by Hew Strachan
Britain put its foreign policy through a rapid and dramatic reorientation after 1900. However, this was less the product of the new circumstances in Europe, and more a response to an accumulation of older and more global pressures. Until the middle years of the nineteenth century Britain led the world in industrial production; free trade guaranteed access to world markets because no other country could manufacture so much so cheaply. But from then on other countries—particularly the United States and Germany—began to catch up: in 1870 Britain commanded 32 per cent of the world’s manufacturing capacity, but by 1910 it had only 14.7 percent, behind both Germany (15.9 per cent) and the United States (35.3 per cent).16 London remained the hub of the world’s banking, insurance, and shipping markets until 1914, and Britain’s invisible exports therefore helped mask its relative industrial decline. Nonetheless, it followed that for some the doctrinaire commitment to free trade— appropriate to the days of easy industrial supremacy—became an increasing, if self-imposed, burden. Given British opposition to protection, formal empire, the direct control of territory, with its guaranteed markets made more economic sense in 1900 than it had in 1850. However, the empire itself was enormously expensive, particularly in relation to the costs of its defence. The colonial ambitions of the other, now industrialized, European powers meant that the yardsticks by which the forces had to be judged were not simply—if they ever had been—the technological and military margin sufficient to defeat Zulus or Pathans. Seapower was the primary means by which free trade had been sustained, and by which both the home country and the colonies guarded against external attack. But what had been a source of stability before the industrialization of the continental powers became a well-spring for insecurity thereafter. Other nations transformed their financial administration and their banking systems, and proved willing to contract debts to fund naval programmes. The introduction of the iron-clad, steam-powered battleship in 1860, and the decision in 1889 that the Royal Navy should be maintained at sufficient strength to be at least equal to the next two ranking naval powers assumed that Britain’s maritime rivals would restrain themselves. They did not, and Britain’s defence spending soared. In 1884 British naval expenditure was £10.7 million; by 1899—in a period of relatively constant prices—it was £24.1 million (and it was to double again by 1914). Britain’s total expenditure on the navy in the seven-year period 1897 to 1904 was 78 per cent higher than in the previous septennium.17 Britain had perforce to adopt policies which eased the fiscal burdens of naval and imperial responsibility. The Boer War, which had cost £200 million and in which not far short of half a million men had served, vividly highlighted in double fashion the precarious nature of Britain’s position. The war had been marked by early defeats and had been protracted; the commitment to it had left Britain’s other possessions vulnerable and exposed. In 1901 Britain eased its problems in the western hemisphere with an agreement with the United States. In January 1902 it followed this up with a treaty with Japan, like America a rising naval power: the purpose of the treaty was limited and local, to help Britain balance Russia in the Far East and to ease the Royal Navy of its burdens in Chinese waters.
The German naval laws and the tub-thumping Teutonic exploitation of British embarrassment in South Africa did not at this stage produce a Eurocentric reconstruction of British strategy and diplomacy. German behaviour between 1898 and 1901 did mean that whatever attractions an Anglo-German alliance might have had for Britain were dissipated. But the end of British isolation in relation to Europe was determined by the relative position of the European powers in Africa and Asia, not within Europe itself. Improved relations with France and Russia, the former aspiring to control of North Africa and the Mediterranean, and thus challenging British control of Egypt and the Suez route to India, and the latter expanding south and east, also towards India, were the keys of future imperial policy.
