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EUROPE—A CONCERT NO MORE
The repose of Europe, as British statesmen of the early decades of the nineteenth century used to describe the balance of power, had been rudely disturbed by the national and social revolutions of 1830 and 1848 all over Europe. Ever since, the foundations of power and legitimacy had been shaky.
Governments and regimes now had to prove, not their ancient lineage but their effectiveness in dynamic nation-states, providing jobs, raising incomes and harnessing modern industry to the needs of society. Rising populations and the quickening pace of industrialization made it imperative to secure raw materials and to open markets. The new mood from the Bristol Channel to the wetlands of the Vistula was a constant forward flight to produce consensus within societies driven by class conflict at home and competition abroad. Germany was no exception.
In 1871 the British government watched, with some unease, how the balance on the Continent was forcefully rearranged through the German triumph over France. While the war was being wound up, Benjamin Disraeli gave expression to deep-seated anxieties about the implications of what had happened on the European continent in the course of the last decade. He termed it “the German revolution,” betraying through this term that the events defied traditional British statesmanship and balance of power politics.
Disraeli had looked far into the future but subsequent British governments, including his own, took a much more relaxed view of the new Germany. When, as Lord Beaconsfield and Prime Minister, he attended the Berlin Congress in 1878, he appreciated Bismarck’s performance, and Bismarck returned the compliment saying, “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann.” Her Majesty’s Government, concerned about the Great Game in central Asia against the Russians who were advancing towards India, as well as with French meddling in Africa, much appreciated Germany’s mediating role at the Congo Conference convoked in Berlin in 1884 to delineate borders. Bismarck and his British counterparts, however, never found enough common ground to come to a formal understanding. Bismarck feared what he called “a German Gladstone cabinet” and did everything to prevent it. To him, and to the social milieu he came from, parliamentary government was a contradiction in terms, parliaments invariably being seen as divided, weak and incapable of organizing national strength. Germany’s exposed position in the center of Europe gave an added argument for keeping ultimate control in the hands of a military monarchy. But regardless of differences in philosophy and power structure, the silent alliance between Britain and Germany worked well under Bismarck and for a few years after. The dynastic ties between the House of Hohenzollern and the House of Hanover looked like a promise of partnership throughout Europe and the world. Queen Victoria, “Grandmother of Europe,” was also the grandmother of Crown Prince William, who came to the throne in 1888.
By the time Bismarck had to leave the Chancellor’s office in 1890, France and Russia were working to forge an alliance in both commercial and military terms. French capital markets were supplying Russian industrialization with the investment that was drying up, not least thanks to Bismarck’s intervention, from the German side. The French arms industry looked to provide the Russian armies with modern equipment. Russian officers were lavishly entertained in Paris, and naval squadrons paid much-heralded visits to Le Havre and St. Petersburg. This was the “nightmare” that Bismarck had always feared, posing a threat to Germany’s strategic borders in the west and to Austria’s existence in the east. Now more than ever was the time to cultivate Germany’s informal alliance with the British Empire. But such a strategic collaboration rested on one overriding condition: that Germany continued to honor traditional Prussian restraint in naval matters. The German navy had been the most tangible expression of German national aspirations during the revolutionary months of 1848, and the few ships acquired were auctioned off when that episode ended. The army remained firmly under the control of the monarchy, while the navy was an expression of middle-class and commercial ambition, destined for wider horizons than the old battlefields in Poland and Champagne where the scions of the Prussian aristocracy had spilled their blood. The footguard and horseguard officers of Potsdam looked upon it as a costly and money-consuming vehicle for ambitious technocrats and Etagen-Adel, landless nobles. For Bismarck the few cruisers under the black, white and red colors of the Reich had no purpose except to fly such flags and transport troops. To underline traditional priorities, an infantry general was put in charge of the navy. But with the arrival of William II, given to romantic dreams of naval grandeur, wishing to impress his British cousins and, if possible, put them into second place, all this was to change.
