Monday, November 26, 2012
Today -100: November 26, 1912: Of Balkan wars
The Great Powers are trying not to let the Balkan War turn into a, to coin a phrase, world war as a result of the smaller powers fighting the war making territorial claims that impinge on what the larger powers consider to be their interests. Austria in particular has been getting quite bellicose towards Serbia, but Germany seems to be trying to restrain it. Messages and meetings are going back and forth between German, Austrian and Russian kaisers and tsars. Russia, which is more or less allied with its fellow Eastern Orthodox Slavs in Serbia, denies reports that it is mobilizing its troops against Austria. Austria and Italy want a new autonomous state of Albania, but Serbia’s insistence on access to the Adriatic would carve that state in two.
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The downside of this fascinating and all-round lovely -100 feature is that we've got 4 years of mechanised slaughter coming up. I shall have to remember to enjoy 1913.
ReplyDelete1913, otherwise known as the time of the First and (spoiler alert) Second Balkan War.
ReplyDeleteI don't particularly want Today -100 to be swamped by the Great War either. Part of my interest in doing this for the Taft years was precisely the fact that nothing of cosmic significance was going on, no great social changes, etc, so we could see how that society and its politics functioned on a day to day basis, what interested its people and what they ignored.