Kaiser Wilhelm II was however far from willing to restrict Germany’s foreign policy objectives to the ‘parochial backyard of Central Europe’. To be a great European power was no longer enough; he wanted Germany to strive for Weltmacht (world power).cxlvi Forsaking Bismark’s wisdom, Wilhelm steered German foreign policy into stormier waters; waters that were compounded by institutional flaws within the Reich. Of these flaws, the historian Christopher Clark argued that, ‘The demarcation line between civil and military authority was the most fateful legacy Prussia bequeathed to Germany.’cxlvii (25) Nowhere was this fault line more clearly on show than in her colony of German West Africa (modern day Namibia). Bismarck had created secretaries of state in a wide variety of areas, from justice to finance and foreign affairs, but none had been created for the army; at the insistence of Wilhelm I, the army remained the exclusive preserve of the Kaiser, as did his appointments to the posts of the Chiefs of Staff.(27) The core of the problem was that in times of crisis, military authority could act independently of civilian authority, with disastrous consequences.
The local colonial governor in South West Africa was responsible to the Prussian Foreign Office, which reported directly to the Chancellor (Prime Minister). However, the military man sent from Berlin to put down an indigenous Herero uprising was only answerable to the General Staff, who in turn were directly responsible to the Kaiser. The only crossing point between civil and military authority rested in the hands of the Kaiser. Too much power and responsibility rested in the hands of one man alone, and when push came to shove, Wilhelm II generally favoured the military. When the Herero and Nama people of South West Africa rose up against German colonial rule, they attacked and killed up to 700 civilians and German farmers. Between 1904–07, German military authorities killed between 24,000 and 65,000 Nama tribal people through a war and scorched earth policy, driving them into the desert and incarcerating families in Boer War-style concentration camps. This genocide wiped out 50 to 70 per cent of the Hereros and 50 per cent of the Nama.(28) The brutal subjugation of the Herero and Nama peoples were the first genocides to be committed by the German state.
Germany’s institutional flaws are often attributed as having their roots in the militarism that existed within imperial Prusso-German society. Militarism and Prussia having become synonymous in the minds of many looking at Germany from the outside, and as we have seen, Kaiser Wilhelm mirrored the stereotype perfectly. Large sections of German society did indeed view Prussian military officers as better role models than middle-class liberal politicans. Much of the middle class in Germany aped the values and attitudes of the military caste. Military service was not regarded as a loathsome burden but as a distinction and an opportunity for social advancement. Furthermore, popular culture romanticised and glamorised images of dashing officers in old Prussian regiments, such as the guards, in their elaborate uniforms bedecked with gold braid and sparkling sabres, while teachers and civil servants took great pride in their status as officers in the Reserve.
The military was no doubt held in high regard in all the great nation states of Europe, however, historians have emphasised that this took on new heights in Germany in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and was one of the reasons why the evolution of more democratic institutions stagnated. It was not surprising the military was held in such high regard; three successful wars had brought about German unity. One could argue a counter posture, that two disastrous world wars have made modern Germany the least militaristic of all the powerful nations today; success and defeat breed different mindsets. Even so, the social status of the German military did appear somewhat extreme, especially to foreign observers. German civilians were expected to step off the pavement to give officers the right of way. Following a visit to Germany, a British commentator wrote, ‘I had seen German offiziere swaggering three or four abreast along the pavement; sweeping women and children into the gutter… I felt hatred at the stupidity of the thing. I thought we were going to free the German people from this Juggernaut of their own creation.’(29)
In 1913, an incident in the town of Zabern in the Alsace occurred when Prussian officers attacked some locals who were making derogatory remarks about the military, an example of the overbearing nature of the military in civilian affairs. This appeared to underscore the arrogance with which the military conducted itself in Germany, but to the credit of German democracy this incident led to major debates in the Reichstag, and the media, about the role of the military establishment in Germany. Wilhelm II quickly rallied to support ‘his’ military and their right to uphold ‘their honour’. These and similar incidents have been repeatedly cited by some historians to try and underpin the notion that Germany was somehow uniquely militaristic and hell-bent on a major European war, or world domination. A view that simply does not stand up to closer scrutiny.
