In a cartoon published in the late 1890s, a French artist depicted the crisis brewing over China on the eve of the Boxer Uprising. Watched warily by Britain and Russia, Germany makes to carve out a slice identified as ‘Kiao-Tschaou’ from a pie called ‘China’, while France offers her Russian ally moral support and Japan looks on. Behind them all, a Qing official throws up his hands in despair, but is powerless to intervene. As so often in such images, the powers are represented as individual persons: Britain, Germany and Russia by caricatures of their respective sovereigns, France by ‘Marianne’, the personification of the Republic, and Japan and China by stereotypical exotic figures. Personifying states as individuals was part of the shorthand of European political caricature, but it also reflects a deep habit of thought: the tendency to conceptualize states as composite individuals governed by compact executive agencies animated by an indivisible will.
Yet even a very cursory look at the governments of early twentieth-century Europe reveals that the executive structures from which policies emerged were far from unified. Policy-making was not the prerogative of single sovereign individuals. Initiatives with a bearing on the course of a country’s policy could and did emanate from quite peripheral locations in the political structure. Factional alignments, functional frictions within government, economic or financial constraints and the volatile chemistry of public opinion all exerted a constantly varying pressure on decision-making processes. As the power to shape decisions shifted from one node in the executive structure to another, there were corresponding oscillations in the tone and orientation of policy. This chaos of competing voices is crucial to understanding the periodic agitations of the European system during the last pre-war years. It also helps to explain why the July Crisis of 1914 became the most complex and opaque political crisis of modern times.
‘The Scramble for China’, by Henri Meyer, Le Petit Journal, 1898
Early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies. Of the six most important powers, five were monarchies of one kind or another; only one (France) was a republic. The relatively new nation-states of the Balkan peninsula – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania – were all monarchies. The Europe of fast cruisers, radio-telegraph, and electric cigar-lighters still carried at its heart this ancient, glittering institution yoking large and complex states to the vagaries of human biology. The European executives were still centred on the thrones and the men or women who sat on them. Ministers in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were imperial appointees. The three emperors had unlimited access to state papers. They also exercised formal authority over their respective armed forces. Dynastic institutions and networks structured the communications between states. Ambassadors presented their credentials to the sovereign in person and direct communications and meetings between monarchs continued to take place throughout the pre-war years; indeed they acquired a heightened importance, creating a parallel plane of interaction whose relationship to official diplomacy was sometimes difficult to ascertain.
Monarchs were symbolic as well as political actors, and in this role they could capture and focus collective emotions and associations. When Parisian onlookers gawped at Edward VII sprawled in a chair outside his hotel smoking a cigar, they felt they were looking at England in the form of a very fat, fashionable and confident man. His triumphant ascent in Parisian public opinion in 1903 helped smooth the path to the Entente signed with France in the following year. Even the mild-mannered despot Nicholas II was greeted like a conquering hero by the French when he visited Paris in 1896, despite his autocratic political philosophy and negligible charisma, because he was seen as the personification of the Franco-Russian Alliance.1 And who embodied the most unsettling aspects of German foreign policy – its vacillations, lack of focus and frustrated ambition – better than the febrile, tactless, panic-prone, overbearing Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who dared to advise Edvard Grieg on how to conduct Peer Gynt?2 Whether or not the Kaiser actually made German policy, he certainly symbolized it for Germany’s opponents.
Wilhelm II and Nicholas II wearing the uniforms of each other’s countries
Edward VII in his uniform as colonel of the Austrian 12th Hussars
At the core of the monarchical club that reigned over pre-war Europe was the trio of imperial cousins: Tsar Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V. By the turn of the twentieth century, the genealogical web of Europe’s reigning families had thickened almost to the point of fusion. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria’s granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II were both great-great grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The Kaiser’s great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the Tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud.
Assessing how much influence these monarchs wielded over or within their respective executives is difficult. Britain, Germany and Russia represented three very different kinds of monarchy. Russia’s was, in theory at least, an autocracy in which the parliamentary and constitutional restraints on the monarch’s authority were weak. Edward VII and George V were constitutional and parliamentary monarchs with no direct access to the levers of power. Kaiser Wilhelm II was something in between – in Germany, a constitutional and parliamentary system was grafted on to elements of the old Prussian military monarchy that had survived the process of national unification. But the formal structures of governance were not necessarily the most significant determinants of monarchical influence. Other important variables included the determination, competence and intellectual grasp of the monarch himself, the ability of ministers to block unwelcome initiatives and the extent of agreement between monarchs and their governments.
One of the most striking features of the influence wielded by the sovereigns on the formulation of foreign policy is its variation over time. Edward VII, who presided over the diplomatic realignments of 1904–7, had strong views on foreign policy and prided himself on being well informed. His attitudes were those of an imperialist ‘jingo’; he was infuriated by Liberal opposition to the Afghan War of 1878–9, for example, and told the colonial administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere: ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan and kept it.’3 He was overjoyed at the news of the raid against the Transvaal Republic in 1895, supportive of Cecil Rhodes’s involvement in it, and infuriated by the Kaiser’s Kruger telegram. Throughout his adult life he maintained a determined hostility to Germany. The roots of this antipathy appear to have lain partly in his opposition to his mother, Queen Victoria, whom he regarded as excessively friendly to Prussia, and partly in his fear and loathing of Baron Stockmar, the unsmiling Germanic pedagogue appointed by Victoria and Albert to hold the young Edward to a regime of unstinting study. The Prussian-Danish War of 1864 was a formative episode in his early political life – Edward’s sympathies in that conflict rested firmly with the Danish relatives of his new bride.4 After his accession to the throne, Edward was an important sponsor of the anti-German group of policy-makers around Sir Francis Bertie.5
The king’s influence reached its height in 1903, when an official visit to Paris – ‘the most important royal visit in modern history’, as it has been called – paved the road towards the Entente between the two imperial rivals. Relations between the two western empires were still soured at this time by French outrage over the Boer War. The visit, which had been organized on Edward’s own initiative, was a public relations triumph and did much to clear the air.6 After the Entente had been signed, Edward continued to work towards an agreement with Russia, even though, like many of his countrymen, he detested the tsarist political system and remained suspicious of the designs that Russia had on Persia, Afghanistan and northern India. In 1906, when he heard that the Russian foreign minister Izvolsky was in Paris, he rushed south from Scotland in the hope that a meeting could be set up. Izvolsky responded in kind and made the journey to London, where the two men met for talks that – according to Charles Hardinge – ‘helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia’.7 In both these instances, the king was not deploying executive powers as such, but acting as a kind of supernumerary ambassador. He could do this because his priorities accorded closely with those of the liberal imperialist faction at Whitehall, whose dominance in foreign policy he had himself helped to reinforce.
George V was a very different case. Until his accession in 1910, he took little interest in foreign affairs and had acquired only the sketchiest sense of Britain’s relations with other powers. The Austrian ambassador Count Mensdorff was delighted with the new king, who seemed, by contrast with his father, to be innocent of strong biases for or against any foreign state.8 If Mensdorff hoped the changing of the guard would produce an attenuation of the anti-German theme in British policy, he was soon to be disappointed. In foreign policy, the new monarch’s seeming neutrality merely meant that policy remained firmly in the hands of the liberal imperialists around Grey. George never acquired a political network to rival his father’s, refrained from backstairs intrigue and avoided expounding policy without the explicit permission of his ministers.9 He was in more or less constant communication with Edward Grey and granted the foreign secretary frequent audiences whenever he was in London. He was scrupulous about seeking Grey’s approval for the content of political conversations with foreign representatives – especially his German relatives.10 George’s accession to the throne thus resulted in a sharp decline in the crown’s influence on the general orientation of foreign policy, even though the two monarchs wielded identical constitutional powers.
Even within the highly authoritarian setting of the Russian autocracy, the influence of the Tsar over foreign policy was subject to narrow constraints and waxed and waned over time. Like George V, the new Tsar was a blank sheet of paper when he came to the throne in 1894. He had not created a political network of his own before the accession and his deference to his father ensured that he refrained from expressing a view on government policy. As an adolescent, he had shown little aptitude for the study of affairs of state. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the conservative jurist drafted in to give the teenage Nicky a master class on the inner workings of the tsarist state, later recalled: ‘I could only observe that he was completely absorbed in picking his nose.’11 Even after he mounted the throne, extreme shyness and terror at the prospect of having to wield real authority prevented him in the early years from imposing his political preferences – insofar as he had them – on the government. He lacked, moreover, the kind of executive support he would have needed to shape the course of policy in a consistent way. He possessed, for example, no personal secretariat and no personal secretary. He could – and did – insist on being informed of even quite minor ministerial decisions, but in a state as vast as Russia’s, this merely meant that the monarch was engulfed in trivia while matters of real import fell by the wayside.12
The Tsar was nonetheless able, especially from around 1900, to impart a certain direction to Russian foreign policy. By the late 1890s, Russia was deeply involved in the economic penetration of China. Not everyone in the administration was happy with the Far Eastern policy. Some resented the immense cost of the infrastructural and military commitments involved. Others, such as the minister of war, General Aleksei A. Kuropatkin, viewed the Far East as a distraction from more pressing concerns on the western periphery, especially the Balkans and the Turkish Straits. But at this time Nicholas II still firmly believed that the future of Russia lay in Siberia and the Far East and ensured that the exponents of the Eastern policy prevailed over their opponents. Despite some initial misgivings, he supported the policy of seizing the Chinese bridgehead at Port Arthur (today Lüshun) on the Liaodong peninsula in 1898. In Korea, Nicholas came to support a policy of Russian penetration that placed St Petersburg on a collision course with Tokyo.
Nicholas’s interventions took the form of informal alignments, rather than of executive decisions. He was closely associated, for example, with the aristocratic entrepreneurs who ran the vast Yalu river timber concession in Korea. The Yalu timber magnate A. M. Bezobrazov, a former officer of the elite Chevaliers Guards, used his personal connection with the Tsar to establish the Yalu as a platform for extending Russian informal empire on the Korean peninsula. In 1901, the finance minister Sergei Witte reported that Bezobrazov was with the Tsar ‘no less than two times a week – for hours at a time’ advising him on Far Eastern policy.13 Ministers were exasperated by the presence at court of these influential outsiders, but there was little they could do to curb their influence. These informal links in turn drew the Tsar into an ever more aggressive vision of Russian policy in the region. ‘I do not want to seize Korea,’ Nicholas told Prince Henry of Prussia in 1901, ‘but under no circumstances can I allow Japan to become firmly established there. That would be a casus belli.’14
Nicholas further tightened his control over policy by appointing a Viceroy of the Far East with full responsibility not only for civil and military matters but also for relations with Tokyo. The holder of this office, Admiral E. I. Alekseev, was subject directly to the Tsar and thus immune from ministerial supervision. The appointment had been engineered by the clique around Bezobrazov, who saw it as a means of bypassing the relatively cautious Far Eastern policy of the foreign ministry. As a consequence, Russia operated what were in effect two parallel official and non-official imperial policies, enabling Nicholas II to pick between options and play the factions off against each other.15 Admiral Alekseev had no experience or understanding of diplomatic forms and exhibited an abrasive and intransigent style that was bound to alienate and anger his Japanese interlocutors. Whether Nicholas II ever consciously adopted a policy of war with Japan is doubtful, but he certainly carried the lion’s share of responsibility for the war that broke out in 1904, and thus also for the disasters that followed.16
On the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, then, one could say that the Tsar’s influence was up, while that of his ministers was down. But this state of affairs was shortlived, because the catastrophic outcome of the Tsar’s policy sharply diminished his ability to set the agenda. As the news of successive defeats sank in and social unrest engulfed Russia, a group of ministers led by Sergei Witte pushed through reforms designed to unify government. Power was concentrated in a Council of Ministers, headed for the first time by a ‘chairman’ or prime minister. Under Witte and his successor, P. A. Stolypin (1906–11), the executive was shielded to some extent against arbitrary interventions by the monarch. Stolypin in particular, a man of immense determination, intelligence, charisma and tireless industry, managed to assert his personal authority over most of the ministers, achieving a level of coherence in government that had been unknown before 1905. During the Stolypin years, Nicholas seemed ‘curiously absent from political activity’.17
The Tsar did not acquiesce for long in this arrangement. Even while Stolypin was in power, Nicholas found ways of circumventing his control by making deals with individual ministers behind the premier’s back. Among them was Foreign Minister Izvolsky, whose mishandling of negotiations with his Austria-Hungarian counterpart triggered the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908–9. In return for Vienna’s diplomatic support over Russian access to the Turkish Straits, Izvolsky approved the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Neither Prime Minister Stolypin nor his ministerial colleagues had been informed in advance of this daring enterprise, which was cleared directly with Tsar Nicholas himself. By the time of Stolypin’s assassination by terrorists in the autumn of 1911, Nicholas was systematically undercutting his authority by supporting his political opponents. Confronted with a ministerial bloc that threatened to confine his freedom of action, Nicholas withdrew his support and intrigued against the men he had himself placed in power. Witte fell victim to this autocratic behaviour in 1906; Stolypin would have done so if he had not been killed, and his successor, the mild-mannered Vladimir Kokovtsov, was removed from office in February 1914 because he too had revealed himself a devotee of the idea of ‘united government’. I return below to the implications of these machinations for the course of Russian foreign policy – for the moment, the key point is that the years 1911–14 saw a decline in united government and the reassertion of autocratic power.18
Yet this autocratic power was not deployed in support of a consistent policy vision. It was used in a negative way, to safeguard the autonomy and power of the monarch by breaking any political formations that looked as if they might secure the initiative. The consequence of autocratic intervention was thus not the imposition of the Tsar’s will as such, but rather a lasting uncertainty about who had the power to do what – a state of affairs that nourished factional strife and critically undermined the consistency of Russian decision-making.
Of the three imperial cousins, Wilhelm II was and remains the most controversial. The extent of his power within the German executive is still hotly disputed.19 The Kaiser certainly came to the throne intending to be the author of his country’s foreign policy. ‘The Foreign Office? Why, I am the Foreign Office!’ he once exclaimed.20 ‘I am the sole master of German policy,’ he remarked in a letter to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII), ‘and my country must follow me wherever I go.’21 Wilhelm took a personal interest in the appointment of ambassadors and occasionally backed personal favourites against the advice of the chancellor and the Foreign Office. To a greater extent than either of his two imperial cousins, he regarded the meetings and correspondence with fellow dynasts that were part of the regular traffic between monarchies as a unique diplomatic resource to be exploited in his country’s interest.22 Like Nicholas II, Wilhelm frequently – especially in the early years of his reign – bypassed his responsible ministers by consulting with ‘favourites’, encouraged factional strife in order to undermine the unity of government, and expounded views that had not been cleared with the relevant ministers or were at odds with the prevailing policy.
