Austria-Hungary, Germany, Romania, and Italy start off at position 100, indicating a full endorsement of Austria’s position against Serbia following Franz Ferdinand’s assassination. Serbia and Greece start off at a position of 0 on the issue scale, indicating their total opposition to Austro-Hungarian demands for Serbia to surrender its sovereignty. The rest of the European states fall approximately between 33 and 45 on the scale, suggesting that they tilted toward Serbia and against Austria but not decisively.
As seen in figure 9.1, a palace full of bearded mathematicians crunching away on the numbers in 1914 would have anticipated war. They also would have realized that war could be avoided if they just crunched the numbers long enough, reflecting a prolonged diplomatic effort instead of a rush to war. The figure shows that the model anticipates war sometime in August 1914. This is the stage at which the model’s logic says diplomatic efforts to resolve the dispute without resorting to the use of force would have ended.
FIG. 9.1. The Predicted Failure of Negotiations During the 1914 Crisis
You see that the model is constantly calibrating the expected benefits from continuing to negotiate, weighing them against the model’s estimate of the expected costs from continuing to pursue diplomacy. Eventually, in the absence of an agreement, the players conclude that the prospects or value of a future agreement just isn’t worth the effort. In essence, the model’s algorithm makes a judgment about the value the players attach to extracting a concession tomorrow compared to extracting the same concession today. Getting some benefit sooner is always worth more than getting it later. In this instance, the period that corresponds approximately to early to mid-August happens to be the time the model says the game would end because too little progress was being made in closing the gap between Austrian demands and Serbian concessions. So the game predicts its own end in August. At that point there is no agreement between the main antagonists, and so, according to the model, a new game starts, with generals taking over from the diplomats.
Up to this point the Austrians (supported by their German allies) have persisted in demanding enforcement of the Austrian ultimatum. Meanwhile the Serbian government has gone a good distance toward meeting many of Austria’s demands. Still, Serbia shows no willingness to accept the Austrian ultimatum, exactly as the Austrians hoped. Instead, Serbia adopts a moderately conciliatory posture that is consistent with the concessions pushed by the British, French, and Russians. The latter three, according to the simulated crisis, were believed to be strongly committed to finding a settlement. Because of that, neither in reality nor in the simulation did the Austrians and Germans think their foes in the Triple Entente were likely to go to war on Serbia’s behalf.
What were the Italians, members of the Triple Alliance, up to during the crisis? In reality, they indicated on July 28, 1914, that they could not support the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum, delivered just five days earlier. With war imminent, the Italians declared themselves neutral. They resigned from the Triple Alliance on the grounds that Austria-Hungary was launching an aggressive, not a defensive, war.
In the model’s assessment, the Italians start out at the same position as the Germans and Austrians, befitting their membership in the Triple Alliance. As can be seen in the figure, by mid-July in model time the Italians break from the Triple Alliance and become neutral. They adopt a position hovering around 50 on the issue scale. So the model sees the Italians moving a week or two earlier than they actually did, but nevertheless it foresees their shift to a neutral position. In the model’s logic, and in reality, the Italians were not committed to standing by their Austrian and German allies once they recognized that the unfolding events were going to produce something vastly larger than a small Austrian-Serbian war.
The model indicates that Austria-Hungary and Germany expected war over Serbia for the first few weeks of the crisis, while Serbia shared that expectation. Austria actually declared war on Serbia at the end of July while professing to have no quarrel with others. By the start of August the model anticipates that Serbia was relegated to a relatively minor role as events ran ahead of Austria-Hungary and Germany’s ability to cope with them. Germany in fact declared war on Russia on August 1, and the war anticipated by the model’s logic actually began.
Was war inevitable? Emphatically the answer must be
The beauty of a model is the freedom it gives us to ask lots of what-if questions. We can replay the World War I diplomacy game, just as I did in an earlier chapter for a litigation client, while changing how players present themselves. That way we can see if this or that player could have approached the game better, producing a happier result from its point of view.
Let’s replay the 1914 crisis, this time making the British diplomats more skillful than they actually were but no more skillful than they could have been. I am going to let them look inside the model’s approximation of what was going on in the heads of the German and Austrian decision makers. In this way I am going to pretend that they had a little army of mathematicians doing the calculations my computer does for me. This will make it easier for the British to be more thoughtful and decisive, instead of as wishy-washy as they were.
The historian Niall Ferguson has argued that a big factor leading to war in 1914 was that the Austrians and Germans were uncertain of British intentions and that this uncertainty was caused by the British.3 Britain may have done well for a long time by muddling through, but that was not much of a strategy in 1914. Did the British really intend to defend Serbia, or were they bluffing? Certainly nothing they said or did at that time was sufficient to convince the powers of the Dual Alliance that defending Serbia was really important to Britain. This was an important failing on their part, and it deserves further exploration.
Remember that when we looked at a lawsuit I worked on, we examined the consequences that followed when I advised my client to bluff having a stronger commitment to their bargaining position than in fact they had. Such a bluff can be risky and costly. If the other side believes—correctly—that a tough posture is just posturing and not the real thing, then they will call the bluff. In the lawsuit, that would have raised the odds of a costly outcome. The client would have faced severe felony charges. They might have been exonerated in court, but trials are, as we’ve seen, always risky business. Without bluffing, they were going to face those charges anyway, so bluffing looked (and proved) attractive.
Think how much costlier and riskier bluffing could have been for Britain in the summer of 1914 than it was for my client in the lawsuit. With hindsight we know that the guns of August were not stilled for more than four years. At the end of the war, the United States—not Britain, not France, not Germany, and not Russia—would be the greatest power in the world. At the end of the war, Austria-Hungary would not even exist. But when decisions had to be made, no one knew any of that. They had to think about what their circumstances would look like if they showed eagerness to compromise or if they showed real resolve to stick to their guns, so to speak. The British looked for compromise, and disaster followed. What does the model say would have happened had they bluffed being resolved to defend Serbia, and how could they have conveyed such resoluteness?