Until the outbreak of the First World War, German expenditure on the army and navy never reached the level of Britain’s. In terms of overall military expenditure, Great Britain, France and Russia all spent far more from 1870–90 than Germany did.(30) In his excellent history of the lead up to the First World War, Thirteen Days — Diplomacy and Disaster — The Countdown to the Great War, Clive Ponting wrote, ‘Germany was not uniquely militaristic, conscripting a little over half of its eligible males each year, compared to eighty per cent in France. Neither was Europe, as a whole, engaged in an uncontrolled arms race. On average states were spending between three and five per cent of their national income on defence every year.’cxlviii (31) A.J.P. Taylor described the disaster that befell Europe in the following terms:
Men are reluctant to believe that great events have small causes. Therefore once the Great War started, they were convinced that it must be the outcome of profound forces. It is hard to discover these when we examine the details. Nowhere was there a conscious determination to provoke a war. Statesmen miscalculated. They used the instruments of bluff and threat which had proved effective on previous occasions. This time things went wrong. The deterrent on which they relied failed to deter; the Statesmen became prisoners of their own weapons. The great armies (that had been) accumulated to provide security and preserve the peace, carried the nations to war… (32)
The counter-argument to this was advocated in Fritz Fischer’s classic, Griff nach der Weltmacht (Grab for World Power), which was highly critical of Wilhelmian Imperial Germany and its role in creating the conditions that led up to the First World War. Fischer believed its foreign policy objectives had inevitably brought Germany into conflict with the other great powers. He argued that Imperial Germany’s desire for economic hegemony in Continental Europe and equal world power status with the great empires of the day (those of France, Great Britain, the United States and Imperial Russia) could only be achieved through the destruction of the balance of power, further annexations, and the extension of influence through the building of a substantial navy and merchant marine.(33)
Historians still argue over whether Fischer, in hindsight, ascribed too much purpose to German war plans.cxlix Just because a state plans for war does not necessarily mean they intend to start one; just because they have territorial ambitions does not mean they are implacably set on achieving them, irrespective of the opportunities or consequences. The greatest flaw in Fischer’s argument was that the ‘blueprint’ for Germany’s war aims that he referred to was not actually written until September 1914, a month after the war had started. Fischer was a product of his time, of a generation of historians with a narrow, specialised knowledge of their favoured period of history who were taught not to try to make historical analogies with other countries or periods and were abjectly incapable of putting German history into any kind of broader context. Beyond that he had his own demons to lay to rest, not least his membership of the Nazi Party and his service in the Wehrmacht, which gave him more reasons than most to dwell upon the origins of the great catastrophe. It led him to seek out and believe to have found the roots of Nazism in Imperial Germany’s foreign
policy agenda of World War One. That’s a stretch, but his pitch sparked a debate that lasted a generation and polarised the historical profession, not least in his native Germany. Christopher Clark, whose seminal work on Prussia and Germany has received wide acclaim from across the historical establishment has joined a growing number of historians who have argued that during the age of global imperialism ‘Germany behaved in no way worse than any other European power.’(35)
After both world wars, the victorious Allies were not short on ambition for annexations themselves, despite earnest public protestations to the contrary at their outset. The enormous losses suffered by the major combatants did much to radicalise the war aims of all sides. At the beginning, France was unquestionably keen to avenge her humiliating defeat of 1870 and to regain Alsace Lorraine, but it is questionable to what extent French public opinion (beyond the sabre-rattling politicians), would have wanted another major war to realise these aims. In 1914, no one seriously considered reconstituting Poland, nor did anyone believe there was benefit in fostering the total break-up of Austria-Hungary, and the Allies never thought they would turn their previous aims of keeping Russia out of the Dardanelles on their head, or promise to compensate Russia with the Straits and Constantinople to keep her in the game. But war makes strange bedfellows, and outcomes and ambitions frequently mutate as death tolls rise.
To continue to suggest that German imperialism and militarism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, up to the close of the First World War, was somehow unique, is only a convincing argument if you view Germany and its imperial ambitions in total isolation from those of the other great powers.
KAISER WILHELM AND THE COUNTDOWN TO THE FIRST WORLD WAR
When Wilhelm II picked Leo von Caprivi, a former Chief of the Admiralty, as Bismarck’s replacement, he did so with care. Both Caprivi and his replacement at the Admiralty, Admiral Fredrick von Holstein, were united behind the Kaiser in their determination to build a great German fleet. Nothing jeopardised relations with Britain more than this aim. No nation, not France, Germany, or even America, had previously been allowed to challenge British naval supremacy and the perceived threat this would cause to the British Empire. In 1890, Germany’s fleet was insignificant, but by the turn of the century the construction of thirty-eight battleships had been approved. Within the next decade, Germany went on to construct the second largest fleet in the world, a navy greater than that of France and Russia combined.(36)
