On July 28, 1914, while sitting at a tavern table in Nis, Nikola Baja Pašić learned that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia. The tavern was called "Europe". Four and a half years later, there won't even be a black fingernail left from that Europe, known to the Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Serbia. Tsar Nicholas II will end up in a basement in Yekaterinburg in front of a Bolshevik firing squad along with the Empress, his son and four daughters; Kaiser Wilhelm II will escape from the mutinous sailors to Holland, where he will discover chopping wood as a hobby in Dorm; Emperor Charles, after spending only two years on the throne, will barely get hold of Portugal. Their empires will collapse like towers of cards: Russia, at least nominally, will become a country of workers and peasants, Germany - a republic in permanent political crisis, and Austria-Hungary will simply no longer be on the map; out of nine new states in Europe, four will be created on its territory. There will be no major changes in France and Great Britain, but there will be no more strength for the global "big game" - Italy will be unsuccessfully tried to insert into it in a foolhardy and operetta way..., wrote Philip Schwarm on the occasion centenary of the First World War.
And he continues: Baja Pašić himself, four and a half years after he remembered his lunch in "Europe", will become the prime minister of the first state of the united South Slavs, independent and without a superpower on the borders capable of shaping its future. Was there a mother's son who could imagine this at the moment when Austria-Hungary's aggression against Serbia started the First World War?
The good old days
"It is not surprising that a catastrophe of world proportions was finally caused by a crisis (Sarajevo assassination - op. author.) that was much simpler than many that had been overcome until then, but that its outbreak was awaited for so long," writes the former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his book Diplomacy.
The figures explain: the share of military expenditure in the national gross product jumped between 1889 and 1913 in Russia from 3,5 to 4,4 percent, in Austria-Hungary from 6,5 to 7,6 percent, in Great Britain from 2,1 to 2,8 percent, in Germany from 2,6 to 2,7 percent and in France from 2,8 to 3,9 percent (Sava Živanov, The fall of the Russian Empire).
What is the basis of this accelerated arming of the European nations and divided into two military-political blocs - the Entente and the Central Powers? Why did crises such as the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 or the Franco-German tension around Agadir in 1911 come close to escalating into a world conflict? And that in the golden age belle epoque in which many see Austria-Hungary with all its peoples as a kind of forerunner of the European Union, the industrial revolution and the rule of law of Great Britain as a model for long-term national development planning, and the intellectual life and culture of France together with the achievements of Germany in science, economy and organization - for foundations of permanent progress?
"Imagine that one slave owner who has one hundred slaves goes to war with another slave owner who has two hundred slaves over a 'fairer' division of the slaves," writes Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin in his pamphlet Socialism and war. In other words: the foundations of that entire Europe with all its indisputable achievements in various fields were based on the systematic looting of colonies, peripheral areas around the great powers and, in this context, on a frantic war for all markets and raw material bases. And since all these resources are not unlimited, the fight for and around them had to lead sooner or later to an armed confrontation and bloodshed. And that's about it for the causes of the First World War.
There is also something else
Europe - Austria-Hungary, Russia and a good part of Germany, above all - was an empire of great estates. Only thanks to the bravado of ragged and miserable landless people, all those counts, barons and junkers in tailcoats and gold-embroidered suits endlessly hunted large and small game, lost millions on roulette, drank champagne from the shoes of actresses and singers, feasted on balls, studied the history of art and - ruled the states... In order to maintain such a lifestyle, i.e. to avoid settling accounts due to their parasitism, year after year they rattled their weapons raised tensions by presenting themselves as protectors of national rights and pride, patriotism, faith, and moral values. It is inexplicable why, but they believed them. Especially the intelligentsia from the middle class, enmeshed in increasingly complex state mechanisms, in the functioning of which the entire aristocracy with all its emperors and kings represented a pure surplus.
Big business also fit perfectly into this order. Extra profits did not grow only thanks to the gunboats off the coasts of Africa, Asia and South America, colonial armies and paramilitaries in the heart of the "colored" continents, constant dictates to small states in the immediate or distant neighborhood... Fat hunting was thrashed on miserable wages in factories, mines, shipyards, in damp shantytowns where the tuberculous cough echoes, the absence of social and health care, and not to list any further - whoever went through the neoliberal transition knows what it's all about.