It was in this last area – the unauthorized exposition of unsanctioned political views – that the Kaiser achieved the most hostile notice, both from contemporaries and from historians.23 There can be no doubt about the bizarre tone and content of many of the Kaiser’s personal communications in telegrams, letters, marginal comments, conversations, interviews and speeches on foreign and domestic political themes. Their exceptional volume alone is remarkable: the Kaiser spoke, wrote, telegraphed, scribbled and ranted more or less continuously during the thirty years of his reign, and a huge portion of these articulations was recorded and preserved for posterity. Some of them were tasteless or inappropriate. Two examples, both of them linked with the United States, will serve to illustrate the point. On 4 April 1906, Kaiser Wilhelm II was a dinner guest at the US embassy in Berlin. During a lively conversation with his American hosts, the Kaiser spoke of the necessity of securing more space for the rapidly growing German population, which had counted around 40 million at the time of his accession, he told the ambassador, but was now around 60 million. This was a good thing in itself, but the question of nutrition was going to become acute in the next twenty years. On the other hand, large portions of France appeared to be under-populated and in need of development; perhaps one should ask the French government whether they would mind pulling their border back westwards to accommodate the surfeit of Germans? These inane burblings (which we can presume were offered in jest) were earnestly recorded by one of his interlocutors and forwarded to Washington with the next diplomatic bag.24 The other example stems from November 1908, when there was widespread press speculation over a possible war between the United States and Japan. Agitated by this prospect and keen to ingratiate himself with the Atlantic power, the Kaiser fired off a letter to President Roosevelt offering him – this time in all seriousness – a Prussian army corps to be stationed on the Californian coast.25
How exactly did such utterances connect with the world of actual policy outcomes? Any foreign minister or ambassador in a modern democracy who indulged in such grossly inappropriate communications would be sacked on the spot. But how much did such sovereign gaffes matter in the larger scheme of things? The extreme inconsistency of the Kaiser’s utterances makes an assessment of their impact difficult. Had Wilhelm pursued a clear and consistent policy vision, we could simply measure intentions against outcomes, but his intentions were always equivocal and the focus of his attention was always shifting. In the late 1890s, the Kaiser became enthusiastic about a project to create a ‘New Germany’ (Neudeutschland) in Brazil and ‘demanded impatiently’ that migration to that region be encouraged and increased as quickly as possible – needless to say, absolutely nothing came of this. In 1899, he informed Cecil Rhodes that it was his intention to secure ‘Mesopotamia’ as a German colony. In 1900, at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, we find him proposing that the Germans should send an entire army corps to China with a view to partitioning the country. In 1903, he was once again declaring ‘Latin America is our target!’ and urging the Admiralty staff – who apparently had nothing better to do – to prepare invasion plans for Cuba, Puerto Rico and New York, invasion plans that were a complete waste of time, since (among other things) the General Staff never agreed to provide the necessary troops.26
The Kaiser picked up ideas, enthused over them, grew bored or discouraged, and dropped them again. He was angry with the Russian Tsar one week, but infatuated with him the next.27 There were endless alliance projects: for an alliance with Russia and France against Japan and Britain; with Russia, Britain and France against the USA; with China and America against Japan and the Triple Entente, or with Japan and the USA against the Entente, and so on.28 In the autumn of 1896, at a time when relations between Britain and Germany had cooled following tensions over the status of the Transvaal, the Kaiser proposed a continental league with France and Russia for the joint defence of colonial possessions against Britain. At virtually the same time, however, he played with the notion of eliminating any cause of conflict with Britain by simply doing away with all the German colonies except East Africa. But by the spring of 1897, Wilhelm had dropped this idea and was proposing that Germany should enter into a closer relationship with France.29
Wilhelm wasn’t content to fire off notes and marginalia to his ministers, he also broached his ideas directly to the representatives of foreign powers. Sometimes his interventions opposed the direction of official policy, sometimes they endorsed it; sometimes they overshot the mark to arrive at a grossly overdrawn parody of the official view. In 1890, when the Foreign Office was cooling relations with the French, Wilhelm was warming them up again; he did the same thing during the Moroccan crisis of 1905 – while the Foreign Office stepped up the pressure on Paris, Wilhelm assured various foreign generals and journalists and a former French minister that he sought reconciliation with France and had no intention of risking war over Morocco. In March, on the eve of his departure for Tangier, the Kaiser delivered a speech in Bremen in which he announced that the lessons of history had taught him ‘never to strive after an empty power over the world’. The German Empire he added, would have to earn ‘the most absolute trust as a calm, honest and peaceful neighbour’. A number of senior political figures – especially among the hawks within the military command – believed that this speech spiked the guns of official policy on Morocco.30
In January 1904, the Kaiser found himself seated next to King Leopold of the Belgians (who had come to Berlin to celebrate Wilhelm’s birthday) at a gala dinner and used the occasion to inform Leopold that he expected Belgium to side with Germany in the event of a war with France. Should the Belgian king opt to stand with Germany, Wilhelm promised, the Belgians would gain new territories in northern France, and Wilhelm would reward the Belgian king with ‘the crown of old Burgundy’. When Leopold, taken aback, replied that his ministers and the Belgian parliament would hardly accept such a fanciful and audacious plan, Wilhelm retorted that he could not respect a monarch who felt himself to be responsible to ministers and deputies, rather than to the Lord God. If the Belgian king were not more forthcoming, the Kaiser would be obliged to proceed ‘on purely strategic principles’ – in other words, to invade and occupy Belgium. Leopold is said to have been so upset by these remarks that, when rising from his seat at the end of the meal, he put his helmet on the wrong way round.31
It was precisely because of episodes like this that Wilhelm’s ministers sought to keep him at one remove from the actual decision-making process. It is an extraordinary fact that the most important foreign policy decision of Wilhelm’s reign – not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890 – was made without the Kaiser’s involvement or prior knowledge.32 In the summer of 1905, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow entrusted Wilhelm with the task of putting an alliance proposal to Nicholas II off the Finnish coast at Björkö, only to find on the Kaiser’s return that Wilhelm had dared to make an alteration in the draft of the treaty. The chancellor’s response was to tender his resignation. Terrified at the prospect of being abandoned by his most powerful official, Wilhelm immediately backed down; Bülow agreed to remain in office and the treaty amendment was withdrawn.33
The Kaiser constantly complained of being kept out of the loop, of being denied access to important diplomatic documents. He was particularly upset when foreign policy officials insisted on vetting his personal correspondence with foreign heads of state. There was quite a fuss, for example, when the German ambassador in Washington, Speck von Sternburg, refused to pass on a letter from Wilhelm to President Roosevelt in 1908, in which the Kaiser expressed his profound admiration for the American president. It was not the political content of the letter that worried the diplomats, but rather the effusiveness and immaturity of its tone. It was surely unacceptable, one official remarked, that the sovereign of the German Empire should write to the president of the United States ‘as an infatuated schoolboy might write to a pretty seamstress’.34
These were disturbing utterances, to be sure. In an environment where governments were constantly puzzling over each other’s intentions, they were even potentially dangerous. Nevertheless, we should bear three points in mind. The first is that in such encounters, the Kaiser was performing a role of leadership and control that he was incapable of exercising in practice. Secondly, these rhetorical menaces were always associated with imagined scenarios in which Germany was the attacked party. Wilhelm’s indecent proposal to Leopold of the Belgians was not conceived as an offensive venture, but as part of a German response to a French attack. What was bizarre about his reflections on the possible need in a future conflict to breach Belgian neutrality is not the idea of the breach as such – the option of a Belgian invasion was discussed and weighed up by the French and British General Staffs as well – but the context in which it was broached and the identity of the two interlocutors. It was one of this Kaiser’s many peculiarities that he was completely unable to calibrate his behaviour to the contexts in which his high office obliged him to operate. Too often he spoke not like a monarch, but like an over-excited teenager giving free rein to his current preoccupations. He was an extreme exemplar of that Edwardian social category, the club bore who is forever explaining some pet project to the man in the next chair. Small wonder that the prospect of being buttonholed by the Kaiser over lunch or dinner, when escape was impossible, struck fear into the hearts of so many European royals.
Wilhelm’s interventions greatly exercised the men of the German foreign ministry, but they did little to shape the course of German policy. Indeed it may in part have been a deepening sense of impotence and disconnection from the real levers of power that fired up Wilhelm’s recurring fantasies about future world wars between Japan and the USA, invasions of Puerto Rico, global jihad against the British Empire, a German protectorate over China and so on. These were the blue-sky scenarios of an inveterate geopolitical fantasist, not policies as such. And whenever a real conflict seemed imminent, Wilhelm pulled in his horns and quickly found reasons why Germany could not possibly go to war. When tensions with France reached a peak at the end of 1905, Wilhelm took fright and informed Chancellor Bülow that socialist agitation at home absolutely ruled out any offensive action abroad; in the following year, rattled by the news that King Edward VII had just paid an unscheduled visit to the fallen French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé, he warned the chancellor that Germany’s artillery and navy were in no condition to hold out in a conflict.35 Wilhelm could talk tough, but when trouble loomed he tended to turn and run for cover. He would do exactly that during the July Crisis of 1914. ‘It is a curious thing,’ Jules Cambon, French ambassador in Berlin, observed in a letter to a senior official at the French foreign ministry in May 1912, ‘to see how this man, so sudden, so reckless and impulsive in words, is full of caution and patience in action.’36
An overview of the early twentieth-century monarchs suggests a fluctuating and ultimately relatively modest impact on actual policy outcomes. Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary read vast quantities of dispatches and met with his foreign ministers regularly. Yet for all his stupendous work as the ‘first bureaucrat’ of his empire, Franz Joseph, like Nicholas II, found it impossible to master the oceans of information that came to his desk. Little effort was made to ensure that he apportioned his time in accordance with the relative importance of the issues arising.37 Austro-Hungarian foreign policy was shaped not by the executive fiats of the Emperor, but by the interaction of factions and lobbies within and around the ministry. Italy’s Victor Emanuel III (r. 1900–1946) worked much less hard than Franz Joseph – he spent most of his time in Piedmont or on his estates at Castelporziano and, though he did make an effort to get through some diplomatic dispatches, he also spent around three hours a day reading newspapers and meticulously listing the errors he found in them. The Italian king cultivated close relations with his foreign ministers and he certainly supported the momentous decision to seize Libya in 1911, but direct interventions were few and far between.38 Nicholas II could favour this or that faction or minister and thereby undermine the cohesion of government, but was unable to set the agenda, especially after the fiasco of the Russo-Japanese War. Wilhelm II was more energetic than Nicholas, but his ministers were also better able than their Russian colleagues to shield the policy-making process against interventions from above. Wilhelm’s initiatives were in any case too disparate and ill coordinated to provide any kind of alternative operational platform.
Whether or not they intervened aggressively in the political process, the continental monarchs nonetheless remained, by virtue of their very existence, an unsettling factor in international relations. The presence in only partially democratized systems of sovereigns who were the putative focal points of their respective executives with access to all state papers and personnel and with ultimate responsibility for every executive decision created ambiguity. A purely dynastic foreign policy, in which monarchs met each other to resolve great affairs of state, was obviously no longer apposite – the futile meeting at Björkö proved that. Yet the temptation to view the monarch as the helmsman and personification of the executive remained strong among diplomats, statesmen and especially the monarchs themselves. Their presence created a persistent uncertainty about where exactly the pivot of the decision-making process rested. In this sense, kings and emperors could become a source of obfuscation in international relations. The resulting lack of clarity dogged efforts to establish secure and transparent relations between states.
Monarchical structures also shrouded the power relations within each executive. In Italy, for example, it was unclear who actually commanded the army – the king, the minister of war or the chief of the General Staff. The Italian staff chief did his best to keep civilians out of his discussions with his German and Austrian counterparts, and civilian officials reciprocated by shutting the officers out of the political loop – with the result, for example, that the chief of Italy’s General Staff was not even informed of the stipulations of the Triple Alliance defining the conditions under which Italy might be called upon to fight a war on behalf of its allies.39
In a situation like this – and we can find analogous conditions in all the continental monarchies – the king or emperor was the sole point at which separate chains of command converged. If he failed to perform an integrating function, if the crown failed to compensate for the insufficiencies, as it were, of the constitution, the system remained unresolved, potentially incoherent. And the continental monarchs often did fail in this role, or rather they refused to perform it in the first place, because they hoped by dealing separately with key functionaries within the executive to preserve what remained of their own initiative and pre-eminence within the system. And this in turn had a malign effect on decision-making processes. In an environment where the decision reached by a responsible minister could be overridden or undermined by a colleague or rival, ministers often found it hard to determine ‘how their activities fitted into the larger picture’.40 The resulting ambient confusion encouraged ministers, officials, military commanders and policy experts to think of themselves as entitled to press their cases in debate, but not as personally responsible for policy outcomes. At the same time, the pressure to secure the favour of the monarch stimulated an atmosphere of competition and sycophancy that militated against the kinds of interdepartmental consultation that might have produced a more balanced approach to decision-making. The consequence was a culture of factionalism and rhetorical excess that would bear dangerous fruit in July 1914.
If the monarchs didn’t determine the course of foreign policy, who did? The obvious answer must surely be: the foreign ministers. These men oversaw the activities of the diplomatic corps and the foreign ministries, read and replied to the most important foreign dispatches and were responsible for explaining and justifying policy to parliament and the public. In reality, however, the power of the foreign ministers to shape policy fluctuated at least as much and varied at least as widely across the European powers as did the political traction of the sovereigns. Their influence depended upon a range of factors: the power and favour of other ministers, especially prime ministers, the attitude and behaviour of the monarch, the willingness of senior foreign ministerial functionaries and ambassadors to follow the minister’s lead and the level of factional instability within the system.
In Russia, the foreign minister and his family occupied private apartments in the ministry, a vast, dark red edifice on the great square facing the Winter Palace, so that his social life and those of his wife and children, were interwoven with the work of the ministry.41 His capacity to shape policy was determined by the dynamics of a political system whose parameters were redefined in the aftermath of the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 Revolution. A group of powerful ministers moved to establish a more concentrated decision-making structure that would enable the executive to balance domestic and foreign imperatives and to impose discipline on the most senior officials. How exactly this should be achieved was a matter of controversy. The most energetic and talented of the reformers was Sergei Witte, an expert on finance and economic policy who had resigned from the government in 1903 because he opposed its forward policy in Korea. Witte wanted a ‘cabinet’ headed by a ‘prime minister’ with the power not only to discipline his fellow ministers, but also to control their access to the Tsar. The more conservative sometime finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov* viewed these proposals as an assault on the principle of tsarist autocracy, which he took to be the only form of government suitable to Russian conditions. A compromise was struck: a cabinet of sorts was created in the form of the Council of Ministers, and its chairman or prime minister was granted the power to dismiss an uncooperative minister. But the ‘right of individual report’ – in other words, the right of ministers to present their views to the Tsar independently of the chairman of the council – was retained.
What resulted was a somewhat unresolved arrangement in which everything depended on the balance of initiative between the successive chairmen, their ministers and the Tsar. If the chairman was forceful and strong, he might hope to impose his will on the ministers. But if a confident minister managed to secure the support of the Tsar, he might be able to break with his colleagues and go his own way. With the appointment of Pyotr Stolypin as Chairman of the Council of Ministers in the summer of 1906, the new system acquired a charismatic and dominant leader. And the new foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, looked like the kind of politician who would be able to make the new arrangement work. He saw himself as a man of the ‘new politics’ and promptly established foreign ministry liaison posts to manage relations with the Duma. The tone of his dealings with the Tsar was respectful, but less deferential than that of his predecessors. He was committed to the reform and modernization of the ministry and he was an outspoken enthusiast for ‘unified government’.42 Most importantly of all, he agreed with most of his colleagues in the Council of Ministers on the desirability of the settlement with Britain.
It soon emerged, however, that Izvolsky’s vision of Russian foreign policy diverged from that of his colleagues in key ways. Stolypin and Kokovtsov saw the Anglo-Russian Convention as securing the opportunity to withdraw from the adventurism of the years before the Russo-Japanese War and concentrate on the tasks of domestic consolidation and economic growth. For Izvolsky, however, the agreement with England was a licence to pursue a more assertive policy. Izvolsky believed that the cordial relations inaugurated by the Convention would allow him to secure London’s acceptance of free access by Russian warships to the Turkish Straits. This was not just wishful thinking: the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey had explicitly encouraged Izvolsky to think along these lines. In a conversation with the Russian ambassador in London in March 1907, Grey had declared that ‘if permanent good relations were to be established’ between the two countries, ‘England would no longer make it a settled object of its policy to maintain the existing arrangement’ in the Straits.43
It was against this background that Izvolsky launched in 1908 his ill-fated negotiations with Aehrenthal, in which he promised Russian approval for the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in return for Austrian support for a revision of the Straits settlement. The agreement with Aehrenthal was supposed to be the first step towards a comprehensive revision. This démarche was undertaken with the support of the Tsar; indeed it may have been Nicholas II who pushed Izvolsky into offering the Austrians a deal. Having been an ardent exponent of Far Eastern expansion before 1904, the Tsar was now focusing his attention on the Straits: ‘the thought of taking the Dardanelles and Constantinople’, one Russian politician recalled, ‘was constantly on his mind’.44 Rather than risking rejection from Stolypin, Kokovtsov and the other ministers, Izvolsky exploited the right of individual report. It was the highpoint of the foreign minister’s political independence – an independence acquired by playing the margins between the different power centres in the system. But the triumph was shortlived. Since there was no deal to be had in London, the Straits policy failed. Izvolsky was disgraced in the eyes of Russian public opinion and returned to face the ire of Stolypin and Kokovtsov.
