The Sleepwalkers (56 page)

Analogous structural and political constraints stood in the way of a lasting détente between Germany and Britain. The Haldane mission of February 1912, when Germany and Britain failed to come to an agreement on naval armaments limitation, is a case in point. The original architect of the mission was Bethmann. His aim was to secure an understanding with Britain that would enable international (especially colonial) questions to be resolved collaboratively rather than through competition and confrontation. The chancellor saw in Admiral Tirpitz's ambitious naval construction programme the chief obstacle to such an understanding. But the Kaiser's personal support for the naval programme and the disjointed, praetorian structure of the German executive meant that oblique manoeuvres were needed to dislodge the current policy. In order to weaken Tirpitz's grip, Bethmann aligned himself with the Admiralty in its long-standing campaign against the Imperial Naval Office (the Admiralty was critical of Tirpitz's concentration on ship numbers rather than the education and training of naval personnel). He encouraged the army, which had long been starved of funds while the naval budgets ballooned, to insist on refurbishment and expansion.
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And of course he briefed Metternich, the German ambassador in London, to provide him with the ammunition he would need to persuade the Kaiser that curbing naval growth might have a more persuasive effect on London than the current policy of strength and challenge. In short, Bethmann assiduously worked the various switches in the system in the hope of weaning Reich defence policy off its addiction to naval growth.

Like Joseph Caillaux during the Agadir crisis, Bethmann made use of a non-state go-between, the Hamburg-based shipping magnate Albert Ballin, who played a crucial role in opening up a channel of communication. Like many senior figures in the commercial and banking sector, Ballin believed utterly in the civilizational value of international trade and the criminal stupidity of a European war. Through his contacts with the British banker Sir Ernest Cassel, Ballin was able to bring to Berlin a message conveying British interest in principle in seeking a bilateral understanding on issues arising from naval armaments and colonial questions. In February 1912, Lord Haldane, the secretary of state for war, travelled to Berlin to sound out the possibilities.

