The Sleepwalkers (27 page)

A further and more obvious problem was that Berlin's efforts to pursue German interests outside Europe inevitably met with protest from Britain. When the Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid entrusted the Deutsche Bahn-Gesellschaft with the construction of a branch line of the Anatolian Railway to Konya, in the direction of Baghdad, there were loud complaints from the British government which saw in the German-financed project an ‘unauthorised penetration into the English sphere', because it would diminish the profitability of the British-financed Smyrna Railway – in this, as in many other disputes, British policy-makers proceeded from the assumption that whereas British imperial interests were ‘vital' and ‘essential', German ones were a mere ‘luxury', the energetic pursuit of which must be construed as a provocation by other powers.
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The dispute over the Anglo-Congolese Treaty of 12 May 1894, by which Britain acquired a 25-kilometre-wide corridor of land linking Uganda with Rhodesia, was a further case in point. This treaty, essentially designed to obstruct French designs on the Upper Nile, also had the effect of abutting German South-east Africa with a cordon of British territory. Only under concerted German pressure did London eventually back down. This outcome produced jubilation in a German press desperate for signs of national self-assertion. It also reinforced the belief among German policy-makers that standing up to Britain was the only way to secure German interests.
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Anglo-German tension peaked during the Transvaal crisis of 1894–5. There had long been local problems between the British-controlled Cape Colony and the neighbouring Boer South African Republic, also known as the Transvaal. Although the independence of the Transvaal was internationally recognized (including by Britain), Cecil Rhodes, the dominant figure in the Cape Colony, pressed for annexation of the northern neighbour, lured by the vast gold deposits discovered there in the 1880s. Since German settlers played a prominent role in the Transvaal economy and Germans owned one-fifth of all foreign capital invested there, the Berlin government took an interest in maintaining the Republic's independence. In 1894, Berlin's involvement in plans to build a German-financed railway linking the landlocked Transvaal with Delagoa Bay in Portuguese Mozambique triggered protests from London. While the British government considered acquiring control of the offending railway through the annexation of Delagoa Bay and rejected any arrangement that would dilute their political and economic dominance in the region, the Germans insisted on the continuing political and economic independence of the Transvaal.
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There was further friction in the autumn of 1895, when the British ambassador in Berlin, Sir Edward Malet, spoke of the Transvaal as a trouble spot in Anglo-German relations and hinted darkly at the possibility of war between the two countries if Germany refused to back down.

The German government were thus in an ill humour when an abortive British attack on the Transvaal in December 1895 triggered an international crisis. The British government had not formally sanctioned Dr Leander Starr Jameson's raid on the Republic, though at least one British government minister (Joseph Chamberlain) had prior knowledge of it. And the raid itself was a fiasco: Jameson's men were quickly defeated and captured by troops of the Transvaal Republic. In Berlin, as in Paris and St Petersburg, it was universally believed, despite official denials from Whitehall, that London was behind the attempted invasion. Determined to signal its indignation, the German government dispatched a personal telegram from the Kaiser to Paul Kruger, president of the Transvaal Republic. The ‘Kruger telegram', as it came to be known, wished the president a happy new year, and congratulated him on having defended ‘the independence of his country against external attack' without ‘appealing for the help of friendly powers'.
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This mildly worded message produced a torrent of outrage in the British press and a corresponding wave of jubilation in Germany, where it was welcomed as a sign that something was finally being done to stand up for German interests overseas. But the Kruger telegram was little more than gesture politics. Germany quickly withdrew from the confrontation with Great Britain over southern Africa. It lacked the means to project its will, or even to secure the respect due to an equal partner in such conflicts of interest. Berlin ultimately accepted a compromise agreement, which in return for nugatory British concessions excluded Germany from further involvement in the political future of southern Africa.
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To the disgust of the German nationalist press, the German government refused to intervene on behalf of the Transvaal before or during the Boer War of 1899–1902 that resulted in the Transvaal's defeat and its conversion into a British colony.

The 1890s were thus a period of deepening German isolation. A commitment from Britain remained elusive and the Franco-Russian Alliance seemed to narrow considerably the room for movement on the continent. Yet Germany's statesmen were extraordinarily slow to see the scale of the problem, mainly because they believed that the continuing tension between the world empires was in itself a guarantee that these would never combine against Germany. Far from countering their isolation through a policy of rapprochement, German policy-makers raised the quest for self-reliance to the status of a guiding principle.
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The most consequential manifestation of this development was the decision to build a large navy.

