Germany

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.

A loving couple. An heir to the throne. A wife shunned by her husband’s family. Two countries bitterly at odds. A shadowy secret organization. Security officials indifferent to their responsibilities. Young men willing to die for a cause. Warnings of imminent danger that go unheeded or are never passed along. Bravery that in retrospect looks like recklessness. Bombs, guns, and cyanide. A chance mistake that puts a victim in the crosshairs of an assassin. Two gunshots. These may sound like plot points in a Hollywood summer action movie. They are instead the basic facts of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia on June 28, 1914. The archduke’s death set off a series of events that culminated in World War I. Directly or indirectly more than fifteen million people would die in the fighting, the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian empires would all be swept from the scene, and the course of the twentieth century would be fundamentally changed. All triggered by an event that almost didn’t happen. Archduke Franz Ferdinand visited Sarajevo despite warnings that anti-Austrian sentiment seethed among Serbs in the city. For centuries, Bosnia had been part of the Ottoman Empire. But Ottoman power in the Balkans had rapidly declined in the late nineteenth century, and in 1908 the Austro-Hungarian Empire annexed Bosnia. The move enraged Serbia, which had its own designs on the former Ottoman province. June 28 was a particularly inauspicious day for the archduke’s visit. It was St. Vitus Day, which marked the day the Ottoman Empire defeated the Serbs in 1389, opening the Balkans to centuries of Ottoman rule. Despite the historic defeat, the day symbolized for Serbians inside and out of Serbia their determination to fight off foreign domination. June 28 also had special significance for the archduke and his wife, Sophie. Franz Ferdinand had married Sophie for love, not money or dynastic connections. She had some of the former and none of the latter. She came from an aristocratic Czech family, but she was not royalty. And royal blood was required to marry the heir to the Habsburg throne. Sophie’s lineage might have mattered less if Franz Ferdinand’s cousin, the son of Emperor Franz Joseph and the first in line to the Austro-Hungarian throne, had not killed himself years earlier. But with his cousin’s suicide and his own father’s death, Franz Ferdinand went from a mere member of the royal family to the heir apparent. And his uncle the emperor had no intention of letting him marry Sophie. It took five years, and repeated urgings from the pope and European royalty, before Emperor Franz Joseph relented. But he exacted a stiff price for his concession. On June 28, 1900, Franz Ferdinand signed an oath of renunciation denying any children of his marriage with Sophie the right to ascend to the throne. Sophie was also denied her husband’s rank, title, and privileges, meaning that in most circumstances she would not be allowed to appear in public with her husband. The rules were more relaxed outside of Vienna. As the archduke’s trip to Bosnia to inspect local troops wrapped up, Sophie insisted that she spend the final day with her husband in Sarajevo. So on the morning of June 28, 1914, she joined him in an open-air touring car, part of a six-car motorcade, that picked them up at the Sarajevo train station and then headed to their first stop of the day, the Sarajevo town hall. What Franz Ferdinand and Sophie did not know as they got into their car was that seven assassins were stationed along their route. They had been recruited in Belgrade by members of the Black Hand, a secret society bent on uniting all Serbs in the Balkans under Serbian rule, and then smuggled into Bosnia. They had selected Franz Ferdinand as their target in good part because they feared that his support for political reform in the empire would undermine efforts to expand Serbian claims in the Balkans. Despite the secrecy surrounding the plot, news of it reached Serbia’s prime minister Nikola Pašić. He feared that the assassination would trigger a diplomatic crisis with the much more powerful Austria. Pašić worried more, though, that exposing the plot might give Vienna a pretext to attack Serbia, or prompt the Black Hand to order his own assassination. So he directed Serbia’s ambassador to Austria to warn a senior Austrian official that the archduke faced grave danger if he went to Sarajevo. The senior official never passed along the warning, perhaps because the ambassador delivered a message so oblique that the Austrian official did not realize that he was being warned. The assassins had a distinct advantage in carrying out their attack: the archduke’s plans to visit Sarajevo had been public since March, and his motorcade route had been published in the local newspaper. On the morning of June 28, they took up their positions along the planned route. The first two would-be assassins lost their nerve and allowed the car to pass. The third threw a bomb at the archduke’s car. The device bounced off the back of the car before exploding. Several Austrian officers in the next car were wounded, but the archduke and his wife were unharmed. Franz Ferdinand reacted calmly to the attack. Apparently convinced that calling off the day’s activities would be seen as evidence of Austrian weakness, he said, “The fellow is insane. Gentlemen, let us proceed with the program.” The motorcade drove to the town hall. There the town’s mayor greeted the archduke with a prepared speech that declared that “All of the citizens of the capital city of Sarajevo find that their souls are filled with happiness, and they most enthusiastically greet Your Highness’s most illustrious visit with the most cordial of welcomes.” The Archduke erupted in anger: “One comes here to visit and is received with bombs. Mr. Mayor, what do you say? It’s outrageous!” Sophie intervened and calmed Franz Ferdinand down. The mayor resumed his speech. The archduke gave one of his own, reading from a paper speckled with the blood of one of the Austrian officers wounded in the morning’s attack. With the speeches concluded, the talk turned to what to do next. Franz Ferdinand dismissed a suggestion that he cut his day short. He instead decided to visit the wounded officers. Sophie, who had been scheduled to leave her husband at the town hall, insisted on going with him to the hospital. The royal motorcade left the town hall and retraced its steps through Sarajevo. No one, however, had thought to tell the driver of the change in plans. He followed the original route. When he turned onto a side street—oddly enough named Franz Josef Strasse—his passengers shouted that he had gone the wrong way. The driver stopped. The car, which had no reverse gear, was slowly pushed back onto the main street. It was a fateful mistake. Standing across the street was nineteen year-old Gavrilo Princip, one of the assassins. He had taken up a position there in the event that the motorcade stuck to its original route. He did what his co-conspirators failed to do. He walked up to the archduke’s car and fired his gun twice from point-blank range. The bullets struck Franz Ferdinand in the neck and Sophie in the abdomen. She cried out to her husband: “For God’s sake! What has happened to you?” and then slumped into his lap. The archduke cried out in anguish: “Sophie, Sophie! Don’t die! Live for our children!” He then too collapsed, muttering over and over “It is nothing.” Within minutes both the archduke and his beloved Sophie were dead. It was just after 11:00 a.m. His mission accomplished, Princip attempted to kill himself, first by ingesting cyanide and then by shooting himself. The cyanide only made him retch, and bystanders knocked the gun from his hand. He was dragged away from the scene by police. He would eventually be tried and convicted for killing Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. He was spared the death penalty because he was under the age of twenty. He died in prison in 1918 of tuberculosis. Three of his co-conspirators were hanged. The archduke’s assassination sparked the diplomatic crisis that Serbian prime minister Pašić feared. On July 23, Austria issued an ultimatum demanding Serbia allow it to investigate Belgrade’s role in the assassination. Vienna deemed Belgrade’s artfully written response inadequate and on July 28, declared war. It was the domino that tipped over all the others. By August 4, all the major European powers had followed suit. (The Wilson administration proclaimed U.S. neutrality toward the war in Europe that same day.) At first it looked as if the Schlieffen Plan would bring Germany a swift victory—by the start of September German troops were within thirty miles of Paris. But the German armies were overstretched. French and British troops prevailed at the First Battle of the Marne. The prospect of a quick victory evaporated. The Allied and Central Powers began (literally) to dig in for one of the most devastating wars in history. And all of it was triggered by an assassination that almost didn’t happen.