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, British policy had been to keep a navy three times the size of its nearest rival. Now it had to struggle to keep its navy only twice the size of Germany’s, and would have to join forces with France and Russia to maintain naval predominance in the likely theatres of war. A British Navy League was established in 1893 as a pressure group for increasing British naval expenditure as the naval shipbuilding race began. Lord Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, warned that, ‘To us, defeat in maritime war would mean disaster of almost unparalleled magnitude in history. It might mean the destruction of our mercantile marine, the stoppage of our manufacturers, scarcity of food, invasion, disruption of Empire. No other country runs the same risks in war with us.’ However, John Ramsden argues, ‘It did not require post-1918 hindsight to see that this was a one-sided viewpoint, for all those disasters could also happen to Germany when blockaded by the Royal Navy. Such a fate could come only slowly though, whereas for Britain, as Winston Churchill (a later incumbent as First Lord of the Admiralty) would put it, the Royal Navy could ‘lose the war in an afternoon’. The Prussian General Staff understood the distinction, planning a lightning attack to knock out France and a medium-quick campaign against Russia, both designed to be over before the Royal Navy could starve Germany.’(37)
What drove this incredible German naval build-up was its burgeoning economy, which also increasingly posed a threat to Britain’s domination of world trade. By 1910, Germany’s share of world trade had reached 15.9 per cent, overtaking Britain’s at 14.7 per cent. Britain, however, still dominated banking, insurance and shipping, carrying half the world’s trade in a third of the world’s ships. But, in ‘the struggle for the mastery of Europe’, Germany dominated the key industries and those most important in wartime. She produced two thirds of the continent’s steel, and half its coal; in power generation she produced 20 per cent more electricity than Great Britain, France and Italy combined. German growth in agriculture — and more importantly in emerging fields like chemicals, artificial fertilisers, pharmaceuticals, metals, tool making machinery and industrial tool production — outstripped that of France, Britain and Russia combined. She also dominated modern manufacturing with world famous brands like Krups, Thyssen, Bosch, Borsig, Bayer, BASF, Hoechst and AEG. And Siemens pioneered a new revolution in communications by manufacturing and laying electrical cables that connected Europe and America. By the outbreak of the First World War, Germany was the wealthiest, most powerful and advanced economy in Europe, and the living standards and social welfare provisions of her workers were among the highest in the world.(38)
A consensus began to build, which argued that Germany could not be allowed to have the world’s most powerful army and navy together, with a population that by 1910 almost equalled Britain and France combined, and an economy that had overtaken everyone but the United States. Germany had not only shattered the much cherished and sought after European balance of power, she had torn it to shreds. In the years before the outbreak of war, any semblance of the balance of power had ceased to exist. As early as 1903, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, said Germany, ‘[is] our worst enemy and our greatest danger. I do not doubt that there are many Germans well disposed to us, but they are a minority; and the majority dislike us so intensely that the friendship of their Emperor or their Government cannot be really useful to us.’ Grey, with the support of Edward VII, became the key architect of realigning British foreign policy against Germany.(39)
The efforts of France to rebalance her power against the growing German colossus had long pinned her hopes on an alliance with Russia, steadily increasing credits to the Tsar and Russian industry until she became Russia’s greatest creditor.(40) German diplomacy had foolishly let Bismarck’s treaty with Russia lapse in 1890. Two years later, France and Russia signed a military convention that was directed against the central powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany. Attempts were made between Britain and Germany to have Germany scale down her naval building plans but Wilhelm II was not prepared to let go of his pet project. He and his advisers misread and underestimated the changing fortunes of international diplomacy. They banked on a number of false assumptions; it appeared inconceivable to them that Britain would break her long cherished position of ‘splendid isolation’ on her protected island with the world’s largest navy and a mercantile empire that spanned the globe. She did not need to make allies with anyone, least of all with her oldest adversary, France. Her clash of interests with France in 1898–99 in Egypt and Sudan just seemed to reiterate that the old animosities were far from extinguished. But with Germany’s refusal to stop the escalating naval building race, Great Britain’s isolation no longer looked quite so splendid, and rapprochement with unlikely allies began.
For Great Britain’s monarch, Edward VII, there was no love lost for his cousin, Wilhelm II. Edward, together with like-minded leading elements at the Foreign Office, played a significant role in switching the focus of British foreign policy and diplomacy away from its long standing alliance with Prussia and Germany towards a set of new alliances with her old enemies. Although Edward VII was half German, he forgot his own heritage in favour of pursuing Britain’s long-standing policy of stopping any and all emerging powers that threatened to dominate the Continent. In the face of opposition, at home, and in France (when Edward first went to Paris, to pave the way for the Entente Cordiale, he was greeted with jeers of ‘Vive les Boers’), the King managed to create an atmosphere in which the unthinkable happened. In 1904, France an
d Great Britain buried the hatchet and delineated their spheres of influence in North Africa, with Britain keeping Egypt and France taking Morocco. With the signing of the Entente Cordiale a new era of Franco-British cooperation began. It did not yet commit Britain to France in the event of a war with Germany, but it was a step in that direction. German diplomacy responded disastrously.
In March 1905, when Wilhelm II took a cruise aboard the Deutschland through the Mediterranean, the Chancellor and the German Foreign Office encouraged him to make a stopover at the key trading port of Tangiers in Morocco. Their aim was to bolster Germany’s increasing trade interests in North Africa, but the Kaiser got carried away with his reception, announcing to the Sultan and the world that the Sultanate was an independent territory that no foreign power could lay claim to. This directly contravened the spirit and the letter of the Anglo-French Entente. An international incident ensued, with France and Germany pressing their claims, which ended up in a humiliating climb down for German foreign policy at the Algeciras conference in 1906. France, backed by Britain and most Mediterranean countries, had her claims to the territory upheld and Germany’s international isolation was clear for all to see. Her only supporter at the conference had been Austria-Hungary. Russia remained ominously quiet.
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