In the mid-1890s, after a long period of stagnation and relative decline, naval construction and strategy came to occupy a central place in German security and foreign policy.
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Public opinion played a role here – in Germany, as in Britain, big ships were the fetish of the quality press and its educated middle-class readers.
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The immensely fashionable ‘navalism' of the American writer Alfred Thayer Mahan also played a part. Mahan foretold in
The Influence of Sea Power upon History
(1890) a struggle for global power that would be decided by vast fleets of heavy battleships and cruisers. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who supported the naval programme, was a keen nautical hobbyist and an avid reader of Mahan; in the sketchbooks of the young Wilhelm we find many battleships – lovingly pencilled floating fortresses bristling with enormous guns. But the international dimension was also crucial: it was above all the sequence of peripheral clashes with Britain that triggered the decision to acquire a more formidable naval weapon. After the Transvaal episode, the Kaiser became obsessed with the need for ships, to the point where he began to see virtually every international crisis as a lesson in the primacy of naval power.
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The Kaiser's deepening personal preoccupation with naval matters coincided with a bitter factional struggle within the uppermost ranks of the German naval administration. The chief of the naval cabinet, Admiral Baron Gustav von Senden Bibran, and his ambitious protégé Alfred von Tirpitz pressed for the construction on a grand scale of large battleships. On the other side of the fight was the cautious Admiral Friedrich Hollmann, secretary of state for the navy and the man with responsibility for drafting naval bills for the Reichstag. Hollmann remained committed to the construction of a force of fast cruisers of the type favoured by the still-fashionable French
jeune école
. Whereas Tirpitz saw German naval strategy in terms of a future struggle for parity with Great Britain in waters close to home, Hollmann envisaged a more flexible, long-distance weapon that would be used to press German claims and protect German interests on the periphery. Between 1893 and 1896, Tirpitz and his allies waged a guerrilla campaign against Hollmann, openly questioning his competence and bombarding the Kaiser with memoranda outlining their own strategy proposals. After oscillating for a while between the two camps, Wilhelm II withdrew his support from Hollmann in 1897 and appointed Tirpitz in his place.
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On 26 March 1898, following an intense propaganda campaign, the Reichstag passed a new navy bill. In place of the eclectic and unfocused proposals of the early and mid-1890s, Admiral von Tirpitz's Imperial Naval Office installed a massive long-term construction programme that would dominate German defence expenditure until 1912. Its ultimate objective was to enable Germany to confront the British navy on equal terms.
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Germany's decision to embark on an ambitious naval programme has occupied a commanding position in the literature on the origins of the First World War. Viewed with hindsight, it might appear to foreshadow, or even perhaps to explain, the conflict that broke out in 1914. Wasn't the decision to challenge British naval hegemony a needless provocation that permanently soured relations between the two states and deepened the polarization of the European system?

There are many criticisms one can make of German naval strategy, the most serious being that it was not embedded in a broader policy concept, beyond the quest for a free hand in world affairs. But the new naval programme was neither an outrageous nor an unwarranted move. The Germans had ample reason to believe that they would not be taken seriously unless they acquired a credible naval weapon. It should not be forgotten that the British were accustomed to using a rather masterful tone in their communications with the Germans. In March 1897, for example, a meeting took place between the assistant under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, Sir Francis Bertie, known as ‘the Bull' for his aggressive manner, and the chargé d'affaires and acting German ambassador in London, Baron Hermann von Eckardstein. In the course of their discussion, Eckardstein, a notorious Anglophile who dressed in the manner of Edward VII and loved to be seen about the London clubs, touched on the question of German interests in southern Africa. Bertie's response came as a shock. Should the Germans lay so much as a finger on the Transvaal, Bertie declared, the British government would not stop at any step, ‘even the ultimate' (an unmistakable reference to war), to ‘repel any German intervention'. ‘Should it come to a war with Germany,' he went on, ‘the entire English nation would be behind it, and a blockade of Hamburg and Bremen and the annihilation of German commerce on the high seas would be child's play for the English fleet.'
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German naval policy has to be seen against this background of friction and threat. Of course, there can be no doubt about the anti-English orientation of the new weapon – Tirpitz himself made this abundantly clear: the memorandum setting out his fleet plan to the Kaiser in June 1897 began with the lapidary observation that: ‘For Germany, the most dangerous naval enemy at the present time is England,' and the same assertion cropped up in various forms throughout the draft proposals and memoranda of later years.
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But there was nothing surprising about this: armaments programmes usually measure themselves against the most formidable potential opponent; until the signing of the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the programmatic documents of the French naval strategists of the
jeune école
had envisioned the systematic use – in the event of war – of fast, well armed cruisers to attack commercial shipping and force the British Isles into starvation and submission. As late as 1898, this prospect had seemed real enough in British naval circles to generate panic over the need for extra cruisers and the consolidation of domestic food supplies.
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In any case, it was not the building of German ships after 1898 that propelled Britain into closer relations with France and Russia. The decisions to enter into an Entente with France and to seek an arrangement with Russia came about primarily as a consequence of pressures on the imperial periphery. British policy-makers were less obsessed with, and less alarmed by, German naval building than is often supposed.
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British naval strategy was never focused solely on Germany, but on the need to remain dominant in a world of great naval powers – including France, Russia and the United States. Nor did German naval construction have the mesmerizing effect on British strategists that has sometimes been claimed for it.
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In 1905, the director of British naval intelligence could confidently describe Britain's naval preponderance over Germany as ‘overwhelming'.
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In October 1906, Charles Hardinge, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, acknowledged that Germany posed no immediate naval threat to Britain. In the following year, Admiral Sir A. K. Wilson remarked in a report on current Admiralty war plans that an Anglo-German conflict was unlikely, that neither power was in a position to do the other any ‘vital injury' and that ‘it was difficult to see how such a conflict could arise'. Foreign Secretary Edward Grey was also sanguine: ‘We shall have seven dreadnoughts afloat before they have one,' he observed in November 1907. ‘In 1910, they will have four to our seven, but between now and then there is plenty of time to lay down new ones if they do so.'
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Even the First Sea Lord Sir John (‘Jackie') Fisher wrote to King Edward VII in 1907 boasting of Britain's superiority over the Germans: ‘England has 7 dreadnoughts and 3 invincibles, while Germany [has] not yet begun one!' There was good reason for such confidence, because the Germans lost the naval race hands down: whereas the number of German battleships rose from thirteen to sixteen in the years 1898–1905, the British battle fleet rose from twenty-nine to forty-four ships. Tirpitz had aimed at achieving a ratio of one German battleship to every 1.5 British, but he never got close. In 1913, the German naval command formally and unilaterally renounced the Anglo-German arms race, Tirpitz declaring that he was satisfied with the ratios demanded Britain. By 1914, Britain's lead was once again increasing. The naval scares that periodically swept through the British press and political circles were real enough, but they were driven in large part by campaigns launched by the navalists to fend off demands for funding from the cash-starved British army.
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