The Sleepwalkers (32 page)

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