Why did the Haldane mission fail? The answer is not simply German intransigence over the scale and pace of naval construction, because Bethmann and – albeit reluctantly – Kaiser Wilhelm II were willing to make concessions on that front.
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The real sticking-point was Berlin's insistence on something tangible in return, namely an undertaking of British neutrality in the event of a war between Germany and another continental power. Why were the British so unwilling to grant what was asked? The argument that they were bound by the terms of their obligations to France is flawed, because Bethmann was willing to limit the proposed neutrality agreement to cases in which Germany ‘cannot be said to be the aggressor', and expressly conceded that any agreement reached would have ‘no application insofar as it may not be reconcilable with existing agreements which the high contracting parties have already made'.
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The true reason for British reticence lay rather in an understandable disinclination to give away something for nothing: Britain was winning the naval arms race hands down and enjoyed unchallenged superiority. Bethmann and Wilhelm wanted a neutrality agreement in exchange for recognizing that superiority as a permanent state of affairs. But why should Britain trade for an asset it already possessed?
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In sum: it was not ships as such that prevented an agreement, but rather the irreconcilability of perceived interests on both sides.
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Haldane returned from Berlin shaking his head at the confusion he had observed there: it was clear even to an outsider that Bethmann had not succeeded in rallying the Kaiser and the Reich Naval Office behind his policy. But in Britain, too, powerful interests were ranged against the mission's success.
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From the start, it was understood in London as a purely exploratory enterprise. Haldane was obliged to travel to Berlin under the cover of an educational enquiry (he was then chairing the Royal Commission on London University) and he possessed, in the words of a British draft note to the German government, ‘no authority to make any agreement or to bind any of his colleagues'.
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The mission, Haldane himself reassured Jules Cambon, was about
détente
, not
entente
.
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In Paris, Bertie worked hard to sabotage the agreement by tipping off Poincaré and goading the Quai d'Orsay to apply pressure to London.
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It is telling, moreover, that the man entrusted with providing Haldane with documentation and advice during the talks was none other than Sir Arthur Nicolson, a man who had always believed that any concession to Germany risked antagonizing the Russians, whose benevolence was essential to British security. Nicolson made no secret of his hostility to the Haldane venture. ‘I do not myself see,' he told Sir Francis Bertie, the British ambassador to Paris, in February 1912, ‘why we should abandon the excellent position in which we have been placed, and step down to be involved in endeavours to entangle us in some so-called “understandings” which would undoubtedly, if not actually, impair our relations with France and Russia.'
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The ambassador agreed: the Haldane mission was a ‘foolish move' undertaken merely to silence the ‘Grey-must-go radicals'.
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From the outset, then, there was no realistic chance that the mission would succeed.
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To the great relief of Nicolson and Bertie, Grey refused to consider a ‘neutrality clause' and the Haldane talks collapsed. Ambassador Goschen wrote from Berlin to congratulate Nicolson: ‘You have been foremost in this good work.'
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As Nicolson's remarks suggest, the growth of détente was constrained – at least in Britain – by bloc thinking, which was still accepted as providing the indispensable foundation for national security. Détente might offer a supplement to bloc strategy, but could not supersede it. Sir Edward Grey had put it elegantly in a speech to the House of Commons in November 1911: ‘One does not make new friendships worth having by deserting old ones. New friendships by all means let us make, but not at the expense of the ones we have.'
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Precisely because so little had been invested in the Haldane mission, its collapse was easily digested and the post-Agadir Anglo-German détente continued. Only in the light of later events did the failure to achieve a naval agreement come to appear historically significant. In the autumn of 1912, as the Balkan crisis broke, the German foreign secretary Kiderlen-Wächter proposed to Goschen, the British ambassador in Berlin, that the two countries coordinate their response with a view to preventing the powers from falling into two hostile camps. Grey, for his part, let Bethmann know that he desired ‘intimate political cooperation' with Britain.
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Britain and Germany joined in sponsoring the Ambassadors' Conference that met in London between December 1912 and July 1913. The two powers helped to broker compromise solutions to the thorniest problems arising from the First Balkan War, and they urged restraint on their respective bloc partners, Russia and Austria.
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Ulterior motives were in play, of course. Foreign Secretary Jagow, who picked up the policy thread when Kiderlen died suddenly in December 1912, hoped that continued Balkan collaboration would counteract British dependence on the Entente powers by opening London's eyes to the aggressiveness of Russian policy in the region. Grey hoped that the Germans would continue reining in the Austrians and thereby prevent Balkan regional conflicts from threatening European peace. But neither side was prepared to make any substantial change to their respective bloc strategies. The Anglo-German ‘Balkan détente' worked in large part because it was so tightly focused on an area (the Balkan peninsula) where neither of the two states had fundamental interests at stake. It also depended on Austria and Russia's willingness not to go to war. It was a flimsy thing without substantive content that could survive only for as long as there was no serious threat to peace.

We might thus say that the potential for détente was circumscribed by the resilience of the alliance blocs. This is true enough, except insomuch as it implies that the alliance blocs were solid and immovable fixtures of the international system. But it is worth noting how fragile and flux-prone many of the key decision-makers felt the alliance system was. The Austrians intermittently feared that the Germans were on the point of settling their differences with Russia and leaving their Habsburg allies in the lurch, and there was some justification for this concern, for the evidence suggests that Germany's policy of restraint vis-à-vis Vienna over the period 1910–13 merely emboldened the Russians in the Balkans without yielding an offsetting security benefit.
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Poincaré saw in the vacuous meeting at Baltic Port the ominous herald of a Russo-German partnership in the Balkans and on the Straits. In the spring of 1913, there was even irritation in Paris at the current ‘flirtation' between the courts of St James and Berlin, King George V being suspected of seeking warmer relations with Germany.
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For Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, the slightest evidence of a thaw between Vienna and St Petersburg sufficed to conjure up the horrifying prospect that Russia would abandon the Entente and join forces with Germany and Austria, as it had done in the days of the Three Emperors' Leagues of the 1870s and 1880s.

