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The Crime against Europe

Substance of a talk given by Brendan Clifford to the Brecon Political and Theological Discussion Group, 3rd November, 2005

 

Brendan Clifford said he would be arguing that without the intervention of Britain, the war which began in Europe in 1914 would not have become a world war. He saw it as three wars which followed each other in rapid succession but which could nonetheless be distinguished:

1. a local war between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Serbia

2. which became a European war through the intervention of Russia and France

3. and became a world war through the intervention of Britain.

Britain was the only worldwide power and therefore the only force that could spread the war throughout the world.

 

WAR No 1

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was not an 'Empire' in the same sense of the word as the British, French, Dutch or Portuguese Empires. It was not a case of a single country ruling territories that were foreign to it and scattered throughout the world. It was a single, territorially continuous, polity which grouped together several different nationalities which could be divided into three peoples - Germans, Hungarians and Slavs. Since 1867 it had been governed as a 'dual monarchy', German and Hungarian (there was one monarch but two state systems). It was in the process of becoming a triple monarchy ­ German, Hungarian and Slav. The principal advocate for introducing a distinct Slav component was the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne. The Empire was primarily concerned with its own survival and no longer had any expansionist aims.

In 1908, however, it had annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina, and this was the basis of the dispute with Serbia. Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina had both been part of the Ottoman Empire. Throughout the nineteenth century, the Orthodox Christian Serbs had waged a series of very bloody wars to gain their independence. By 1878 they had their own kingdom more or less correspondng to the territory known as 'Serbia' at the present day. This left Bosnia-Herzegovina isolated from the main body of the Ottoman Empire. It had a mixed Catholic ­ Muslim ­ Orthodox population. The Orthodox population was sizeable and the territory was claimed by the militants of the Serb nationalist movement. It was to prevent a Serb takeover that the Austro-Hungarians took it over as part of the settlement of 1878, initially as a protectorate that was legally still part of the Ottoman Empire, then formally annexing it in1908, in response to the nationalist militancy of the Young Turk movement.

The Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by native Bosnians (the group responsible was mainly of Orthodox Serb origin but included at least one Muslim) who supported unification with Serbia. There were solid grounds for believing that the assassins were linked to elements in the Serb Secret Service. Brendan drew a parallel with the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. The possibility that this might have been committed with the kowledge or support of elements within the government of Afghanistan is now regarded almost universally as adequate justification for the war to overthrow the Afghan government and return the country to a state of anarchy. By these standards it is impossible not to accept the justification for the Austrian ultimatum and subsequent 'punitive expedition;' launched against Serbia.

 

WAR No 2

This very specific local quarrel became a European quarrel through the involvement of Russia and France. Both Russia and France, unlike Germany and the Empire, had an interest in provoking a general European war in pursuit of expansionist or irredentist aims which neither could pursue unaided. Russia could be described as expansionist by nature ­ it had been pursuing a policy of continuous expansion for the previous three hundred years. At present its ambitions were fixed on a final expulsion of the Turks from the European land mass and, in particular, on the capture of Constantinople (Istanbul), former capital of the Orthodox world.

France had the ambition of recovering Alsace and Lorraine. These were largely German-speaking territories which France had taken in the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They had been lost as a result of the Franco-German war in 1870-1 when France had invaded German territory with a view to preventing the process of German unification, led by Prussia and its chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The French had expected support from opponents of Bismarck in Southern Bavaria but in the event their intervention had the opposite to the desired effect and cemented the German solidarity it was designed to prevent.

Between 1870 and 1914, Germany and Austro-Hungary were largely at peace while both Britain and France were engaged in a series of colonial wars. France and Russia had a treaty of mutual defense which the French claimed obliged them to support the Russians when they declared war on Austria-Hungary as protectors of their fellow Orthodox Slavs in Serbia.

 

WAR No 3

As the story has been told so far the motives for the war that started in 1914 are relatively easy to understand and the aims of the different parties are limited. The Serbs wanted Bosnia; the Russians wanted to increase their influence among the Slav and Orthodox nations with a view to the eventual expulsion of the Turks from Constantinople; the French wanted Alsace-Lorraine; the Germans and Austro-Hungarians wanted to preserve the status quo, including, so far as possible, the Ottoman power. It is with the entry of Britain that the ends of the war become mysterious and unlimited, expanding throughout the world.

The pretext for Britain's entry was the German invasion of Belgium. It was well-established in military thinking that one of Germany's options for attacking France would be to advance through Belgium. Germany was of course anxious to keep Britain out of the war. Had the British made it clear that it would regard any infringement of Belgian sovereignty as a casus belli the Germans would not have done it. But the British made no such declaration. German diplomacy was trying hard to find out what the British reaction would be but the British were refusing to commit themselves. It is hard to resist the conclusion that they wanted the attack on Belgium in order to furnish them with the necessary justification.

