ABSTRACT
If the keynote of European diplomacy in the years 1850 to 1871 had been the confrontation of the Great Powers, leading to wars between them in 185356, 1859, 1866 and 187071, circumstances would be quite different in the following two decades. Then, the diplomatic scene would be characterized by a freezing of Great Power confrontations in the European heartland, and a turning outwards of policy, ambitions and potential conflicts. If German Russian relations were becoming increasingly strained in the 1880s, relations between Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the other major element of Bismarck's alliance system, had a built-in source of tension, the Eastern Question, the problems raised by the declining power of the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman rule in the Balkans had been regularly punctuated by uprisings in the nineteenth century, and generally the Sultans armed forces, badly organized and undersupplied and underpaid as they usually were, had proved capable of dealing with them, provided there was no outside interference.
