Archduke Franz Ferdinand's Peacetime Alliances

In 1888, Otto von Bismarck remarked that “the next great European war will probably come out of some damn foolish thing in the Balkans.” (Massie, p. 82) At the time, he was referring to the aftermath of the Serbo-Bulgarian war, which managed, in a series of resonating blows, to shatter the Ottoman Empire’s tenuous grasp on the Balkans and splinter the League of Three Empires. Over the next forty years, the ever-fluid situation in the Balkans ebbed and flowed, but never strayed far from a point of complete catastrophe. The decaying behemoth of the Porte disintegrated, replaced with a proliferation of nascent Southern Slav states, intent on empowering their particular clade with no regard to the tensions pervading Europe. Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s …show more content…
There were, of course, alliances of expediency and convenience – the Napoleonic coalitions, the Austrian-Russian pact in the 1848 rebellions, the various alliances of the 18th century dynastical succession wars – but nothing that could possibly be considered permanent. This all changed in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War ended with the formation of the German Empire through blood and iron. A radical shift in the power spectrum had thus transpired. Wilhelm I, through the German Empire, fractured the power structure in Europe. To secure German economic dominance and the balance of power throughout Europe, unprecedented actions had to be taken. The network of alliances that would eventually strangle Europe was formed out of desire for peace and prosperity: von Bismarck’s actions to quell pan-European tension ultimately lead to continental …show more content…
Sazonov’s – the Russian Foreign Affairs Minister – orders for a general mobilization instead of a partial mobilization directed against Austria provoked a German response, but a failure to do so would have left Russia crippled against any potential German reaction. The very nature of German mobilization meant that Wilhelm II’s orders to activate the Schlieffen Plan made war an inevitability – but to forestall was to risk encirclement and ”’the full brunt of [a] French and British attack’” (Ferguson, p. 147). Even Asquith’s reluctant intervention, in a sense, was a product of the tense European political situation – to the British Empire, war came about as a result of gentlemen’s agreements with France, the threat of a German goliath, and yes, the matter of Belgium neutrality. Individual decisions transformed Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination into a global calamity, but Europe was bound to war eventually – it was merely a matter of which incident would break the fragile continental