The Sleepwalkers (36 page)

Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey's continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey's arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.

Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists', yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.

Sir Edward Grey

There was a curious dissonance between Grey's persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.'
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Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French'.
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Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable'.
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And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact', a plot hatched at Grey's fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.

Grey quickly secured unchallenged control over the policy-making process, ensuring that British policy focused primarily on the ‘German threat'. It would be going too far, of course, to view this reorientation of British policy as a function solely of Edward Grey's power. Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Nicolson, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled closely on reports from Hardinge.
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The ascendancy of the Grey group was eased by recent structural reforms to the Foreign Office whose object had not been to reinforce the authority of the foreign secretary, but rather to parcel influence out more widely across a range of senior officials.
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Nevertheless, the energy and vigilance with which Grey maintained his ascendancy are impressive. It helped, of course, that he enjoyed the firm support of his former co-conspirator Herbert Asquith, prime minister from 1908 until 1916. The backing of a large part of the Conservative bloc in the House of Commons was another important asset – and Grey proved adept at maintaining his cross-party appeal.

But Grey's plenitude of power and consistency of vision did not entirely protect British policy-making from the agitations characteristic of the European executives. The anti-German position adopted by the Grey group did not enjoy wide support outside the Foreign Office. It was not even backed by the majority of the British cabinet. The Liberal government, and the Liberal movement more generally, were polarized by the tension between liberal imperialist and radical elements. Many of the leading radicals, and they included some of the most venerable figures in the party, deplored the foreign secretary's policy of alignment with Russia. They accused Grey and his associates of adopting a pose towards Germany that was unnecessarily provocative. They doubted whether the advantages of appeasing Russia outweighed the potential benefits of friendship with the German Empire. They worried whether the creation of a Triple Entente might not pressure Germany into adopting an ever more aggressive stance and they pressed for détente with Berlin. A further problem was the complexion of British public opinion, especially within the cultural and political elite, which, despite intermittent Anglo-German ‘press wars', was drifting into a more pro-German mood during the last few years before the outbreak of war.
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Antagonism to Germany coexisted across the British elites with multi-layered cultural ties and a deep admiration of the country's cultural, economic and scientific achievements.
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Grey met these challenges by shielding the policy-making process from the scrutiny of unfriendly eyes. Documents emanating from his desk were often marked ‘For Limited Circulation Only'; a typical annotation from his private secretary reads ‘Sir E. Grey thinks this circulation sufficient'. Consultations on important policy decisions – notably regarding the deepening commitment to France – were confined to trusted contacts within the administration. Cabinet was not informed, for example, of the discussions between France and Britain in December 1905 and May 1906, in which military representatives of both countries agreed in principle the form that a British military intervention in support of France would take in the event of war. This mode of proceeding suited Grey's elitist understanding of politics and his avowed view of the Entente, which was that it should be cultivated ‘in a loyal and generous spirit' ensuring that any pitfalls arising would ‘strengthen' rather than weaken the ‘Agreement', and that the gradual advance into a deepening commitment should always be insulated from ‘party controversy'.
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In other words, Grey ran a double-track policy. In public, he repeatedly denied that Britain was under any obligation to come to France's aid. London's hands remained absolutely free. Pressed by hostile colleagues, he could always say that the interlinked mobilization scenarios of the military were mere contingency plans. By means of these complex manoeuvres, Grey was able to impart a remarkable inner consistency to the management of British foreign policy.

Yet it is easy to see how this state of affairs – driven by the shifting balance of power between factions within the British government and the political elite – gave rise to confusion. To those French interlocutors who dealt directly with the foreign secretary and his associates, it was clear that ‘Sir Grey', as some of them quaintly called him, would stand by France in the event of a war, notwithstanding the official insistence on the non-binding character of the Entente. But to the Germans, who were not privy to these conversations, it looked very much as if Britain might stand aside from the continental coalition, especially if the Franco-Russian Alliance took the initiative against Germany, rather than the other way around.

The fluctuation of power across different points in the decision-making structures amplified the complexity and unpredictabilty of interactions in the European international system, especially in those moments of political crisis when two or more executives interacted with each other in an atmosphere of heightened pressure and threat. We can observe this effect with particular clarity in the quarrel that broke out between Germany and France over Morocco in the summer of 1911. The Franco-German Moroccan Agreement of 1909 broke down, as we have seen, following a sequence of steps undertaken by the Quai d'Orsay, culminating in the dispatch of a large French force to the Sultanate in April 1911. On 5 June 1911, alarmed at the prospect of a unilateral French seizure of power in Morocco, the Spanish government deployed troops to occupy Larache and Ksar-el-Kebir in northern and northwestern Morocco. A German intervention was now inevitable, and the gunboat
Panther
, an unimpressive craft that was two years overdue for scrapping, duly dropped anchor off the Moroccan coast on 1 July 1911.

There is something very odd about the Agadir crisis. It was allowed to escalate to the point where it seemed that a western-European war was imminent, yet the positions advanced by the opposing parties were not irreconcilable and eventually provided the basis for an enduring settlement. Why did the escalation happen? Part of the reason lay in the intransigence of the Quai d'Orsay. It was the Centrale that seized and held the initiative in the early phase of the crisis. The position of the permanent officials was strengthened by the fact that Foreign Minister Jean Cruppi left office on 27 June, a few days before the
Panther
arrived off Agadir. His successor Justin de Selves – a default candidate like Cruppi – immediately fell under the thrall of the
chef du cabinet
at the French foreign ministry, Maurice Herbette. As chief of communications between 1907 and 1911, Herbette had built up an extensive network of newspaper contacts and he worked hard during the Agadir crisis to discredit the very idea of talks with Germany. It was partly a consequence of the intransigence of Herbette and other powerful permanent officials that it was not until the end of July 1911 that the French ambassador in Berlin was even instructed to commence talks with Berlin about how Germany might be compensated for the consolidation of French exclusive dominion in Morocco.

This conciliatory move was itself only possible because Ambassador Jules Cambon appealed from his Berlin posting over the head of his foreign minister to the energetic and outspoken premier Joseph Caillaux, who had taken office on 27 June, just before the crisis broke. The son of a finance minister, the celebrated Eugène Caillaux who had paid off the French indemnity to Germany so swiftly after 1870, Joseph Caillaux was an economic liberal and fiscal modernizer who viewed foreign affairs with the pragmatic eyes of a businessman. He saw no reason why German commercial interests in Morocco should not be treated on exactly the same footing as those of other nationalities and he was critical of the mercantilist style of economic strategy that had become a hallmark of European imperialism.
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The cabinet was split between Caillaux, who favoured a conciliatory policy on Morocco, and Justin de Selves, who functioned as a mouthpiece for the hawks at the Quai d'Orsay. De Selves was under pressure from his ministry to send French cruisers to Agadir, a move that might have triggered a serious escalation. After Caillaux vetoed this option, the hawks began to organize against him and Jules Cambon. Press releases were used to discredit the champions of conciliation. Caillaux became so exasperated at Maurice Herbette's efforts to sabotage his policy that he summoned him to his office and told him, fitting the action to the words: ‘I will break you like this pencil'.
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Caillaux was eventually able to achieve an agreement with Germany, but only by conducting confidential and unofficial talks with Berlin (through the German embassy in Paris, through Jules Cambon in Berlin and through the mediation of a businessman called Fondère) that successfully circumvented the minister and his officials.
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The result was that by the beginning of August, Caillaux had secretly accepted a compensation deal with Berlin to which his foreign minister Justin de Selves remained adamantly opposed.
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