In the short term, then, the débâcle of the Bosnian annexation crisis (like the débâcle of the Japanese war) led to a reassertion of the collective authority of the Council of Ministers. The Tsar lost the initiative, at least for the moment. Izvolsky was forced to back down and to submit to the discipline of ‘united government’. Stolypin, on the other hand, now reached the peak of his power. Conservative supporters of the autocracy began to view him with alarm as an over-mighty ‘lord’ or ‘Grand Vizier’ who had usurped the powers of his imperial master. The choice of Sergei Sazonov to replace Izvolsky in September 1910 appeared to reinforce Stolypin’s dominance. Sazonov was a relatively junior diplomat, had little experience in senior chancellery posts within the ministry of foreign affairs and lacked aristocratic and imperial connections. He had little knowledge of St Petersburg politics and scarcely any influence in government circles. His chief qualifications for office, critical outsiders noted, were a reputation for ‘mediocrity and obedience’ and the fact that he was Stolypin’s brother-in law.45
After the débâcle of Izvolsky’s policy and his departure from office, Russian foreign policy thus bore the imprint not of the foreign minister, but of the prime minister, Chairman Pyotr Stolypin, whose view was that Russia needed peace at all costs and should pursue a policy of conciliation on every front. The consequence was a period of pronounced rapprochement with Berlin, despite the recent tensions over Bosnia. In November 1910, a visit by Nicholas II and Sazonov to Potsdam set in train discussions culminating in an agreement marking a highpoint in Russo-German détente.46
Stolypin’s assassination at first did little to change the orientation of policy. In the immediate aftermath of his patron’s death, Sazonov struggled to find his own voice. But Sazonov’s weakness, in combination with Stolypin’s death, in turn amplified a further potential instability within the system; the most experienced and confident Russian agents abroad were free to play a more independent role. Two ministers in particular, N. V. Charykov in Constantinople and Nikolai Hartwig in Belgrade, sensing a loosening of control from St Petersburg, embarked on potentially hazardous independent initiatives in order to capitalize on the worsening political situation in the Balkans.47 In the meanwhile, the Russian ambassador to France was none other than the former foreign minister, Alexander Izvolsky, whose determination to shape policy – on the Balkans especially – remained undiminished after his transfer back into the diplomatic service. Izvolsky hatched his own intrigues in Paris, all the while ‘hectoring Sazonov through the diplomatic pouch’.48
Sazonov’s eclipse was not permanent. With time, he began to make his own way in Balkan policy, exploiting the political weakness of Kokovtsov, Stolypin’s successor as Chairman of the Council of Ministers. The key point is that the influences shaping policy in Russia were constantly changing. Power flowed through the system, concentrating at different points: the monarch, the foreign minister, the prime minister, the ambassadors. Indeed we can speak of a kind of ‘hydraulics of power’, in which the waxing of one node in the system produced the waning of others. And the adversarial dynamic within the system was further energized by the tension between opposed policy options. Russian liberal nationalists and pan-Slavs were likely to favour a forward policy on the Turkish Straits and a posture of solidarity with the Slavic ‘little brothers’ on the Balkan peninsula. Conservatives, by contrast, tended to be acutely aware of Russia’s inner political and financial weakness and the dangers – as Kokovtsov put it – of pursuing ‘an active foreign policy at the expense of the peasant’s stomach’; they therefore favoured a policy of peace at all costs.49
When the significance of the Bosnian annexation crisis was debated in the Duma in the spring of 1909, for example, the conservative interests represented in the Council of the United Nobility argued that the annexation had in no way damaged Russian interests or security and that Russia should adopt a policy of complete non-interference in Balkan affairs, while seeking reconciliation with Berlin. The real enemy, they argued, was Britain, which was trying to push Russia into a war with Germany in order to consolidate British control of world markets. Against this position, the pro-French and pro-British liberals of the Constitutional Democrat (Cadet) Party called for the transformation of the Triple Entente into a Triple Alliance that would enable Russia to project power in the Balkan region and arrest the decline of its great power status.50 This was one of the central problems confronting all the foreign policy executives (and those who try to understand them today): the ‘national interest’ was not an objective imperative pressing in upon government from the world outside, but the projection of particular interests within the political elite itself.51
In France, there was a different but broadly analogous dynamic. To a much greater extent than in Russia, the foreign ministry, or the Quai d’Orsay as it was known on account of its location, enjoyed formidable power and autonomy. It was a socially cohesive and relatively stable organization with a high sense of its own calling. A dense network of family connections reinforced the ministry’s esprit de corps: the brothers Jules and Paul Cambon were the ambassadors to Berlin and London respectively, the ambassador to St Petersburg in 1914, Maurice Paléologue, was Jules and Paul’s brother-in-law, and there were other dynasties – the Herbettes, the de Margeries, and the de Courcels, to name just a few. The ministry of foreign affairs protected its independence through habits of secrecy. Sensitive information was only rarely released to cabinet ministers. It was not unusual for senior functionaries to withhold information from the most senior politicians, even from the president of the Republic himself. In January 1895, for example, during the tenure of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, President Casimir Périer resigned after only six months in office, protesting that the ministry of foreign affairs had failed to keep him informed even of the most important developments. Policy documents were treated as arcana. Raymond Poincaré was informed of the details of the Franco-Russian Alliance only when he became premier and foreign minister in 1912.52
But the relative independence of the ministry did not necessarily confer power and autonomy upon the minister. French foreign ministers tended to be weak, weaker indeed than their own ministerial staff. One reason for this was the relatively rapid turnover of ministers, a consequence of the perennially high levels of political turbulence in pre-war France. Between 1 January 1913 and the outbreak of war, for example, there were no fewer than six different foreign ministers. Ministerial office was a more transitory and less important stage in the life cycle of French politicians than in Britain, Germany or Austria-Hungary. And in the absence of any code of cabinet solidarity, the energies and ambition of ministers tended to be consumed in the bitter factional strife that was part of the everyday life of government in the Third Republic.
Of course, there were exceptions to this rule. If a minister stayed in power for long enough and possessed sufficient determination and industry, he could certainly imprint his personality upon the workings of the ministry. Théophile Delcassé is a good example. He remained in office for a staggering seven years (from June 1898 until June 1905) and established his mastery over the ministry not only through tireless work, but also by ignoring his permanent officials in Paris and cultivating a network of like-minded ambassadors and functionaries from across the organization. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the waxing and waning of specific offices within the system produced adjustments in the distribution of power. Under a forceful minister like Delcassé, the power-share of the senior civil service functionaries known collectively as the Centrale tended to shrink, while the ambassadors, freed from the constraints imposed by the centre, flourished, just as Izvolsky and Hartwig did during the early years of Sazonov. Delcassé’s long spell in office saw the emergence of an inner cabinet of senior ambassadors around the Cambon brothers (London and Berlin) and Camille Barrère (Rome). The ambassadors met regularly in Paris to discuss policy and lobby key officials. They communicated with the minister through private letters, bypassing the functionaries of the Centrale.
The senior ambassadors developed an extraordinarily elevated sense of their own importance, especially if we measure it against the professional ethos of today’s ambassadors. Paul Cambon is a characteristic example: he remarked in a letter of 1901 that the whole of French diplomatic history amounted to little more than a long list of attempts by agents abroad to achieve something in the face of resistance from Paris. When he disagreed with his official instructions from the capital, he not infrequently burned them. During a tense conversation with Justin de Selves, minister of foreign affairs from June 1911 until January 1912, Cambon somewhat tactlessly informed de Selves that he considered himself the minister’s equal.53 This claim looks less bizarre if we bear in mind that between 1898, when he became ambassador to London, and the summer of 1914, Cambon saw nine ministers enter and leave office – two of them did so twice. Cambon did not regard himself as a subordinate employee of the government, but as a servant of France whose expertise entitled him to a major role in the policy-making process.
Underpinning Cambon’s exalted sense of self was the belief – shared by many of the senior ambassadors – that one did not merely represent France, one personified it. Though he was ambassador in London from 1898 until 1920, Cambon spoke not a word of English. During his meetings with Edward Grey (who spoke no French), he insisted that every utterance be translated into French, including easily recognized words such as ‘yes’.54 He firmly believed – like many members of the French elite – that French was the only language capable of articulating rational thought and he objected to the foundation of French schools in Britain on the eccentric grounds that French people raised in Britain tended to end up mentally retarded.55 Cambon and Delcassé established a close working relationship whose fruit was the Entente Cordiale of 1904. It was Cambon, more than anyone else, who laid the groundwork for the Entente, working hard from 1901 to persuade his British interlocutors to settle over Morocco, while at the same time urging Delcassé to relinquish France’s putative claims on Egypt.56
Things changed after Delcassé’s departure at the height of the first Moroccan crisis. His successors were less forceful and authoritative figures. Maurice Rouvier and Léon Bourgeois occupied the minister’s post for only ten and seven months respectively; Stéphen Pichon had a longer spell, from October 1906 to March 1911, but he abhorred regular hard work and was often absent from his desk in the Quai d’Orsay. The result was a steady rise in the influence of the Centrale.57 By 1911, two factional groupings had coalesced within the world of French foreign affairs. On the one side were the old ambassadors and their allies within the administration, who tended to favour détente with Germany and a pragmatic, open-ended approach to France’s foreign relations. On the other were the ‘Young Turks’, as Jules Cambon called them, of the Centrale.
The ambassadors wielded the authority of age and the experience acquired over long years in the field. The men of the Centrale, on the other hand, possessed formidable institutional and structural advantages. They could issue press releases, they controlled the transmission of official documents, and above all, they had access to the cabinet noir within the ministerial office – a small but important department responsible for opening letters and intercepting and deciphering diplomatic traffic. And just as in Russia, these structural and adversarial divisions coincided with divergent views of external relations. The agitations of the internal struggle for influence could thus have a direct impact on the orientation of policy.
French policy on the Morocco question is a case in point. After the Franco-German clash over Morocco in 1905 and the German débâcle at Algeciras in the following year, Paris and Berlin struggled to find an accord that would put the Moroccan conflict behind them. On the French side, opinions were divided on how German claims vis-à-vis Morocco ought to be handled. Should Paris seek to accommodate German interests in Morocco, or should it proceed as if German rights in the territory simply did not exist? The most outspoken exponent of the first view was Jules Cambon, brother of Paul and French ambassador to Berlin. Cambon had several reasons for seeking détente with Germany. The Germans, he argued, had a right to speak up for the interests of their industrialists and investors abroad. He also formed the view that the most senior German policy-makers – from the Kaiser and his close friend Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, to the chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, the German foreign secretary Heinrich von Tschirschky and his successor Wilhelm von Schoen – were sincerely desirous of better relations with Paris. It was France, he argued, with its factionalized politics and its perfervid nationalist press, that was chiefly responsible for the misunderstandings that had arisen between the two neighbouring powers. The fruit of Cambon’s efforts was the Franco-German Accord of 9 February 1909, which excluded Berlin from any political initiative in Morocco, while affirming the value of Franco-German cooperation in the economic sphere.58
On the other side of the argument were the men of the Centrale who opposed concessions of any kind. From behind the scenes, key officials such as the maniacally Germanophobe Maurice Herbette, head of communications at the Quai d’Orsay from 1907 to 1911, used his extensive newspaper contacts to sabotage negotiations by leaking potentially controversial conciliatory proposals to the French press before they had been seen by the Germans, and even by stirring up jingoist press campaigns against Cambon himself.59 Herbette was an excellent example of an official who managed to imprint his own outlook on French policy-making. In a memorandum of 1908 that resembles Eyre Crowe’s famous British Foreign Office memorandum of the previous year (except for the fact that whereas Crowe’s document fills twenty-five pages of print, Herbette’s stretches to an astonishing 300 pages of chaotic manuscript), Herbette painted the recent history of Franco-German relations in the darkest colours as a catalogue of malign ruses, ‘insinuations’ and menaces. The Germans, he wrote, were insincere, suspicious, disloyal, duplicitous. Their efforts to conciliate were cunning ploys designed to trick and isolate France; their representations on behalf of their interests abroad were mere provocations; their foreign policy a repellent alternaton of ‘menaces and promises’. France, he concluded, bore absolutely none of the responsibility for the poor state of relations between the two states, her handling of Germany had always been unimpeachably ‘conciliatory and dignified’: ‘an impartial examination of the documents proves that France and its governments cannot in any way be made responsible for this situation’. Like Crowe’s memorandum of the previous year, Herbette’s memorandum was focused on the ascription of reprehensible motives and ‘symptoms’ rather than on naming actual transgressions.60 There is no evidence that Herbette ever changed his views on Germany. He and other intransigent officials within the Centrale were a formidable obstacle to détente with Berlin.
With the collapse of the government at the beginning of March 1911 and Pichon’s fall from office, the influence of the Centrale reached an all-time high. Pichon’s successor as foreign minister was the conscientious but completely inexperienced Jean Cruppi, a former magistrate whose main qualification for the foreign affairs portfolio was that so many individuals better suited for the post had already turned it down – an indication of the low regard in which ministerial posts were held. During Cruppi’s short period at the ministry – he took office on 2 March 1911 and was out by 27 June – the Centrale seized effective control over policy. Under pressure from the political and commercial director at the Quai d’Orsay, Cruppi agreed to terminate all economic links with Germany in Morocco, an unequivocal repudiation of the 1909 accord. A sequence of unilateral initiatives followed – negotiations for the joint Franco-German management of a railway from Fez to Tangier were broken off without notice and a new financial agreement with Morocco was drafted in which there was no mention whatsoever of German participation. Cambon was horrified: the French, he warned, were conducting their relations with Germany in an ‘esprit de chicane’.61
Finally, in deciding, without consulting other interested countries, to deploy a substantial force of French metropolitan troops to the Moroccan city of Fez in the spring of 1911 on the pretext of repressing a local uprising and protecting French colonists, Paris broke comprehensively both with the Act of Algeciras and with the Franco-German Accord of 1909. The claim that this deployment was needed to protect the European community in Fez was bogus; the rebellion had occurred deep in the Moroccan interior and the danger to Europeans was remote. The Sultan’s appeal for assistance from Paris had in fact been formulated by the French consul and was passed to him for signature after Paris had already decided to intervene.62 We return below to the Agadir crisis that followed these steps – for the moment the crucial point is that it was not the French government as such that generated the forward policy in Morocco, but the hawks of the Quai d’Orsay, whose influence over policy was unrivalled in the spring and early summer of 1911.63 Here, as in Russia, the flux of power from one part of the executive to another produced rapid shifts in the tone and direction of policy.
In Germany, too, foreign policy was shaped by the interaction between power-centres within the system. But there were some structural differences. The most important was that, within the complex federal structure created to house the German Empire founded in 1871, the role of foreign minister was largely absorbed in the office of the imperial chancellor. This pivotal post was in fact a composite, in which a range of different offices were linked in personal union. The chancellor of the German Empire was usually also both the minister-president and the foreign minister of Prussia, the dominant federal state, whose territory encompassed about three-fifths of the citizens and territory of the new empire. There was no imperial foreign minister, just an imperial state secretary for foreign affairs, who was the direct subordinate of the chancellor. And the chancellor’s intimate link with the making of foreign policy was physically manifested in the fact that his private apartments were accommodated in the small and crowded palace at Wilhelmstrasse 76, where the German Foreign Office was also at home.
This was the system that had allowed Otto von Bismarck to dominate the unique constitutional structure he had helped to create in the aftermath of the German Wars of Unification and single-handedly to manage its external affairs. Bismarck’s departure in the early spring of 1890 left a power vacuum that no one could fill.64 Leo von Caprivi, the first post-Bismarckian chancellor and Prussian foreign minister, had no experience in foreign affairs. Caprivi’s epoch-making decision not to renew the Reinsurance Treaty was in fact driven by a faction within the German Foreign Office which had secretly opposed the Bismarckian line for some time. Led by Friedrich von Holstein, director of the political department at the Foreign Office, a highly intelligent, hyper-articulate, privately malicious and socially reclusive individual who aroused admiration but not much affection in his fellows, this faction had little difficulty in winning over the new chancellor. Just as in France, in other words, the weakness of the foreign minister (or in this case, chancellor) meant that the initiative slipped towards the permanent officials of the Wilhelmstrasse, the Berlin equivalent of the Centrale. This state of affairs continued under Caprivi’s successor, Prince Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who occupied the chancellorship in the years 1894–9. It was Holstein, not the chancellor or the imperial foreign secretary, who determined the shape of German foreign policy in the early and mid-1890s.
