The Sleepwalkers (28 page)

There was thus a gross discrepancy between the rhetorical storm kicked up by Tirpitz and his colleagues to justify naval expenditure and the relatively meagre results achieved. German naval construction was intended to provide support for what had come to be known by 1900 as
Weltpolitik
– meaning literally ‘global policy'. The term denoted a foreign policy focused on extending Germany's influence as a global power and thereby aligning it with the other big players on the world scene. ‘Phenomenal masses of land will be partitioned in all corners of the world in the course of the next decades,' the historian and publicist Hans Delbrück warned in an important essay of 1897. ‘And the nationality that remains empty-handed will be excluded for a generation to come from the ranks of those great peoples that define the contours of the human spirit.'
⁸⁹
In a popular and influential speech of 6 December 1897, the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Bernhard von Bülow, articulated the ebullient new mood. ‘The times when the German left the earth to one of his neighbours, the sea to the other, and reserved for himself the heavens where pure philosophy reigns – these times are over,' he announced. ‘We don't want to put anyone in the shadow, but we too demand our place in the sun.'
⁹⁰

For a time, the word
Weltpolitik
seemed to capture the mood of the German middle classes and the national-minded quality press. The word resonated because it bundled together so many contemporary aspirations.
Weltpolitik
meant the quest to expand foreign export markets (at a time of declining export growth); it meant escaping from the constraints of the continental alliance system to operate on a broader world arena. It expressed the appetite for genuinely national projects that would help knit together the disparate regions of the German Empire and reflected the almost universal conviction that Germany, a late arrival at the imperial feast, would have to play catch-up if it wished to earn the respect of the other great powers. Yet, while it connoted all these things,
Weltpolitik
never acquired a stable or precise meaning.
⁹¹
Even Bernhard von Bülow, widely credited with establishing
Weltpolitik
as the guiding principle of German foreign policy, never produced a definitive account of what it was. His contradictory utterances on the subject suggest that it was little more than the old policy of the ‘free hand' with a larger navy and more menacing mood music. ‘We are supposed to be pursuing
Weltpolitk
,' the former chief of the General Staff General Alfred von Waldersee noted grumpily in his diary in January 1900. ‘If only I knew what that was supposed to be.'
⁹²

The concrete achievements of
Weltpolitik
after 1897 were correspondingly modest, especially if we measure them against the imperial predations of the United States in the same years: while Germany secured the Mariana and Caroline islands, a segment of Samoa and the small bridgehead at Kiaochow on the Chinese coast, the United States waged war against Spain over Cuba and in the process acquired the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam in 1898, formalized its possession of Hawaii in the same year, fought a horrific colonial war in the Philippines (1899–1902) that cost between half a million and 750,000 Filipino lives; acquired some of the Samoan islands in 1899 and subsequently built a canal across the Central American Isthmus under the protection of a Canal Zone under its own control, in accordance with its secretary of state's express view that it was ‘practically sovereign' on the continent of South America.
⁹³
When Bülow wrote to Kaiser Wilhelm II in exultant tones that ‘this gain will stimulate people and navy to follow Your Majesty further along the path which leads to world power, greatness and eternal glory', he was referring to Germany's acquisition of the economically and strategically worthless Caroline Islands!
⁹⁴
Small wonder that some historians have concluded that Germany's
Weltpolitik
was designed above all with domestic consumers in mind: as a means of strengthening national solidarity, saddling the national parliament with long-term budgetary commitments, muting the appeal of dissident political creeds such as social democracy and thereby consolidating the dominance of the existing industrial and political elites.
⁹⁵

Perhaps the most remarkable shortcoming of German policy in the years around 1900 was the failure to see how swiftly the international environment was changing to Germany's disadvantage. The policy-makers in Berlin remained confident in the first years of the twentieth century that the global tension between the British Empire and Russia would continue to guarantee a certain freedom of manoeuvre for Germany. In the short term, they focused on maintaining good relations with St Petersburg. In the longer run, they believed, the burden of opposing Russia and the growth of the German fleet would force Britain to seek better relations with Berlin.