William II had a kind of love-hate relationship with Britain, its empire and in particular with the Royal Navy, which he saw in all its splendor on his annual visits to Cowes, next door to Portsmouth. He believed like many of his middle-class subjects that Germany’s expanding global trade required for its protection a blue-water deep-sea navy. Sir Ernest Cassel—a close friend of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII—and Albert Ballin, chief of the Hamburg Amerika Line and often the Kaiser’s dinner guest, both knew more about shipping than anybody else and tried to persuade hotheads on both sides to moderate their views, but in vain. There was loose talk about British commercial envy, although Britain kept faith with free trade long after Germany had converted to protectionism. The fact that there were many advances in naval architecture and technology about this time whetted appetites: the torpedo, the steam turbine engine, better armor, better guns, better optics, the imminent prospect of submarines, of oil replacing coal as fuel. Did this not give the energetic newcomer all the chances in the world to outflank the established supremacy of the Royal Navy?
A youthful and energetic naval captain called Alfred Tirpitz, from a modest but ambitious middle-class family in the north, found his vocation in devising a battle fleet for the Kaiser capable of forcing the British into a strategic duel where their empire was most vulnerable, in the waters around the British Isles. Such a strategy was in blatant defiance of the time-honored instincts of the Junkers, with their great respect for the combined might of Russia and France. What fascinated the Kaiser, however, was the chance to impress not only British admirals but also German voters, and to capture their imagination and loyalty by opening up new prospects for Germany’s Grosse Politik. He saw himself as a true successor of the “soldier king” Frederick William I and his son Frederick the Great, and wanted to go down as another hero in the annals of Prussian greatness. The army may have felt that this was no time to divert funds to a navy that no sensible person could really desire, but it did not understand the fascination of distant colonies and naval displays for the middle classes of Germany.
Naval fever among the Germans owed much to the wave of imperialism gripping the world in the 1880s. In 1882 the scramble for Africa began when the British Empire, on top of controlling the Suez Canal through a majority shareholding, formally occupied Egypt. Other European powers looked for acquisitions elsewhere. Bismarck, meanwhile, kept a cool head. One day a colonial adventurer came to impress upon him the need to catch up with France and Britain and to stake out German claims in Africa. “Your map of Africa is very nice,” Bismarck said. “But there is France, and here is Russia, and we are in the middle, and that is my map of Africa.” However, pressure from the press and the public mounted, driven by the idea that vast riches waited to be grabbed by German explorers and traders, and that, if emigration from German lands could not be stopped, at least it should be channeled into German colonies.
Reluctantly, Bismarck accepted that a little money from the Reich budget should be allocated for subsidies to shipping lines, and that the German flag should be raised in Tanganyika in east Africa, where tea and coffee could be grown, and in southwest Africa where diamonds and other desirables were eventually discovered. However, he never lost sight of the precarious position of the Reich in the middle of the European system. He therefore did everything possible to help the French to get enmeshed in A
frica and Asia so as to make French public opinion forget la ligne bleue des Vosges, and succumb instead to the lure of the Atlas mountains and the rice paddies of Cochinchine. With the British he was willing to swap Zanzibar for Heligoland in the North Sea, and his successor Caprivi delivered. In his last years in office Bismarck, weary of colonial imbroglios with the British Empire, even tried to rid the Reich of the whole colonial burden, negotiating with a consortium of Hanseatic merchants who would, for a symbolic rent of one mark, run the show on their own account. Alas, this was not to be. The colonial lobby had grown too strong, the popular fascination with far-flung dependencies too great.
