ABSTRACT
By the summer of 1885 the Three Emperors' Alliance had established a modus Vivendi amongst the Great Powers concerned. The Dual Alliance was strictly defensive; relations with Britain and Italy were on a purely defensive basis; and, as the Monarchy relied on an army of conscripts, public opinion would also have to be considered. Klnoky threw out a sop to the warmongers with a reference to the ultimately inevitable settling of accounts between Germanism and Slavdom. In January 1889 Klnoky took the gravest umbrage at an Italian law enfranchising Italian-speakers outside the kingdom. The Roumanian alliance was beset by still greater difficulties. During the Serbo-Bulgarian war Bucharest was in a very anti-Serbian mood. The political alarm subsided in the spring of 1886. Not so the Austro-Roumanian commercial quarrel. And the decline of the Monarchy's Balkan alliances was perhaps inevitable, given the underlying economic and political conflict between Magyar chauvinism and Serbian and Roumanian irredentism.