Somewhere it was better, somewhere worse, every won worker's right was paid for with their lives, but all those metal workers, miners and locksmiths enthusiastically - to Lenin's great surprise - went to war in August 1914. A workplace is a workplace; if the bosses lose the markets, if the goods cannot be rolled in China, India, Central Asia, if the control over the raw materials is lost - where will the man get a job and what will he earn a living from then? And let's not even talk about that feeling that the artillery platoons with their nationalism and military fraternity, with their ever-increasing nationalism and military brotherhood, offer the opportunity to replace standing behind the assembly line or behind the lathe with that unfathomable but so romantic opportunity for a new beginning and rise on the social ladder. When you add to all this the ubiquitous European racism based on technological superiority and conquered civilizational assets like vaccines and electricity, it is clear why the gates of hell have opened wide.
Our case
Lenin had no qualms that the First World War was an imperialist calculation for a new redistribution of the colonies and, as such, according to Marxist teaching - unjust. However, every rule has an exception. Here it is the case of Serbia and Montenegro; for these two countries, Lenin believed that they were waging a just, defensive and liberating war.
Through a gradual but persistent and tireless struggle, Serbia and Montenegro from the beginning of the nineteenth century until the Berlin Congress in 1878 got out of the vassal relationship with Turkey. Immediately, according to the law, the military, political and economic forces entered the gravitational field of Austria-Hungary. That semi-colonial, peripheral position on the border with the Central European superpower ended in 1903 with the May coup in Belgrade; without that turn in internal and external politics, Serbia simply could not develop any more. A greater challenge could hardly have been addressed to Vienna.
In contrast to Austria-Hungary and its aristocracy, officer caste, financial and industrial circles that were not limited by anything, German and Hungarian domination over all other nations of the dual monarchy, Serbia was a homogeneous state of the free peasantry. It is far from the truth - as it is known today - that the Serbs then got along and that the country flowed with honey and milk. Corruption and nepotism constantly dominated political life, the officers from the May Coup formed one of the extra-constitutional centers of power, and the eternal intrigues of the heirs to the throne, Aleksandar Karađorđević and Nikola Pašić, were a permanent source of instability. In addition, more than eighty percent of the population lived in the countryside, subsisting on an average holding of about five hectares of land and buying only the bare essentials such as salt and matches, industry was in its infancy, in some parts of the country seven out of ten people were illiterate... Nevertheless, almost universal suffrage prevailed in Serbia (it was valid only for men): the census amounted to only fifteen dinars of the annual tax, which corresponded to the price of one pig or two sacks of flour. In Croatia as part of Austria-Hungary - on the other side - only eleven percent of the population could vote, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina even less.
Vertical social mobility in Serbia was huge at that time: with some money and a little luck, peasant sons got an education and then clerical, ministerial or military careers - out of the four Serbian dukes from the First World War, three were from the countryside. Also, success in trade or rudimentary industry was primarily limited by the degree of one's ability and the level of available initial capital, not by social or class affiliation. From today's perspective, it is difficult to talk about civil liberties in Serbia before the First World War, but it is a fact that the government was cursed on all sides, that officers knew how to challenge editors to a duel "because of the language", that in the party fights they did not refrain from mentioning and families and saints, whoever we are talking about... If the price of this peasant egalitarianism, in which there was no classical class dominance, was paid by the preservation of the patriarchal way of life and the resulting relative backwardness, on the other hand on the other hand, there was a zest marked by the awareness that the future and all its possibilities are held in one's own hands. Just as the Serbian peasant did not accept that anyone in the country had greater rights than him, he also did not agree that Serbia would grow as a subordinate semi-colony of a powerful empire on its borders.
All this is how it had to be felt and it was felt. Bending and maneuvering in all directions, forming an alliance with France and above all - with Russia, Serbia gained economic and political independence in the Customs War (1906-1911) with Austria-Hungary. The success is hard to overestimate: aligning with one military-political bloc far from its borders, Pašić and Aleksandar managed to get the country out of the immediate reach of the other. Another step necessarily followed from this step. To the general surprise of Europe, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Greece formed an alliance and in 1912, in the First Balkan War, expelled Turkey from the peninsula. The key problem of this, without any doubt, liberation campaign, came to light the very next year, in 1913: yesterday's allies Bulgaria and Serbia were at each other's throats over the division of the spoils; destroying an empire, both of these states did not find it appropriate to establish the will of the local people from the area from which they expelled Turkey, which certainly includes the right to self-determination.
