The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (10 page)

The poor relations with France remained to trouble Salisbury’s last government; indeed, there was to be another quite serious war scare in 1898. The new and developing friendship between France and another rival for empire, Russia, was also worrying. Salisbury’s preference for working with the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy no longer seemed an adequate counterbalance. How little it could be depended upon was demonstrated by the Armenian massacres during the mid 1890s in what is today the eastern part of Turkey.

These unfortunate Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire were being slaughtered by their Muslim neighbours and the government, either deliberately or through sheer incompetence, did nothing to prevent the atrocities. British policy had for much of the century been to prop up the Ottomans as a way of keeping the waters leading from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean out of the hands of the Russians.
Self-interest, however, did not always fit well with British public opinion, which found much to outrage it when the Ottoman Empire treated one or other of its Christian communities badly. Gladstone indeed had fought a whole election campaign on the Bulgarian atrocities and the need for the international community to do something. For all that he disliked meddling in the internal affairs of other nations, Salisbury had always taken a dim view of the Ottomans and would have been happy to abandon them earlier if Britain had not needed a friend at the eastern end of the Mediterranean. In 1895 he tried to find partners – possibly Austria or Italy, perhaps Germany, even Russia – to put pressure on the Ottomans to stop the attacks on the Armenians but no other power was willing to act. Salisbury had sleepless nights over the matter but was forced to accept that there was nothing Britain could do. He also came to the conclusion that he would have to look for other ways to safeguard British interests in the Mediterranean and the crucial Suez Canal link to India than propping up the moribund and corrupt Ottoman Empire. The question, which was to remain open for the next few years, was how. Increased (and expensive) military strength in Egypt and in the Mediterranean? An alliance with another power with interests in the region such as France or Russia? Neither seemed likely given the rivalries elsewhere.

The Ottoman Empire was worrying in another way, for the temptations it offered in an age of imperialism. The powers, and their publics, measured their importance in the world in terms of the number of colonies they possessed but the supply of unclaimed land was running out. Africa had been pretty much divided up by the 1890s, as had the Far East and the Pacific islands. That left the parts of the world where the old orders were collapsing: China, for example, Persia or the Ottoman Empire. In 1898 Salisbury made a speech in the Albert Hall in London which became famous. ‘You may roughly divide the nations of the world as the living and the dying,’ he told his Conservative audience. ‘On the one side you have great countries of enormous power growing in power every year, growing in wealth, growing in dominion, growing in the perfection of their organisation.’ On the other side, were their natural victims, dying of the diseases of corruption and misgovernment. The process which Salisbury saw as likely to occur was a potentially dangerous one. ‘The living nations will gradually encroach on the
territory of the dying, and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear.’
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They already were appearing. Britain and France had quarrelled over Egypt, still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, in the 1880s and the French and Italians were rivals in Tunis. The Ottoman government floundered like a fish in a net and the strings grew ever tighter; loans from European governments and banks and then more outside control over its finances; concessions to European interests to build railways, good for commerce but also a way of extending European influence; European interference in the name of humanitarianism with its treatment of its Christian subjects; and European demands for reforms. Further down the road, when the Ottomans could no longer cope, their territories, which included parts of the Balkans and the Arab Middle East, would surely be up for grabs.

The spread of the Russian Empire southwards and east brought Persia into the Great Game between the Russians and the British in Central Asia. The Russians were increasingly influential in the north while the British tried to consolidate their position in the south and along the Indian Ocean and both wooed the Shah of Shahs. The game played on in Afghanistan, which now stood between Russian territory and British India, in Tibet, and further east in China.

In Asia, the European powers found China, with its evident weakness, almost irresistible. They were joined by the United States even though opposition to imperialism had deep historical roots there; Grover Cleveland, President in the mid 1880s and then again between 1893 and 1897, and a leading opponent of the United States acquiring colonies, famously said in his first inaugural address that his country would remain true to its revolutionary origins and that it had no ambitions towards other continents. Yet the United States was already predisposed to intervene in its own backyard in the Caribbean and was shortly to take over the Philippines, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Where China was concerned, American administrations maintained that the only right course was an Open Door policy with access for all nations to China’s territory in place of exclusive spheres of interest.

To the Westerners’ surprise and considerable admiration, Japan, which had seen off the threat of becoming another colony by a rapid adaptation to the new forces in the world, showed that it too had
imperialist ambitions in China. The powers forced concession after concession out of the moribund regime in Beijing: treaty ports where foreigners could live and work under the protection of their own laws and their own governments; railways, of course – and in China these were protected by foreign troops; and exclusive rights to mining and trade in particular areas. The Chinese rightly saw a pattern emerging where their country would be carved up like a melon.