Russia, spurned by a Germany focusing its foreign policy on the simplicities of the Triple Alliance after Bismarck’s fall in 1890, and anxious for French loans to finance its industrialization, had come to terms with France between 1891 and 1894. The two powers ratified a military convention by which each agreed to defend the other in the event of a German attack, or of a German-supported attack by Austria-Hungary on Russia or by Italy on France: French and Russian mobilization was to follow immediately on the mobilization of any member of the Triple Alliance. Thus, in 1904 the Russo-Japanese War in Manchuria found France allied to the former and Britain to the latter; one pressure for an Anglo-French rapprochement was that both were wedded to a policy of mutual restraint in relation to Manchuria. However, the key motivation for France behind the affirmation of the entente cordiale, effected on 8 April of that year, was—as for Britain—imperial. After the drubbing of 1870, French ambitions—or those in France possessed of ambition—had looked away from the metropolis to North Africa. Delcassé, foreign minister from 1898, was anxious to expand France’s influence from its colony, Algeria, into Morocco, to the exclusion of Germany. Britain, by agreement with France on the Moroccan question, in return secured its own controls over the gates of the Mediterranean, Gibraltar and Egypt, and hence over the route to India, the focus of the empire. The Entente was intended to affect the naval balance here and not in the North Sea.18
By 1904, therefore, the context in which Bülow’s Weltpolitik was set seemed very different from that of 1897. The composing of French and British differences, the existence of secret clauses in this agreement (which actually concerned the division of Morocco), and the more formal Franco-Russian alliance, conjoined to play on German insecurities. Convinced that France wanted revenge for the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, determined that Britain would be challenged by the naval programme, and terrified by the strategic dilemma of a war on both its western and eastern fronts simultaneously, Germany projected its fears onto its putative opponents and in due course gave its imaginings a reality which in origin they need not have had.
German policy therefore aimed to woo Russia from France or to split France from Britain. Given Russia’s weakness in 1904–5, its defeat at the hands of the Japanese and its subsequent revolution, the opportunities for the former seemed somewhat greater. In the event Russia saw any treaty with Germany as incompatible with its commitments to France, resisting the German offer of a defensive alliance in October 1904 and refusing to ratify the agreement reached between the Kaiser and the Tsar at Björkö in July 1905. The opportunity to divide Britain and France was presented by French policy in Morocco. Moroccan independence was guaranteed by the 1880 Madrid Convention. Delcassé’s advancement of French interests was hardly compatible with Moroccan integrity, and on 31 March 1905 the Kaiser landed at Tangiers and declared his support for the Sultan’s bid to maintain his independence.
On the face of it, despite its provocative nature, the Kaiser’s action was fully justified and deserving of success. Both the French prime minister and French public opinion seemed to think so, and Delcassé—the author of France’s Moroccan policy—was ousted by June. But divided counsels within Germany, themselves a reflection of the lack of centralized control, and the absence of diplomatic sensitivity turned success into humiliation.
What it seems fairly clear that Germany did not want was war. Many of those who argue that Germany did not plan for war in 1914 point to the 1905 crisis and show how much more favourable to Germany the international position was at that juncture. The French army was still reeling from the Dreyfus affair and from the Third Republic’s continuing uncertainty as to its political loyalties. The British army was both small and focused on India. Above all, Russia’s preoccupation with Japan removed the threat of a war on two fronts. The chief of the German general staff, Alfred von Schlieffen, recognized the opportunity for a preventive war. But the focus of the general staff’s planning was German security in Europe; whatever German objectives in Morocco, they were not in the first instance concerned with that. Furthermore, Schlieffen’s was not necessarily the dominant voice in German mil
itary counsels, let alone in Germany more generally. Of late the navy had enjoyed the higher profile, and yet Tirpitz did not regard the German fleet as ready to take on the Royal Navy. Indeed, the German navy in 1905 had no operational plan for war with Britain or with Britain and France.19 Schlieffen recognized that the army did not have the means to attack Britain should Britain support France. Moreover, both Germany’s allies, Italy and Austria-Hungary, looked as militarily weak as did Germany’s putative opponents. In these circumstances, the caution uttered by the Prussian minister of war, von Einem, was compelling—and gained force when Schlieffen fell sick in the summer. Von Einem was particularly concerned by the fact that France had completed the re-equipment of its army with quick-firing field artillery but Germany had not.20
Weltpolitik, in other words a diplomatic success, not war, was Germany’s purpose in 1905. But, behind the overall aim of disrupting the Entente, middle-distance German objectives diverged. Wilhelm stood for little more than he had publicly declared: an open door to Morocco was necessary given the volume of German trade. But others saw the opportunity to exchange concessions to the French for German gains elsewhere, and Friedrich von Holstein of the Foreign Ministry—to whom Bülow gave a free hand—wanted to emphasize to France the dangers of disregarding Germany.21 The foreign office realized that militarizing the crisis, threatening war, albeit with no intention of going to war, could help it achieve these wider objectives. Delcassé regarded this posturing as bluff, but others in France, all too conscious of their military weakness, were less sure. Germany insisted on the summoning of a conference at Algeçiras in January 1906 to discuss the Moroccan question. But at the same time the Kaiser made it clear that Germany would not fight. Thus, in the subsequent deliberations Germany harvested all the disadvantages and none of the benefits that its earlier high-handedness had promised. Britain was provoked into hardening its support of France; furthermore, the Triple Alliance showed its weakness, Italy backing the Entente (and thus reflecting its own awareness of the relative naval balance in the Mediterranean) and Austria-Hungary urging Germany to be more conciliatory. The conference left France in a dominant position in Morocco.
