The Sleepwalkers (31 page)

‘The Scramble for China', by Henri Meyer,
Le Petit Journal,
1898

Early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies. Of the six most important powers, five were monarchies of one kind or another; only one (France) was a republic. The relatively new nation-states of the Balkan peninsula – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania – were all monarchies. The Europe of fast cruisers, radio-telegraph, and electric cigar-lighters still carried at its heart this ancient, glittering institution yoking large and complex states to the vagaries of human biology. The European executives were still centred on the thrones and the men or women who sat on them. Ministers in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were imperial appointees. The three emperors had unlimited access to state papers. They also exercised formal authority over their respective armed forces. Dynastic institutions and networks structured the communications between states. Ambassadors presented their credentials to the sovereign in person and direct communications and meetings between monarchs continued to take place throughout the pre-war years; indeed they acquired a heightened importance, creating a parallel plane of interaction whose relationship to official diplomacy was sometimes difficult to ascertain.

Monarchs were symbolic as well as political actors, and in this role they could capture and focus collective emotions and associations. When Parisian onlookers gawped at Edward VII sprawled in a chair outside his hotel smoking a cigar, they felt they were looking at England in the form of a very fat, fashionable and confident man. His triumphant ascent in Parisian public opinion in 1903 helped smooth the path to the Entente signed with France in the following year. Even the mild-mannered despot Nicholas II was greeted like a conquering hero by the French when he visited Paris in 1896, despite his autocratic political philosophy and negligible charisma, because he was seen as the personification of the Franco-Russian Alliance.
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And who embodied the most unsettling aspects of German foreign policy – its vacillations, lack of focus and frustrated ambition – better than the febrile, tactless, panic-prone, overbearing Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who dared to advise Edvard Grieg on how to conduct
Peer Gynt
?
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Whether or not the Kaiser actually made German policy, he certainly symbolized it for Germany's opponents.

Wilhelm II and Nicholas II wearing the uniforms of each other's countries

Wilhelm II

Edward VII in his uniform as colonel of the Austrian 12th Hussars

At the core of the monarchical club that reigned over pre-war Europe was the trio of imperial cousins: Tsar Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V. By the turn of the twentieth century, the genealogical web of Europe's reigning families had thickened almost to the point of fusion. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II's wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria's granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II were both great-great grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The Kaiser's great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the Tsar's grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud.

Assessing how much influence these monarchs wielded over or within their respective executives is difficult. Britain, Germany and Russia represented three very different kinds of monarchy. Russia's was, in theory at least, an autocracy in which the parliamentary and constitutional restraints on the monarch's authority were weak. Edward VII and George V were constitutional and parliamentary monarchs with no direct access to the levers of power. Kaiser Wilhelm II was something in between – in Germany, a constitutional and parliamentary system was grafted on to elements of the old Prussian military monarchy that had survived the process of national unification. But the formal structures of governance were not necessarily the most significant determinants of monarchical influence. Other important variables included the determination, competence and intellectual grasp of the monarch himself, the ability of ministers to block unwelcome initiatives and the extent of agreement between monarchs and their governments.

