ABSTRACT
At the onset of the First World War, the prospect of national self-determination for the subject peoples of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires seemed quite remote. Though facing severe domestic and foreign challenges, these empires were not only still intact, but seemed downright vigorous in many respects. The Habsburg empire had just expanded its territory by formally incorporating the province of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908. (It had assumed de facto control there in 1878.) For its part, the Ottoman empire was undergoing an ambitious political-reform and administrative-modernization effort under the aegis of the Young Turks, who had consolidated their grip on power following Ottoman military defeats in North Africa and the Balkans that discredited rival elites. Russia’s humiliation at the hands of the Japanese in the war of 1904-1905 had only reinforced its ruling elite’s zeal for an ever faster pace of industrialization and military modernization, while turning its foreign ambitions away from the Far East and back toward the intricacies of Balkan politics.