Being president is a tough job. Your every mistake is relentlessly dissected and replayed. Even when you get it right, people sometimes insist you got it wrong. Just ask John F. Kennedy. On June 26, 1963, he gave a rousing speech to several hundred thousand cheering West Berliners. Yet that speech is misremembered by many people a half century later for a mistake he did not make. JFK’s visit to Berlin had immense symbolism. The city was the focal point of Cold War rivalry. In 1948, Stalin barred Western powers from accessing Berlin, which was deep in what was then the Soviet sector of Germany, by highway and railroad. President Harry Truman responded with the Berlin Airlift. For thirteen months, U.S. airplanes landed at Tempelhopf Airport virtually around the clock, bringing West Berliners food and fuel and sustaining their lifeline to the West. Over the dozen years after the Berlin Blockade, East Germans increasingly fled to West Berlin. On the night of August 13, 1961, the Soviets and their East German client state had enough: they began construction of the Berlin Wall. Not willing to risk starting a war in Europe, Kennedy could only complain as first barbed wire and cinderblocks, and then concrete walls and guard towers, went up around the city. So when JFK arrived in West Berlin in the summer of 1963, a huge crowd awaited him. By some counts, six out of every ten residents turned out to see the young president—and leader of the Free World—speak. What they heard was not especially new to anyone who had read the speeches he had given since taking the oath of office. But the impact of a speech often depends more on its context than its novelty. And seldom has any speaker better understood his context than JFK did that day in Rudolph Wilde Platz. Just three paragraphs into his remarks he delivered the line that bonded him to his audience and made clear that the United States would stand by West Berlin: Two thousand years ago the proudest boast was "civis Romanus sum." Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is "I am a Berliner." These famous words do not appear on the final typed notecards prepared for Kennedy. But the phrase was not improvised. Robert Lochner, Kennedy’s translator and a fluent German speaker, practiced the phrase with him in the office of West Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, until right before the speech. What the cheering crowds did not realize that day was that JFK’s speech would generate a powerful urban legend: that in declaring his solidarity with West Berliners, Kennedy had actually called himself a jelly doughnut. The legend has persisted despite being debunked time and again, perhaps because so many news sources, including the august New York Times, have repeated the mistake over and over. Yes, a “Berliner,” or more precisely a “Berliner Pfannkuchen,” is a jelly donut. But context matters. Just as no American would think someone who says “I am a Bostonian” is saying “I am a shoe,” or that someone who says “I am a New Yorker” is saying “I am a car” or “I am a magazine,” Berliners knew exactly what JFK was saying that day in Rudolph Wilde Platz. “Ich bin ein Berliner” is the great gaffe that never was.

