peace treaty with the Triple Entente (Russia, France and Britain), ending World War I.

Common whippersnappers

The peaceful manner in which the Poles took control of Warsaw was to a large degree an effect of Piłsudski’s aims. He wanted to avoid a confrontation with the numerous German troops, a confrontation that could potentially lead to mass casualties.

In fact, it was precisely because of Piłsudski’s authority among Poles – and his resulting ability to contain the chaos caused in Polish territories by the partitioning powers’ wartime demise – that he was freed from Magdeburg in the first place.

But to fully understand why the Germans surrendered Warsaw so willingly on the 11th, one has to go back a day further. On the 10th, Piłsudski arrived in the city on an early morning train. After a meeting with Zdzisław Lubomirski, a member of the Regency Council, he went to 2 Moniuszki Street (which no longer exists), where he stayed for two days at a bed and breakfast operating in one of the flats. At the establishment, run by Wanda, Halina and Maria Romanówna, three sisters conspiring with POW, further meetings took place – there were plenty of pressing matters.

Among those received by Piłsudski was the young military man Józef Jęczkowiak. The marshal recounted the unrest he had witnessed in Germany, where war-weary soldiers were mutinying and creating committees advocating for a release from duty, an event historians now call the German Revolution. This was why he wanted to send Jęczkowiak on a mission to weaken the morale of the German troops in Warsaw.

Posing as a German soldier, Jęczkowiak, together with his associates, quickly visited one of the German army’s dayrooms and addressed those gathered there:

[…] I stood on the table, and in a full voice, I began to tell about the revolution in Germany and about what I had heard from Piłsudski […]. People started shouting, at first only a few, later many of them: ‘we’ll do the same thing’, ‘long live the revolution’. I didn’t hear anybody opposing […].
From ‘Był Czyn i Chwała! Wspomnienia Harcerza 1913-1918’ by Józef Jęczkowiak, 2015, trans. MK

The German soldiers stationed in Warsaw had also had enough of the war and were more than eager to go home. After Jęczkowiak’s speech, they established their own committee (the one addressed in front of the Presidential Palace), which worked with Piłsudski towards the city’s evacuation. The disarmament had actually already begun on the 10th, but most of it occurred the day after.

Since the morale of the German soldiers had been successfully undermined, Zdzisław Lubomirski’s wife Maria could write in her memoirs on the 11th:

We’re free! We get to govern ourselves! This really happened and in such an unexpected fashion at that […] The Germans are dumbfounded, they’re sporadically resisting, but they allow themselves to be disarmed not only by military men, but also by common civilian whippersnappers… Strange things in our capital!
From ‘Pamiętnik Księżnej Marii Zdzisławowej Lubomirskiej 1914-1918’, 1997, trans. MK

Unforgettable and filled with happiness

Another description by a witness to the day’s events comes from the eminent writer Maria Dąbrowska. Apart from remarking that the weather was ‘absolutely beautiful’, she also wrote the following in her Dzienniki 1914-1945 (Memoirs 1914-1945), published in 2009:

From early in the morning, German officers are being disarmed on every street corner. But not only is the militia disarming them, so is the mob […] Throughout the day, military assets and civilian authorities are being taken from the Germans. All day long, the streets are crowded. The trams are running as usual. There are cars with our soldiers everywhere […]. In the midst of all this, Poland is rising. And nobody can see how beautiful it is. Nobody notices in this commotion. (Trans. MK)

Perhaps due to all the excitement, the beauty of the weather and the newly reborn state did indeed slip the attention of some observers. Without a doubt, it was independence from occupation that most people were reacting to. The moment’s enthusiasm was well expressed in the aforementioned memoirs of Maria Lubomirska:

The present day is historic, unforgettable, filled with happiness and triumphant! (Trans. MK)

Nevertheless, Poland was definitely going to be noticed by plenty of people soon, not only in the country but also worldwide. The evacuation of Warsaw and other Polish territories was generally going smoothly – in a matter of days, all German soldiers would leave the capital.

On the 16th, Piłsudski sent a telegram to the rulers of the USA, Britain, Germany and other countries:

As the commander-in-chief of the Polish Army, I hereby notify war-faring and neutral governments and nations of the existence of an Independent Polish State, encompassing all lands of united Poland. […] The Polish State arises from the will of the entire nation and shall be based on democratic principles.
From ’11th November – National Independence Day’, published by the Central Club of Polish Soldiers, 2012

The shape of the reappearing country’s borders would still need to be determined, but after reclaiming its capital and political centre on the 11th, there was no doubt that an independent Polish state would now exist.