The consequence of this, the first Moroccan crisis, was thus the reverse of that intended by Germany. The Entente gained a dynamism which it had hitherto lacked. Germany was plainly using colonial questions as an instrument in European and great power politics. Such an approach found a ready response within France. French colonial activity had been in part a substitute for the loss of status in Europe, the acquisition of empire a compensation for forfeiting Alsace-Lorraine. Popular enthusiasm for colonialism was therefore yoked to continental rivalries. Delcassé had, after all, sought out an alliance with Britain precisely to enable France the better to counter Germany. Many of the permanent civil servants within the Foreign Ministry, particularly those of the younger generation, were characterized by a blend of nationalism, colonialism, and anti-Germanism: with Delcassé’s fall, French foreign policy lacked a guiding ministerial hand, and the civil servants became correspondingly more powerful.22
But it was the change in British attitudes that was really decisive in confirming the shift, and in directing colonial rivalries back into a European context. Late-nineteenth-century colonial rivalry has often been portrayed as an extra-European safety valve for the tensions of the great powers. In 1898 the French Colonel Marchand and Britain’s General Kitchener had glared at each other at Fashoda, but both countries had treated their competition for the Upper Nile as a purely African problem. In 1902 and 1904 Britain had settled with Japan and France at least in order to remain isolated from Europe. But during the course of 1905 German behaviour caused the British to see the Moroccan crisis less as a colonial issue and increasingly as a European one. The Anglo-German rivalry, whose roots extended back over the previous three decades, and which had been nurtured by economic competition, now found clear political expression.
Germany’s naval challenge was only a part, although the most concrete manifestation, of the two powers’ mutual antagonism. The build-up of the Royal Navy pre-dated the 1898 German naval law: it was a product of the introduction of the iron-clad battleship, the two-power standard, and the need to sustain a consistent pattern of orders in order to use shipyard and industrial capacity effectively. But by 1901 the Admiralty was seriously worried by Germany’s plans, and thereafter Germany provided the thrust to British naval policy. On the day before Trafalgar Day 1904 ‘Jackie’ Fisher was appointed First Sea Lord. His brief was to cut naval spending, an objective which he believed he could achieve while simultaneously delivering gains in efficiency. By December the main outlines of his reforming programme were already clear. The combination of a steam-powered fleet with the Japanese and French agreements allowed Britain’s battleships to concentrate on the North Sea without sacrificing their global mission. The redistribution scheme, which used the Atlantic Fleet at Gibraltar as a potential support for the Channel Fleet, meant that three-quarters of Britain’s battleships were available to face the Germans.23 Secondly, Fisher decided to begin work on a new and revolutionary class of battleship, the Dreadnought. In so doing he rendered obsolete Britain’s existing naval superiority, but in practice he had little choice since other powers were on the brink of taking comparable decisions. Fisher’s early thinking on warships was conditioned by rivalry with France and Russia, and put speed ahead of armour. Envisaging war in the Atlantic or the Pacific, he wanted a vessel whose speed would enable the Royal Navy to keep its opponents at a distance and so defeat them through long-range gunnery: he dubbed this the ‘battle cruiser’. But by 1905, when the first Dreadnought was laid down, the likely enemy was Germany and the probable theatre of operations the more confined spaces of the North Sea. The ship that therefore resulted was a battleship, and her most striking feature was not her speed of 22 knots but her armament.24 Her size enabled her to mount five twin-turrets with 12-inch guns: her broadside and her effective range were double those of a pre-Dreadnought. The battleship had secured a fresh lease of life by being able to operate outside torpedo range. Fisher’s anti-Germanism was as pronounced as Tirpitz’s Anglophobia, and his hopes for a preventive war with Germany in 1905 were quite sufficient to justify German fears of another Copenhagen. But in his calmer moments Fisher, like Tirpitz, rationalized his fleet as a deter-rent.25