Holstein could do this in part because he had excellent ties both with the responsible politicians and with the coterie of advisers around Kaiser Wilhelm II.65 These were the years when Wilhelm was most energetically throwing his weight about, determined to become ‘his own Bismarck’ and to establish his own ‘personal rule’ over the cumbersome German system. He failed in this objective, but his antics did paradoxically produce a concentration of executive power, by virtue of the fact that the most senior politicians and officials clubbed together to ward off sovereign threats to the integrity of the decision-making process. Friedrich von Holstein, Count Philipp zu Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s intimate friend and influential adviser, and even the ineffectual chancellor Hohenlohe became adept at ‘managing the Kaiser’.66 They did so mainly by not taking him too seriously. In a letter of February 1897 to Eulenburg, Holstein observed that this was the ‘third policy programme’ he had seen from the sovereign in three months. Eulenburg told him to take it easy: the Kaiser’s projects were not ‘programmes’, he assured Holstein, but whimsical ‘marginal jottings’ of limited import for the conduct of policy. The chancellor, too, was unconcerned. ‘It seems that His Majesty is recommending another new programme,’ Hohenlohe wrote, ‘but I don’t take it too tragically; I’ve seen too many programmes come and go.’67
It was Eulenburg and Holstein who placed the career diplomat Bernhard von Bülow on the road to the chancellorship. Already as imperial foreign secretary under Chancellor Hohenlohe (1897–1900), Bülow had been able, with the help of his friends, to secure control of German policy. His position was even stronger after 1900, when the Kaiser, acting on Eulenburg’s advice, appointed Bülow to the chancellorship. More than any chancellor before him, Bülow deployed all the arts of the seasoned courtier to draw Wilhelm into his confidence. Despite internal rivalries and suspicions, the Bülow–Holstein–Eulenburg troika for a time kept a remarkably tight hold on policy-making.68 The system worked well as long as three conditions were satisfied: (i) the partners were in agreement on their ultimate objectives, (ii) their policies were successful, and (iii) the Kaiser remained quiescent.
During the Morocco crisis of 1905–6, all three of these preconditions lapsed. First, Holstein and Bülow found themselves in disagreement on German aims in Morocco (Bülow wanted compensation; Holstein hoped, unrealistically, to explode the Anglo-French Entente). Then it became clear at the conference of Algeciras in 1906, where the German delegation found itself isolated and outmanoeuvred by France, that the Morocco policy had been disastrously mishandled. One consequence of this fiasco was that the Kaiser, who had always been sceptical of the Moroccan démarche, disassociated himself from his chancellor and re-emerged as a threat to the policy-making process.69
It was the inverse of what happened at around the same time in Russia, where the débâcle of the Tsar’s East Asia policy weakened the sovereign’s position and set the scene for the assertion of cabinet responsibility. In Germany, by contrast, the failure of the senior officials temporarily restored the Kaiser’s freedom of movement. In January 1906, when the office of foreign secretary suddenly fell vacant (because its previous incumbent had died of overwork), Wilhelm II imposed a replacement of his own choice, disregarding Bulow’s advice. It was widely understood that Heinrich von Tschirschky, a close associate of the Kaiser who had often accompanied him on his travels, had been appointed to replace the Bülow–Holstein policy with something more conciliatory. By early 1907, there was talk of feuding between the ‘Bülow camp’ and the ‘Tschirschky circle’.
In the final years of his chancellorship, which lasted until 1909, Bülow fought ruthlessly to regain his former supremacy. He tried, as Bismarck had done in the 1880s, to build a new parliamentary bloc defined by loyalty to his own person, in the hope of rendering himself politically indispensable to the Kaiser. He helped to engineer the shattering scandal of the ‘Daily Telegraph Affair’ (November 1908) in which jejune remarks by Wilhelm in an interview published in a British newspaper triggered a wave of protest from a German public tired of the Kaiser’s public indiscretions. Bülow was even indirectly involved in the chain of press campaigns in 1907–8 that exposed homosexuals within the Kaiser’s intimate circle – including Eulenburg, the chancellor’s erstwhile friend and ally, now reviled by Bülow, who was himself probably homosexual, as a potential rival for the Kaiser’s favour.70 Despite these extravagant manoeuvres, Bülow never regained his earlier influence over foreign policy.71 The appointment of Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg to the chancellorship on 14 July 1909 brought a degree of stabilization. Bethmann may have lacked a background in foreign affairs, but he was a steady, moderate and formidable figure who quickly asserted his authority over the ministers and imperial secretaries.72 It helped that after the shock and humiliation of the Daily Telegraph and Eulenburg scandals, the Kaiser was less inclined than in earlier years to challenge the authority of his ministers in public.
Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.
Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.
There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’73 Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’.74 Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’.75
And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.
Grey quickly secured unchallenged control over the policy-making process, ensuring that British policy focused primarily on the ‘German threat’. It would be going too far, of course, to view this reorientation of British policy as a function solely of Edward Grey’s power. Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Nicolson, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled closely on reports from Hardinge.76 The ascendancy of the Grey group was eased by recent structural reforms to the Foreign Office whose object had not been to reinforce the authority of the foreign secretary, but rather to parcel influence out more widely across a range of senior officials.77 Nevertheless, the energy and vigilance with which Grey maintained his ascendancy are impressive. It helped, of course, that he enjoyed the firm support of his former co-conspirator Herbert Asquith, prime minister from 1908 until 1916. The backing of a large part of the Conservative bloc in the House of Commons was another important asset – and Grey proved adept at maintaining his cross-party appeal.
But Grey’s plenitude of power and consistency of vision did not entirely protect British policy-making from the agitations characteristic of the European executives. The anti-German position adopted by the Grey group did not enjoy wide support outside the Foreign Office. It was not even backed by the majority of the British cabinet. The Liberal government, and the Liberal movement more generally, were polarized by the tension between liberal imperialist and radical elements. Many of the leading radicals, and they included some of the most venerable figures in the party, deplored the foreign secretary’s policy of alignment with Russia. They accused Grey and his associates of adopting a pose towards Germany that was unnecessarily provocative. They doubted whether the advantages of appeasing Russia outweighed the potential benefits of friendship with the German Empire. They worried whether the creation of a Triple Entente might not pressure Germany into adopting an ever more aggressive stance and they pressed for détente with Berlin. A further problem was the complexion of British public opinion, especially within the cultural and political elite, which, despite intermittent Anglo-German ‘press wars’, was drifting into a more pro-German mood during the last few years before the outbreak of war.78 Antagonism to Germany coexisted across the British elites with multi-layered cultural ties and a deep admiration of the country’s cultural, economic and scientific achievements.79
Grey met these challenges by shielding the policy-making process from the scrutiny of unfriendly eyes. Documents emanating from his desk were often marked ‘For Limited Circulation Only’; a typical annotation from his private secretary reads ‘Sir E. Grey thinks this circulation sufficient’. Consultations on important policy decisions – notably regarding the deepening commitment to France – were confined to trusted contacts within the administration. Cabinet was not informed, for example, of the discussions between France and Britain in December 1905 and May 1906, in which military representatives of both countries agreed in principle the form that a British military intervention in support of France would take in the event of war. This mode of proceeding suited Grey’s elitist understanding of politics and his avowed view of the Entente, which was that it should be cultivated ‘in a loyal and generous spirit’ ensuring that any pitfalls arising would ‘strengthen’ rather than weaken the ‘Agreement’, and that the gradual advance into a deepening commitment should always be insulated from ‘party controversy’.80 In other words, Grey ran a double-track policy. In public, he repeatedly denied that Britain was under any obligation to come to France’s aid. London’s hands remained absolutely free. Pressed by hostile colleagues, he could always say that the interlinked mobilization scenarios of the military were mere contingency plans. By means of these complex manoeuvres, Grey was able to impart a remarkable inner consistency to the management of British foreign policy.
Yet it is easy to see how this state of affairs – driven by the shifting balance of power between factions within the British government and the political elite – gave rise to confusion. To those French interlocutors who dealt directly with the foreign secretary and his associates, it was clear that ‘Sir Grey’, as some of them quaintly called him, would stand by France in the event of a war, notwithstanding the official insistence on the non-binding character of the Entente. But to the Germans, who were not privy to these conversations, it looked very much as if Britain might stand aside from the continental coalition, especially if the Franco-Russian Alliance took the initiative against Germany, rather than the other way around.
The fluctuation of power across different points in the decision-making structures amplified the complexity and unpredictabilty of interactions in the European international system, especially in those moments of political crisis when two or more executives interacted with each other in an atmosphere of heightened pressure and threat. We can observe this effect with particular clarity in the quarrel that broke out between Germany and France over Morocco in the summer of 1911. The Franco-German Moroccan Agreement of 1909 broke down, as we have seen, following a sequence of steps undertaken by the Quai d’Orsay, culminating in the dispatch of a large French force to the Sultanate in April 1911. On 5 June 1911, alarmed at the prospect of a unilateral French seizure of power in Morocco, the Spanish government deployed troops to occupy Larache and Ksar-el-Kebir in northern and northwestern Morocco. A German intervention was now inevitable, and the gunboat Panther, an unimpressive craft that was two years overdue for scrapping, duly dropped anchor off the Moroccan coast on 1 July 1911.
There is something very odd about the Agadir crisis. It was allowed to escalate to the point where it seemed that a western-European war was imminent, yet the positions advanced by the opposing parties were not irreconcilable and eventually provided the basis for an enduring settlement. Why did the escalation happen? Part of the reason lay in the intransigence of the Quai d’Orsay. It was the Centrale that seized and held the initiative in the early phase of the crisis. The position of the permanent officials was strengthened by the fact that Foreign Minister Jean Cruppi left office on 27 June, a few days before the Panther arrived off Agadir. His successor Justin de Selves – a default candidate like Cruppi – immediately fell under the thrall of the chef du cabinet at the French foreign ministry, Maurice Herbette. As chief of communications between 1907 and 1911, Herbette had built up an extensive network of newspaper contacts and he worked hard during the Agadir crisis to discredit the very idea of talks with Germany. It was partly a consequence of the intransigence of Herbette and other powerful permanent officials that it was not until the end of July 1911 that the French ambassador in Berlin was even instructed to commence talks with Berlin about how Germany might be compensated for the consolidation of French exclusive dominion in Morocco.
This conciliatory move was itself only possible because Ambassador Jules Cambon appealed from his Berlin posting over the head of his foreign minister to the energetic and outspoken premier Joseph Caillaux, who had taken office on 27 June, just before the crisis broke. The son of a finance minister, the celebrated Eugène Caillaux who had paid off the French indemnity to Germany so swiftly after 1870, Joseph Caillaux was an economic liberal and fiscal modernizer who viewed foreign affairs with the pragmatic eyes of a businessman. He saw no reason why German commercial interests in Morocco should not be treated on exactly the same footing as those of other nationalities and he was critical of the mercantilist style of economic strategy that had become a hallmark of European imperialism.81 The cabinet was split between Caillaux, who favoured a conciliatory policy on Morocco, and Justin de Selves, who functioned as a mouthpiece for the hawks at the Quai d’Orsay. De Selves was under pressure from his ministry to send French cruisers to Agadir, a move that might have triggered a serious escalation. After Caillaux vetoed this option, the hawks began to organize against him and Jules Cambon. Press releases were used to discredit the champions of conciliation. Caillaux became so exasperated at Maurice Herbette’s efforts to sabotage his policy that he summoned him to his office and told him, fitting the action to the words: ‘I will break you like this pencil’.82 Caillaux was eventually able to achieve an agreement with Germany, but only by conducting confidential and unofficial talks with Berlin (through the German embassy in Paris, through Jules Cambon in Berlin and through the mediation of a businessman called Fondère) that successfully circumvented the minister and his officials.83 The result was that by the beginning of August, Caillaux had secretly accepted a compensation deal with Berlin to which his foreign minister Justin de Selves remained adamantly opposed.84
This backstairs diplomacy helped the premier to bypass the Germanophobe hawks of the French foreign ministry, but it brought its own additional risks. In the first week of August 1911, a brief breakdown in communications led to an entirely unnecessary escalation, including threats to dispatch French and British warships to Agadir, even though Caillaux and his German counterpart were at that point in fact both willing to compromise.85 Caillaux blamed his mediator Fondère for the misunderstanding, but there would have been no need for a go-between like Fondère or for Caillaux’s backstairs dealing, had it not been for the fact that the officials of the ministry were conspiring to throw him out of office and wreck negotiations for an understanding with Germany. Inevitably, this also meant that Caillaux was sometimes forced to backtrack on his commitments, because his ministerial colleagues refused to accept the assurances he had made to Berlin. And these complex manoeuvres heightened the uncertainty in Berlin about how French moves should be read: it was a matter of weighing contradictory trends against each other, as one junior German diplomat did when he reported that ‘despite the screaming in the press and the chauvinism of the army’, Caillaux’s policy would probably prevail.86
As for German policy during the crisis, it was formulated not by Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, and certainly not by the Kaiser, who was completely uninterested in Morocco, but by the energetic Swabian imperial state secretary for foreign affairs, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter. Kiderlen had been involved in drawing up the Franco-German Agreement on Morocco of February 1909 and it was natural that he should play a leading role in formulating Germany’s response to the French troop deployment. In a manner characteristic of the upper reaches of the German executive, the foreign secretary seized personal control of the Morocco policy-thread, managing communications with Paris and keeping the chancellor at arm’s length from the developing crisis.87 Kiderlen had no interest in securing a German share of Morocco, but he was determined not to allow France unilaterally to impose exclusive control there. He hoped, by mirroring French moves with a sequence of incremental German gestures of protest, to secure an acknowledgement of German rights and some form of territorial compensation in the French Congo. He had good reason to believe that this objective could be secured without conflict, for in May 1911, Joseph Caillaux, then finance minister, had assured German diplomats in Paris that ‘France would be prepared, if we [the Germans] recognized its vital interest in Morocco, to make concessions to us elsewhere.’88 After Caillaux’s accession to the office of premier in June, therefore, Kiderlen assumed that this would be France’s policy. He rejected plans to send two ships to Agadir; he believed that the Panther, which was not equipped to organize an effective landing and had no instructions to attempt one, would suffice for a symbolic demonstration.89
The subsequent evolution of the crisis revealed that Kiderlen had grossly misjudged the French response. He also seriously mismanaged the German domestic environment. Kiderlen’s personal relations with Kaiser Wilhelm II were not especially cordial and the Emperor was as sceptical of the administration’s policy on North Africa in 1911 as he had been in 1905.90 In order to bolster himself against possible opposition from this quarter, Kiderlen marshalled the support of German ultra-nationalist politicians and publicists. But he was unable, once the press campaign got underway, to control its tone or content. As a consequence, a German policy that aimed consistently to keep the crisis below the threshold of armed confrontation unfolded against the background of thunderous nationalist press agitation that rang alarm bells in Paris and London. Banner headlines in the ultra-nationalist papers shrieking ‘West Morocco to Germany!’ were grist to the mills of the hawks in Paris. They also worried the Kaiser, who issued such sharp criticisms of the foreign secretary’s policy that on 17 July Kiderlen tendered his resignation – only through Chancellor Bethmann’s mediation was it possible to save the policy and keep Kiderlen in office.91
On 4 November 1911, a Franco-German treaty at last defined the terms of an agreement. Morocco became an exclusively French protectorate, German business interests were assured of respectful treatment and parts of the French Congo were conceded to Germany. But the 1911 Moroccan crisis had exposed the perilous incoherence of French diplomacy. An internal disciplinary committee convened on 18 November 1911 to investigate the actions of Maurice Herbette revealed the elaborate machinations of the permanent officials in Paris. Caillaux, too, was discredited. He and his cabinet were associated in the public eye with a treaty that many French nationalists thought had conceded too much to the Germans, which is remarkable, given that it conceded less than Delcassé had envisaged offering in exchange for Morocco in the late 1890s. Revelations of the premier’s secret negotiations with the Germans (acquired as decrypts by the cabinet noir and tactically leaked to the press by the Centrale) sealed his fate and Caillaux fell from office on 21 January 1912, having occupied the premiership for only seven months.