The beginning of the end
Here, however, there is one mitigating circumstance. Almost all the national political and cultural leaders in the South Slavic countries of the time - in the positive sense of the word - believed that the most important goal was liberation from foreign, imperial rule; they believed that only united South Slavic peoples could maintain their independence and autonomy; they were also convinced that so much unites them, and so little divides them, that they barely dealt with the forms of future unification and all its consequences. In this context, Serbia acted as an example and support.
Vienna perfectly recognized this trend. The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina became increasingly restless and increasingly vocal in asserting their national rights. It didn't go smoothly with Hungary either; Budapest spread the list of its demands every day. From that perspective, the existence of Serbia - especially after the Customs and Balkan Wars - became unsustainable for Austria-Hungary. Because Vienna simply did not have any relevant answer to two simple questions: first - why are Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Bosniaks, Czechs, Slovaks and others forcibly kept within the monarchy when the example of Serbia shows that freedom, independence and independence are possible and attainable; and secondly - why couldn't all these, so related and close South Slavic peoples live together within their own state union instead of one under German or Hungarian domination?
It is therefore no surprise that Baja Pašić - to paraphrase Kissinger - received the declaration of war on July 28, 1914 in "Europe"; it's a huge miracle that she didn't arrive earlier.
The High Command of the Serbian Army will learn with disbelief that the main Austro-Hungarian attack is coming from Bosnia, across the Drina and difficult terrain, and not through the "natural direction", the Morava valley. The reason is simple: the plan was made by General Oskar Poćorek at the time of the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, believing that in this way he would prevent an uprising there in the event of a war with Serbia. And how much Austria-Hungary, with its fifty-five million inhabitants, saw the collapse of a small Balkan state with four and a half million people as its key task, is evidenced by the fact that it engaged two armies on the Drina (at the time of the Battle of Cers and the third from Srem), although elementary military logic dictated that he stay there on the defensive and send most of these divisions to Galicia, against Russia...
"Summer military walk to Nis"
Although advertised as a "summer military march to Niš", the aggression against Serbia went wrong at the very start. With the advantage of wartime experience from the Balkan wars, the Serbian soldier - and nine out of ten of them were peasants - had a huge motive to defend his hard-won freedom, independence and his way of life; their determination to resist at all costs determined the war much more than the skill of the officers and generals. And they were anything but immature or incompetent.
That's why Serbian soldiers marched in 1914 in torn boots and shoes; they also lacked weapons and ammunition; ragged and unkempt, they froze and got wet in the trenches on the Drina; they starved, found families on the run, buried children in ditches; they died in battles, died of typhoid and dysentery in the mud... Sometimes there was panic, desertion, marauding and open rebellion in some units, but on the whole, they never gave in or gave up: in the first six months of the war - on Cer and on Kolubara - they broke the Austro-Hungarian army to such an extent that it could no longer independently launch an offensive against Serbia. The extent to which these ordinary soldiers, peasants, saw themselves as free people is also witnessed by the American journalist, the latter Lenin's like-minded person, John Reed. At the beginning of 1915, he noted that politics was discussed freely in every place in Serbia, that the cart driver called one of his oxen Radomir after the head of the Supreme Command, and the other Per after the king, and that no one he talked to suspected that he was fighting for the righteous cause and that it will win in the end. Simply, the war for the redistribution of colonies and global supremacy was not a matter for Serbian peasants - they did everything they could to prevent Serbia from becoming a colony.
From a hundred-year perspective, the actual question is whether Serbia should have suffered so many victims - both the Austro-Hungarian crimes in Mačva and the typhus plague and the retreat through Albania and Montenegro to Corfu and the Thessaloniki front, all in all, more than a million dead during the First World War ? Was it perhaps wiser to lie down under the ore, accept the request of the powerful and sing as a mantra that the submissive head is not cut by the saber? The problem with this question is that it presupposes the possibility of an election, which there was neither in 1914 nor later. Just as all warring parties believed that they would win by Christmas, so Serbian soldiers fought and died with the belief that Cerska, Kolubarska or any subsequent battle could be the last one in which they would finally defend everything they care so much about. They never really felt defeated, not even in the snowy mountains of Albania, and because of everything they had gone through until then, they had to feel the obligation to continue. Otherwise, nothing would be worth it and all those sacrifices would have been made in vain.
Rich, happy and successful countries under foreign rule do not exist. For those who do not understand why, let them ask themselves why the American and every other war for independence was fought. The price of freedom is not without reason so high.
