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From the time of the Balkan Wars, which had increased the size of Serbia, it had been the opinion of leading Austrian officials (most notably the Foreign Minister, Count Leopold von Berchtold) that Austria would have to wage a "preventive war" to greatly weaken or destroy Serbia as a state in order to preserve the dual monarchy which held extensive Serb-populated Balkan territories.[3] Between January 1913 and January 1914, Count Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf advocated a preventive war against Serbia twenty-four times.[3]
File:Map Europe, Alliances 1914-en.svg
The alliance situation in central Europe in 1914
Serbia expanded its territory at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria[4] under the terms of the Treaty of Bucharest. Regarding the expansion of Serbia as an unacceptable increase in the power of an unfriendly state and in order to weaken Serbia, the Austrian government threatened war in the autumn of 1912 if Serbs were to acquire a port from the Turks.[4] Austria appealed for German support, only to be rebuffed at first.[4]
In November 1912 Russia, humiliated by its inability to support Serbia during the Bosnian crisis of 1908 or the First Balkan War, announced a major reconstruction of its military.
On November 28, in partial reaction to the Russian move, German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow told the Reichstag, the German parliament, that “If Austria is forced, for whatever reason, to fight for its position as a Great Power, then we must stand by her”.[4] As a result, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey responded by warning Prince Karl Lichnowsky, the German Ambassador in London, that if Germany offered Austria a “blank cheque” for war in the Balkans, then “the consequences of such a policy would be incalculable”. To reinforce this point, R. B. Haldane, the Germanophile Lord Chancellor, met with Prince Lichnowsky to offer an explicit warning that if Germany were to upset the balance of power in Europe by trying to destroy either...