The Sleepwalkers (26 page)

The same logic underlay the British decision to seek an understanding with France. Already in 1896, Lord Salisbury had found that concessions to France along the Mekong valley in the borderlands between British Burma and French Indochina produced the welcome side effect of drawing the French in and temporarily loosening the cohesion of the Franco-Russian Alliance.
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The Entente Cordiale of 1904 was, by the same token, not primarily an anti-German agreement (at least not from Whitehall's perspective) but one that was intended to mute colonial tensions with France, while at the same time generating some measure of indirect leverage on Russia. Delcassé had encouraged this speculation by suggesting that if an Entente were to come into being, France would exercise a restraining influence on Russia and even make it clear to St Petersburg that French support would not be forthcoming if Russia were to pick a fight with Britain.
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There was thus good reason to hope, as Lord Lansdowne put it, that ‘a good understanding with France would not improbably be the precursor of a better understanding with Russia'.
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The last point is important. At the same time as they balanced against Russia with Japan, British policy-makers strove to meet the Russian challenge by tethering St Petersburg to an imperial power-sharing agreement. There was no contradiction in this. As Sir Thomas Sanderson, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office, observed in a letter to the British ambassador at St Petersburg in May 1902, the Japanese alliance was useful precisely because ‘until [the Russians] see that we can take our pigs to other markets, we are not likely to bring them to book'; it would thus tend ‘to promote rather than discourage [Britain's] chance of some definite understanding'.
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British security reviews continued to envisage catastrophic scenarios in Central Asia: the Russians, the British cabinet was told in December 1901, were capable of pouring 200,000 troops into Transcaspia and the Herat. In order to prevail against such a force, the British garrison in India would have to be increased permanently by between 50,000 and 100,000 men, at huge cost to the government – this at a time when the best financial advice called for drastic cuts in expenditure.
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And the ‘frenzied pace' of Russian railway building to the Afghan frontier suggested that the situation was swiftly developing to Britain's disadvantage.
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These concerns were further amplified by the outbreak of war between Russia and Japan in February 1904. The fact that Russian forces at sea and on land performed rather poorly against their Japanese adversaries at first did nothing whatsoever to mute British anxieties. What if, as Viscount Kitchener warned, the Russians were tempted to offset their losses against Japan by threatening India? In this event, India would require massive reinforcements – by February 1905, the projected figure was 211,824 troops, according to government of India estimates.
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The attendant rise in expenditure would be enormous – Kitchener estimated that countering ‘the menacing advance of Russia' would cost ‘£20 million plus an annual charge of another £1.5 million'.
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This was a matter of some consequence for the Liberal government that came to power in 1905 promising to cut military costs and expand domestic programmes. And if Britain could no longer afford to defend the north-western frontier of India by force, then it followed that a non-military means must be found of securing India against a Russian assault.

Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 clinched the argument in favour of an agreement. Given the magnitude of the Russian defeat and the wave of domestic turbulence that paralysed the country, the claim that the threat from Russia justified immense investment in Indian defence no longer seemed so compelling.
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The new foreign secretary, Edward Grey, came to office in December 1905 determined to ‘see Russia re-established in the councils of Europe, and I hope on better terms with us than she has been yet'.
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In May 1906, Grey succeeded in having the option of Indian reinforcements placed on the back burner.

