The War that Ended Peace

by Margaret MacMillan

  He does not seem to have disliked any one nation more than another – except for the United States. He found in Americans everything he disliked about the modern world: they were greedy, materialistic, hypocritical, and vulgar and believed that democracy was the best form of government. During the Civil War he was a passionate supporter of the Confederate side, partly because he thought that Southerners were gentlemen and Northerners were not. In addition, though, he feared the growth of American power. As he wrote gloomily in 1902: ‘It is very sad, but I am afraid America is bound to forge ahead and nothing can restore the equality between us. If we had interfered in the Confederate War it was then possible for us to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career.’29

  His views on foreigners did not prevent Salisbury, when he was in charge of foreign affairs, working for specific ends with other powers. He made agreements, for example, with Italy and Austria at the end of the 1880s to maintain the status quo in and around the Mediterranean. To keep Egypt safe from the French, who had not forgiven Britain for taking over its management in 1882, he kept on good terms with Germany. At times, although he disliked the growing importance of public opinion in foreign affairs, he found it useful in refusing unwanted commitments and alliances. In the 1890s, when the Germans suggested a common front against the French, Salisbury regretted that his hands were tied: ‘Parliament and people would not be guided in any degree by the fact that the Government had some years before signed a secret agreement to go to war.’30 He also made the further argument, easier perhaps with an unwritten constitution, that Great Britain was constitutionally barred from making peacetime agreements that could lead to war.31 More importantly, the Royal Navy – the largest in the world – and the geographical advantages that came from being an island, meant Britain had the freedom to choose to remain relatively independent in world affairs.

  While he did his best to keep Britain free of entanglements, Salisbury also tried to prevent strong blocs coalescing against it. As he explained in a speech at Caernarvon in 1888, nations should behave like sensible householders with their neighbours.

  If you wish to get on with the people with whom you are living, you must not be looking for perpetual opportunities of getting a little advantage over them; you must view your own claims and theirs in a just and neighbourly spirit, – on the one hand never sacrificing any important and genuine right in respect to which you think that oppression or encroachment is being attempted, – and, on the other hand, abstaining from erecting small controversies into envenomed disputes and treating every difference as a matter of vital principle.

  Those who are not careful to behave in a reasonable and neighbourly fashion, he went on, ‘will find that they are opposed by a combination of those neighbours …’32

  If there were to be combinations, Salisbury felt, and this reflected a long-standing British policy, it was better that they should be two or more and against each other rather than Britain. Britain’s relations with Europe usually worked best when Britain was on as friendly a footing with as many of the other powers as possible and when there was a rough balance of power on the Continent which enabled Britain to manoeuvre among the different groupings. Salisbury managed to convince himself, if not the other European powers, that Britain was in this way contributing to the greater good of all. As he put it in his Caernarvon speech, ‘There is all the difference in the world between good natured, good humoured effort to keep well with your neighbours, and that spirit of haughty and sullen “isolation” which has been dignified by the name of “non-intervention”. We are part of the community of Europe and we must do our duty as such.’33

  Although Salisbury disliked what he called ‘jargon about isolation’,34 that is how his foreign policy has come to be characterised. When Queen Victoria protested in January 1896 that Britain seemed somewhat isolated, Salisbury replied sharply that isolation ‘is much less danger than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us’. It was a view shared by his Conservative colleagues. ‘Our isolation’, Lord Goschen, the First Lord of the Admiralty, told a Conservative gathering in 1896, ‘is not an isolation of weakness, or of contempt for ourselves; it is deliberately chosen, the freedom to act as we choose in any circumstances that may arise.’35 In the same year first a Canadian politician and then Joseph Chamberlain added the adjective ‘splendid’ and the term spread with surprising rapidity. ‘Splendid isolation’ and Britain’s skilful manipulation of the balance of power were, so it was argued, not only a deliberate policy choice but one sanctified by tradition at least as far back as the great Queen Elizabeth I herself as she manoeuvred between her rivals of France and Spain to ensure Britain’s safety. ‘A balance of power on the Continent’, said an historian of her reign, ‘was what suited her, as it has generally suited this country.’36 Montagu Burrows, the Chichele Professor of Modern History at Oxford, vested it with almost mystical significance as ‘the Balance’ and quoted Edmund Burke with approval as saying that Britain was of all powers the most suited to look after it. ‘It is not too much say’, he said proudly, ‘that it has been the saving of Europe.’37

  In retrospect, how complacent it seems. Even at the time there was something defiant about it all. In 1897, as it celebrated the Diamond Jubilee, Britain was indeed isolated but its position in the world was not all that splendid. It had no secure friendships in Europe. It was engaged in a number of disputes and rivalries around the world, with the United States over Venezuela, with France in several parts of the world, with Germany in Africa and the Pacific, and with Russia in Central Asia and China. The empire itself was a mixed blessing. To be sure it brought Britain prestige and it gave British manufacturing protected markets and in theory it brought greater power as well. A cartoon in Punch at the time of the great naval review showed an old British lion rowing four young lions – Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the Cape – out to see the fleet.38 Yet the young lions did not always show much enthusiasm for taking on the burden of defending themselves, much less the empire as a whole.