So Germany, after the Caprivi interlude of strategic restraint, continued to plant the black, white and red flag in the South Pacific and on the shores of China. However, even the most fervent of colonial enthusiasts also began to learn that the future lay as much with informal imperialism—trade routes, control of strategic minerals and other precious goods, such as oil, sisal and rubber, and captive markets overseas. British jingoism, French chauvinism and German imperialism matched each other, with the Russians, Italians, Belgians, Japanese and Americans also in the running. The Netherlands, Portugal and Spain had had colonies since the sixteenth century. In a thundering Reichstag speech in 1897, the chief of the Wilhelmstrasse, as the German Foreign Office came to be called, State Secretary Bernhard von Bülow, demanded “a place in the sun.” He did not have in mind a picnic spot in the nearby Tiergarten, Berlin’s Hyde Park, but foreign possessions to dream about, and from which to make money, to gain prestige and to enhance national cohesion. A German government saying no to the colonial lure would have had to be strong, and not even Bismarck at the zenith of his power had been able to reject completely what he saw as dangerous and entangling adventures. But the successive incumbents of the Wilhelmstrasse—from 1894 to 1900 the septuagenarian Prince Hohenlohe, no longer capable of serious work, and from 1900 to 1909 Baron, then Count and Prince von Bülow, called by his many detractors “the eel” because of his extremely flexible spine—were weak leaders. They were appointed by the Kaiser so he could have all the prestige and glory of Weltpolitik, imagining he could run the country with a combination of neo-absolutism and charismatic leadership, undisturbed by the complications of modern industrial society. For William II, the whole of Germany was nothing but a giant toy created by the Almighty to please His Imperial Majesty. Of course, this could never work in a political system with militant organized interests and ambitious and jealous political parties, and it ended, after a series of gaffes on his part, in sad caricature.
The battle fleet and all the vainglorious dreams coming with it in fact provided a powerful and suggestive means, not so much for foreign adventure as for domestic consensus. Up and down the country Admiral von Tirpitz, now in high administrative office as Secretary for the Navy, paid journalists to sing the praises of imperialism and professors to give Weltpolitik their academic blessing. In 1896 Max Weber, one of the great sociologists of the early twentieth century and later a democrat by conviction, thundered in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg that the founding of the German Empire in 1871 would have been nothing but a youthful whim if it were not followed, here and now, by a massive commitment to “a new Grosse Politik.” The Flottenverein—the Naval League—was one big propaganda machine, well oiled by the Reichsmarineamt and its secret funds. Even opposition members of the Reichstag were treated with great finesse when it came to voting ever more funds for a navy whose strategic failure was clear to see by the time the British began building a new fleet of all-big-gun Dreadnought battleships in 1900.
Never was there a political strategy more broadly based and more popularly accepted than the conversion of Germany to the battle fleet. It was founded in the borderlands of democracy and demagoguery, but it also recruited support across a wide array of organized interests. Even the landowning classes were somehow reconciled to the naval enterprise through the return to agricultural protectionism, embodied in the tariffs introduced by Johannes von Miquel, Prussian Minister of Finance. They had acquired a taste for the better things in life, but their estates were mortgaged to the hilt, while they observed with disdain how the rich Commercienrath in the city—a title conferred by the administration on the rich, public-minded industrialist or banker, conveying official recognition of merit, sound finances and respectability—could pick a son-in-law from the flower of the aristocracy. In this situation they enjoyed the return to protectionism, recognized the bargain and welcomed a respite in a long story of decline.
The blue 100-mark bill portrayed a well-armed Germania, holding the emblems of commerce and industry, sitting under a giant oak tree, her gaze fixed on a long line of battleships steaming at high speed. At the turn of the century, little boys and girls from the well-to-do families used to wear sailor suits as their Sunday best and there is not a family photo from those days where naval uniform is not to be seen. The naval building program gave employment to the large arms firms such as Krupp of Essen and displayed German workmanship at its most modern, especially in optics and electrical appliances. A special tax was introduced on champagne to help pay for the navy—a tax that, by the way, has survived to this day.
Germany was an industrial latecomer compared to Britain. But in the last decades of the nineteenth century, German industry was catching up rapidly, and after 1900 it was beginning to overtake all of its earlier competitors except the United States of America. German big business, as a rule, harnessed the sciences to its wagon, with the state-financed colleges of technology and Technische Hochschulen supplying a steady stream of ambitious, hard-working experts. German companies large and small, not spoiled by captive markets in colonies and dominions, paid more attention to marketing, invested in permanent education for the workforce and understood the economies of scale better than their British competitors. The fusion of basic research and practical application became a specific German strength, while the early shortage of capital had been overcome long ago, not least through the formation of giant, multifunctional banks operating worldwide.
