Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchivs 46. (1998)

GODSEY, William D. Jr.: Officers vs. Diplomats: Bureaucracy and Foreign Policy in Austria-Hungary 1906–1914

William D. Godsey

parts in Russia and Italy.13 On a few occasions through the years, Habsburg officers served provisional tours of duty at the Monarchy’s embassies abroad, but were not thereby known as kommandiert officers. In the 1890s, three General-Staff captains, including Prince Hugo Dietrichstein, successively spent short periods detailed to the military plenipotentiary in St. Petersburg. With the failure, however, to renew the latter post after the turn of the century, the assignment of subordinate officers also ended.14 Between 1907 and 1909, Captain Emmerich von Pfliigl carried out a similar function under the military plenipotentiary in Constantinople, but his appointment there had neither precedent nor sequel before 1914. It also happened occasionally that officers were attached to consulates general, like those in Belgrade and Bucharest, but those instances date mostly from the 1870s and 1880s. In no case did any such assignment ever become regularized as in Prussia, though, as we shall see, the subject came up for discussion in the months before the outbreak of the war.

The conflict between General Baron Franz Conrad, as Chief of the General Staff (1906-1911 and 1912-1917), and Foreign Minister Count Alois Aehrenthal (1906- 1912) over the course of Austro-Hungarian foreign policy in the last decade before the First World War, especially with respect to the handling of Serbia and Italy, has received extensive coverage.15 It is not my purpose to recount its course once again here. However, one important element in that struggle has remained all but unexplored: Conrad’s efforts to put together an intelligence-gathering apparatus similar to that of his perceived rival. The lack of such, he clearly believed, handicapped him in his aggressive attempts to influence the course of the Monarchy’s foreign policy. New directions in the recent historiography of international history recommend moving away from the examination of high policy in a vacuum and illuminating the larger context within which a debate took place. The general’s failure to prevail at the bureaucratic substratum, which at a deeper level may have reflected the prevalence of certain social configurations, furnished in part the prerequisite for his inability to carry his case in meetings at the Hofburg. A look then at such factors furnishes both a new perspective on and possible explanatory value for the outcome further up the ladder.

Conrad’s program for increasing his flow of information began soon after his accession to power and essentially involved a two-pronged approach. Until the second half of Aehrenthal’s tenure, he continued unhindered the previous practice of sending officers aboad on secret missions to collect intelligence on matters of military

HHStA, Administrative Registratur [AR], F 6, carton 49, folder Missionen I.: Colonel Carl Bardolff to Count Leopold Berchtold, November 12, 1913.

Allmayer-Beck: Die Archive der k. u. k. Militärbevollmächtigten und Militär-Adjoints, p. 367-8.

On the Aehrenthal-Conrad conflict, see Rothenberg: The Army of Francis Joseph, p. 139 f; Mü Her, Eugenie Maria: Der Konflikt Conrad Ährenthal. Wien (Phil. Diss.) 1978; Regele, Oskar: Feldmarschall Conrad. Auftrag und Erfüllung 1906-1918. Wien-München: Herold, 1955, p. 130 f; Pantenius, Hans Jürgen: Der Angriffsgedanke gegen Italien bei Conrad von Hötzendorff. 2 vols. Wien 1984. See also W ank, Solomon: Political vs. Military Thinking in Austria-Hungary, 1908-1912. In: Peace and Change 7(1980), p. 1-15.

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