Page - 593 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

Hohenzollern against Habsburg 593 Serbia. Around half of Serbia, including the south as far as the border to Montenegro with Pristina and Prizren, should fall to Bulgaria. Austria was to be recompensed at most with the territory south of Šabac. The rest of Serbia should also be brought into a close and above all economic dependence on the Habsburg Monarchy. Regarding Romania, Burián wanted frontier improvements at the Iron Gates and at the Transyl- vanian passes. But that was not all, and the Minister was aware above all that during negotiations quite a number of compromises would have to be made. Even allowing for this ‘negotiations factor’, however, this programme corresponded in no way to the war situation. On this basis, it was clear that no peace negotiations would be initiated. The genesis of the demands can be traced back a long way ; some of them had al- ready been formulated in 1914 ; but now they were on the table. And Burián let it be known that Emperor Franz Joseph would have agreed to these demands.1368 Perhaps not so much importance should be attached to all the things that were submitted by the Austrians during this phase of contact concerning a peace offer of the Central Powers, for the reason that it did not in its entirety find its way into the actual peace offer of 12 December. But it is worthwhile beginning the balance of the war year 1916 with a reference to the demands introduced by Burián. They are so far from being compre- hensible in the light of the military and domestic circumstances of the Dual Monarchy that either Foreign Minister Burián must be certified as being so remarkably lacking in a sense of reality or one understands this war aims list to be a symptom. This is all the more the case since ten months earlier it had been the same Burián who had stopped Conrad von Hötzendorf when he was formulating his far-reaching war aims and placing the political leadership under pressure with them. Together with the Hungarian Prime Minister, he had put a dampener on the General Staff Chief’s theoretical flights of fancy, not least bearing in mind what Tisza had written to him : ‘[…] we cannot force [peace] on the enemy. We can only create by means of further military gains a situation in which the enemy is convinced that a continuation of the struggle would be pointless and that peace is in his own interests. This conviction is dependent to a large extent on our peace conditions.’1369 No session of the Joint Council of Ministers had taken place to discuss Burián’s war aims. The question of the presentation of such demands in the framework of a peace offensive had also not been linked to the question as to whether the Monarchy was even in a position to make demands. And, besides, it had not really been considered what would happen if the demands were to be rejected and the war had to be continued. Hohenzollern against Habsburg If Minister Burián had still given the impression in 1915 that he did not want peace with victory, the year 1916  – with its very different events and an ever longer list of