After 123 years of partitions, Poland was free once again.

Leave a comment

Filed under military, language, democracy, migration, nationalism, Germany, Poland, Austria

by Joel | 9 November 2026 · 6:04 am

Maps With/Without Poland

This week’s Culture.pl newsletter includes a richly illustrated article by Mikołaj Gliński from 2017 titled The Map Is Not the Territory: How Satirists Charted Poland When It Wasn’t on the Map. Here are some paragraphs of comment below the variety of mostly satirical maps.

In the late 18th century, Poland disappeared from the political map of Europe and didn’t return until over a century later. But is the map the territory? Where was Poland when it wasn’t there? Culture.pl tries to find Poland in the maps of cartographers and satirists who were suddenly dealing with a missing country that never truly went away.

In 1795, the last of a series of partitions effectively wiped Poland off the map of Europe. Naturally the country and its citizens didn’t vanish altogether, and the so-called ‘Polish question’ was an important element of debate in 19th-century Europe. Here’s how cartographers and cartoonists reflected on the position of Poland at a time when the country was relegated from the map… Namely, the Polish question illustrated.

Before the partitions

The Partitions of Poland came in the late 18th century. But beforehand in the 16-17th centuries, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was one of the most powerful empires in Europe. At the peak of its power in the late 17th century this multi-ethnic state stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The map above shows the empire in the 18th century, not long before it was disbanded.

Cutting the cake

The first partition of Poland took place in July 1772. For many of its contemporaries, the seemingly legal partition of an existing legal state must have seemed like a hardly paralleled event in history. A contemporary British satirical drawing titled Picture of Europe in July 1772 shows an allegorical picture of the first partition of Poland, with the three monarchs – Katherine the Great, Joseph II and Frederick the Great – dividing Poland in the presence of Polish king Stanislaus August, pictured here as their captive.

The two monarchs shown in the background – French king Louis XV and Charles III of Spain – seem to be indifferently assisting the process, while the British king George III is drowsing in the corner. The scale above the head of the Polish king shows a sudden shift in the balance of powers. But the doings of the monarchs turned out only an introduction to more permanent changes in Europe. Over the next 25 years, the map on their laps was re-drawn at least twice more – a process which came to an end in 1795 with the final partition.

And it’s gone …

This 1799 map by English cartographer William Faden shows the former territories of Poland five years after the last partition. The boundaries of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth are coloured light red. The map marks the land acquisitions made by Prussia (yellow), Austria (green), and Russia (beige). As a result of the three partitions, the territory of former Poland was divided among Austria (128,900 km²), Prussia (141,400 km²) and Russia which gained most ground (462,000 km² and 5.5 million people).

Or is it …

But let us not lose hope. The name of Poland didn’t disappear completely. Here’s an English map from the same year (1799) whose author seems to have missed the partitions. Poland is shown with its traditional borders and one can read Poland standing proudly across the territories.

Poland as nowhere (1870)

Satirical maps of Europe were a popular way to symbolically reflect the various tensions and sympathies of European politics. This French map of Europe by Paul Hadol was created shortly before the outbreak of the French-Prussian war of 1871. Poland is not there (it’s essentially somewhere under the Prussian soldier’s moustache) but notice also that the map doesn’t include countries that were already on the map in 1870, like Greece.

Poland’s grave (1870)

Presenting Poland as a grave and its nation as a dead man was a popular way to imagine the fate of a country that was terminated, or to put it more figuratively, ‘buried alive’. In fact, this is how many Poles – and especially Polish poets – came to see the fate of their country. Little wonder that Poland’s ultimate return on the map of Europe was sometimes described as a ‘resurrection’.

Can you find Poland in this picture?

Another satirical map, this time German, from the same period shows Russia as a giant ruthless boyar sharpening a huge knife. He is pushing with his back on Germany and Austria. Poland, it might seem at first, is not there. But take a closer look! Can you see a little guy holding onto the belt of the giant and being almost crushed by his backside? With all probablility, it’s Poland.

Polonia shackled

In this Italian map, published originally in Bologna circa 1871, Poland is shown as a shackled fair lady on the ground, holding on to an anchor (traditionally a symbol of hope). The figure, usually referred to as Polonia, is chained by the iron belt around her waist to three oppressors: Russia again is a giant dwarf holding a knife dripping with blood, while an Austrian soldier and the Prussian Kaiser are considerably smaller. Note the little men at the feet of the Russian Tsar – they are serfs who rejoice after the abolition of serfdom which took place in the Russian Empire in 1861, and in the Polish Kingdom in 1863. The Italian verse (here translated into English) carries a rather sad lesson:

Poland / Tied in shackles, at the feet of her tyrants / The name of Nation honours her no more… / She can’t rise up! She can’t avenge herself / Who carries like a mule, deserves to be beaten

In the arms of the octopus

In its time, the regularly-updated British Serio-Comic War Map by Fred Rose was one of the most popular symbolic representations of political tensions in Europe. The map, often referred to simply as the Octopus Map, had many variants which also changed with time to better fit the purposes and political agendas of those who created them.