Simultaneous with the anti-German shift in British naval thought was a comparable and similar growth within the British Foreign Office. Some members of the diplomatic service, like Eyre Crowe, were not immune to the navalism which accompanied Fisher’s reforms. But most important was a belief in the balance of power in Europe, and the conviction after 1905 that Germany represented a threat to it. In the British case, ministerial direction from December 1905 was firm and continuous. Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who became prime minister when the Liberals were returned to power that month, appointed Sir Edward Grey as his foreign secretary. Grey, a liberal imperialist, used a cross-party appeal to win Conservative support for his policies, and to remove foreign policy from party-political debate and endow it with consistency and direction. Indeed, he managed to remain remarkably independent of his own cabinet, and thus minimize any challenge from the government’s own left wing. The Liberals’ programme of social reform, and after 1910 the preoccupations of domestic problems, meant that both parliament and cabinet were happy to collude in the separation of Britain’s foreign policy from the mainstream. Thus Grey was left free to pursue a design that aimed at maintaining peace in Europe by preparing for war, and that saw Britain’s role as the arbitrator in balancing power in Europe. Grey’s stance was moral and high-minded, but it was also shrewdly realistic: a dominant power in Europe would threaten Britain’s command of the sea at its most vulnerable point—the Channel—and so the European balance was an integral component in imperial security.26
The immediate threat to European stability, it was clear by 1906, came from Germany. Thus British policy leaned towards France and towards giv
ing the Entente firmer shape and direction, albeit without a formal commitment. Paul Cambon, France’s ambassador in London, picked up the mood in 1905, and worried that the Liberals might back-pedal encouraged the French to seek ways of making the Entente a defensive alliance. In December 1905 and January 1906 the two powers arranged and conducted military staff talks which continued until May 1906. Grey was a driving force in these conversations, but he insisted to the French that they did not compromise British neutrality, and to begin with set them directly in the context of the Moroccan crisis. Even when he later acknowledged that the maintenance of the Entente would itself be a cause for war, he omitted to inform the cabinet of the talks.27
Therefore, when in 1907 Britain settled its differences with Russia, the treaty could not, like the earlier agreements with Japan and France, remain set solely in a local and colonial context. The arena for British and Russian rivalry was Asia, and for Britain the worry of Russian penetration through Persia and Afghanistan to the frontiers of India itself. In November 1904 fears of Russians at the Khyber led the viceroy in India to demand a potential reinforcement of 143, 686 men in addition to the army already in India.28 Therefore, Britain’s rapprochement with Russia was not a revolution in British foreign policy: it was a diplomatic conclusion determined by strategic and financial common sense, and one which Grey himself had espoused ever since he had been parliamentary under-secretary at the Foreign Office in the early 1890s. The main domestic obstacle had been Liberal sentiment, averse to any agreement with a reactionary autocracy. Such sensibilities were eased by the constitutional reforms introduced in Russia after the 1905 revolution, and were further consoled by the treaty’s Asiatic context, which rendered it the solution to a long-standing imperial rivalry. But the implications were much greater than the fact that not so many troops would have to go to India. The Anglo-Russian convention was the coping-stone of the Anglo-French Entente. The Triple Entente had become simultaneously the means by which Britain could contain Germany in Europe, and also a contrivance for moderating relations with France and Russia. If Britain wanted to support France, it had also to accommodate Russia. French capital was increasingly—by 1914 it would be a quarter of all French investments—committed to Russia; the falling French birth rate—the lowest of the major powers in Europe—rendered France reliant on Russia’s military manpower. Thus, for Conservatives the settlement was the first stage in facing a fresh threat, that of Germany.