The Sleepwalkers (25 page)

Théophile Delcassé

In order to heighten the pressure on Britain, Delcassé tried, exactly as Hanotaux had foreseen, to bring the Germans into a consortium with France and Russia. During the autumn, winter and spring of 1899– 1900, the political weather seemed auspicious for such an enterprise: in conversations with the French ambassador in Berlin, the new German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow hinted at shared Franco-German interests outside Europe. It was well known in Paris that the German press (like the French) was hostile to Britain's war on the Boer Republic. Reports of wrathful anti-British outbursts on that subject by the German Kaiser gave further cause for optimism. In January 1900, leader articles inspired by Delcassé's press office urged Germany to join forces with France on the Egyptian question, pointing out that Germany too would benefit from the neutralization of the Suez Canal, and that the combined naval forces of the continental powers would be sufficient to ensure British respect for any international settlement. In the diplomatic community, it was common knowledge that these articles hailed from the office of Delcassé and expressed the official policy of the French ministry of foreign affairs.
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While he waited for a German response, Delcassé prepared his colleagues in Paris, with characteristic impetuosity, for a war with Britain that might well be global in scope. ‘Some suggest a landing in England,' he told the French cabinet on 28 February 1900, ‘others an expedition to Egypt; yet others advocate an attack on Burma by troops from Indo-China which would coincide with a Russian march on India.'
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It was agreed that an enlarged meeting of the Conseil Supérieur de la Guerre should be convened to consider the question of where exactly France should mount an assault on the British Empire. Britain represented a threat to world peace, Delcassé declared, and it was time, as he remarked to a journalist in March 1900, to take a stand ‘for the good of civilisation'.
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The British, he claimed, were working on all fronts to alienate Italy and Spain from France; they had their own beady eyes on Morocco (in later years, Delcassé became preoccupied with
American
plans to seize Morocco
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). For a time, the visceral distrust usually directed at Berlin was refocused on London.

These extraordinary deliberations came to nothing, because the Germans refused to play along with Delcassé's plan for a continental league against Britain. From Berlin came the vexing proposal that the British government should be consulted before any demands were addressed to London. There was, it seemed, a gaping discrepancy between the Kaiser's anti-English verbal outbursts and the hesitant course of his foreign policy: ‘He
says
“I detest the English . . .”,' Delcassé complained, ‘but he paralyses everything.'
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The real deal-breaker was Berlin's demand for something in return: on 15 March 1900, the French ambassador in Berlin reported that the Germans would continue negotiations on the formation of an anti-British coalition only on the preliminary condition that France, Russia and Germany should undertake to ‘guarantee the status quo as it affected their European possessions'. This was a coded request for the affirmation by France of German sovereignty in Alsace and Lorraine.
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The response from Berlin prompted a deep and lasting reorientation in Delcassé's thinking. From this moment, the French foreign minister abandoned any thought of Franco-German collaboration.
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The project of a joint démarche on Egypt was unceremoniously dropped. Instead, Delcassé gravitated, via a series of intermediate positions, towards the notion that French objectives could be achieved in
collaboration
with Britain, by means of an imperial barter: the consolidation of British control over Egypt would be exchanged for British acquiescence in French control over Morocco. This arrangement had the advantage that it would prevent the dreaded (though in reality very unlikely) prospect of an Anglo-German joint initiative in Morocco.
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By 1903, the French foreign minister had come to believe that a Morocco–Egypt exchange should serve as the foundation for an encompassing entente with Britain.

This reorientation had profound implications for Franco-German relations, for the decision to appease rather than to oppose Britain facilitated a more forceful articulation of the anti-German potential in French foreign policy. We can see this clearly in the changes in Delcassé's approach to the acquisition of Morocco. In an earlier incarnation of his programme, Delcassé had envisaged using an Egyptian challenge to pressure Britain into acquiescence on Morocco and buying off the other interested powers with concessions. Spain would receive lands in northern Morocco, Italy would be offered French support for Italian ambitions in Libya, and the Germans would be compensated with territories from French Central Africa. The new post-1900 Morocco policy was different in two important respects: it was to be accomplished, firstly, in concert with Britain. More importantly, Delcassé now planned to seize Morocco, a country whose independence had been guaranteed under an international treaty, without compensating or even consulting the German government. By adopting this provocative programme and holding to it over the protests of his French colleagues, Delcassé laid a diplomatic tripwire in North Africa that would be activated in the Moroccan crisis of 1905.