In Germany, too, the treaty of November 1911 was denounced – for granting the Germans too little. Kiderlen was partly to blame for this – there was a gaping discrepancy between what Germany could expect to achieve by challenging the French over Morocco and the glittering prizes – a ‘German West Morocco’, for example – held out to the public by the ultra-nationalist press whose agitation Kiderlen had briefly and unwisely encouraged. By doing this, the foreign secretary contributed to the deepening alienation between the government and those who claimed to be its ‘natural supporters’ on the far right. Yet this faustian pact with the nationalist media had only been necessary because Kiderlen had no other means of ensuring that the sovereign would not compromise his own control of the policy-making process.
Perhaps the most important consequence of German policy oscillation during the crisis was a growing tendency in Paris to misread German actions as driven by a policy of bluff. When he read the files of the Quai d’Orsai in the first months of 1912, the new incoming premier and foreign minister, Raymond Poincaré, was struck by the alternation of toughness and concessions in German policy: ‘whenever we have adopted a conciliatory approach to Germany’, Poincaré observed, ‘she has abused it; on the other hand, on each occasion when we have have shown firmness, she has yielded’. From this he drew the ominous conclusion that Germany understood ‘only the language of force’.92
Britain’s involvement in the crisis, too, bore the imprint of deep divisions within the executive structure. The reaction of the Liberal cabinet in London was initially cautious, since it was felt that France was largely responsible for triggering the crisis and should be urged to give ground. On 19 July, the cabinet even authorized Grey to inform Paris that there were circumstances under which Britain might accept a German presence in Morocco. The French government angrily replied that British acquiescence on this point would amount to a breach in the Anglo-French agreement of 1904.93 At the same time, the anti-Germans around Grey adopted a robustly pro-French position. Nicolson, Buchanan, Haldane and Grey himself talked up the threat posed by Germany and revived the notion that what was at stake was the maintenance of the Entente. On 19 July, the secretary of state for war Richard Haldane asked the director of military operations Sir Henry Wilson to delay his departure for the continent so that he could spend a morning assessing prospective troop strengths in the event of a conflict on the Franco-German frontier.94 When Justin de Selves expressed surprise at the extent of German demands for compensation in the Congo, Sir Francis Bertie wrote to Grey from Paris of the ‘excessive’ requirements of the Germans, which ‘are known by them to be impossible of acceptance and are intended to reconcile the French to the establishment of Germany on the Moroccan coast’95 – this was a misreading of the German position, and it was calculated to strike fear into the British navalists, for whom the establishment of a German stronghold on the Atlantic would have been unacceptable.
It was the prospect of a German Atlantic port that enabled Grey to secure cabinet approval for a private warning to the German ambassador on 21 July that if Germany meant to land at Agadir, Britain would be obliged to defend her interests there – by which Grey meant the deployment of British warships.96 On the same day, the Grey group raised the temperature yet further: on the evening of 21 July 1911, the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George delivered a speech at the Mansion House issuing a sharp warning to Berlin. It was imperative, Lloyd George said, that Britain should maintain ‘her place and her prestige among the Great Powers of the world’. British power had more than once ‘redeemed’ continental nations from ‘overwhelming disaster and even from national extinction’. If Britain were to be forced to choose between peace on the one hand and the surrender of her international pre-eminence on the other, ‘then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great nation like ours to endure’.97 In the days that followed, Grey stoked the fires of a naval panic in London, warning Lloyd George and Churchill that the British fleet was in danger of imminent attack and informing Reginald McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty, that the German fleet was mobilized and ready to strike – in reality, the High Seas Fleet was scattered and the Germans had no intention of concentrating it.98
The Mansion House speech was no spontaneous outburst; it was a gambit carefully planned by Grey, Asquith and Lloyd George. Just as Caillaux bypassed his Foreign Office in order to impose his own dovish agenda on the negotiations with Berlin, so the anti-Germans around Grey bypassed the dovish radicals in the Liberal cabinet in order to deliver a harsh and potentially provocative message to the Germans. Lloyd George had not cleared the sensitive passages of his speech with the cabinet, only with Prime Minister Asquith and Foreign Secretary Grey.99 The speech was all the more important for the fact that it signalled Lloyd George’s defection from the camp of the dove radicals to that of the liberal imperialists. His words caused consternation in Berlin, where it was felt that the British government was needlessly disrupting the passage of Franco-German negotiations. ‘Who is Lloyd George to lay down the law to Germany and to stop a quick Franco-German settlement?’ Arthur Zimmermann, under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, asked the British ambassador in Berlin.100
Lloyd George’s words also shocked those British cabinet ministers who had not signed up to Grey’s programme. Viscount Morley, secretary of state for India, denounced the speech – and Grey’s subsequent defence of it in conversation with the German ambassador in London – as an ‘unwarranted and unfortunate provocation to Germany’. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Loreburn, was appalled to find Britain so aggressively backing France in a dispute in which (as it seemed to Loreburn) Paris was by no means clear of blame. He entreated Grey to disavow the speech and to make it clear that Britain had no intention of interfering in the negotiations between France and Germany.101
The Grey group prevailed. At a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence convened on 23 August 1911, it was agreed that should a Franco-German war break out, Britain would mount a rapid continental intervention, including the transshipment of a British Expeditionary Force. Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George and the service chiefs were present, but key radicals, including Morley, Crewe, Harcourt and Esher, were either not informed or not invited. The weeks that followed were filled (to the horror of the radicals) with enthusiastic planning for war. Even Asquith recoiled from the extensive ‘military conversations’ designed to coordinate mobilization plans and strategy with the French in September 1911, but Grey refused to have them stopped.102 To a greater extent than either of the two original quarrelling parties, Britain was willing to consider the possibility of a drastic escalation.103 While the French had made no war preparations, even at the height of the crisis, Bethmann remarked in a letter to the German ambassador in London, ‘Britain seems to have been ready to strike every day.’104 The Austrian foreign minister Count Aehrenthal came to a similar conclusion, noting on 3 August that England had for a moment seemed ready to use the Moroccan quarrel as a pretext for a full-on ‘reckoning’ with its German rival.105 The contrast with Russia’s relatively reserved and conciliatory position was particularly striking.106 Only after this British reaction did Vienna abandon the policy of neutrality it had hitherto adopted on the Morocco question.107
The battle between the hawks and the doves was not yet over. Just as the officials of the French foreign ministry wrought their revenge upon Caillaux and the hapless Justin de Selves, toppling them from office in January 1912, so in Britain the radical Liberal sceptics renewed their assault on the policy pursued by Grey. Among the ministers there were many who had never appreciated the depth of Grey’s commitments to France before Agadir. In December 1911, there was a backbench revolt against Grey. Part of the ill-feeling against him arose from a frustration at the secretiveness of his tactics – why had no one been told about the undertakings the government was supposedly making on behalf of the British people? Arthur Ponsonby and Noel Buxton, both prominent Liberal anti-Grey activists, demanded that a committee be formed to improve Anglo-German relations. The backlash against the foreign secretary swept through virtually the entire liberal press. But whereas the die-hards in Paris did succeed in discrediting both Caillaux and his conciliatory approach, the ‘pro-German’ lobby in Britain failed to dislodge Grey or his policy.
There were three reasons for this: the first was that British ministers were inherently less vulnerable to this kind of campaigning, thanks to the robust partisan structure of British parliamentary politics; then there was the fact that if Grey’s policy were comprehensively disavowed, he himself might resign, taking Lloyd George, Haldane and possibly Churchill with him – this would be the end of the Liberals in government, a sobering thought for the Liberal non-interventionists. No less important was the support of the parliamentary Conservatives for Grey’s policy of military entente with France. One of the things that helped the foreign secretary to weather the storms of the Agadir crisis was the secret assurance of support from Arthur Balfour, leader of the Conservative Party until November 1911.108 This dependence on the parliamentary opposition would prove something of a liability in the summer of 1914, when a looming crisis over Ireland raised questions about the continuation of Conservative support.
But if the essentials of Grey’s ententiste policy remained in place, the fact that he had to defend his position against such vociferous and influential domestic opposition nonetheless prevented him from articulating his commitments as unequivocally as he might have wished. After Agadir, Grey had to walk a tightrope between French demands that he make a clearer commitment and the insistence of the non-interventionists in cabinet (who were, after all, still in the majority) that he do no such thing. In two cabinet resolutions of November 1911, fifteen of his fellow cabinet ministers called Grey to order, demanding that he desist from sponsoring high-level military discussions between Britain and France without their prior knowledge and approval. In January 1912, there was talk among the non-interventionists led by Loreburn of agreeing a cabinet statement to the effect that Britain was ‘not under any obligation, direct or indirect, express or implied, to support France against Germany by force of arms’. Grey and his people were spared this blow only by Loreburn’s illness and retirement.109
The need to balance such concerted opposition from inside his government with a policy focused on maintaining the entente as a security device produced a baffling ambiguity in British diplomatic signalling. On the one hand, British military commanders had always been accorded a certain discretion in their dealings with their French colleagues; their assurances of British military support in the event of a conflict with Germany helped to harden the French position.110 These initiatives were not sanctioned by Cabinet, let alone by the British parliament. During the Agadir crisis of 1911, the new DMO, Major General Henry Wilson, was sent to Paris for discussions with the French General Staff aimed at agreeing a schedule for an Anglo-French joint mobilization against Germany. The resulting Wilson–Dubail memorandum of 21 July 1911 (General Auguste Dubail was at that time the French General Staff chief) stipulated that by day fifteen of mobilization, six British infantry divisions, one cavalry division, and two mounted brigades (encompassing 150,000 men and 67,000 horses) would be deployed on the French left flank.111 The decision in the early months of 1912 to neutralize German naval expansion by coordinating Anglo-French naval strategy strengthened the presumption that something like a defensive alliance was coming into existence.
On the other hand, the famous Grey–Cambon letters of 22–23 November 1912, ‘extorted’, as Morley later put it, from Grey by his non-interventionist opponents, made it clear that the Entente was anything but an alliance, for they asserted the freedom of both partners to act independently, even if one of the parties were to be attacked by a third power. Was there an obligation to support France, or was there not? It was all very well for Grey to declare in public that these were mere contingency plans with no binding force. In private, the foreign secretary acknowledged that he viewed the Anglo-French military conversations as ‘committing us to cooperation with France’, so long as her actions were ‘non-provocative and reasonable’. When the permanent under-secretary for foreign affairs, Sir Arthur Nicolson, inisted to Grey at the beginning of August 1914 that ‘you have over and over again promised M. Cambon that if Germany was the aggressor you would stand by France’, Grey merely replied: ‘Yes, but he has nothing in writing.’112
Anglo-French diplomacy thus came to be marked at the highest level – on the British side – by a kind of doublethink. It was understood that Grey must tailor his public statements and even his official communications to the expectations of the non-interventionists in cabinet and among the broader public. Yet, when Paul Cambon listened to his anti-German friends in London, or to Bertie in Paris, he heard what he wanted to hear. This was a difficult arrangement for the French to live with, to say the least. As the July Crisis of 1914 reached its climax, it would cost the decision-makers in Paris, the French ambassador in London and indeed Grey himself a few moments of high anxiety. More importantly, uncertainty about the British commitment forced French strategists to compensate in the east for their weaknesses in the west by committing ever more strongly to militarizing the alliance with Russia.113 The French government, Baron Guillaume, the Belgian minister in Paris, noted in the spring of 1913, was obliged to ‘tighten more and more its alliance with Russia, because it is aware that Britain’s friendship for it is less and less solid and effective’.114 For Germany too the irresolution of British policy was a source of confusion and vexation. On the one hand, Grey was obliged to maintain the appearance of an open door to Berlin in order to placate the non-interventionists. Yet he also felt obliged from time to time to administer harsh warnings to the Germans, lest they come to the conclusion that France had been comprehensively abandoned and could be attacked without fear of a British response. The result of this system of mixed messaging, a consequence of the mutability of power relations within the European executives, was a perennial uncertainty about British intentions that would unsettle the policy-makers in Berlin throughout the July Crisis.
‘The situation [in Europe] is extraordinary,’ Colonel Edward House reported to American President Woodrow Wilson after a trip to Europe in May 1914. ‘It is militarism run stark mad.’115 House’s views may have been shaped in part by a personal experience: he was a ‘political colonel’ of the American type. He had been appointed to that rank in the Texas militia in return for political services there. But when Colonel House visited Berlin, the Germans took him to be a military man and always sat him with the generals at dinner. His views on the prevalence of militarism may have owed something to this unfortunate misunderstanding.116 Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, viewed from across the Atlantic, pre-war Europe presented a curious spectacle. Senior statesmen, emperors and kings attended public occasions wearing military uniform; elaborate military reviews were an integral part of the public ceremonial of power; immense illuminated naval displays drew huge crowds and filled the pages of the illustrated journals; conscript armies grew in size until they became male microcosms of the nation; the cult of military display entered the public and the private life of even the smallest communities. In what ways did this ‘militarism’ shape the decisions that led Europe to war in 1914? Did the roots of the July Crisis lie, as some historians have argued, in an abdication of responsibility by civilian politicians and a usurpation of political power by the generals?
There was without doubt a struggle between the soldiers and the civilians within the pre-war executives: it was a struggle for money. Defence expenditure accounted for a substantial share of government spending. Military commanders keen to improve equipment, training and infrastructure had to contend (as they do today) with civilian politicians for access to government resources. Conversely, ministers of finance and their political allies fought to impose restraint in the name of fiscal rigour or domestic consolidation. Who prevailed in these contests depended on the structure of the institutional environment and the prevailing domestic and international political constellation.