Iron and steel output were an indicator for both economic strength and military potential. Germany forged ahead from 4.1 million tons in 1880 to 6.3 million in 1900 and 17.6 million in 1913, while Britain fell behind significantly: 8.0 million in 1880, 5.0 million in 1900, 7.7 million in 1913. The figures of iron and steel output for the United States are no less instructive: 9.3 million in 1880, 10.3 million in 1900, 31.8 million in 1913. France, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Japan were, by comparison, insignificant, and so was Italy. In energy consumption, another indicator of industrial prowess, Germany started in 1880 at about half the British level, but by 1913 the two countries were almost on a par. In terms of aggregate industrial potential, measured in numbers employed, investment and value of production, Germany had overtaken Britain by 1913, while the United States was a global power in the making. In comparative terms the index was: USA 298.1, Germany 137.7, Britain 127.2.
Military strength and manpower did not keep pace with these industrial figures. In 1880 Germany had 425,000 soldiers and sailors, compared to Russia’s 791,000, France’s 543,000 and Britain’s 367,000. In 1910 the numbers were Germany 694,000, France, with a considerably smaller population, 769,000, Britain 571,000 and the United States 127,000. In warship tonnage, Britain remained the leader throughout, but the margin closed significantly: in 1880 Germany had 88,000 tonnes, Britain 650,000, France 27,000, Russia 200,000 and the United States 169,000. In 1910 the figure was 964,000 tonnes for Germany, while Britain registered 2,174,000, France 725,000, the United States 824,000 and Imperial Japan 496,000. In short, while Germany’s steel production led Europe, the country remained far behind in terms of military personnel. Even the substantial increase in naval vessels, in spite of Admiral von Tirpitz’s ambitious and long-term building program of 1897, left it with only about 40 per cent of the British overall tonnage.
At the time of the Boer War in southern Africa (1899–19
02), the British Foreign Office was ready to contemplate an alliance with “our German cousins,” but the Wilhelmstrasse, under pressure from an enraged public, could not oblige. Instead the Franco-British Entente Cordiale of 1904 ended Britain’s diplomatic and strategic isolation. Originally meant simply to forestall colonial imbroglios between Britain and France, such as the recent one in Upper Egypt near Fashoda, the Entente Cordiale was soon seen as a means to contain Germany’s expanding power. British leaders had shown for many years that they were no longer able and willing to manage the balance of Europe, yet now they got involved in the system of continental alliances and, unwittingly, put at risk the very empire whose existence they wanted to preserve. This was tragedy for both Britain and Germany.
The German leaders were far from having a strategy to acquire global power, but in London and Paris they were perceived as pursuing a master plan. During the first Morocco crisis in 1905, when the French tightened control over this north African territory, the Kaiser sent a naval detachment to Tangier. He wanted to remind the French that Germany was strong and that Russia, after the Japanese victory in 1904, was weak, and that they had better think of compensations for Germany. At the subsequent Algeciras Conference, Germany did indeed receive another piece of Africa. But the price was that the Entente Cordiale was consolidated. In 1907, when Britain and Russia reached agreement over the Far East as well as over Persia and Afghanistan, putting to rest the “Great Game” at least for the time being, Russia became a partner to the Entente Cordiale. The resulting Triple Entente reinforced the geostrategic pincer movement on Germany, whose government and people were enraged by this “encirclement.” And encirclement it was, unwise by every standard of modern arms control, let alone by traditional old-world diplomacy. But German diplomacy had contributed decisively: “Intoxicated by German power, the Germans felt the need of no allies and made concessions to no one.” Whether this is, as A. J. P. Taylor claimed, the one and only meaning of “encirclement” for Germany can be doubted. The European diplomat and historian George F. Kennan in his Decline of the Bismarckian Order had a different story: he saw French and Russian policies converging, ever since the 1880s, to undo the status quo, revise the settlement of 1871 and destroy the Habsburg monarchy. The Entente Cordiale finally tipped the balance of Europe against the central powers, and thereby the European system became menacingly unstable. In addition, among the central powers Austria-Hungary was seen as a sick man, while the Entente could not count on revolution-torn Russia. Both sides therefore had a strange incentive to go to war sooner rather than later, for fear that a member might easily collapse before it could enter the fray.
The German Empire Page 8