On the night of 8–9 February 1904, Admiral Togo Heiachiro's fleet attacked and sank Russian battleships at anchor off Port Arthur on the Chinese coast, thereby starting the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese began the conflict, but it was the Russians who had provoked it. For the past decade, the Tsar and his most powerful advisers had been mesmerized by the prospect of acquiring a vast East Asian empire. The Russians had steadily pushed forward into northern China, the Liaodong peninsula and northern Korea, encroaching on the Japanese sphere of interest. They used the Boxer Rebellion of 1898–1901 (itself in part the consequence of Russian incursions into China) as a pretext for sending 177,000 troops to Manchuria, supposedly to protect its railways. After the rebellion subsided, Russia ignored demands from the other powers for the withdrawal of its troops. By early 1903, it was clear that they intended to occupy Manchuria indefinitely. Repeated requests from the Japanese for a formal demarcation of Russian and Japanese spheres of influence in Manchuria and Korea respectively received short shrift in St Petersburg.

Strengthened by their alliance of 1902 with Britain, the Japanese felt confident enough to take matters into their own hands. The war that followed brought defeat for Russia on a scale that no one had foreseen. Two of the three Russian fleets were destroyed (the third, the Black Sea Fleet, was saved, ironically enough, by the restrictions still preventing Russian warships from passing the Turkish Straits). Russian forces were overrun and defeated in Manchuria in 1904, the Japanese besieged Port Arthur, and the army sent to relieve it was forced to retreat from the area. In January 1905, after a long and bitter fight, Port Arthur surrendered. Two months later, a Japanese army numbering 270,000 men routed a slightly larger Russian force near Mukden in Manchuria. While these disasters were unfolding, a wave of inter-ethnic violence, massive strikes, political protests and uprisings swept across the Russian Empire, exposing the inner fragility of the Tsarist autocracy; at one point, an army of nearly 300,000 – larger than the force facing the Japanese in Manchuria – had to be stationed in Poland to restore order.

The impact of the Russo-Japanese conflict was both profound and ambivalent. In the short term, the war seemed to offer Germany unexpected opportunities to break through the constraints imposed by the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Anglo-French Entente. In the longer term, however, it had precisely the opposite effect: it produced a tightening of the alliance system that refocused formerly peripheral tensions on to the continent of Europe and drastically reduced Germany's freedom of movement. Since both these aspects bear on the events of 1914, it is worth looking briefly at each in turn.

By the summer of 1904, Germany's diplomatic position was substantially worse than it had been when Bismarck left office in 1890. German political leaders made light of these developments, mainly because they believed that tensions between Britain and the continental powers would keep the door to a German-British rapprochement permanently open. Against this background, the news of the Anglo-French Entente came as a serious blow. In a letter to Bülow of April 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm informed the chancellor that the Entente gave him ‘much food for thought', because the fact that England and France no longer had to fear anything from each other meant that their ‘need to take account of our position becomes ever less pressing'.
⁹⁶

How could Germany extricate itself from this unhappy state of affairs? Two options presented themselves. The first was to commit the Reich to an arrangement with Russia and thereby weaken or neutralize the Franco-Russian Alliance. The second was to find some means of weakening the new entente between Britain and France. The Russo-Japanese War provided the opportunity to test both options. The German Kaiser had been calling for some time – without success – for a diplomatic approach to the Russians and he quickly spotted the advantages to be reaped from Russia's predicament. In a letter of February 1904 to the Tsar, he pointed out that the French were supplying the Japanese with raw materials and thus hardly behaving as reliable allies.
⁹⁷
In June he told Nicholas that he believed France's entente with Britain, an ally of Japan, was ‘preventing the French from coming to your aid!' Other letters made sympathetic noises about the ill fortune of the Russian army and expressed confidence in future successes.
⁹⁸
The Germans also provided more practical help, such as the coaling of Russian battleships from German stations en route to the East. These overtures culminated in two formal offers of alliance. The first, presented on 30 October 1904, proposed an alliance stipulating that each of the two signatories would come to the other's aid in the event of either being attacked in Europe or anywhere else in the world. But Tsar Nicholas was unwilling to enter into a formal agreement before consulting his French ally. Since it was inconceivable that the French would agree, this was tantamount to rejecting the proposal.

