Council on Foreign Relations
Austria-Hungary Issues an Ultimatum to Serbia
Blog Post by James M. Lindsay
July 23, 2019 -- Be careful what you
wish for, you just might get it. That adage applies to governments as well as
to people. A case in point is the ultimatum that Austria gave Serbia on July
23, 1914. Austrian officials were counting on Serbia to reject their demands,
which would give Vienna the opportunity it was seeking to wage a swift and
victorious war against its upstart neighbor. The Austrians were right on the
first count, but horrifically wrong on the second. The result would be the
Great War that changed the course of the twentieth century.
The immediate reason for Austria’s
ultimatum was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie
in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28, 1914 by the Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo
Princip. Austrian officials suspected, quite rightly and understandably, that
the Serbian government either orchestrated the assassination or (as was
actually the case) knew who had. But the deeper reason was the contest for
power in the Balkans. Both Austria and Serbia had their sights set on acquiring
the remains of the collapsing Ottoman Empire. With Franz Ferdinand’s death,
Austria had the pretext it wanted to put the smaller and weaker Serbians in
their place.
Only one obstacle stood in Vienna’s way:
Russia. It was Serbia’s patron. If Austria marched on Serbia, Russia would
likely come to Belgrade’s side. If that happened, an easy victory might
suddenly become a devastating loss.
Looking to force Moscow to stay on the
sidelines, Austria turned to its ally, Germany. On July 5, a week after Franz
Ferdinand’s assassination, Kaiser Wilhelm II gave Austria what it wanted: the
promise of Germany’s “faithful support” if Russia came to Serbia’s aid.
With the Kaiser’s so-called blank check
in hand, Austrian officials began drafting an ultimatum to Serbia. The
rationale for the ultimatum was simple: attacking Serbia without warning would
make Serbia look like a victim. In contrast, an ultimatum would put the burden
of avoiding war on Belgrade.
It took Austrian officials a week to
persuade Count Tisza, the prime minister of Hungary, the often overlooked half
of the Austro-Hungarian empire, to agree to the ultimatum. Even when he did,
Vienna had to decide when to send it. French president Raymond Poincaré was
scheduled to meet with Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg from July 20–23.
Vienna worried that if it delivered the ultimatum while Poincaré was in St.
Petersburg, Russia might coordinate its response with France. So Vienna decided
to wait until the evening of July 23.
At 6:00 PM on the appointed day, the
Austrian ambassador to Serbia, Baron Giesl, delivered the ultimatum to the
Serbian finance minister Lazar Paču. He was acting in the place of the Serbian
prime minister, Nikola Pašić, who was campaigning in southern Serbia for the
country’s August elections. The cover letter to the ultimatum gave Belgrade
precisely forty-eight hours to reply.
The ultimatum listed ten demands. The
most significant were that Serbia accept “’representatives of the
Austro-Hungarian government for the suppression of subversive movements” (Point
5) and that Serbia "bring to trial all accessories to the Archduke’s
assassination and allow Austro-Hungarian delegates (law enforcement officers)
to take part in the investigation" (Point 6).
The ultimatum caused a stir in foreign
capitals. Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov declared that no state could
accept such demands without “committing suicide.” British foreign secretary Sir
Edward Grey declared that he had "never before seen one state address to
another independent state a document of so formidable a character."
Winston Churchill, then Britain’s first lord of the admiralty, called it “the
most insolent document of its kind ever devised.”
Perhaps. From the vantage point of 2014,
the Austrian ultimatum looks far less insolent. As Christopher Clark notes in
The Sleepwalkers, his magisterial history of the origins of World War I,
Vienna’s demands in 1914 fell far short of the demands NATO made on Serbia in
1999 over Kosovo. They also fell far short of the demands that President George
W. Bush made of the Taliban after September 11. And Austria’s ultimatum was far
more diplomatic than the one President Theodore Roosevelt gave Morocco ten
years before Franz Ferdinand’s assassination after the brigand Ahmed
ibn-Muhammed Raisuli kidnapped Ion Perdicaris, a Greek-American citizen.
Roosevelt’s demand was blunt: "Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead."
Whether the ultimatum was insolent or
not, Vienna got the answer it wanted. Serbia refused to meet all ten demands.
On July 28, Austria declared war on Serbia. The result, however, was not the
quick and glorious triumph that Austrian officials expected. What they got instead
was a cataclysmic fight that devastated Europe and ended the Austro-Hungarian
empire. Be careful what you wish for, indeed.
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