Poland has maintained economic growth despite the global financial crisis and eurozone woes, while asserting itself as a leading advocate for greater European integration.

Last week brought some seemingly good news for Turkey’s long moribund effort to join the European Union. At a joint press conference in Berlin with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared that "The EU is an honest negotiating partner" and that Brussels would pursue Turkey’s membership in "good faith." In a way, there was reason for Turks to celebrate Merkel’s forward leaning statements.  Both she and former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, have been the most vocal and public proponents of what they call a "privileged partnership" for Turkey in lieu of full EU membership, which is a nice way of saying the status quo.  Merkel’s willingness to energize the accession process is no doubt more apparent than real, however.  European opposition to Turkey’s membership in one of the world’s most exclusive clubs is pretty wide and deep even among European leaders who give lip service to the notion. It goes without saying that Turkey isn’t ready for EU membership.  Ankara still needs to address a host of political problems including human rights issues, freedom of the press, the quality of the judicial system, and the generalized backsliding on the ambitious democratic reforms the Justice and Development Party began in 2003.  There is also, of course, the state of relations between the Republic of Cyprus--an EU member--and Turkey, which has tens of thousands of troops on the island protecting the  orphaned and illegitimate Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.  Resolving these issues will be daunting and require political leadership, but one can imagine ways in which they can be solved. No, the problems with Turkey’s EU membership are not technical-political-foreign policy related, but rather are directly related to the Europeans’ fundamental inability to agree on what "Europe" is and what it means to be "European." If the EU is geographic, co-terminus with predominantly Christian countries, Turkey’s bid for membership continues only because Brussels doesn’t want to be tagged as anti-Muslim and the Turks don’t want to let the Europeans off the hook for promises that were made to the Turks about integration with Europe dating as far back as the 1964 Ankara Agreement.  If, however, Europe is based on a set of common ideas, norms, and principles about rule of law, transparency, tolerance, and consensual politics then Turkey could clearly be an EU member one day. My sense is that when a lot of Europeans pull their covers up at night, they regard the European Union in geographic terms and recoil at the idea that Europe could one day border Iraq, Syria, and Iran.  Moreover, imagine your average Frenchman or German who think of themselves and their countries as the most important members of the largest economic bloc in the world. It must be jarring that one day they may wake up to find that 75 million Turks have joined the Union and now have the largest representation in the European parliament, the biggest military, and most dynamic economy in Europe. That thought can’t sit well and Turkey’s membership is clearly political freight European chauvinism is not likely to bear any time soon. Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Erdogan have clearly decided to let Turkey’s minister for EU Affairs, Egemen Bagis, continue burning jet fuel in his quixotic mission rather than let some of these well-known, but rarely spoken ugly truths out in the open.