By the summer of 1905, however, Russia's domestic and military position had worsened drastically. When the Kaiser renewed his approaches to Nicholas, he found the Tsar more inclined to consider a German offer. In the summer of 1905, the royal yacht
Hohenzollern
made its way towards the small fishing village of Björkö in the Gulf of Finland for a rendezvous with the Tsar's
Polar Star
. The two boats moored alongside each other on 23 July and the Tsar came aboard for dinner. Confidential discussions followed, during which Wilhelm played – with considerable success – on the Tsar's anxieties about British designs against Russia and the unreliability of the French, who had now thrown in their lot with Britain. The overwrought Nicholas burst into tears, embraced his German cousin and signed on the dotted line. But the draft treaty that resulted did not survive the scrutiny of the Tsar's officials in St Petersburg. It was impossible, they pointed out, to reconcile a commitment to Berlin with the French alliance that still constituted the bedrock of Russian security. Reports from Paris confirmed that the French would never tolerate any alteration of the terms of the alliance for the sake of Russo-German rapprochement. The Tsar remained favourably disposed to an agreement of some kind with Germany, but under pressure from his political and economic advisers he gradually dropped the idea. The eastern road out of German isolation was thus closed off, at least for the foreseeable future.

At the same time, the German leadership looked for ways of pushing open the door that had recently been shut by the Anglo-French Entente. As part of the comprehensive settlement of outstanding colonial disputes negotiated through the Entente Cordiale, the British had agreed to recognize Morocco as standing within the French sphere of influence, in return for French recognition of British primacy in Egypt. Determined to capitalize on this arrangement while the British commitment was still fresh, the French government sent a diplomatic mission to Fez with a view to arranging the consolidation of French control in Morocco in January 1905.

Given the terms of the Anglo-French agreement, there was nothing especially surprising in the bid to consolidate French power in Morocco. But the French foreign minister chose to endow the policy with a pointedly anti-German spin. Potential disagreements with Spain had been resolved through the exchange of territory, and the North African agreement of 1902 with Italy ensured that Rome would be acquiescent. British agreement was built into the terms of the Entente. But the Germans were offered nothing. Berlin was not even informed in advance of French intentions. This was a departure from Delcassé's own earlier policy, which had foreseen that German assent would be negotiated in return for territorial compensation ‘in other parts of Africa where she may have ambitions'.
⁹⁹
In opting to freeze the Germans out, Delcassé built an entirely unnecessary element of provocation into his North African policy and exposed himself to the criticism of his French colleagues: even Paul Revoil, Delcassé's closest collaborator in the Moroccan question, lamented the minister's intransigence; the ‘great misfortune', Revoil protested, was that Delcassé found it ‘repugnant to have talks with Germany. “The Germans are swindlers”, he says. But, in heaven's name, I'm not asking for an exchange of romantic words or lovers' rings but for a business discussion!'
¹⁰⁰
Even Eugène Étienne, leader of the French Colonial Party, viewed Delcassé's refusal to negotiate with the Germans over Morocco as ‘the height of imprudence'.
¹⁰¹

The German Foreign Office, for its part, had long been watching French moves in Morocco with suspicion and was determined not to allow the French government to act unilaterally in a manner that would damage German interests in the area. The German viewpoint was legitimate in legal terms: an international agreement of 1881 had formally recognized Morocco as an area whose status could only be altered multilaterally, by international treaty. The ultimate objective of German policy, however, was not to uphold international law, but rather to test the strength of the Entente. Reports from London had given the Germans reason to suppose that the British government would not feel bound to intervene in a dispute over Morocco between France and a third power.
¹⁰²
It was hoped that this in turn would remind the French – in the Kaiser's quaint formulation – that ‘a navy has no wheels', and thereby soften their opposition to an understanding of some kind with Germany.
¹⁰³
In this sense, the Moroccan initiative can be seen as a western version of the approaches made to Russia during 1904–5.