In the case of British relations with Russia, apprehension at the prospect of losing a powerful friend was underscored by the fear of gaining a powerful enemy. During the last three years before the outbreak of war, the old geopolitical tensions between Russia and Britain were coming back to the fore. There were problems all along the Sino-Central-Asian frontier, from Tibet and Outer Mongolia to Turkestan and Afghanistan, but the most urgent issue was Persia. By the summer of 1912, armed Russian penetration of northern Persia was raising questions about whether the Anglo-Russian Convention could be continued in its current form. As early as November 1911, Grey warned Count Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London, that he might soon be forced to issue public ‘disavowals' of Russian activity in Persia and that Russia was placing the future of the Convention at risk.
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And this was an issue that attracted interest not just in the Foreign Office, but in cabinet, parliament and the press. When Sazonov and Grey met at Balmoral in September 1912 for talks focused mainly on the Persian question, there were public demonstrations against the Russian minister. Fear for Britain's imperial future combined with the traditional Russophobia of the liberal movement and the British press to form a potent mix. And these concerns remained acute during 1913 and early 1914. In letters of February and March 1914 to Ambassador Buchanan in St Petersburg, Grey commented angrily on Russian plans to construct a strategic railway across Persia and all the way to the Indian frontier. The Russians had begun to push aside British trading interests in Persia, even within the zone allotted to Britain under the terms of the Convention. The situation along the Chinese frontier was hardly more encouraging: in 1912–13, dispatches from British agents reported that the Russians were fomenting ‘unusual military activity' between Mongolia and Tibet; shipments of Russian rifles had been detected passing through Urga to Lhasa and Russian Buriat ‘monks' were training the Tibetan army, just as the Russians pushed forward into Chinese Turkestan to establish fortified positions only 150 miles from the British garrison at Srinagar.
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Russia, it appeared, was waiting for the next opportunity to invade India.
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These perceived threats produced fine cracks in the policy fabric of the Foreign Office. In Grey's eyes, the vexatious behaviour of the Russians enhanced the value of the Anglo-German Balkan détente. It was impossible not to be struck by how easily British and German diplomats were working together, just at the moment when Sazonov's opportunist Balkan zig-zagging was exasperating Russia's British partners. And Grey was supported in these reflections by his long-serving private secretary, William Tyrrell, the man who saw more of the foreign secretary than any other colleague. Tyrrell had earlier favoured ‘the anti-German policy', but he later became ‘a convinced advocate of an understanding'.
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The attractiveness of this option was doubtless reinforced by the awareness that since Germany had lost the naval race, the chief threat posed by Berlin had ‘lost its sting'.
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The return to a more flexible policy promised both to mute the Russophobe arguments of the radical opposition and to spike the guns of the ‘Grey-must-go' brigade, who saw in the foreign secretary's hostility to Berlin a needless threat to British independence and European peace.

But this option remained chimerical for as long as the risks of losing Russian allegiance did not seem to be offset by the benefits of closer collaboration with Germany. Until that tipping point was reached – and this did not appear imminent in 1913–14 – the argument for appeasing Russia and opposing Germany continued to carry great weight. Russia was a much more dangerous foe in 1913 than she had been in 1900, especially if one viewed it through the lenses of the British policy-makers who, like their French colleagues, subscribed to an extraordinarily exaggerated assessment of Russian power. Throughout the years between the Russo-Japanese War and the July Crisis of 1914, and despite much evidence to the contrary, British military attachés and experts presented what seems in retrospect an absurdly positive image of Russian military prowess.
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In an entirely typical report filed in September 1909, General Sir Ian Hamilton, who as former military attaché to the Japanese forces in Manchuria had witnessed the Russian army in action, reported that immense improvements had been made during the interim. Thanks to an ‘extraordinary advance' in ‘fire and move' tactics, Russian troops could now be described as ‘better fighters and keener soldiers than the Germans'. Since Hamilton had also attended German manoeuvres, his words were treated with respect.
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