Until 1908, the chaotic structure of the Russian military command made it difficult for the generals to lobby government effectively. But the balance began to shift from 1908, when reforms to the military administration created a more concentrated executive structure, establishing the minister of war as the pre-eminent defence official with the exclusive right to report to the Tsar on military matters.117 From 1909, a rivalry of epic bitterness evolved between the new war minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov (who was still in post in July 1914) and the strong-willed conservative finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Backed by the powerful premier Pyotr Stolypin, Kokovtsov, a champion of fiscal responsibility and domestic economic development, routinely blocked or curtailed Sukhomlinov’s draft budgets. Professional friction swiftly deepened into lively personal hatred.118 Sukhomlinov thought Kokovtsov ‘narrow, verbose and self-seeking’; Kokovtsov accused the minister of war (with more justice) of incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption.119
Kokovtsov’s German equivalent was Adolf Wermuth, treasury minister in 1909–11, who, with the support of Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg, worked hard to rebalance the Reich budget and cut public debt. Wermuth was critical of overspending under Tirpitz and often complained of the naval secretary’s irresponsibility, just as Kokovtsov complained of Sukhomlinov’s profligate handling of military funding.120 The treasury minister’s motto was: ‘no expenditures without revenues’.121 There was also perennial tension between the chief of staff and the minister of war, since the former’s demands for increased funding were often rejected or opposed by the latter.122 A recent study has even suggested that the famous memorandum of 1905 in which the chief of the General Staff Alfred von Schlieffen sketched the outlines of a massive westward offensive, was not a ‘war plan’ as such but a plea for more government money – among other things, Schlieffen’s sketch envisaged the deployment of eighty-one divisions, more than the German army when mobilized actually possessed at the time.123 The question of military finance was complicated in Germany by the fact that the federal constitution assigned direct taxation revenues to the member states, rather than to the Reich government. The devolved structure of the German Empire placed a fiscal limit on Reich defence expenditure that had no direct counterpart in Britain, France or Russia.124
Nevertheless, the conflict over resources was muted in Germany by the fact that military budgets were submitted to the parliament only at five-yearly intervals – a system known as the Quinquennat. Because senior military figures valued the Quinquennat as a means of protecting the army from constant parliamentary interference, they were reluctant to jeopardize it by requesting large extra-budgetary credits. This system worked as a powerful incentive for self-restraint. As the Prussian minister of war Karl von Einem observed in June 1906, the Quinquennat was a cumbersome arrangement, but it was useful nonetheless, because ‘the savage and persistent agitation against the existence of the army which arises with every military expansion would only become all the more dangerous if it were a yearly occurrence’.125 Even in 1911, when the Quinquennat came up for renewal and Chief of Staff Moltke and War Minister Heeringen joined forces in pressing for substantial growth, the opposition of Treasury Minister Wermuth and Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg ensured that the resulting increase in the strength of the peacetime army was very modest (10,000 men).126
We can discern analogous tensions in every European executive. In Britain, the Liberals campaigned (and won an absolute majority) in 1906 on the promise to cut back the vast military expenditure of the Boer War years under the slogan ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’. Budgetary constraints were a significant factor in the decision to seek an understanding with France and Russia. One consequence was that, while British naval budgets continued to soar (British naval spending was three times the German figure in 1904 and still more than double in 1913), army expenditure remained static throughout the pre-war years, forcing War Minister Haldane to focus on efficiency savings and reorganization rather than expansion.127 In Austria-Hungary, the tumultuous domestic politics of dualism virtually paralysed the monarchy’s military development after the turn of the century, as autonomist groups within the Hungarian parliament fought to starve the monarchy’s joint army of Hungarian tax revenues and recruits. In this environment, proposals for increased military allocations were worn down in endless legislative feuding, and the Habsburg military languished in a condition, as the Austrian staff chief put it, of ‘persistent stagnation’. This was one reason why, as late as 1912, Austria-Hungary spent only 2.6 per cent of its net national product on defence – a smaller proportion than any other European power and certainly far below what its economy could afford (the figures for Russia, France and Germany in that year were 4.5, 4.0 and 3.8 per cent respectively).128
In France, the ‘Dreyfus affair’ of the 1890s had destroyed the civil– military consensus of the Third Republic and placed the senior echelons of the army, viewed as a bastion of clerical and reactionary attitudes, under a cloud of public suspicion, especially in the eyes of the republican and anticlerical left. In the wake of the scandal, three successive Radical governments pursued a programme of aggressive ‘republicanizing’ military reform, especially under prime ministers Émile Combes (1903–5) and Georges Clemenceau (1906–9). Government control over the army was tightened, the civilian-minded ministry of war grew stronger vis-à-vis the regular army commanders and the period of service was reduced in March 1905 – against the advice of the military experts – from three years to two with a view to transforming the politically suspect ‘praetorian guard’ of the Dreyfus years into a ‘citizen army’ of civilian reservists for national defence in wartime.
Only in the last pre-war years did the tide begin to turn in favour of the French military. In France, as earlier in Russia, the army leadership was streamlined in 1911 and the chief of the General Staff, Joseph Joffre, was designated as the official responsible for military planning in peacetime and the command of the main army at war. The ‘long and painful story’ of the struggle to secure increased funds continued, but in 1912–14, the pro-military attitude of the Poincaré government and then of the Poincaré presidency, reinforced by complex realignments in French politics and opinion, created an environment more conducive to rearmament.129 By 1913 it was politically feasible to press for a return to a three-year training regime, albeit over the protests of Finance Minister Louis-Lucien Klotz, who argued that the reinforcement of border fortifications would be cheaper and more effective.130 In Germany, too, the souring of the mood after Agadir encouraged Minister of War Josias von Heeringen and Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke to press harder for army growth. From his position in the Reich Treasury Office, Adolf Wermuth fought a robust rearguard action against higher expenditures, but resigned in March 1912, after it became clear that his policy no longer enjoyed broad governmental support. The fiscal rigorism of the Wermuth era was renounced, and the exponents of military expenditure gradually gained the upper hand over their naval rivals. After a long period of relative stagnation, the army bill of 3 July 1913 took German military expenditure to unprecedented heights.131
In Russia, Vladimir Kokovtsov, who remained finance minister and succeeded Pyotr Stolypin as premier after the latter’s assassination, found it harder and harder to fight off the relentless lobbying and backstairs intrigues of War Minister Sukhomlinov. The feud between the two men came to a head at an important ministerial meeting in the spring of 1913, when Sukhomlinov ambushed the premier with a major budgetary proposal on which everyone at the table had been briefed except Kokovtsov himself. The support of the sovereign was crucial to this shift in the balance of power. ‘In your conflicts with Sukhomlinov you are always right,’ Nicholas II told Kokovtsov in October 1912. ‘But I want you to understand my attitude: I have been supporting Sukhomlinov not because I have no confidence in you, but because I cannot refuse to agree to military appropriations.’132
Did this massive transfer of resources entail a transfer of power, or at least of political influence? An answer to this question has to take account of the diverse conditions prevailing in the various states. The country where we encounter the firmest regime of civilian control is without doubt France. In December 1911, when Joffre outlined his new strategic plan, focused on a massive offensive deployment across the Franco-German border, the Radical prime minister Joseph Caillaux curtly informed the staff chief that decision-making was ultimately the responsibility of the civilian authorities.133 The task of the CGS, Caillaux frequently pointed out, was merely to advise his political masters on the matters that fell within his expertise. The switch to increased military expenditure and the decision to invest in Joffre’s offensive deployment in 1912–14 emanated not from the military, but from the politicians, under the leadership of the hawkish but in constitutional terms emphatically civilian Raymond Poincaré.
The situation in Russia was quite different. Here, the presence of the Tsar as the focal point of the autocratic system made it possible for individual ministers to carve out a certain relative autonomy. War Minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov is a characteristic example. At the time of his appointment in 1909, a struggle was raging in St Petersburg over parliamentary control of the army. An influential group of deputies was attempting to assert the Duma’s right of oversight over defence policy. Sukhomlinov was brought in to see off the Duma, prevent the infiltration of ‘civilian attitudes’ into military decision-making and protect the Tsar’s prerogative, a role that earned him the hatred of public opinion, but assured him strong support from the throne.134 This backing from the sovereign enabled the war minister to formulate a security policy dramatically at variance with official Russian commitments to the alliance with France.
Rather than meeting French demands for a swift offensive strike against Germany in the first phase of mobilization, Sukhomlinov’s Reorganization of 1910 shifted the focus of Russian deployments away from the western border zones in the Polish salient to locations in the Russian interior. The aim was to achieve a better balance between unit strengths and population density and to create a force that could be deployed, if necessary, to an eastern theatre of operations. The extreme west was to be abandoned to the enemy in the first phase of hostilities, pending a massive combined counter-offensive by the Russian armies.135 It does not seem that any effort was made to square this innovation with the ministry of foreign affairs. French military experts were initially horrified at the new plan, which they saw as depriving the Franco-Russian Alliance of the military initiative against Germany. The Russians did ultimately address these French concerns, but it is remarkable nonetheless that Sukhomlinov possessed sufficient independence to devise and implement a policy that appeared to run against the grain of the alliance with France, the centrepiece of Russian foreign policy.136
Armed with the support of the Tsar, Sukhomlinov was also able to undermine the authority of Prime Minister Kokovtsov, not just by challenging him over military budgeting, but also by building a hostile bloc in the Council of Ministers. And this in turn furnished him with a platform from which he could expound his views on Russia’s security situation. In a series of key meetings in the fourth week of November 1912, Sukhomlinov expounded the view that war was inevitable, ‘and it would be more profitable for us to begin it as soon as possible’; a war, he argued, ‘would bring [Russia] nothing but good’. These bizarre and deluded claims astonished the cautious Kokovtsov.137 But Sukhomlinov was able to do this only because he had the support of other civilian ministers, Rukhlov, Maklakov, Shcheglovitov, and most importantly the powerful A. V. Krivoshein, minister of agriculture and a confidant of the Tsar. In the last months of 1912, a ‘war party’ emerged within the Council of Ministers, led by Sukhomlinov and Krivoshein.138
In Germany, too, the praetorian character of the system assured the military a certain freedom of manoeuvre. Key figures such as the chief of staff could clearly acquire intermittent leverage on decision-making, especially at moments of heightened tension.139 Establishing what military commanders said is easy enough; ascertaining the weight of their counsels in government decision-making is much less straightforward, especially in an environment where the absence of a collegial decision-making organ like the Russian Council of Ministers removed the need for open conflict between military and civilian office-holders.
One way of understanding the interaction between military and civilian policy-making is to examine the relationship between the official diplomatic apparatus of ambassadors, ministers and legation secretaries and the parallel network – overseen by the General Staff and the Admiralty – of the military and naval attachés, whose perspective on events sometimes diverged from that of the official diplomatic networks. To take just one example: in October 1911, Wilhelm Widenmann, the German naval attaché in London, sent an alarming report to Berlin. British naval officers, Widenmann wrote, were now openly admitting that England had ‘mobilised its entire fleet’ during the summer months of the Agadir crisis. England, it seemed, had ‘merely been waiting for a signal from France to fall upon Germany’. To make matters worse, the new First Sea Lord was the ‘unscrupulous, ambitious and unreliable demagogue’ Winston Churchill. Germany must therefore steel itself for the possibility of an unprovoked attack, in the manner of the British annihilation of the Danish fleet at Copenhagen in 1807. Further naval rearmament was essential, for ‘only one thing impresses in England: a firm goal and the indomitable will to accomplish it’.140 These dispatches were passed to Wilhelm II, who covered them in delighted annotations – ‘correct’, ‘correct’, ‘excellent’ and so on. There was nothing especially remarkable in any of this – Widenmann was reacting in part to what he had observed in London, but his underlying purpose was to prevent the General Staff back in Berlin from using the Agadir crisis to challenge the financial pre-eminence of the navy.141
The significance of the Widenmann reports lay less in their content or the Kaiser’s reactions than in the response they elicited from the chancellor and the foreign secretary. Irritated by this para-diplomatic panic-mongering, Bethmann Hollweg requested the German ambassador in London, Count Metternich, to file a counter-dispatch refuting Widenmann’s arguments. Metternich responded with a report that nuanced Widenmann’s claims. While it was true that ‘all England’ had been ‘prepared for war’ in the summer of 1911, this did not imply a readiness for aggressive action. To be sure, there were many younger naval officers to whom a war would ‘not be unwelcome’, but this was an attitude common to the military functionaries of other countries. In any case, Metternich observed – and here was the sting – in England, such questions were decided not by army or naval officers, nor by ministers of war, nor by the First Sea Lord, but rather by a cabinet composed of responsible ministers. ‘Over here,’ Metternich announced, ‘fleet and army are regarded as the most important instruments of policy, as means to an end, but not as determinants of the course of policy.’ In any case, the English were now keen to put the tensions of the summer behind them. Instead of putting all of its eggs in the armaments basket, therefore, the German government should seek an improvement in its relations with London.142
This time, the Kaiser was less happy: ‘wrong’, ‘rubbish’, ‘unbelievable hogwash!’, ‘scaredy-cat’ screamed the scribbles on the margins of the document. ‘I don’t agree with the judgement of the Ambassador! The Naval Attaché is right!’143 The odd thing about this pair of conflicting dispatches is that both of them went on to shape policy: the Kaiser used the Widenmann report as a pretext for demanding a further naval law, while Bethmann persisted with the policy of détente recommended by Metternich. In Germany, as one senior commander later observed, ‘the Kaiser made one policy, the Chancellor another [and] the General Staff came up with its own answers’.144
It looks, at first glance, as if we can draw a line between democratic, parliamentary Britain and France on the one hand, where civilian decision-makers called the shots, and the more authoritarian constitutions of Russia, Austria and Germany, where, despite variations in the degree of parliamentarization, military personnel could compete with their civilian colleagues on an equal or superior footing for political influence, thanks to their privileged access to the sovereign. But the reality was more complex than this dichotomy would allow. In France, the restructuring of the military after 1911 produced an extraordinary concentration of authority in the hands of Chief of Staff Joffre, to the extent that he wielded greater power over the armed forces than his aristocratic, militarist German counterpart, Helmuth von Moltke; what is more, the new French measures secured for the army almost complete autonomy within the state – though this autonomy depended, unlike that of the German army, upon the cooperation and support of the relevant civilian ministers.145
In Britain, too, the deepening of the entente with France was driven by military, rather than civilian negotiations and agreements. We have already seen how eagerly key military figures in Britain proffered support to France during the first Moroccan crisis in 1905–6. And it is far from clear that the leading British military commanders saw themselves as compliant servants of their political masters. Wilson was not simply acting on instructions; he had his own views on Britain’s military role in a future continental war and consistently pressed for a military confrontation. Like his continental colleagues, Wilson despised civilian politicians, believing them entirely incapable of understanding military affairs. Sir Edward Grey, he wrote in his diary, was an ‘ignorant, vain and weak man, quite unfit to be the foreign minister of any country larger than Portugal’. As for the rest of the Liberal cabinet, they were no more than ‘dirty, ignorant curs’. The whole idea of civilian government of the army was ‘vicious in theory and hopeless in practice’.146 Conservative in his politics, Wilson intrigued energetically against a Liberal political leadership he despised, siphoning information from the Foreign Office through his close associate Permanent Under-secretary Sir Arthur Nicolson and passing it to his allies in the Conservative Party. In Major General Henry Wilson, Britain possessed ‘its own version’ of Austria-Hungary’s Conrad and Serbia’s Apis.147 The significance of the military discussions with France lay not just in the pressure they exerted on the civilian leadership, but also in the fact that they seemed, by virtue of their very existence, to imply a moral obligation to fight with France in the event of a war with Germany. The militarization of the Entente thus exposed the widening discrepancy between British military planning and an official diplomatic stance for which the commitments associated with the term ‘alliance’ were still anathema.
Something analogous took place in the context of the French alliance with Russia. The efforts of the French military commanders to undo the effects of Sukhomlinov’s 1910 deployment plan led to a deepening interdependence of military planning in the two allied states – a process managed by the military, but sanctioned by the civilian leadership. But even as the civilians licensed this process, they could not prevent it from shifting the parameters within which political decisions could be made. When the French insisted at the annual Franco-Russian joint General Staff meetings that the Russians spend vast amounts of borrowed money to upgrade their westward strategic railways, the effect was to push the balance of power in St Petersburg away from Kokovtsov towards his adversaries in the Russian military command. Kokovtsov was probably right when he accused the military command of exploiting inter-service ties within the alliance in order to strengthen their own leverage within the Russian political system.148
Conversely, the demands of the Russians on their French allies had potentially far-reaching consequences for French domestic politics. In 1914, when the Russians warned that any reduction in the period of national military service would undermine the value of France as an ally, they locked the country’s leading statesmen into supporting a measure (the recently adopted Three Year Law) which was controversial with the French electorate. Even the most technical details of operational planning could provide gunpowder for political explosions.149 In France, a small group of key policy-makers went to great pains to conceal the extent and nature of the strategic commitments of the alliance from those (mainly Radicals and Radical Socialists) who might object on political grounds. The need for discretion became especially acute in early 1914, when Poincaré cooperated with the military in concealing the essentially offensive character of French strategic planning from a cabinet, a chamber and a public increasingly committed to a défenciste approach. So secretive was Poincaré in his handling of these issues that he and Joffre even withheld the details of the new French deployment plans from the minister of war, Adolphe Messimy.150 By the spring of 1914, the French commitment to a coordinated Franco-Russian military strategy had become a potentially disuptive force in politics, because it obliged France to hold fast to a form of military planning and preparation whose public legitimacy was in question. How long Poincaré could have continued this balancing act we shall never know, because the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914 made the question obsolete.
