Origins and Legal Basis of the Mürzsteg Reform Plan
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The alleged nobility of the enterprise was indeed undermined by latent rivalries. To prevent France and Britain from gaining the diplomatic initiative in Macedonia, Austria-Hungary and Russia sent Turkey a note on September 24, 1903 declaring that they “insist on the program approved by all the Powers,” a reference to the existing Vienna Plan. Landsdowne proposed in a letter of September 29th to the British ambassador in Vienna that a Christian government be nominated for Macedonia, without attachment to the Balkans or to the signatory powers to the 1878 Treaty of Berlin. An alternative proposal was for an Ottoman Turkish governor with European assessors or advisors. He also wanted a reorganization of the gendarmerie with an increase in the number of officers.
The Austro-Hungarian/Russian reaction to these initiatives by Britain and France was the programme laid out in the Mürzsteg Reform Plan, which built on the model laid out by the Vienna Plan and, six years before that, the interventionist scheme in Crete.
On September 30, 1903, the Emperor Franz Joseph I and the Czar Nicholas II met at Mürzsteg – that “dismal hunting lodge in Styria,” in central Austria – to decide the fate of Macedonia. The second Austro-Hungarian/Russian Reform Scheme was the result of these deliberations, and became known as the Mürzsteg Reform Plan. The two heads of state met ostensibly to ensure that the Vienna Plan reforms of February were being adequately followed.
What resulted, however, was an altogether new and expanded set of reforms that incorporated the recommendations of the other powers. On October 22, they submitted these new reforms to the Turkish government. On November 25, the Turks, who had been blasted by criticism over their heavy-handed response to the Krusevo uprising, reluctantly accepted the nine points of what came to be known as the Mürzsteg Program.
The initiative for the Mürzsteg Reform Plan came from Baron Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian ambassador in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Tsarist Russia. He supported the cooperation embodied in the Mürzsteg Program between Austria-Hungary and his own state, and he favored the continuation of a joint foreign policy between the two countries in the Balkans. What Aehrenthal was hoping for was to extend the entente between Russia and Austria-Hungary that had been established in 1897, thus continuing the policy of Otto von Bismarck which had divided the Balkans into Russian and Austro-Hungarian spheres of influence and control. Aehrenthal wanted to revive the Dreikaiserbund or Three Emperors Union from the Bismarck era. The entente had been established when Emperor Franz Joseph I and Foreign Minister Agenor Goluchowski met with Czar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg in 1897, agreeing to a policy of carefully defined interventionism. The understanding would exist, however, only until 1908, when Austria-Hungary took the fateful step of annexing Bosnia.
The Mürzsteg Reform Plan thus exemplified the kind of activity envisioned by the agreement reached by Russian and Austro-Hungarian diplomats five years before. The plan was also a natural extension, or the next phase of the Vienna Plan, which had been found lacking in several respects.
Under Mürzsteg, the powers resolved to create an international gendarmerie that would restore order and stability for the Christian populations, however, without infringing on the sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire.
According to the plan, the Austro-Hungarian and Russian ambassadors in Ottoman Constantinople would be charged with implementing the reforms. The Austrian and Russian consuls in Macedonia were instructed to be in charge of “watching over a strict application of the agreed reforms.” They were also to “meet as often as possible to discuss in common the measures taken by the Ottoman authorities.” They first had to reach a “preliminary understanding” if they were going to intervene in the Turkish administration in Macedonia. If any disagreements arose, the consuls were to contact their respective ambassadors in Constantinople.
Article 23 of the 1878 Treaty of Berlin was cited as the authoritative legal basis for the reforms and accompanying international intervention. Recourse to the controversial and contested 1878 treaty was taken to preserve the Sultan’s sovereignty over Macedonia. This document was then considered a holy grail of sorts for international relations in the Balkans, and like the UN Resolution for Kosovo more than a century later, carried within it the seeds of regional destruction.
