The Sleepwalkers (30 page)

The memorandum of 1 January 1907 opened with a brief overview of the recent Moroccan crisis. Crowe endowed the narrative with the contours of a
Boy's Own
morality tale. The German bully had threatened France in the hope of ‘nipping in the bud' her ‘young friendship' with Britain. But the bully had underestimated the pluck and loyalty of France's British pal; he ‘miscalculated the strength of British feeling and the character of His Majesty's ministers'. Like most bullies, this one was a coward, and the prospect of an ‘Anglo-French coalition in arms' was enough to see him off. But before he retreated, the bully further disgraced himself by crudely currying favour with the British friend, ‘painting in attractive colours a policy of cooperation with Germany'. How ought Britain to respond to this unlovely posturing? As the pre-eminent world power, Crowe argued, Britain was bound by what amounted to a ‘law of nature' to resist any state that aspired to establish a coalition opposed to British hegemony. Yet this was exactly what German policy intended to do. Germany's ultimate objective was ‘German hegemony, at first in Europe and eventually in the world'. But whereas British hegemony was welcomed and enjoyed by all and envied and feared by none on account of its political liberality and the freedom of its commerce, the vociferations of the Kaiser and the pan-German press showed that German hegemony would amount to a ‘political dictatorship' that would be ‘the wreckage of the liberties of Europe'.

Of course Crowe could not and did not object in principle to the growth in German power and influence. The problem lay in the abrasive and provocative way in which Germany pursued its objectives. But of what exactly did Germany's provocations consist? They included such enormities as ‘dubious proceedings' in Zanzibar, and the seizure of the Cameroons at a time when London had already announced its intention to grant the inhabitants of that country a British protectorate. Everywhere they looked – or so it seemed to Crowe – the British found themselves stumbling over the Germans. The list of outrages continued, from German financial support for the Transvaal Republic, to complaints at London's conduct of the South African war, to vexatious meddling in the Yangtze Valley region, ‘then considered to be practically a British preserve'. And to make matters worse, there was the ‘somewhat unsavoury business' of German efforts to influence the international press, from New York, to St Petersburg, Vienna, Madrid, Lisbon, Rome, Cairo and even London, ‘where the German Embassy entertains confidential and largely unsuspected relations with a number of respectable and widely read papers'.
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There is much one could say about this fascinating document, which Grey circulated as recommended reading to Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and other senior ministers. First there is Crowe's almost comical tendency to view the wars, protectorates, occupations and annexations of imperial Britain as a natural and desirable state of affairs, and the comparatively ineffectual manoeuvres of the Germans as gratuitous and outrageous breaches of the peace. How impossible of the Germans to pester Britain on the Samoa question when London was on the point of ‘submitting' its quarrel with the Transvaal ‘to the arbitrament of war'! Then there was the tendency to see the long arm of German policy behind every inter-imperial conflict; thus, it was the Germans who ‘fomented' Britain's ‘troubles with Russia in Central Asia' and ‘carefully encouraged' the European opposition to Britain's occupation of Egypt. Wherever there was friction between Britain and its imperial rivals, the Germans were supposedly pulling strings in the background. As for German press manipulations from Cairo to London, there was more than a pinch of paranoia in Crowe's handling of this issue: German press work paled into insignificance beside the much larger and better-financed subsidy operations run by St Petersburg and Paris.

Perhaps the offensive incidents were ultimately of secondary importance; the core of the argument was Crowe's nightmarish psychogram of the German nation-state, imagined as a composite person conniving to gain concessions by ‘offensive bluster and persistent nagging', a ‘professional blackmailer', ‘bullying and offending' at every turn, manifesting a ‘heedless disregard of the suceptibilities of other people'. Whether there was any underlying plan behind all the bluster, or whether it was ‘no more than the expression of a vague, confused, and unpractical statesmanship, not fully realizing its own drift' made little difference. The upshot was the same: only the firmest discipline would teach the Germans good behaviour. The French too, Crowe recalled, had once been very annoying, gratuitously challenging Britain at every turn. But Britain's adamant refusal to yield an inch of ground on Egypt and the Sudan, followed by the threat of war over Fashoda, had put an end to all that. Now Britain and France were the best of friends. It followed that only the most ‘unbending determination' to uphold ‘British rights and interests in every part of the globe' would win ‘the respect of the German government and the German nation'. This was not a scenario that left much room to accommodate the rising power of Europe's youngest empire.