In a speech to the House of Commons of 9 February 1871, only three weeks after the proclamation of the German Empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the Conservative statesman Benjamin Disraeli reflected on the world-historical meaning of the Franco-Prussian War. It was, he told the members of the House, ‘no common war', like the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, or the French wars over Italy, or even the Crimean War. ‘The war represents the German revolution, a greater political event than the French Revolution of last century.' There was not a single diplomatic tradition, he added, which had not been swept away. ‘The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers more and feels the effects of this change most, is England.'
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Disraeli's words have often been cited as a prescient vision of the coming conflict with Germany. But to read the speech this way – through the lens of 1914 and 1939 – is to misapprehend his intentions. What mattered most to the British statesman in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War was not the rise of Germany, but the untethering of Britain's old enemy Russia from the settlement imposed on her after the Crimean War (1853–6). Under the terms laid down by the governments of Britain and France in the Treaty of Paris of 1856, the waters of the Black Sea were ‘formally and in perpetuity interdicted' to ships of war either of the powers possessing its coasts or of any other power.
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The purpose of the treaty was to prevent Russia from threatening the Eastern Mediterranean or disrupting the British land and sea routes to India. But the political foundations of the 1856 treaty were destroyed by the defeat of France. The new French Republic broke with the Crimean settlement, renouncing its opposition to a Russian militarization of the Black Sea. Knowing that Great Britain alone could not enforce the Black Sea clauses, Russia now pressed ahead with the building of a Black Sea battlefleet. On 12 December 1870, news reached London that Russia had ‘repudiated' the Peace of 1856 and was constructing a ‘new Sebastopol' – an arsenal and a port for ships of war – in the town of Poti on the eastern coast of the Black Sea, only a few miles away from the Turkish frontier.
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It seemed that a new era of Russian expansionism was dawning, and it was this prospect that captured Disraeli's attention in the speech of 9 February 1871. For 200 years, Disraeli observed, Russia had pursued a policy of ‘legitimate' expansion as it ‘found its way to the coast'. But the militarization of the Black Sea appeared to herald a new and unsettling phase of Russian aggression, focused on the desire to acquire Constantinople and control of the Turkish Straits. Since Russia had ‘no moral claim to Constantinople' and ‘no political necessity to go there', Disraeli declared, this was ‘not a legitimate, but a disturbing policy'. Russia was not the only threat on Disraeli's horizon – he was also concerned at the growing power and belligerence of the United States – but the important point is that when he spoke of the ‘German revolution' he was not referring to the threat posed by the new Germany, but rather to the global and imperial consequences of the recent war between Germany and France, a war which had ‘dislocated' the ‘whole machinery of States'.
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Disraeli's speech announced a theme that would remain central to British foreign policy until 1914. During the years 1894–1905, it was Russia, not Germany, that posed ‘the most significant long-term threat' to British interests.
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The China Question that exercised British policy-makers in those years is a case in point.
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In China, as in the Balkans, the underlying motor of change was the retreating power of an ancient empire. During the early 1890s, Russian penetration into northern China triggered a cascade of local and regional conflicts that culminated in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5.
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Victorious Japan emerged as a rival with Russia for influence in northern China. China's defeat, in the meanwhile, inaugurated a race for concessions by the great powers hoping to exploit the further decay of the Chinese state. The negative energies generated by the race for China in turn heightened tensions in Europe.
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The core of the problem, from Britain's perspective, was the growth of Russian power and influence. In China, which in terms of its trade potential was infinitely more important to Britain than Africa, Russia posed a direct threat to British interests. The problem became even more acute after the international intervention to suppress the Boxer Rebellion (1898–1901), when the Russians capitalized on their role in the intervention to reinforce their position in northern China.
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Yet, in view of the Russian Empire's geographical location and the preponderance of its land forces, it was hard to see how its penetration of East Asia could be resisted. A new Great Game was opening up that Russia seemed likely to win.
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India was another vulnerable frontier: British policy-makers observed with alarm that the steady penetration of the Russian railway system into Central Asia meant that Russia enjoyed ‘better military access' to the subcontinent than Britain itself.
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Since Russia appeared to be pursuing an anti-British policy in Central Asia and the Far East, and France was a rival and challenger of Britain in Africa, the Franco-Russian Alliance appeared from London's perspective to be a chiefly anti-British device. The problem was particularly pressing during the Boer War, when the deployment of substantial troop contingents in South Africa left northern India exposed. In August 1901, a report by the Intelligence Department of the War Office on the ‘Military Needs of the Empire in a War with France and Russia' concluded that the Indian army was in no position to defend its key strongpoints against a Russian attack.
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To make matters worse, Russian diplomats were not merely (in British eyes) hostile, expansionist and ruthless, but also prone to underhandedness and false dealing. ‘The lying is unprecedented even in the annals of Russian diplomacy,' Lord George Hamilton, secretary of state for India, reported in March 1901, during negotiations towards a settlement in China. ‘Russia's diplomacy, as you know, is one long and manifold lie,' George Curzon, Viceroy of India, told the Earl of Selborne, First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1903.
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British policy-makers responded to the Russian threat by pursuing a two-track policy. The first involved rapprochement with Japan and France, the second the quest for a power-sharing agreement with Russia itself that would take the pressure off Britain's imperial periphery. In the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–5, Britain and Japan shared a common interest in opposing further Russian expansion. Japan was Britain's ‘natural ally' in the Far East, as Foreign Secretary Kimberley put it in a letter of May 1895 to the British minister in Tokyo.
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The threat posed to Russia's Chinese frontier by Japan's formidable land forces – 200,000 Japanese troops had entered Manchuria by the end of 1895 – would offset the vulnerability of the British imperial periphery in northern India. The swiftly growing Japanese fleet would provide a further ‘counterpoise to the Russians' and thereby relieve the strain on Britain's overstretched fleets.
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In 1901, after a long period of cautious rapprochement, discussions began with a view to a formal alliance – first a naval defence pact, later the more encompassing agreement signed in London on 30 January 1902. Renewed (with expanded terms) in 1905 and in 1911, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance became a fixture in the international system of the pre-war world.