The Sleepwalkers (42 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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'
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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'.
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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'.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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