‘Significant Individuals’

Add an “S” to MAIN for ‘Significant Individuals’

Fewer than fifty men, and they were all men, were involved in the decisions made during the July Crisis. They included politicians and military chiefs, though where the fateful decisions were made – in Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia – the politicians were appointed by their monarchs rather than elected. And in Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia, the ultimate decision whether to go to war or not lay in the hands of an emperor, a kaiser and a tsar. Each was convinced of his ‘divine right’ to rule, that is that they ruled by God’s will, and each saw himself as, above all else, a military man, a soldier.

Emperor Franz Joseph was the most experienced of the three. Kaiser Wilhelm looked up to him and made a point of regularly visiting him. On the other hand, Wilhelm had little regard for Tsar Nicholas, younger than the Kaiser by ten years. Nicholas, for his part, found dealing with Wilhelm in person exhausting.

Franz Joseph was, of all the monarchs, the most able, though, at the time of the July crisis in 1914, Franz Joseph was 84 and his health was beginning to fail and he was increasingly reluctant to intervene in government matters. He didn’t attend a single meeting of his Council of Ministers in the three years prior to the war. And of his advisors, only the Hungarian prime minister advised caution.

Wilhelm wanted to be seen as a great monarch, not just amongst Germans but on the world stage. He saw himself as a soldier (he wanted to be seen as a warrior-king). And as a sovereign, he felt it necessary to present a forceful character. He loved the dramatic gesture, regardless of the diplomatic price to be paid. Yet in all these guises, he himself knew that something was lacking. He was, indeed, emotionally fragile. He was unpredictable, prone to outbursts of anger and also to fits of anguish which included threats to abdicate, even commit suicide. Yet he was also an autocrat and he did not like to be contradicted. He wanted to control things, but he was not a good listener, he certainly did not want to hear viewpoints that contradicted his own.

In Russia, the Tsar had a strong sense of Russian honour and Russia had been forced to back down too often. But he was a weak character, indecisive and, by his own admission, unfit to rule. He was dangerously indecisive in the July Crisis but was warned that unless he defended Serbia, he would risk revolution and perhaps his throne.

So, the decisions that led to a war that became a world war, that lasted more than four years, and that caused such loss of life with many more badly injured, were ultimately made by three autocrats with little or no democratic controls to keep them in check. Something worth thinking about!