Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal ( eng)

Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (27 September 1854 – 17 February 1912) was an Austrian diplomat. He pressed ahead with the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 on the basis of a secret agreement with Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolsky. The annexation ultimately destroyed Austro-Russian preparedness to collaborate on settling Balkan questions, and stirred chauvinist popular emotion in Russia which felt humiliated in a sphere of vital interest to it.

Origins

Born at Groß Skal Castle in Bohemia (present-day Hrubá Skála, Czech Republic), he was the second-born son of Baron (Freiherr) Johann Lexa von Aehrenthal (1817–1898), a large-scale landowner in Groß Skal and Doksany, and his wife Marie, née Countess Thun und Hohenstein. His great-grandfather Johann Anton Lexa (1733-1824), from a rural background in Kralovice, had founded an insurance company in Prague and was ennobled in 1790.

In his lifetime Aehrenthal was often claimed to be of partly Jewish descent. Examples abound. Thus according to German Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, Aehrenthal was the grandson of a certain Lexa, a Jewish grain merchant of Prague ennobled in the nineteenth century under the name of Aehrenthal (literally 'valley of grain') in allusion to his calling; this ostensible Jewish strain led German Emperor Wilhelm II to refer to him less respectfully simply as Lexa in his marginal notes. Aehrenthal's erstwhile collaborator Lützow wrote after falling out with him that Aehrenthal displayed 'semitic cunning'. Aehrenthal however had no Jewish ancestors. The insinuations of Jewish ancestry may have inflamed his profound antisemitism.

Character

"His diplomacy" wrote Olof Hoijer, was "composed more of hard arrogance and dissolvent intrigue than of prudent reserve and ingratiating souplesse was a mixture of pretention and subtlety, of force and ruse, of realism and cynicism: his readiness to cheat, to circumvent, to outwit hid a harsh and ruthless will." Asquith regarded him as the cleverest and perhaps the least scrupulous of Austrian statesmen. He undoubtedly showed himself to be an able and ambitious diplomat, a cool negotiator, a wide-awake observer, a patient listener, a discreet talker endowed with great outward calm but with a lively and dominating imagination more passionate than clear sighted.[6]
Career

With no great prospects of inheritance, Aehrenthal studied jurisprudence and politics at the University of Bonn and the Prague Charles University. He began his career in the diplomatic service of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as attaché in Paris under Count Beust (1877). He went in 1878 in the same capacity to St. Petersburg, and from 1883 to 1888 he worked at the Foreign Office in Vienna under Count Gustav Kálnoky, with whom he formed close relations. In 1888 he was sent as councillor of embassy to St. Petersburg, where he exercised considerable influence with the ambassador, Count Wolkenstein.[4]

Recalled in 1894 to service in the Foreign Office, he undertook important duties, and in the following year went to Bucharest as ambassador. Here he succeeded in strengthening the relations between the courts of Vienna and Bucharest, the secret alliance which King Charles had concluded in 1883 with the Central European Powers being renewed on 30 September. In 1899 he became ambassador in St. Petersburg, where he remained until his appointment as Foreign Minister in October 1906. Aehrenthal at this time thought that Austria-Hungary must, even at the cost of some sacrifice, come to an agreement with Russia. In this sense he endeavoured to continue the negotiations successfully begun by his predecessor, Prince Franz Liechtenstein, for the bridging over of the differences on Balkan questions between Vienna and St. Petersburg, in order to create a basis for a permanent friendly relation between Austria-Hungary and Russia. He played a principal part in concluding the Mürzsteg Agreement of 1903. During the Russo-Japanese War he took a strong line in favour of a benevolent attitude on the part of the Vienna Cabinet towards Russia.

In October 1906, he replaced Count Goluchowski as minister of foreign affairs. He at first maintained the views which he had professed as ambassador. He was determined to preserve the interests of Austria-Hungary in the Balkans, but also showed himself prepared to meet the Russian wishes in the Dardanelles question. However, in the course of the Bosnian Crisis, he abandoned the idea of a friendly accommodation with the Russian Government.