  And the empire kept growing as Britain took on still more colonies and protectorates around the world, partly in an attempt to protect what it already had. As other powers joined in the scramble for territory its empire became increasingly vulnerable. Sir Thomas Sanderson, the Permanent Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, said a few years later: ‘It has sometimes seemed to me that to a foreigner reading our Press the British Empire must appear in the light of some huge giant sprawling over the globe, with gouty fingers and toes outstretched in every direction which cannot be approached without soliciting a scream.’39 The term ‘imperial over-stretch’ had not yet been coined but Britain was suffering from it by the 1890s. Kipling’s poem ‘Recessional’, which he wrote just after he saw the great naval review at Spithead, contained a warning:

  Far-called our navies melt away –

  On dune and headland sinks the fire –

  Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

  Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

  Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

  Lest we forget – lest we forget!

  While Britain was still the world’s leading manufacturer, its industries were being overtaken by newer and more dynamic ones in Germany or the United States, which were also cutting into its overseas markets. The stories that toy soldiers for British children were made in Germany may not have been true but they reflected a growing anxiety – including about Britain’s ability to defend itself.

  Because it was an island, Britain had been able to get away with having a tiny army and relying on its navy for its own defence and that of its empire. The advances in technology meant that navies were increasingly expensive and the burden on the budget correspondingly greater. ‘The weary Titan,’ said Joseph Chamberlain, ‘staggering under the too-vast orb of his fate.’40 Moreover, there were worries that the global commitments of the Royal Navy left the British Isle
s themselves underprotected. Pessimists in the military had been warning since the late 1880s that the French, if they chose, could easily sweep aside a British naval force in the Channel and land an invasion force in England. Salisbury himself sketched out a scenario in 1888 in a memorandum to the Cabinet in which he envisaged the French, led ‘by the kind of soldier who comes to the top in a revolution’, landing on a Saturday night when the British were enjoying the weekend. With the help of ‘two or three Irish patriots’, the invaders could cut the telegraph wires and make their way to London before anyone in the British military could react.41 The prospect – and how much he really believed in it is questionable – did not stop him, however, from continuing to take his holidays in France.

  The poor relations with France remained to trouble Salisbury’s last government; indeed, there was to be another quite serious war scare in 1898. The new and developing friendship between France and another rival for empire, Russia, was also worrying. Salisbury’s preference for working with the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy no longer seemed an adequate counterbalance. How little it could be depended upon was demonstrated by the Armenian massacres during the mid 1890s in what is today the eastern part of Turkey.

  These unfortunate Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were being slaughtered by their Muslim neighbours and the government, either deliberately or through sheer incompetence, did nothing to prevent the atrocities. British policy had for much of the century been to prop up the Ottomans as a way of keeping the waters leading from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean out of the hands of the Russians. Self-interest, however, did not always fit well with British public opinion, which found much to outrage it when the Ottoman Empire treated one or other of its Christian communities badly. Gladstone indeed had fought a whole election campaign on the Bulgarian atrocities and the need for the international community to do something. For all that he disliked meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, Salisbury had always taken a dim view of the Ottomans and would have been happy to abandon them earlier if Britain had not needed a friend at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. In 1895 he tried to find partners – possibly Austria or Italy, perhaps Germany, even Russia – to put pressure on the Ottomans to stop the attacks on the Armenians but no other power was willing to act. Salisbury had sleepless nights over the matter but was forced to accept that there was nothing Britain could do. He also came to the conclusion that he would have to look for other ways to safeguard British interests in the Mediterranean and the crucial Suez Canal link to India than propping up the moribund and corrupt Ottoman Empire. The question, which was to remain open for the next few years, was how. Increased (and expensive) military strength in Egypt and in the Mediterranean? An alliance with another power with interests in the region such as France or Russia? Neither seemed likely given the rivalries elsewhere.

  The Ottoman Empire was worrying in another way, for the temptations it offered in an age of imperialism. The powers, and their publics, measured their importance in the world in terms of the number of colonies they possessed but the supply of unclaimed land was running out. Africa had been pretty much divided up by the 1890s, as had the Far East and the Pacific islands. That left the parts of the world where the old orders were collapsing: China, for example, Persia or the Ottoman Empire. In 1898 Salisbury made a speech in the Albert Hall in London which became famous. ‘You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying,’ he told his Conservative audience. ‘On the one side you have great countries of enormous power growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organisation.’ On the other side, were their natural victims, dying of the diseases of corruption and misgovernment. The process which Salisbury saw as likely to occur was a potentially dangerous one. ‘The living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear.’42

  They already were appearing. Britain and France had quarrelled over Egypt, still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, in the 1880s and the French and Italians were rivals in Tunis. The Ottoman government floundered like a fish in a net and the strings grew ever tighter; loans from European governments and banks and then more outside control over its finances; concessions to European interests to build railways, good for commerce but also a way of extending European influence; European interference in the name of humanitarianism with its treatment of its Christian subjects; and European demands for reforms. Further down the road, when the Ottomans could no longer cope, their territories, which included parts of the Balkans and the Arab Middle East, would surely be up for grabs.