The original version from 1877 shows Russia as an octopus, and Poland is seen as suffocating in the grasp of one of the octopus’s arms. The other arms are reaching out to different parts of the continent: Germany, Scandinavia and Turkey (which is being surrounded from both directions). And yet, in regard to Poland, this (clearly anti-Russian) depiction somehow forgets to represent also other oppressors. The map below from 1900 reiterates many of these allusions, while also showing the octopus expanding east…

A later Japanese variant of the map shows stylised skulls for Poland and Finland – regions for whom the touch of the octopus was deadly. In this version, the arms of the Russian octopus are reaching to Persia, India, China and even Tibet.

Why is Poland a bloodhound (1882)

This splendid French satirical map from 1882 shows the European states as animals. Poland is presented as a dog chained to its master Russia, which itself is presented as a white bear munching on a crescent, a symbol of Turkey. The other partitioning powers are presented as a fox (Germany) and an owl (Austria). The legend explains that the fox’s head head rests on a friendly Austria but his eyes watch the scenes in France, the owl is explained as the Grand Duke, ‘eager and anxious’.

The legend expounds that the Polish dog in the picture is Chien de Saint-Hubert, that is a bloodhound. The dog wears an alarm bell – but its overall symbolism eludes us. Another question is the meaning of the black hole right where Ukraine and Belarus are today…

Printed in Poland without Poland (1878)

The political situation at the close of the century looked pretty grim for Poland. This map printed in 1898 in Warsaw, shows no trace of Poland except for the Polish-sounding names of cities and towns. At this time Warsaw was the capital of Privislinsky Krai, a part of the Russian Empire. The Russian Cyrillic note at the bottom left reads ‘Dozvoleno cenzuroû Varšava‘ – a sign of the ubiquitous censorship which was part of the oppressive system in the empire of the Tsar.

The Great War hides Poland (1914)

This German satirical map from 1914 shows the conflicting sides of the Great War. While the picture doesn’t even show Poland, Poles did engage in war fighting on many sides. The result: an independent Polish state that eventually emerged from the next four years of carnage.

Back on the map (1918)

In 1918, after 123 years of partitions, Poland once again appeared on the map of Europe. The map above shows the new Polish territory in 1921, that is, with the Vilnius and the country’s eastern border as the result of the Polish-Russian War of 1920.

The new Europe emerges … and disappears

The new map of Europe, as seen being admired in this picture in the US, would only last a little over 20 years . World War II effectively recharted the map of Europe once again in its east.

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, Europe, Germany, nationalism, Poland, publishing, Russia

by Joel | 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under military, Turkey, France, religion, war, Russia, nationalism, Britain, Germany, Hungary, Balkans, Austria

by Joel | 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Romania, France, war, Russia, nationalism, economics, Germany, Hungary, Balkans, Austria, Bulgaria

by Joel | 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Balkans, Italy, Mediterranean, military, nationalism, religion, Turkey, war

by Joel | 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, Balkans, Britain, democracy, France, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, U.S., USSR, Vietnam, war

by Joel | 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).

Leave a comment

Filed under Austria, Britain, democracy, economics, France, Germany, Hungary, military, nationalism, Russia, U.S.

by Joel | 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.

Leave a comment

Filed under family, Poland, religion, travel

by Joel | 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.

…

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.

…

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.

…

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.

Leave a comment

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

by Joel | 27 October 2026 · 6:14 am

Europe’s Shifting Alliances, 1887-1907

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 122-123, 157-159:

If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia in Persia and Central Asia. France was determined to reverse the verdict of the German victory of 1870. Conflicting interests in the Balkans gave rise to tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Italy and Austria were rivals in the Adriatic and quarrelled intermittently over the status of Italophone communities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while there were tensions between Italy and France over the latter’s policy in northern Africa. All these pressures were held in check by the patchwork of the 1887 system. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy (20 May 1882) prevented the tensions between Rome and Vienna from breaking into open conflict. The defensive Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia (18 June 1887) contained articles deterring either power from seeking its fortunes in war with another continental state and insulated the Russo-German relationship against the fallout from Austro-Russian tensions.* The Russo-German link also ensured that France would be unable to build an anti-German coalition with Russia. And Britain was loosely tied into the continental system through the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria – an exchange of notes rather than a treaty – whose purpose was to thwart French challenges in the Mediterranean and Russian ones in the Balkans or the Turkish Straits.