One aspect of this entangled tale of imperial readjustments deserves particular emphasis: neither the Entente Cordiale with France nor the Convention with Russia was conceived by British policy-makers primarily as an anti-German device. Inasmuch as Germany figured in British designs, it was mostly as a subordinate function of tensions with France and Russia. The German government excited resentment and anger above all whenever it appeared to make common cause with Russia and France against Britain – as in the spring of 1895, for example, when Germany joined its two great power neighbours in pressuring Tokyo to return to China territory conquered during the Sino-Japanese War, or in 1897, when the Germans unexpectedly seized a Chinese bridgehead at Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) on the Shantung peninsula – a move that London (rightly) believed had been secretly approved and encouraged by the Russians. In both cases, German actions were read against the background of perceived French and Russian designs against Britain. In the Chinese theatre, as elsewhere, Germany was a diplomatic irritant rather than an existential threat. ‘Anglo-German antagonism' was not, in other words, the primary determinant of British policy; indeed, until around 1904–5, it was more often than not the function of other more pressing concerns.
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The primary aim of German foreign policy in the Bismarck era was to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition of great powers. For as long as it continued, the tension between the world empires made this objective relatively easy to accomplish. French rivalry with Britain intermittently distracted Paris from its hostility towards Germany; Russia's hostility to Britain deflected Russian attention from the Balkans and thus helped to stave off an Austro-Russian clash. As a mainly continental power, Germany, so long as it did not itself aspire to found a global empire, could stay out of the great struggles over Africa, Central Asia and China. And as long as Britain, France and Russia remained imperial rivals, Berlin would always be able to play the margins between them. This state of affairs enhanced the empire's security and created a certain wriggle room for the policy-makers in Berlin.

But the Bismarck strategy also exacted a cost. It required that Germany always punch under its weight, abstain from the imperial feeding frenzies in Africa, Asia and elsewhere and remain on the sidelines when other powers quarrelled over global power shares. It also required that Berlin enter into contradictory commitments to neighbouring powers. The consequence was a sense of national paralysis that played badly with the electors whose votes determined the composition of the German national parliament. The idea of colonial possessions – imagined as eldorados with cheap labour and raw materials and burgeoning native or settler populations to buy national exports – was as bewitching to the German middle classes as to those of the established European empires.

It should be noted that even modest German efforts to overleap the power-political constraints on imperial expansion met with sturdy resistance from the established world powers. In this connection, it is worth recalling an obvious but important difference between the belated German Empire and its world-imperial rivals. As the possessors of vast portions of the earth's inhabited surface with a military presence along extended imperial peripheries, Britain, France and Russia controlled tokens that could be exchanged and bargained over at relatively little cost to the metropolis. Britain could offer France concessions in the Mekong delta; Russia could offer Britain a demarcation of zones of influence in Persia; France could offer Italy access to coveted territories in northern Africa. Germany could not credibly make such offers, because it was always in the position of a parvenu with nothing to trade, pushing to gain a place at an already crowded table. Its attempts to secure a share of the meagre portions that remained usually met with firm resistance from the established club.

In 1884–5, for example, when the German government attempted to placate imperialist appetites by approving the acquisition of a modest suite of colonial possessions, it met with a dismissive response from Britain. In 1883, the Bremen merchant Heinrich Vogelsang had purchased land along the Angra Pequeña coast in today's southern Namibia. In the following year, Bismarck officially asked the British government whether it intended to lay claim to the area. From London came a terse reply stating that Britain was unwilling to allow any other country to establish itself anywhere in the region between Portuguese Angola and the British Cape Colony. Berlin responded with two probing questions: on what was the British claim based? And would the British authorities undertake to protect German settlers in the area?
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Months passed before Whitehall deigned to send a reply. Bismarck was irritated by this condescending style, but he needn't have taken it personally – London adopted exactly the same brusque and haughty manner when dealing with the Americans over the Venezuelan boundary dispute in 1895–6.
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Then, when the Germans went ahead regardless and announced their formal acquisition of the area, the British government promptly countered with a claim of its own. Temperatures in Berlin rose. It was intolerable, Bismarck fumed, that Britain should demand the privilege of an ‘African Monroe Doctrine'.
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The chancellor stepped up the political pressure. His son Herbert was sent to London to head negotiations. The British, distracted by more serious challenges (Russian designs on Afghanistan, African tensions with France), eventually gave in and the crisis passed, but this was a salutary reminder of how little room remained at the table for the latest of Europe's great powers.