One of the most striking features of the influence wielded by the sovereigns on the formulation of foreign policy is its variation over time. Edward VII, who presided over the diplomatic realignments of 1904–7, had strong views on foreign policy and prided himself on being well informed. His attitudes were those of an imperialist ‘jingo'; he was infuriated by Liberal opposition to the Afghan War of 1878–9, for example, and told the colonial administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere: ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan and kept it.'
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He was overjoyed at the news of the raid against the Transvaal Republic in 1895, supportive of Cecil Rhodes's involvement in it, and infuriated by the Kaiser's Kruger telegram. Throughout his adult life he maintained a determined hostility to Germany. The roots of this antipathy appear to have lain partly in his opposition to his mother, Queen Victoria, whom he regarded as excessively friendly to Prussia, and partly in his fear and loathing of Baron Stockmar, the unsmiling Germanic pedagogue appointed by Victoria and Albert to hold the young Edward to a regime of unstinting study. The Prussian-Danish War of 1864 was a formative episode in his early political life – Edward's sympathies in that conflict rested firmly with the Danish relatives of his new bride.
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After his accession to the throne, Edward was an important sponsor of the anti-German group of policy-makers around Sir Francis Bertie.
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The king's influence reached its height in 1903, when an official visit to Paris – ‘the most important royal visit in modern history', as it has been called – paved the road towards the Entente between the two imperial rivals. Relations between the two western empires were still soured at this time by French outrage over the Boer War. The visit, which had been organized on Edward's own initiative, was a public relations triumph and did much to clear the air.
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After the Entente had been signed, Edward continued to work towards an agreement with Russia, even though, like many of his countrymen, he detested the tsarist political system and remained suspicious of the designs that Russia had on Persia, Afghanistan and northern India. In 1906, when he heard that the Russian foreign minister Izvolsky was in Paris, he rushed south from Scotland in the hope that a meeting could be set up. Izvolsky responded in kind and made the journey to London, where the two men met for talks that – according to Charles Hardinge – ‘helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia'.
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In both these instances, the king was not deploying executive powers as such, but acting as a kind of supernumerary ambassador. He could do this because his priorities accorded closely with those of the liberal imperialist faction at Whitehall, whose dominance in foreign policy he had himself helped to reinforce.

George V was a very different case. Until his accession in 1910, he took little interest in foreign affairs and had acquired only the sketchiest sense of Britain's relations with other powers. The Austrian ambassador Count Mensdorff was delighted with the new king, who seemed, by contrast with his father, to be innocent of strong biases for or against any foreign state.
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If Mensdorff hoped the changing of the guard would produce an attenuation of the anti-German theme in British policy, he was soon to be disappointed. In foreign policy, the new monarch's seeming neutrality merely meant that policy remained firmly in the hands of the liberal imperialists around Grey. George never acquired a political network to rival his father's, refrained from backstairs intrigue and avoided expounding policy without the explicit permission of his ministers.
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He was in more or less constant communication with Edward Grey and granted the foreign secretary frequent audiences whenever he was in London. He was scrupulous about seeking Grey's approval for the content of political conversations with foreign representatives – especially his German relatives.
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George's accession to the throne thus resulted in a sharp decline in the crown's influence on the general orientation of foreign policy, even though the two monarchs wielded identical constitutional powers.

Even within the highly authoritarian setting of the Russian autocracy, the influence of the Tsar over foreign policy was subject to narrow constraints and waxed and waned over time. Like George V, the new Tsar was a blank sheet of paper when he came to the throne in 1894. He had not created a political network of his own before the accession and his deference to his father ensured that he refrained from expressing a view on government policy. As an adolescent, he had shown little aptitude for the study of affairs of state. Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the conservative jurist drafted in to give the teenage Nicky a master class on the inner workings of the tsarist state, later recalled: ‘I could only observe that he was completely absorbed in picking his nose.'
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Even after he mounted the throne, extreme shyness and terror at the prospect of having to wield real authority prevented him in the early years from imposing his political preferences – insofar as he had them – on the government. He lacked, moreover, the kind of executive support he would have needed to shape the course of policy in a consistent way. He possessed, for example, no personal secretariat and no personal secretary. He could – and did – insist on being informed of even quite minor ministerial decisions, but in a state as vast as Russia's, this merely meant that the monarch was engulfed in trivia while matters of real import fell by the wayside.
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The Tsar was nonetheless able, especially from around 1900, to impart a certain direction to Russian foreign policy. By the late 1890s, Russia was deeply involved in the economic penetration of China. Not everyone in the administration was happy with the Far Eastern policy. Some resented the immense cost of the infrastructural and military commitments involved. Others, such as the minister of war, General Aleksei A. Kuropatkin, viewed the Far East as a distraction from more pressing concerns on the western periphery, especially the Balkans and the Turkish Straits. But at this time Nicholas II still firmly believed that the future of Russia lay in Siberia and the Far East and ensured that the exponents of the Eastern policy prevailed over their opponents. Despite some initial misgivings, he supported the policy of seizing the Chinese bridgehead at Port Arthur (today Lüshun) on the Liaodong peninsula in 1898. In Korea, Nicholas came to support a policy of Russian penetration that placed St Petersburg on a collision course with Tokyo.