…

Move forward twenty years to a diagram of the European alliances in 1907, and the picture has changed utterly. You see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems. The Triple Alliance is still in place (though Italy’s loyalty to it is increasingly questionable). France and Russia are conjoined in the Franco-Russian Alliance (drafted in 1892 and ratified in 1894), which stipulates that if any member of the Triple Alliance should mobilize, the two signatories will ‘at the first news of this event and without any previous agreement being necessary’ mobilize immediately the whole of their forces and deploy them ‘with such speed that Germany shall be forced to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West’. Britain is linked to the Franco-Russian Alliance through the Entente Cordiale with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. It will be some years before these loose alignments tauten into the coalitions that will fight the First World War in Europe, but the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible.

The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914. It is almost impossible to see how a crisis in Austro-Serbian relations, however grave, could have dragged the Europe of 1887 into a continental war. The bifurcation into two alliance blocs did not cause the war; indeed it did as much to mute as to escalate conflict in the pre-war years. Yet without the two blocs, the war could not have broken out in the way that it did. The bipolar system structured the environment in which the crucial decisions were made. To understand how that polarization came about, it is necessary to answer four interlinked questions. Why did Russia and France form an alliance against Germany in the 1890s? Why did Britain opt to throw in its lot with that alliance? What role did Germany play in bringing about its own encirclement by a hostile coalition? And to what extent can the structural transformation of the alliance system account for the events that brought war to Europe and the world in 1914?

…

The Convention of 1907 was not driven by hostility towards, or fear of, Germany. It was rather the other way around: since Russia posed the greater threat to Britain across a greater range of vulnerable points, it was Russia that must be appeased and Germany that must be opposed. This had been the dominant British thinking on a rapprochement with Russia since before the turn of the century and it remained valid after the Convention was signed. In March 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge put the matter succinctly. ‘We have no pending questions with Germany except that of naval construction,’ he told Sir Arthur Nicolson, who would soon succeed him, ‘while our whole future in Asia is bound up with maintaining the best and most friendly relations with Russia. We cannot afford to sacrifice in any way our entente with Russia, even for the sake of a reduced naval programme.’ The same point can be made for the Russian decision-makers who agreed the Convention: this was not, for them, a policy directed against Germany, but rather a retrenching move designed to secure breathing space for domestic consolidation or (depending on whom you asked) greater freedom of external action. Of particular interest was the link between a deal over Persia and the prospect of British support for improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. For Izvolsky and his ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, the Straits question was ‘the core of the Convention’ and the key to securing favourable revision of Russian access rights at a ‘suitable time’ in the near future.

In other words: while the new international system that emerged from 1907 chiefly disadvantaged Germany, we should not assume that this outcome faithfully reflected the designs that brought it about. Only in the case of France can one speak of a policy that consistently assigned a high priority to containing Germany. It makes more sense to think of this array of agreements as the European consequence of world-historical transitions – the Sino-Japanese War and the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the fiscal burdens imposed by African conflicts and the Great Game in Central Asia, the retreat of Ottoman power in Africa and south-western Europe, and the rise of the China Question, meaning not just the great-power competition there but also the high levels of Chinese domestic turbulence that resulted. Germany’s ‘restlessness’ and its parvenu importuning were part of the picture, but they were perceived within a field of vision that encompassed broader concerns. The once widely held view that Germany caused its own isolation through its egregious international behaviour is not borne out by a broader analysis of the processes by which the realignments of this era were brought about.

In fact the causal relationship between antagonism to Germany and the new alliance system ran to some extent in the other direction: it was not that antagonism to Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. In Russia’s case, for example, the victory of Japan in the East and the provisional settlement of the imperial quarrel with Britain in Central Asia inevitably refocused foreign policy on the sole remaining theatre in which it could still pursue an imperial vision – the Balkans, an area where conflict with Austria-Hungary and, by extension, Germany was going to be difficult to avoid. The old factional divide within the Russian foreign policy community between ‘Asianists’ and ‘Europeanists’ was resolved in the latter’s favour. Under Izvolsky and Sazonov, Europeanists, who tended to distrust Germany and to favour good relations with Britain and France, always occupied a majority of the key positions. The Anglo-French Entente likewise neutralized the anti-British sentiment that before 1904 had intermittently diluted the Germanophobia of French statesmen.