  The spread of the Russian Empire southwards and east brought Persia into the Great Game between the Russians and the British in Central Asia. The Russians were increasingly influential in the north while the British tried to consolidate their position in the south and along the Indian Ocean and both wooed the Shah of Shahs. The game played on in Afghanistan, which now stood between Russian territory and British India, in Tibet, and further east in China.

  In Asia, the European powers found China, with its evident weakness, almost irresistible. They were joined by the United States even though opposition to imperialism had deep historical roots there; Grover Cleveland, President in the mid 1880s and then again between 1893 and 1897, and a leading opponent of the United States acquiring colonies, famously said in his first inaugural address that his country would remain true to its revolutionary origins and that it had no ambitions towards other continents. Yet the United States was already predisposed to intervene in its own backyard in the Caribbean and was shortly to take over the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Where China was concerned, American administrations maintained that the only right course was an Open Door policy with access for all nations to China’s territory in place of exclusive spheres of interest.

  To the Westerners’ surprise and considerable admiration, Japan, which had seen off the threat of becoming another colony by a rapid adaptation to the new forces in the world, showed that it too had imperialist ambitions in China. The powers forced concession after concession out of the moribund regime in Beijing: treaty ports where foreigners could live and work under the protection of their own laws and their own governments; railways, of course – and in China these were protected by foreign troops; and exclusive rights to mining and trade in particular areas. The Chinese rightly saw a pattern emerging where their country would be carved up like a melon.

  Britain was comfortably dominant in trade and commerce in China, particularly along the Yangtze valley, and did not particularly want to acquire pieces of China along with the burden of having to administer them. But could it stand back and watch as other powers moved in on China, perhaps annexing territory? When Salisbury took office in 1895, Russia was already challenging British interests in the northern part of the country. And the competition for influence in China was about to heat up as other players including Germany joined in.

  To add to Salisbury’s worries, relations with the United States, always tricky, were in a particularly bad phase. The long-running dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the latter’s borders with British Guiana had suddenly been taken up by the Grover Cleveland administration. In July 1895, a month after Salisbury took office, the Secretary of State, Richard Olney, issued his belligerent note saying that the United States had the right to intervene in the dispute. He cited the authority of the Monroe Doctrine, that wonderfully vague and infinitely elastic statement which warned outside powers against interfering in the New World. There was uproar in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. The American ambassador in London read out a long dispatch to Salisbury in which his government supported the claims of Venezuela to a substantial piece of British Guiana and demanded that the British agree to arbitration. Salisbury took four months to answer. He refused to accept that the Monroe Doctrine gave the United States any authority over British possessions
in the New World and suggested that the Americans had ‘no apparent practical concern’ in a boundary dispute between a British possession and another country. Cleveland said he was ‘mad clean through’ and there was much excited talk of war in both Britain and the United States. The British had enough on their plate elsewhere and had no inclination to fight and opinion in the United States was divided. Eventually, a compromise was reached; Salisbury stopped objecting to the American extension of the Monroe Doctrine and some minor changes were made to the border in an arbitration in 1899. Venezuela, which the American ambassador in London, dismissed as ‘a mongrel state’, got very little. (The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed the disputed land until his death, and his successors continue to do so.)43

  Salisbury made concessions in other disputes as well. When in 1896 the French annexed Madagascar, where Britain had extensive interests, he let it go by without a protest. He still resisted, though, any suggestions that Britain look for more permanent relationships. He refused as he had always done to worry unduly about every corner of the globe. He preferred to concentrate on the areas of vital importance to the British Empire. As he said to Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), the proconsul in Egypt, when there was a scare about security in the Red Sea: ‘I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places. If they were allowed full scope they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the moon in order to protect us from Mars.’44 His colleagues worried that he was a bit too unconcerned and that he did not have a clear foreign policy. Or if he did he was not about to reveal it; Salisbury’s penchant for secrecy grew more pronounced with age. Lord Curzon, who worked as his Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, later described him as ‘that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top’.45 Curzon felt that Salisbury too often resorted to throwing bones to dogs, who then, as was so evident with France and Russia, only bayed for more. While not all his colleagues were as critical, most worried that Salisbury was no longer up to the work involved in being Prime Minister as well Foreign Minister. He was showing his age by the late 1890s and he was depressed by the drawn-out illness of his wife which ended with her death in 1899.