The Sleepwalkers

The Bulgarian crisis highlighted for a moment the immense danger latent in the instabilities of that region, namely that the activities of an unimportant lesser state might one day inveigle two great powers into a course of action tending towards war.

Too often he spoke not like a monarch, but like an over-excited teenager giving free rein to his current preoccupations. He was an extreme exemplar of that Edwardian social category, the club bore who is forever explaining some pet project to the man in the next chair. Small wonder that the prospect of being buttonholed by the Kaiser over lunch or dinner, when escape was impossible, struck fear into the hearts of so many European royals.

By the spring of 1914, the Franco-Russian Alliance had constructed a geopolitical trigger along the Austro-Serbian frontier. They had tied the defence policy of three of the world’s greatest powers to the uncertain fortunes of Europe’s most violent and unstable region.

It was a striking example of what international relations theorists call the ‘security dilemma’, in which the steps taken by one state to enhance its security ‘render the others more insecure and compel them to prepare for the worst’.

In his System of Subjective Public Laws, published in 1892, the Austrian public lawyer Georg Jellinek analysed what he called ‘the normative power of the factual’. By this he meant the tendency among human beings to assign normative authority to actually existing states of affairs. Human beings do this, he argued, because their perceptions of states of affairs are shaped by the forces exerted by those states of affairs. Trapped in this hermeneutic circularity, humans tend to gravitate quickly from the observation of what exists to the presumption that an existing state of affairs is normal and thus must embody a certain ethical necessity. When upheavals or disruptions occur, they quickly adapt to the new circumstances, assigning to them the same normative quality they had perceived in the prior order of things.

There would be a quarrel in the Balkans – it didn’t really matter who started it – Russia would pile in, pulling in Germany, France would ‘inevitably’ intervene on the side of her ally; in that situation, Britain could not stand aside and watch France be crushed by Germany. This is precisely the script – notwithstanding momentary doubts and prevarications – that Grey followed in 1914.