We can thus speak of two reciprocal processes – one in which a generous measure of initiative was ceded to a constitutionally subordinate military leadership, and another in which a praetorian military enjoying relative independence in constitutional terms was contained, steered or deflected by the statesmen. Moltke’s demands for preventive war were blocked by the Kaiser and by the civilian leaders, just as Conrad’s were by the Emperor, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Leopold von Berchtold.151 Kokovtsov was, for a time at least, strikingly successful in blocking the war minister’s more ambitious initiatives. At the end of 1913, when Sukhomlinov tried to have Kokovtsov – as prime minister and minister of finance – excluded entirely from deliberations on military budgeting, the Council of Ministers recognized that the imperious war minister had gone too far and turned down the request.152 In Russia, Germany and Austria, Britain and France, military policy remained ultimately subordinate to the political and strategic objectives of the civilian leaderships.153
Nevertheless: unanswered questions about the balance of power between civilian and military factions and their respective influence on decision-making continued to befog relations between the great power executives. The European powers all assumed the existence of a hawkish military faction within each prospective opponent’s government and worked hard to establish how much influence it wielded. In a conversation with Count Pourtalès, the German ambassador in St Petersburg, at the beginning of February 1913, when Austro-Russian tensions over the Balkans were riding high, Foreign Minister Sazonov acknowledged that the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, whom he remembered from his St Petersburg days, was a man of peaceable intentions and outlook. But was he strong enough to resist the pressure from the chief of the General Staff, General Conrad von Hötzendorf, whose belligerent schemes were well known to Russian military intelligence? And even if Berchtold was still, for the moment, in control, might not power slip into the hands of the military as the dual monarchy grew weaker and looked for increasingly radical solutions?154 There was an element of projection in these speculations. Sazonov, who observed at first hand the power struggle between Sukhomlinov and Kokovtsov and had recently seen the staff chief push Russia to the brink of war with Austria-Hungary, knew better than most how labile the relationship between military and civilian decision-makers could be. In a subtle analysis of the mood in St Petersburg in March 1914, Pourtalès discerned a kind of equilibrium between belligerent and pacific elements: ‘Just as there are no personalities of whom one can say that they have both the desire and the influence to plunge Russia into a military adventure, so we lack men whose position and influence are strong enough to awaken confidence that they will be able to steer Russia on a peaceful course over a period of years . . .’155 Kokovtsov’s analysis of the same problem was less sanguine. It seemed to him that the Tsar spent more and more of his time in the company of ‘military circles’ whose ‘simplistic views’ were ‘gathering more and more force’.156
The intrinsic difficulty of interpreting such relationships from an external vantage point was heightened by the fact that civilian politicians were not averse to exploiting (or even inventing) the existence of a ‘war party’ to lend weight to their own arguments: thus, during the Haldane mission of 1912, the Germans encouraged the British to believe that the Berlin government was split between a dove and a hawk faction and that British concessions would strengthen Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg against belligerent elements in Berlin. They adopted the same tactic in May 1914, arguing (through a series of ‘inspired’ press articles) that the continuation of Anglo-Russian naval talks would merely strengthen the hand of the militarists against the moderate civilian leadership.157 Here, as in other areas of inter-governmental communication, the mutability of civil-military relations within the respective systems was amplified by misperceptions and misrepresentations.
‘Most of the conflicts the world has seen in the past ten decades,’ the German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow declared before the German parliament in March 1909, ‘have not been called forth by princely ambition or ministerial conspiracy but through the passionate agitation of public opinion, which through the press and parliament has swept along the executive.’158 Was there any truth in Bülow’s claim? Did the power to shape foreign policy lie beyond the chancelleries and ministries in the world of the lobby groups and political print?
One thing is beyond doubt: the last decades before the outbreak of the war saw a dramatic expansion of the political public sphere and broader public discussion of issues linked to international relations. In Germany, an array of nationalist pressure groups emerged, dedicated to channelling popular sentiment and lobbying government. The consequence was a transformation in the substance and style of political critique, which became more demagogic and more diffuse and extreme in its objectives, so that governments often found themselves on the defensive, parrying charges that they had not been assertive enough in the pursuit of national aims.159 In Italy, too, we can discern the beginnings of a more assertive and demanding political public: under the influence of the ultra-nationalist Enrico Corradini and the demagogue Giovanni Papini, Italy’s first nationalist party, the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana, was founded in 1910; through its parliamentary deputies and its newspaper, L’Idea Nazionale, it demanded the immediate ‘repatriation’ of the Italian-populated territories along the Adriatic coast of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was prepared to endorse war if no other means sufficed. By 1911, even more moderate papers, such as La Tribuna of Rome and La Stampa of Turin, were employing nationalist journalists.160 Here, even more than in Germany, there was ample potential for friction with a government obliged to balance conflicting priorities.161 In Russia, too, the last decades of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of a mass press – by 1913, the Russkoe Slovo, Moscow’s best-selling daily paper, was selling up to 800,000 copies per day. Although censorship was still operating, the authorities permitted fairly free discussion of foreign affairs (as long as they did not directly criticize the Tsar or his ministers) and many of the most important dailies engaged retired diplomats to write on foreign policy.162 In the aftermath of the Bosnian crisis, moreover, Russian public opinion grew more assertive – especially on Balkan issues – and more anti-governmental.163 In Britain, too, a burgeoning mass press fed its readers on a rich diet of jingoism, xenophobia, security scares and war fever. During the Boer War, the Daily Mail sold one million copies per day; in 1907, it was still averaging between 850,000 and 900,000.
Monarchs, ministers and senior officials thus had good reason to take the press seriously. In parliamentary systems, positive publicity might be expected to translate into votes, while negative coverage supplied grist for the mills of the opposition. In more authoritarian systems, public support was an indispensable ersatz for democratic legitimacy. Some monarchs and statesmen were positively obsessive about the press and spent hours each day poring through cuttings. Wilhelm II was an extreme case, but his sensitivity to public criticism was not in itself unusual.164 ‘If we lose the confidence of public opinion in our foreign policy,’ Tsar Alexander III had told Foreign Minister Lamzdorf, ‘then all is lost.’165 It is hard to find anyone in the executives of early twentieth-century Europe who did not acknowledge the importance of the press for the making of foreign policy. But were they swept along by it?
An ambivalence underlay the preoccupation with published opinion. On the one hand, ministers, officials and monarchs believed in and sometimes even feared the press as a mirror and channel for public sentiments and attitudes. All the foreign ministers knew what it was like to be exposed to a hostile domestic press campaign over which they had no control – Grey was the butt of the Liberal press in 1911, Kiderlen-Wächter was attacked in the nationalist papers after the Agadir crisis, the Kaiser was ridiculed for many reasons – among them for his supposedly timid and irresolute view of foreign policy. French politicians suspected of softness towards Germany could be hounded, like Joseph Caillaux, from office. In January 1914, Sazonov and his ministry were denounced for ‘pusillanimity’ by the Russian nationalist press.166 Fear of negative publicity was one reason for the secretiveness of so many of the foreign ministries. As Charles Hardinge observed in a letter to Nicolson, then British ambassador in St Petersburg, in 1908, Edward Grey’s policy of rapprochement with Russia was difficult to sell to the British public: ‘We have had to suppress the truth and resort to subterfuge at times to meet hostile public opinion . . .’167 In St Petersburg, the memory of the publicity storm that had ruined Izvolsky remained fresh throughout the pre-war years.168
Most policy-makers took an intelligent and differentiated view of the press. They saw that it was volatile – subject to short-term agitations and frenzies that quickly subsided. They understood that public sentiment was driven by contrary impulses, that the demands it made on government were seldom realistic; they saw, to paraphrase Theodore Roosevelt, that public opinion usually combined ‘the unbridled tongue with the unready hand’.169 Public opinion was frenetic and panic-prone, but it was also highly mutable – witness the way in which the established Anglophobia of the French press melted away during Edward VII’s visit to Paris in 1903: as the king drove with his entourage from the Porte Dauphine railway station down the Champs Élysées, there were shouts of ‘Vive Fashoda!’, ‘Vivent les Boers!’ and ‘Vive Jeanne d’Arc!’, not to mention hostile headlines and insulting caricatures. Yet within a few days, the king won over his hosts with endearing speeches and charming remarks that were quickly taken up by the main newspapers.170 In Serbia, the wave of national outrage stirred by Austria’s interdiction of the customs union with Bulgaria in 1906 soon died away as Serbian citizens woke up to the fact that the terms of the commercial treaty on offer from Austria-Hungary were in fact better for Serbian consumers than membership of the union with Sofia.171 There were sharp fluctuations in public sentiment in Germany during the Agadir crisis of 1911; at the beginning of September a peace demonstration in Berlin attracted 100,000 people, yet only a few weeks later, the mood was less emollient, as reflected in the decision at the Social Democratic Party’s Jena Congress to reject calls for a general strike in the event of war.172 As late as the spring and summer of 1914, the French envoy in Belgrade noted sharp fluctuations in Serbian press coverage of relations with Austria-Hungary: whereas there had been energetic campaigns against Vienna in March and April, the first week of June brought an unexpected mood of détente and concilation on both sides of the Austro-Serbian border.173
As for those aggressive ultra-nationalist organizations whose voices could be heard in all the European capitals, most of them represented small, extremist constituencies. It was a striking feature of the most belligerent ultra-nationalist lobbies that their leaderships were undermined by constant infighting and schisms – the Pan-German League was riven by factional strife; even the much larger and more moderate Naval League suffered in the years 1905–8 from an internal ‘civil war’ between pro-governmental and oppositional groups. The Union of the Russian People, a chauvinist, anti Semitic, ultra-nationalist organization founded in August 1906, with some 900 offices across the cities and towns of Russia, collapsed in 1908–9 after severe infighting into an array of smaller and mutually hostile groups.174
It remained unclear how the public opinion within articulate elites with direct access to the press related to the attitudes prevailing among the masses of the population. War scares and jingo campaigns made good newspaper copy, but how socially deep were they? It was a grave mistake, the German consul-general in Moscow warned in December 1912, to assume that the belligerence and Germanophobia of the Russian ‘war party’ and the Slavophile press were characteristic of the mood in the country, for these circles entertained only ‘the loosest connection with the actual tendencies of Russian life’. The problem with German newspaper coverage of these issues, the consul argued, was that it tended to be written by journalists with little experience of Russia and a very narrow range of elite social contacts.175 In May 1913, the Belgian minister in Paris, Baron Guillaume, acknowledged the efflorescence of ‘a certain chauvinism’ in France. It could be observed not just in the nationalist papers, but also in the theatres, reviews and café-concerts, where numerous performances offered jingoist fare that was ‘calculated to over-excite spirits’. But, he added, ‘the true people of France do not approve of these manifestations . . .’176
All the governments, with the exception of Britain, maintained press offices whose purpose was both to monitor and, where possible, to shape press coverage of issues touching on security and international relations. In Britain, the foreign secretary appears to have felt little need to convince (or even inform) the public of the merits of his policies and there were no official efforts to influence the press; many of the major newspapers received handsome subsidies, but these came from private or party-political sources, rather than from government. This did not, of course, prevent a dense network of informal relationships from developing between Whitehall officials and key journalists.177 The picture in Italy was rather different. Giovanni Giolitti, prime minister (for the fourth time) in 1911–14, made regular payments to at least thirty journalists in return for supportive coverage of his policies.178 The Russian foreign ministry acquired a press department in 1906, and from 1910 Sazonov orchestrated regular tea-time meetings at the ministry with the most important editors and Duma leaders.179 Relations between the Russian diplomats and some favoured newspapers were so close, one journalist reported in 1911, that the ministry of foreign affairs in St Petersburg ‘often seemed a mere branch office of the Novoye Vremya’. The newspaper’s editor, Jegorov, was often to be seen in the ministry’s press bureau, and Nelidov, chief of the bureau and himself a former journalist, was a frequent visitor to the paper’s editorial offices.180 In France, the relationship between diplomats and journalists was especially intimate: nearly half of the foreign ministers of the Third Republic were former writers or journalists and the ‘lines of communication’ between foreign ministers and the press were ‘almost always open’.181 In December 1912, when he was prime minister of France, Raymond Poincaré even launched a new journal, La Politique Étrangère, to promote his views on foreign policy across the French political elite.
Semi-official newspapers and ‘inspired’ articles planted in the domestic press to test the climate of opinion were familiar tools of continental diplomacy. Inspired journalism masqueraded as the autonomous expression of an independent press, but its effectiveness depended precisely on the suspicion among readers that it emanated from the seat of power. It was universally understood in Serbia, for example, that Samouprava represented the views of the government; the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung was considered the official organ of the German Foreign Office; in Russia, the government made its views known through its own semi-official journal, Rossiya, but also ran occasional inspired campaigns in other more popular papers, like Novoye Vremya.182 The French foreign ministry, like the German, disbursed cash to journalists from a secret fund and maintained close ties with Le Temps and the Agence Havas, while using the less serious-minded Le Matin to launch ‘trial balloons’.183
Interventions of this kind could go wrong. Once it was known that a particular newspaper often carried inspired pieces, there was the risk that indiscreet, tendentious or erroneous reports by the same paper would be mistaken for intentional signals from the government, as happened, for example, in February 1913, when Le Temps ran an article based on unauthorized leaks from an unnamed source disclosing some of the details of recent government deliberations on French rearmament – furious official denials followed.184 Russian foreign minister Izvolsky’s efforts in 1908 to ‘prepare [Russian] public opinion and the press’ for the news that Russia had approved the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina proved totally inadequate to the force of the public response.185 And in 1914, Novoye Vremya, despite its previously intimate relationship with the ministry of foreign affairs, turned against Sazonov, accusing him of excessive timidity in the defence of Russian interests, possibly because it was now under the influence of the ministry of war.186 In the aftermath of the Friedjung Affair of 1909, when Austrian foreign minister Aehrenthal threw his weight behind a press campaign based on false allegations of treason against prominent Serbian politicians, the government was forced to sacrifice the head of the foreign ministry’s Literary Bureau; his successor was sacked amid a storm of press and parliamentary criticism over the bungled ‘Prochaska affair’ of the winter of 1912, when allegations of Serbian mistreatment of an Austrian consular official were likewise found to be bogus.187
Official manipulations of the press also took place across national borders. Early in 1905, the Russians were distributing around £8,000 a month to the Parisian press, in the hope of stimulating public support for a massive French loan. The French government subsidized pro-French newspapers in Italy (and Spain during the conference at Algeciras), and during the Russo-Japanese and Balkan Wars the Russians handed out huge bribes to French journalists.188 The Germans maintained a very modest fund for supporting friendly journalists in St Petersburg and plied newspaper editors in London with subsidies in the hope, mostly disappointed, of obtaining more positive coverage of Germany.189
Inspired leader articles might also be formulated for the eyes of a foreign government. During the Morocco crisis of 1905, for example, Théophile Delcassé used thinly disguised press releases divulging the details of British military planning in order to intimidate the Germans. Here the inspired press functioned as a form of deniable, sub-diplomatic international communication that could achieve a deterrent or motivating effect without binding anyone to a specific commitment; had Delcassé himself issued a more explicit threat, he would have placed the British Foreign Office in an impossible position. In February 1912, the French ambassador in St Petersburg, Georges Louis, dispatched the translation of an article in the Novoye Vremya with a covering letter noting that it reflected ‘very accurately the opinion of Russian military circles’.190 In this case the inspired press enabled discrete organizations within the administration – here the ministry of war – to broadcast their views without officially compromising the government. But it did sometimes occur that different ministries briefed the press in opposed directions, as in March 1914 when the Birzheviia Vedomosti (Stock Exchange News) published a leader piece, widely assumed to have been ‘inspired’ by Sukhomlinov, announcing that Russia was ‘ready for war’ and had ‘abandoned’ the idea of a purely defensive strategy. Sazonov responded with a conciliatory counter-piece in the semi-official Rossiya. This was a classic case of parallel signalling – Sukhomlinov was reassuring the French of Russia’s readiness and determination to fulfil its alliance obligations, while Sazonov’s response was intended for the German (and possibly British) foreign offices.
