Kiraly, Bela K. - Stokes, Gale (szerk.): Insurrections, Wars, and the Eastern Crisis in the 1870s - East Europen monographs 197. Brooklyn College Studies on Society in Change 36. Atlantic studies (New York, 1985)
II. The Balkan Crisis and East Central Europe - Zoltán Szász: The Balkan Policies of the Habsburg Empire in the 1870's
87 THE BALKAN POLICIES military understood that the monarchy would have to give up its so-called policy of abstinence. The military justified a policy of expansion as necessary to protect Austro-Hungarian trade and to prevent the formation of a common border between Serbia and Montenegro, but Andrássy decisively rejected both these arguments. In November 1876, in a military policy conference, this time without Andrássy, occupation of the Sanjak of Novi Pazar as the gateway to the Aegean was discussed. At the end of that year, as the new research of István Diószegi and Emil Palotás has revealed,1 Major General Beck also proposed the occupation of all of Albania and part of Macedonia including Salonika, now with the argument that it was essential for an Austro-Hungarian presence on the world’s seas. Archduke Albert thought that it would be hard to win over public opinion for the acquisition of Bosnia but much easier for the acquisition of ports on the Aegean. At the beginning of 1878 the official foreign policy of the monarchy, which wanted to participate with Russia in a division of the booty, experienced an unexpected blow with the Russian cease-fire. In a military policy conference held on January 15, 1878, planners considered turning their diplomacy to a new strategy of war with Russia, or at least of threatening war. But the military shrank from this possibility with horror and were not prepared to concentrate their troops or even to make any sort of unfriendly gesture. Instead, along with Bosnia and Hercegovina, they now wanted to occupy the Sanjak and northern Albania. Two secret conferences held in April 1878 embodied, as Palotás writes,2 a rare historical moment — the unity of the military and foreign-policy leadership on the tasks of the monarchy in the Balkans. Andrássy persuaded the military to take security precautions against Russia and separated the question of Bosnia from that issue. As compensation, he declared himself — perhaps, however, only as a tactical maneuver — prepared for a later Austro-Hungarian expansion into Albania and Macedonia. After the bitter experiences of the Bosnian campaign, the Austro-Hungarian military leaders took a serious step backward. Field Commander Phillipovich wrote the Military Chancellery on August 28 that “in a practical sense the right to occupy the Sanjak is as costly as it is of doubtful value.”3 From the military side Phillipovich and then Beck began to revise the Sanjak’s role as a gateway to the South. In September they repeated their earlier opinion in the discussion of the railroad question. The chief of the general staff, General Anton von Schönfeld, wrote, “it is to be doubted whether a railroad through Sarajevo, Novibazar, and Mitrovica would be the shortest route to Salonika. ...This leaves no ground for adventurism there.”4 Schönfeld went even farther: “As the decay of Turkey continues, Serbia and Montenegro will turn toward the monarchy because they will be able to pursue common goals. The trade route to Salonika will go just as well, or