Lurking beneath these apprehensions, though only indirectly alluded to in Crowe's text, was the spectacle of Germany's titanic economic growth. In 1862, when Bismarck had become minister-president of Prussia, the manufacturing regions of the German states accounted, with 4.9 per cent, for the fifth-largest share of world industrial production – Britain, with 19.9 per cent, was well ahead in first place. In 1880–1900 Germany rose to third place behind the United States and Britain. By 1913, it was behind the United States, but ahead of Britain. In other words, during the years 1860–1913, the German share of world industrial production increased fourfold, while the British sank by a third. Even more impressive was Germany's expanding share of world trade. In 1880, Britain controlled 22.4 per cent of world trade; the Germans, though in second place, were well behind with 10.3 per cent. By 1913, however, Germany, with 12.3 per cent, was hard on the heels of Britain, whose share had shrunk to 14.2 per cent. Everywhere one looked, one saw the contours of an economic miracle: between 1895 and 1913, German industrial output shot up by 150 per cent, metal production by 300 per cent, coal production by 200 per cent. By 1913, the German economy generated and consumed 20 per cent more electricity than Britain, France and Italy combined.
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In Britain, the words ‘Made in Germany' came to carry strong connotations of threat, not because German commercial or industrial practice was more aggressive or expansionist than anyone else's, but because they hinted at the limits of British global dominance.
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German economic power underscored the political anxieties of the great-power executives, just as Chinese economic power does today. Yet there was nothing inevitable about the ascendancy of Germanophobe attitudes in British foreign policy.
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They were not universal, even within the upper reaches of the Foreign Office itself, and they were even less prevalent across the rest of the political elite. Hard work behind the scenes was needed to lever Bertie, Nicolson and Hardinge into the senior posts from which they were able to shape the tone and course of British policy. Bertie owed his rapid ascent after years of frustration in low-level positions to his energetic politicking with the private secretary to King Edward VII. Hardinge, too, was a seasoned courtier and intriguer, who pushed Bertie's candidacy for the Paris ambassadorship in 1905. Hardinge employed his connections at court to ‘override' a ‘certain amount of obstruction at the top of the F.O.'.
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Bertie and Hardinge in turn cooperated in levering Arthur Nicolson into senior ambassadorial posts, despite the fact that his wife was said to shun society and to ‘dress like a housemaid'.
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British policy could have taken a different course: had Grey and his associates failed to secure so many influential posts, less intransigent voices, such as those of Goschen and Lascelles or of the parliamentary under-secretary Edmond Fitzmaurice, who deplored the ‘anti-German virus' afflicting his colleagues, might have found a wider hearing. Instead, the Grey group gradually tightened their grip on British policy, setting the terms under which relations with Germany were viewed and understood.

The ‘invention', as Keith Wilson has put it,
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of Germany as the key threat to Britain reflected and consolidated a broader structural shift. The polycentric world of the ‘great games' in Africa, China, Persia, Tibet and Afghanistan, a world in which policy-makers often felt they were lurching from crisis to crisis and reacting to remote challenges rather than setting the agenda, was making way for a simpler cosmos in which one enemy dominated the scene. This was not the
cause
of Britain's alignment with Russia and France, but rather its consequence. For the restructuring of the alliance system facilitated – indeed it necessitated – the refocusing of British anxieties and paranoia, which were riding high in the years around the Boer War.
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British foreign policy – like American foreign policy in the twentieth century
¹³¹
– had always depended on scenarios of threat and invasion as focusing devices. In the mid-nineteenth century, French invasion scares had periodically galvanized the political elites; by the 1890s, France had been displaced in the British political and public imagination by Russia, whose Cossack hordes would soon be invading India and Essex.
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Now it was Germany's turn. The target was new, but the mechanisms were familiar.

In retrospect, it is tempting to discern in the upheavals of 1904–7 the birth of the Triple Entente that would wage war in 1914. That was certainly how it looked to the French diplomat Maurice Paléologue, who published his diaries of these years three decades later under the title
A Great Turning Point
. Recomposed to incorporate the wisdom of hindsight, Paléologue's ‘diaries' endowed French policy-makers (and especially Paléologue himself) with an almost supernatural foreknowledge of the war to come.
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In this respect they exemplify a distortion of perception that is common to the post-war ‘memoirs' of many pre-war statesmen. The immense denouement of 1914 seems to us to command the horizons of the preceding decade. Yet the reality is that it does so only in our eyes, which is to say: in retrospect.

It was still far from clear in 1907 that the new alliances would take Europe to war. The weakness of Russia after the disaster of 1905 obliged the policy-makers in St Petersburg in the first instance to seek good relations with Germany, and it was widely accepted in St Petersburg, for the time being at least, that Russia's domestic fragility ruled out any form of international adventurism.
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It was hard to imagine the circumstances in which France might be willing to chance its arm for the Russians in the Balkans and even harder to imagine Russians marching to Berlin for the sake of Alsace and Lorraine. In 1909, Paris underscored its independence by signing an accord on Morocco with Germany, a ‘striking instance of the crossing of lines' between the alliance blocs.
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Then, in November 1910, Russian and German leaders met in Potsdam and Berlin to reconcile German and Russian interests in Turkey and Persia. There was no question of loosening the Franco-Russian bond, to be sure, but this was a significant gesture in the direction of détente.
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As for the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, it may have muted the tensions between Russia and Britain but it did not remove their cause, and right through until 1914 there were voices in the Foreign Office warning of the Russian threat to Britain's far-flung empire.

In short: the future was not foreordained. The Triple Entente that went to war in 1914 still lay beyond the mental horizons of most statesmen. The great turning point of 1904–7 helps to explain the emergence of the
structures
within which a continental war became possible. But it cannot explain the specific reasons why that conflict arose. In order to do that, we need to examine how decision-making processes shaped policy outcomes and how the loose network of the continental alliances became interlocked with conflicts unfolding on the Balkan peninsula.

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.