An article published in the Kölnische Zeitung at around the same time attributing aggressive intentions to St Petersburg on account of the most recent hike in Russian military expenditure was almost certainly planted by the German foreign ministry in the hope of eliciting a clarifying Russian response.191 In areas where the European powers competed for local influence, the use of subsidized press organs to win friends and discredit the machinations of one’s opponents was commonplace. The Germans worried about the immense influence of ‘English money’ on the Russian press, and German envoys in Constantinople frequently complained of the dominance of the French-language press, whose subsidized leader-writers did ‘everything possible to incite [hostility] against us’.192
In these contexts, the press was the instrument of foreign policy, not its determinant. But this did not prevent policy-makers from taking the press seriously as an index of opinion. In the spring of 1912, Jules Cambon worried lest the chauvinism of the French press heighten the risk of conflict: ‘I wish that those Frenchmen whose profession it is to create or represent opinion would [exercise restraint] and that they would not amuse themselves in playing with fire by speaking of inevitable war. There is is nothing inevitable in this world . . .’193 Six months later, with the First Balkan War underway and pan-Slav feeling rising high in parts of the Russian press, the Russian ambassador in Berlin feared – or at least claimed to fear – that the ‘state of mind of the population of his country [might] dominate the conduct of his government’.194
Ministers and diplomats who were confident about the capacity of their own governments to shield the policy-making process from the vicissitudes of domestic published opinion often doubted the ability of foreign governments to do the same. In the aftermath of the Agadir crisis of 1911, the German military leadership feared that nationalist agitation and reviving confidence in France might pressure an otherwise peaceable government in Paris into launching a surprise atack on Germany.195 The fear that an essentially peaceable German leadership would be swept into a war on her neighbours by chauvinistic opinion leaders at home was in turn a frequently recurring theme in French policy discussions.196 The Russian government, in particular, was widely seen as susceptible to pressure from the public sphere – especially when this took the form of agitation on Balkan issues – and there was some truth in this view, as the course of the July Crisis would show. But the Russians also viewed the parliamentary western governments as acutely vulnerable to public pressure, precisely because they were democratically constituted, and the British encouraged this inference by suggesting, as Grey habitually did, that ‘the course of the English government in [. . .] a crisis must depend on the view taken by English public opinion’.197 Statesmen frequently hid behind the claim that they were acting under the constraints imposed by opinion in their own country: in 1908–9, the French cautioned the Russians against starting a war over the Balkans, for example, on the grounds that this region was not important to the French public; Izvolsky got his own back in 1911, when he urged Paris – without forgetting to remind his French interlocutors of their earlier advice – to settle with the Germans on the grounds that ‘Russia would have difficulty making its public opinion accept a war over Morocco’.198 The Serbian ambassador in Vienna claimed in November 1912 that Prime Minister Nikola Pašić had no choice but to pursue an irredentist policy on behalf of his country – if instead he attempted to conciliate Austria, the ‘war party’ in Belgrade would sweep him from power and replace him with one of their own number, and Sazonov justified the Serbian leader’s belligerent public postures by reference to the ‘somewhat overwrought’ quality of Serbian opinion.199
Sazonov’s claim to the German ambassador Pourtalès in November 1912 that concern for public opinion obliged him to defend Serbia’s interests against Austria-Hungary was entirely characteristic. He used the same argument to persuade the Romanians not to initiate a conflict with Bulgaria in January 1913: ‘be very careful! If you wage war with Bulgaria, I will not be able to resist an over-excited public opinion.’200 In reality, Sazonov had little respect for newspaper editors and leader-writers and believed that he understood Russian opinion better than the newspapers did. He was quite prepared, when necessary, to sail against the tide of press commentary, all the while exploiting jingoist campaigns at home to persuade the representatives of other powers that he was under pressure to take certain measures.201 The readers of dispatches often saw through these evasions: when reports reached Kaiser Wilhelm in 1908 and 1909 informing him that pro-Slav public opinion might push the Russian government into action over Bosnia-Herzegovina, he scribbled the word ‘Bluff’ in the margins.202 Nevertheless: the widespread assumption that foreign governments were under pressure to align themselves with their own domestic opinion meant that press reports were the bread and butter of diplomatic dispatches. Sheaves of newspaper cuttings and translations fattened the files flowing into foreign ministries from every European legation.
The efforts of all governments by one means or another to shape published opinion enhanced the importance of press monitoring, because it opened up the possibility that the press might provide the key, if not to public opinion, then at least to the opinion and intentions of the government. Thus Grey saw in the anti-British press campaigns of the Agadir crisis in September 1911 a tactical manoeuvre by the German government designed to mobilize support for further naval bills in the coming Reichstag elections, while the Austrian ambassador accused the Russian foreign minister of encouraging negative coverage of Austro-Russian efforts towards détente after the Bosnian crisis.203 Diplomats constantly sifted through the press looking for the inspired pieces that might provide the key to the thinking of this or that ministry. But since most governments used a range of organs, it was often difficult to know for sure whether a specific article was inspired or not. In May 1910, for example, when the French newspaper Le Temps published an article sharply criticizing the latest Russian troop deployment plans, the Russian foreign ministry assumed (wrongly as it happened, in this case) that the piece was officially inspired and forwarded a protest to Paris.204 It was a mistake, the German ambassador in Paris wrote, always to assume that the views expressed in Le Temps reflected those of the ministry of foreign affairs or of the government – its editor, André Tardieu, had sometimes fallen out with the authorities on account of his heterodox declarations on matters of national interest.205 In January 1914, the Belgian minister in Paris warned his government that while the big political leaders in Le Temps were generally the work of Tardieu, they were usually inspired by the Russian ambassador, Izvolsky.206 This haze of uncertainty meant not only that embassy officials had to be vigilant in trawling the press, but also that adverse published comment on foreign governments could give rise on occasion to feuds, in which two foreign ministries skirmished through the pages of the inspired press, in the process stirring public emotions in ways that could be difficult to control. The British and the German foreign offices were typical in the tendency of each to overstate the extent to which public opinion was controlled by the other government.207
Press feuds could also spring up spontaneously, without government involvement. It was widely acknowledged by the governments that slanging-matches between chauvinistic newspaper editors could escalate to the point where they threatened to poison the atmosphere of international relations. At a meeting that took place at Reval in June 1908 between Tsar Nicholas II, King Edward VII and Charles Hardinge, the Tsar confided to Hardinge that the ‘liberty’ of the Russian press had caused him and his government ‘considerable embarrassment’, since ‘every incident that occurred in any distant province of the empire, such as an earthquake or thunderstorms, was at once put down to Germany’s account, and serious complaints had recently been made to him and the government of the unfriendly tone of the Russian press’. But the Tsar confessed that he felt unable to remedy this state of affairs except by an occasional official communiqué to the press and ‘this had generally but slight effect’. He ‘wished very much that the press would turn their attention to internal rather than foreign affairs’.208
Between 1896, when the British newspapers responded with outrage to the Kaiser’s Kruger telegram and 1911 when the British and German papers clashed over events in Morocco, there were repeated press wars between Britain and Germany. Efforts by the two governments to achieve ‘press disarmament’ in 1906 and 1907 by exchanging delegations of senior journalists were largely ineffective.209 Press wars were possible because the newspapers in each state frequently reported on the attitudes adopted by foreign newspapers on questions of national interest; it was not uncommon for entire articles to be reprinted or paraphrased. Thus Tatishchev, the Russian military plenipotentiary in Berlin, could report to Tsar Nicholas II in February 1913 that pan-Slavist articles in Novoye Vremya were making a ‘distressing impression’ in Germany.210 International press relations were especially tense between Austria and Serbia, where the major papers watched their counterparts across the border with eagle eyes (or were supplied with cuttings and translations by the respective foreign ministries) and where complaints about press coverage on the other side of the border were a stock theme – this problem would play a prominent role in the diplomacy of the July Crisis in 1914.
It is questionable, nonetheless, whether the European press was becoming steadily more bellicose in the years before 1914. Recent research on the German newspapers suggests a more complex picture. A study of German press coverage during a sequence of major pre-war crises (Morocco, Bosnia, Agadir, the Balkans, etc.) discerned an increasingly polarized view of international relations and a declining confidence in diplomatic solutions. But there were also periods of quiescence in between, and the era of the Anglo-German press wars came to an abrupt halt in 1912 – the last two pre-war years were a period, by contrast, of ‘unusual harmony and peacefulness’.211 Even Friedrich von Bernhardi, whose Germany and the Next War (1911) is often cited as an example of the increasing bellicosity of German opinion, opened his appallingly aggressive tract with a long passage lamenting the ‘pacifism’ of his compatriots.212 Nor did chauvinism always speak with one voice. In Britain, anti-Russian sentiment was still a powerful public force in the last few years before the outbreak of war, notwithstanding the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. In the winter of 1911–12, as the Agadir crisis was subsiding, the rank and file of the Liberal Party accused Grey of seeking an excessive intimacy with Russia at the expense of a more cooperative relationship with Germany. The public meetings convened up and down the country at the end of January 1912 to demand an Anglo-German understanding were driven in part by hostility to Russia, whose machinations were seen as threatening British interests at numerous points along the imperial periphery.213
Politicians often spoke, or complained, of opinion as an external force pressing on government. In doing so, they implied that opinion – whether public or published – was something outside government, like a fog pressing on the window panes of ministerial offices, something that policy-makers could choose to exclude from their own sphere of action. And by opinion, they mostly meant the public approval or rejection of their own persons and policies. But there is something deeper than opinion, something we could call mentality – a fabric of ‘unspoken assumptions’, as James Joll called it, that shaped the attitudes and behaviour of statesmen, legislators and publicists alike.214 In this domain, we can perhaps discern a deepening readiness for war across Europe, particularly within the educated elites. This did not take the form of bloodthirsty calls for violence against another state, but rather of a ‘defensive patriotism’215 that encompassed the possibility of war without necessarily welcoming it, a viewpoint underpinned by the conviction that conflict was a ‘natural’ feature of international politics. ‘The idea of a prolonged peace is an idle dream,’ wrote Viscount Esher, a promoter of the Anglo-French Entente and a close friend and adviser of Edward VII, in 1910. Two years later, he told an audience of Cambridge undergraduates not to underestimate the ‘poetic and romantic aspects of the clash of arms’, warning that to do so would be to ‘display enfeebled spirit and an impoverished imagination’.216 War, Henry Spenser Wilkinson, the Chichele Professor of Military History at Oxford, observed in his inaugural lecture, was ‘one of the modes of human intercourse’. This fatalistic acceptance of war’s inevitability was held in place by a loose assemblage of arguments and attitudes – some argued from Darwinian or Huxleyite principles that in view of their energy and ambition, England and Germany were bound to come to blows, notwithstanding their close racial kinship; others claimed that turmoil was a natural feature of highly developed civilizations with their sophisticated armaments; yet others hailed war as therapeutic, as ‘beneficial to society and a force for social advance’.217
Underpinning the reception of such views in both Britain and Germany was a ‘sacrificial ideology’ nourished, in turn, by the positive depictions of military conflict to be found in newspapers and the books read by boys of school age.218 A pamphlet penned by a belligerent clergyman from New Zealand and published by the National Service League urged every schoolboy to recall that he ‘stands between his mother and his sisters, his sweetheart and girl friends and all the women he meets and sees and the inconceivable infamy of alien invasion’.219 Even the Scouting movement, founded in 1908, possessed from its inception – notwithstanding its celebration of woodlore, campfires and outdoor adventure – a ‘strong military identification which was emphasised throughout the pre-war period’.220 In Russia, the years following the Russo-Japanese War witnessed a ‘military renaissance’ driven by the desire for military reform: in 1910, 572 new titles on military subjects were published. Most of these were not warmongering tracts, but political interventions in the debate over how the reform of the Russian military should be linked to broader processes of social change that would orient society towards the sacrifices demanded by a major war effort.221
These developments, which had their counterparts in all the European states, help to explain the readiness of the legislatures to accept the financial burden of increased armaments expenditure during the pre-war period. In France, the support of the Chamber of Deputies, after heated controversy, for the new three-year military service law in 1913 reflected the revived ‘prestige of war’ in a public sphere that had tended since the Dreyfus affair to exhibit a strong anti-militarist ethos, though we should not forget that Radical deputies supported this law in part because for the first time it would be financed by a progressive property tax.222 In Germany, too, Bethmann Hollweg managed to secure centre-right support for the massive army bill of 1913; for the separate bill to fund these measures, he was able to capture a centre-left coalition, though only because he was willing to raise part of the money by levying a new tax on the property-owning classes. In both cases, arguments for heightened military preparedness had to be admixed with other socio-political incentives in order to secure the support needed to drive these huge bills through parliament. In Russia, by contrast, the enthusiasm of the political elite for armaments was such after 1908 that the Duma approved allocations even faster than the military commanders could work out what to do with them; here it was the Octobrist bloc in the Duma, not the ministers, who initially drove the campaign for Russian army expansion.223 In Britain, too, the prevalent mood of defensive patriotism left its mark on the legislature: whereas in 1902 only three MPs supported the National Service League, by 1912 the figure had risen to 180.224
The press entered into the calculations of policy-makers in many different ways. It was never under their control, and they were never under its control. We should speak rather of a reciprocity between public opinion and public life, a process of constant interaction, in which policy-makers sought intermittently to guide opinion in a congenial direction, but were careful to shield their own autonomy and to protect the integrity of decision-making processes. On the other hand, statesmen continued to view the foreign press as an indicator not just of public opinion but of official views and intentions, and this meant that uncertainties about who was inspiring or licensing which utterances could further complicate communications between states. More fundamental – and more difficult to measure – were the shifts in mentality that articulated themselves not in the calls of chauvinists for firmness or confrontation, but in a deep and widespread readiness to accept war, conceived as a certainty imposed by the nature of international relations. The weight of this accumulated readiness would manifest itself during the July Crisis of 1914 not in the form of aggressive programmatic statements, but through the eloquent silence of those civilian leaders who, in a better world, might have been expected to point out that a war between great powers would be the very worst of things.
Even if we were to assume that the foreign policies of the pre-war European powers were formulated and managed by compact executives animated by a unified and coherent purpose, reconstructing the relations among them would still be a daunting task, given that no relationship between any two powers can be fully understood without reference to relations with all of the others. But in the Europe of 1903–14, the reality was even more complex than the ‘international’ model would suggest. The chaotic interventions of monarchs, ambiguous relationships between civil and military, adversarial competition among key politicians in systems characterized by low levels of ministerial or cabinet solidarity, compounded by the agitations of a critical mass press against a background of intermittent crisis and heightened tension over security issues made this a period of unprecedented uncertainty in international relations. The policy oscillations and mixed signalling that resulted made it difficult, not just for historians, but for the statesmen of the last pre-war years to read the international environment.
It would be a mistake to push this observation too far. All complex political executives, even authoritarian ones, are subject to inner tensions and oscillations.225 The literature on twentieth-century US foreign relations dwells at length on intra-governmental power struggles and intrigues. In a brilliant study of the US entry into the Vietnam War, Andrew Preston shows that while Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy were reluctant to wage war and the State Department was largely opposed to intervention, the smaller and more nimble National Security Council, which strongly favoured war and operated beyond congressional oversight, narrowed down the president’s options on Vietnam until war was virtually unavoidable.226
Yet the situation in pre-First World War Europe was different (and worse) in one important respect. For all the tensions that may evolve within it, the American executive is actually – in constitutional terms – a very tightly focused organization in which responsibility for executive decisions in foreign policy ultimately falls unambiguously upon the president. This was not the case for the pre-war European governments. There were perennial doubts about whether Grey had the right to commit himself as he did without consulting the cabinet or Parliament; indeed, these doubts were so pressing that they prevented him from making a clear and unequivocal statement of his intentions. The situation was even fuzzier in France, where the balance of initiative between the ministry of foreign affairs, the cabinet and the presidency remained unresolved, and even the masterful and determined Poincaré faced efforts to shut him out of the decision-making process altogether in the spring of 1914. In Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent in Russia, the power to shape foreign policy flowed around a loose human circuitry within the hivelike structure of the political elite, concentrating at different parts of the system, depending upon who formed the more effective and determined alignments. In these cases, as in Germany, the presence of an ‘all-highest’ sovereign did not clarify, but rather blurred the power relations within the system.
It is not a question, as in the Cuban Missile Crisis, of reconstructing the ratiocinations of two superpowers sifting through their options, but of understanding sustained rapid-fire interactions between executive structures with a relatively poor understanding of each other’s intentions, operating with low levels of confidence and trust (even within the respective alliances) and with high levels of hostility and paranoia. The volatility inherent in such a constellation was heightened by the fluidity of power within each executive and its tendency to migrate from one node in the system to another. It may be true that dissent and polemics within the diplomatic services could have a salutary effect, in that they raised questions and objections that might have been suppressed in a more disciplined policy environment.227 But the risks surely outweighed the benefits: when hawks dominated the signalling process on both sides of a potentially conflictual interaction, as happened in the Agadir crisis and would happen again after 28 June 1914, swift and unpredictable escalations could be the result.