On 28 July 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia because of the Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Within days, long-standing mobilization plans went into effect to initiate invasions or guard against them and Russia, France and Britain stood arrayed against Austria and Germany in what at the time was called the "Great War", and was later named "World War I" or the "First World War". Austria thought in terms of one small limited war involving just the two countries. It did not plan a wider war such as exploded in a matter of days.
The British historian John Zametica argued that Austria-Hungary was primarily responsible for starting the war, as its leaders believed that a successful war against Serbia was the only way it could remain a Great Power, solve deep internal disputes caused by Hungarian demands and regain influence in the Balkan states.John Zametica, In Folly and Malice (2017) Others, most notably Christopher Clark, have argued that Austria-Hungary, confronted with a neighbor determined to incite continual unrest and ultimately acquire all of the Serb-inhabited lands of the empire (according to the Pan-Serb point of view, they included all of Croatia, Dalmatia, Bosnia, Hercegovina and some of the southern counties of the Hungary (roughly corresponding to today's Vojvodina)) and had a military and government that were intertwined with the irredentist terrorist group known as "The Black Hand", saw no practical alternative to the use of force in ending what amounted to subversion from Serbia directed at a large chunk of its territories. In that perspective, Austria had little choice but to credibly threaten war and force Serbian submission if it wished to remain a Great Power.Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012).
The view of the key figures in the "war party" in the Tsarist government and many military leaders in Russia that Germany had deliberately incited Austria-Hungary to attack Serbia to have a pretext for war with Russia and France, was promoted by the German historian Fritz Fischer from the 1960s onwards but is no longer accepted by mainstream historians. One of the key drivers of the outbreak of war were two key misperceptions that were radically at odds. The key German decision-makers convinced themselves that Russia would accept an Austrian counter-strike on Serbia and were neither ready for nor seeking a general European war, but they instead engaged in a bluff,James D. Fearon, "Rationalist explanations for war." International organization 49#3 (1995): 379–414 at pp 397–98. especially because Russia had backed down in earlier crises in 1908 and again over Albania in October 1913.Clark, p.417 At the very same time, the most important Russian decision-makers viewed any decisive Austrian response as necessarily dictated by and fomented in Berlin and therefore proof of an active German desire for war against Russia.
There had been no serious joint planning with Germany before the war started and little during the war itself, as leaders in Vienna distrusted German ambitions.Richard W. Kapp, "Divided Loyalties: The German Reich and Austria-Hungary in Austro-German Discussions of War Aims, 1914–1916." Central European History 17.2-3 (1984): 120-139.
Key players and goals A small group made the decisions for Austria-Hungary. They included the aged Emperor Franz Joseph;Joseph Redlich, Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria (1929) online his heir, Franz Ferdinand;Dedijer, 1966 Army Chief of Staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf;Lawrence Sondhaus, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf: architect of the apocalypse (2000). Foreign Minister Leopold Berchtold; Minister-President Karl von Stürgkh; and Finance Minister Leon Bilinski, all of whom were Austrians. The key Hungarian leaders were Prime Minister István Tisza, the minister István Burián and the advisor Lajos Thallóczy.Bridge, pp 10-19.Gerard E. Silberstein, "The High Command and Diplomacy in Austria-Hungary, 1914-1916." Journal of Modern History 42.4 (1970): 586-605. online
Austria-Hungary avoided major wars in the era between 1867 and 1914 but engaged in a number of minor military actions. The Austro-Hungarian General Staff maintained plans for major wars against neighboring powers, especially Italy, Serbia and Russia.Gunther Rothenberg, The Army of Francis Joseph (1976) pp. 97, 99, 113–17, 124–25, 159. The major decisions on military affairs in 1867 to 1895 were made by Archduke Albrecht, Duke of Teschen, the nephew of the Emperor Franz Joseph and his leading advisor. According to the historians John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft: He was a firm conservative in all matters, military and civil, and took to writing pamphlets lamenting the state of the Army's morale as well as fighting a fierce rearguard action against all forms of innovation.... Much of the Austrian failure in the First World War can be traced back to his long period of power.... His power was that of the bureaucrat, not the fighting soldier, and his thirty years of command over the peacetime Habsburg Army made it a flabby instrument of war.John Keegan and Andrew Wheatcroft, Who's Who in Military History: From 1453 to the Present Day (2001) p, 12. As Europe engaged in an arms race from the late 1890s forwards, Austria-Hungary lagged behind by spending the least percentage of its economic potential on its armed forces of all the great powers (2.6% of GDP compared to Russia's 4.5% in 1912).Clark, p. 217 Austro-Hungarian Chief of Staff von Hötzendorf's repeated urgings of "preventative war" against nearly all of Austria's adversaries at one time or another had no rational basis in the actual balance of military power.