It was partly in order to escape from the self-imposed constraints of Bismarckian policy that Germany abandoned the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in 1890. The changing of the guard in that year – the departure of Bismarck, the appointment of Leo von Caprivi to the chancellorship and the emergence of Kaiser Wilhelm II as a key player in imperial politics – inaugurated a new phase in German external relations. The ‘new course' of the early 1890s was initially less a matter of concerted intention than of irresolution and drift. The vacuum created by Bismarck's sudden departure remained unfilled. The initiative passed to Friedrich von Holstein, chief of the foreign ministry's political department. Holstein's policy was to reinforce ties with Austria-Hungary while balancing possible Balkan risks through an agreement with London, though he did not favour a fully-fledged alliance with Britain. The idea at the core of his thinking was independence. A Germany allied to Britain risked becoming London's fall-guy on the continent – the memory of the Seven Years War, when Frederick of Prussia, as Britain's ally, had found himself encircled by a mighty continental coalition, was important here. It was crucial, as Holstein's close associate Bernhard von Bülow put it in March 1890, that Germany ‘should not become dependent on any foreign power'.
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The price for an agreement with Britain would be the renunciation by Germany of colonial acquisitions, but this was a price Caprivi was happy to pay.

The policy of the free hand looked innocuous enough, but it carried very considerable risks. In the summer of 1891, the Germans learned that their Italian ally was engaged in secret talks with France, in the hope of securing French support for future Italian acquisitions in northern Africa. At the same time, news reached Berlin of an official visit by a French flotilla to the Russian port of Kronstadt, where French officers were greeted with jubilation by the Russian press and public. The Franco-Russian Military Convention that followed in 1892 revealed that even the appearance of close collaboration with Britain carried the risk of heightening Germany's exposure on the continent without providing compensatory security benefits. And, most alarming of all, the deepening intimacy between France and Russia did not seem to pressure Britain into seeking closer relations with Germany; on the contrary, it prompted British policy-makers to begin considering the merits of appeasement, first of France and later of Russia. The fact that the French flotilla paid a symbolic visit to Portsmouth on its way home from Russia in 1891 also had a sobering effect on the mood in Berlin.
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Was Germany strong enough to make her way without the support of powerful allies? Caprivi's answer to this question was to expand the empire's defensive capacity. The passage of the army bill of 1893 brought the strength of the army to 552,000 – 150,000 more than a decade before – and military expenditure in that year reached double the 1886 figure. Yet these increases were not integrated with a larger political strategy; their purpose was to achieve deterrence.

The diplomatic implications of this quest for military self-reliance were a matter of contention among the key policy-makers in Berlin. Given the virtual impossibility of better relations with France, should Germany persist in seeking a deal with Britain, or did salvation lie in improved relations with Russia? The pursuit of both options produced frustrating results. The German policy-makers had high hopes of the Russo-German Trade Treaty concluded in the spring of 1894. Ratified by the Reichstag over the vehement protests of the German farming lobby, the treaty was a landmark in commercial relations that brought immense economic benefit to both countries. But it did nothing to loosen Russian attachment to the French alliance; on the contrary, the Russians viewed the treaty as a vindication of their policy and an indication of what could be achieved when the Germans were held in a diplomatically inferior position.
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The British option was no less difficult. The main reason for this is simply that Caprivi's policy of the ‘free hand' freed London's hand much more than it did Berlin's. The conclusion of the Franco-Russian Alliance allowed Britain to oscillate between the continental camps and reduced the incentive to look for a firm understanding with Berlin. Only at times of crisis on the imperial periphery did London actively seek closer ties, but these did not and could not ever amount to the offer of a fully-fledged alliance on terms that Berlin could reasonably be expected to accept. In 1901, for example, with British forces tied down in South Africa and the Russians piling on the pressure in China, Foreign Secretary Lansdowne was so keen to secure German support against Russia that he circulated to cabinet a draft proposal for a secret treaty of alliance with Germany that would under certain conditions have committed Britain and Germany to wage war on Russia in support of Japan. Tentative feelers were put out to Berlin, but the Germans were reluctant to be drawn into any kind of anti-Russian combination, for fear that this would leave them perilously exposed in a continental conflict in which the support of the British navy would carry little weight.
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The question that worried Bülow was: what could the British offer the Germans that would offset the heightened French and Russian enmity that a German alliance with Britain would inevitably bring in its wake? This was the structural problem that always haunted efforts to formalize an Anglo-German rapprochement.