Britain had no apparent interest in the points under dispute among the European powers but had nevertheless been preparing for a war for several years previously. The entente cordiale with the traditional enemy, France, had been directed against Germany, while elaborate plans for a British-German war had been worked out by the 'Committee for Imperial Defense', some of whose members were in the present Liberal government.
Britain had ceased to be capable of feeding itself in 1850, Germany since 1900, so both countries were rivals in their desire to control world markets and a secure supply of primary products. Britain's strength lay in its secure control of the seas and it saw the emergence of a strong German navy as a threat. At the same time the increasingly good relations between Germany and the Turks threatened British ambitions for a continuity of power from the Mediterranean through Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) to India.

Britain's entry brought with it the Empire, thus expanding the war to a world scale. In particular, Britain used a ten year old alliance with Japan to encourage the Japanese to strike at German interests in China. The German presence in the Pacific was further attacked by the British colonists of Australia and New Zealand and in Africa by South Africa. In November 1914, Britain declared war on Turkey on grounds that remain nebulous.(1) In 1914/15, British diplomacy was working on Italian irredentist ambitions on the Austrian territories of the Trentino and the Dalmatian coast (currently part of Croatia). One of their main instruments was the at the time radical Socialist journalist, Benito Mussolini and there is a strong argument for suggesting that in this way British diplomacy was responsible for the formation of the Italian Fascist Party. Trentino and Italy were ceded to Italy as part of the Treaty of London signed in March 1915. This was a secret treaty but a copy was found in the papers of the Russian government and published by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 revolution.

Greece, like Italy, had irredentist ambitions, in this case against Turkey. The head of state, however, King Constantine, was resolutely opposed to entry into the war. Greece was bounced into the war when the British, with the support of the militant nationalist Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, siezed the port of Salonika which was used as the base for the recapture of Serbia, though most of the fighting was done by Serbs and French.

Despite the widening of the war the allies in 1917 appeared to be losing. The balance was swung by the entry of the United States which brought with it the moral support of an almost ridiculous array of allied nations all over the world. The United States had been supplying Britain and risked losing an enormous investment if Britain lost. Brendan suggested that the array of allies, who contributed very little in military terms, was an attempt to implicate the world so that there would be nobody in a position to pass judgment when the flimsy pretexts for such enormous slaughter came to be examined.

 

(1) QUERY BY P.BROOKE: Cyril Falls' The First World War says the Turks had signed a secret treaty obliging them to support Germany on August 2nd, but were hanging back. Britain had refused to deliver two battleships that the Turks had ordered and the German admiral Wilhelm Souchon arrived with two substitute German battleships. Entry was delayed by disputes between the anti-German element and the pro-German element led by the Prime Minister, Enver Pasha, who eventually triumphed. Once in, Souchon declared his battleships to be part of the Turkish fleet and committed Turkey irrevocably by launching an attack against the Russian ports of the Black Sea on 29th October.

REPLY FROM B.CLIFFORD: The concern of the Turkish Government in 1914 was to enable the Ottoman state to survive the war. According to their memoirs, which I read many years ago, that was their only concern. The Cabinet discussed the possible courses of action that might achieve this. Britain confiscated its battleships before declaring war on Germany, which I could only see as a provocation after which ­ and after Britain declared war as an ally of Russia and began to describe Turkey as something in the nature of a German puppet ­ the expectation that the Entente would allow Turkey to sit out the war as a neutral had not much going for it. Britain, with the aid of Japan, had stopped Russia in the East and made arrangements with it at the points of conflict under which it was accorded de facto control in southern Persia, up to the Gulf, and the line of Russian expansion was shifted to the Balkans. It was understood under the Franco-Russian alliance that it would be activated in a situation which enabled both to go for their objectives, i.e. would not go to war in support of the other unless the circumstances enabled it to go to war on its own behalf too. The alliance was a combined venture to gain Alsace Lorraine AND Constantinople and Britain knew this when when joining it. Nevertheless Turkey declared neutrality and kept it up for three months in the face of persistent British provocations. Its agreement with Germany was a dead letter. It did not declare war on Russia or Britain. Both of them declared war on it in early November.

What was said to have happened in late October struck me, when I found out about it, as highly improbable. The alleged Polish attack on Germany in 1939 struck me as being plausible by comparison.

If it was indisputably the case, one would expect it to be given prominence, like the German march through Belgium, but it isn't. I made a point of asking reasonably well-informed people what led to Britain's war with Turkey and nobody mentioned it. In fact, there was little awareness that Britain had launched a distinct war on Turkey months after declaring war on Germany. That extraordinarily well-informed man at your meeting [A.Marr - PB] did not take issue with what I had said. And I find it very curious that an incident which gained Britain a new Empire in the Middle East is so little known about.

My reading on these things was done about fifteen years ago. I know there has been a deluge of publishing about such things during the past ten years but I have not tried to keep up with it.

I recall a book from around 1960 by Elizabeth Montgomery, an associate of Freya Stark, about Britain in the Middle East, in which Arabia is described as a glassis before the Indian Empire, i.e. a killing ground. British foreign policy centred on the defence of India. Defence meant expansion into any adjacent area which might be considered threatening. Having made a settlement with Russia in Persia, Britain extended India to the Gulf and the danger/obstacle was the Ottoman state. There was no reasonable prospect that it might sit out the war in peace.