The far more realistic and cautious Franz Ferdinand, despite his deep personal affection for von Hötzendorf, realized that the rise of Pan-Slavism could rip the empire apart, and his solution was called "Trialism". The empire would be restructured three ways, instead of two, with the Slavic element given representation at the highest levels equivalent to what Austria and Hungary now had. Serbians saw that as a threat to their dream of a new state of Yugoslavia, and it was a factor in motivating the Archduke's assassination in 1914. Hungarian leaders had a predominant voice in imperial circles and strongly rejected Trialism because it would liberate many of their minorities from Hungarian rule, which was considered oppressive. Despite postwar accounts that attempted to make of the heir to the throne a convenient villain in favour of war, Franz Ferdinand, as well as the most public figures of note, supported improved status for the southern and the other Slavs in the empire, was adamantly opposed to annexing Serbia or to war in general and insisted that the monarchy was too fragile internally for foreign adventures. Except for a few days in December 1912, the Archduke repeatedly intervened in government debates during the various Balkan crises of 1908, 1912 and 1913 before his own murder by insisting that advocates of war with Serbia, especially von Hötzendorf, were servants of the Crown who "consciously or unconsciously worked to damage the monarchy".Hans Hantsch, "Leopold Graf Berchtold. Grandseigneur und Staatsmann" 1963, quoted in Clark, p. 291
Zametica argues that by 1909, war with Serbia was the main plan of the "war party" at Vienna. The long-term goal was to stop Russia from forming a Balkan league that would permanently stifle Austria's ambitions: Defeating Serbia would effectively destroy what Vienna saw as a potentially menacing, Russian-inspired Balkan league, because such a league without Serbia would simply be a non-starter.... Last, but not least, a successful war against Serbia would at the same time solve the Monarchy's South Slav question—or at least ensure that Serbia could no longer play a role in it because the country would either not exist at all or it would be too small to matter.... In short, smashing Serbia would make Austria-Hungary the unchallenged master of South Eastern Europe. It was a dazzling prospect.Zametica, 2017, pp 562-63,
After Serbia's spectacular military performance in the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, Vienna succeeded in forcing Serbia's army to finally withdraw from Albania in 1913, but the goal of maintaining traditional sway over Serbia gave way to alarm. Serbia had quintupled in territory, enormous French loans permitted a rapid rearmament and enhancement of its military forcesClark, p. 357 and its newspapers were replete with calls for incorporating Serbian-majority areas of the Habsburg Empire into a Greater Serbia. Anxiety over the long-term survival of Austria-Hungary reached a new pitch of intensity among its governing elite.
Relations with key countries Austria made several overtures for friendlier relations with Russia after 1907, but they were undermined by espionage, propaganda and hostile diplomacy by France. Austria decided the villain was probably Théophile Delcassé, the French ambassador to Russia.J. F. N. Bradley, "Quelques aspects de la politique étrangère de Russie avant 1914 à travers les archives françaises," Études Slaves et Est-Européennes/Slavic and East-European Studies (1962): 97-102. The one seeming success of the effort, a secret agreement with Russian Foreign Minister Alexander Izvolsky for Russian compliance to Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia, itself predicted and assented to in numerous secret agreements between Russia and Austria after the Congress of Berlin in return for Austrian support for Russian military control of the Turkish Straits, the Bosporus and Dardanelles, backfired spectacularly when the Russian press and nationalist politicians in the Duma pilloried Izvolsky by decrying the annexation as a 'humiliation' for Russia. Izolvsky then reversed himself, denying the secret agreement, only to be caught out when Germany ended the crisis by threatening to back Austria up if Russia attacked it over the Bosnian annexation and threatening to release the secret documents that made Izvolsky's secret consent to the annexation a proven fact. The controversy destroyed Izvolsky's career, embittered him and made him become an ardent advocate of war against Austria-Hungary after Tsar Nicholas II of Russia had dismissed him the following year, in 1910, and replaced him with Sergey Sazonov.
Although Germany and Austria knew full well that they would be outnumbered in a major war with the Franco-Russian Alliance (made in 1894 and perhaps the only unambiguous alliance in the pre-war constellation that few doubted would perform as promised), they made no effort to develop joint plans or to familiarise themselves with the other's strength and weaknesses. After the war had started, they remained far apart. Austria had deceived itself by trusting Conrad's elaborate plans and not realizing how bad was the Army's morale, how inefficient and cumbersome was the reserve system, how thin were its stocks of munitions and supplies or how badly its rail network had deteriorated with respect to Russia in recent years. Year by year, as Germany discovered the depth of the weaknesses of Austria's military and Vienna's inability to remedy its deep defects, it was increasingly necessary for Germany to take more and more control of Austrian military operations.Gordon A. Craig, "The World War I Alliance of the Central Powers in Retrospect: The Military Cohesion of the Alliance" Journal of Modern History 37#3 (1965) pp. 336-344 online In the period leading up to the outbreak of war, German policy-makers, from Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the mercurial Kaiser himself, had convinced themselves that Russia was unlikely to go to war to protect Serbia rather inexplicably, but Sazonov indeed had forced the Serbs to back down in the Albania Crisis just a year earlier.Clark, pp. 416-18
Assassination