Britain was comfortably dominant in trade and commerce in China, particularly along the Yangtze valley, and did not particularly want to acquire pieces of China along with the burden of having to administer them. But could it stand back and watch as other powers moved in on China, perhaps annexing territory? When Salisbury took office in 1895, Russia was already challenging British interests in the northern part of the country. And the competition for influence in China was about to heat up as other players including Germany joined in.

To add to Salisbury’s worries, relations with the United States, always tricky, were in a particularly bad phase. The long-running dispute between Britain and Venezuela over the latter’s borders with British Guiana had suddenly been taken up by the Grover Cleveland administration. In July 1895, a month after Salisbury took office, the Secretary of State, Richard Olney, issued his belligerent note saying that the United States had the right to intervene in the dispute. He cited the authority of the Monroe Doctrine, that wonderfully vague and infinitely elastic statement which warned outside powers against interfering in the New World. There was uproar in the press on both sides of the Atlantic. The American ambassador in London read out a long dispatch to Salisbury in which his government supported the claims of Venezuela to a substantial piece of British Guiana and demanded that the British agree to arbitration. Salisbury took four months to answer. He refused to accept that the Monroe Doctrine gave the United States any authority over British possessions in the New World and suggested that the Americans had ‘no apparent practical concern’ in a boundary dispute between a British possession and another country. Cleveland said he was ‘mad clean through’ and there was much excited talk of war in both Britain and the United States. The British had enough on their plate elsewhere and had no inclination to fight and opinion in the United States was divided. Eventually, a compromise was reached; Salisbury stopped objecting to
the American extension of the Monroe Doctrine and some minor changes were made to the border in an arbitration in 1899. Venezuela, which the American ambassador in London, dismissed as ‘a mongrel state’, got very little. (The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez claimed the disputed land until his death, and his successors continue to do so.)
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Salisbury made concessions in other disputes as well. When in 1896 the French annexed Madagascar, where Britain had extensive interests, he let it go by without a protest. He still resisted, though, any suggestions that Britain look for more permanent relationships. He refused as he had always done to worry unduly about every corner of the globe. He preferred to concentrate on the areas of vital importance to the British Empire. As he said to Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), the proconsul in Egypt, when there was a scare about security in the Red Sea: ‘I would not be too much impressed by what the soldiers tell you about the strategic importance of these places. If they were allowed full scope they would insist on the importance of garrisoning the moon in order to protect us from Mars.’
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His colleagues worried that he was a bit too unconcerned and that he did not have a clear foreign policy. Or if he did he was not about to reveal it; Salisbury’s penchant for secrecy grew more pronounced with age. Lord Curzon, who worked as his Undersecretary at the Foreign Office, later described him as ‘that strange, powerful, inscrutable, brilliant, obstructive deadweight at the top’.
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Curzon felt that Salisbury too often resorted to throwing bones to dogs, who then, as was so evident with France and Russia, only bayed for more. While not all his colleagues were as critical, most worried that Salisbury was no longer up to the work involved in being Prime Minister as well Foreign Minister. He was showing his age by the late 1890s and he was depressed by the drawn-out illness of his wife which ended with her death in 1899.

Even before he formally stepped down as Foreign Minister in 1900, Salisbury was already ceding a large role in foreign affairs to his nephew Arthur Balfour, who was Leader of the House of Commons, and his Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. The two men could scarcely have been more different. Balfour was Salisbury’s nephew and so part of that cosy interrelated circle at the apex of British society. As an oldest son of a rich man, he had extensive estates in Scotland. He was handsome, clever, and charming, although many found him cold and elusive.
His smile, said one acquaintance, was ‘like moonlight on a tombstone’.
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It was said that his heart was broken when the woman he loved died of typhoid fever but a close friend suspected that he had ‘exhausted his powers in that direction’ and preferred the ease of affairs with safely married women. His great passion was philosophy and, curiously, he was to develop an enthusiasm for Zionism during the Great War. Although he worked hard, he tried not to show it. He drifted out of the House of Commons to play golf and drifted back in for late sittings in his evening clothes. He lay back on the bench ‘as if to discover’, said
Punch
, ‘how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades’.
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He found Chamberlain interesting but unsympathetic. ‘Joe, though we all love him dearly,’ he wrote to a favourite mistress, ‘somehow does not absolutely or completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us.’
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Chamberlain was a self-made industrialist, one of the new men whose rise Salisbury had so deplored. Born into a middle-class family, he had left school at sixteen and ended up working in a family business in Birmingham which made metal screws. Unlike Balfour, he had married – three times. His first two wives died giving birth to sons, the first Austen and the second Neville, who was going to become famous or infamous as the appeasing Prime Minister of the late 1930s. His third wife, who was about half his age, was an American, the daughter of the Secretary of War in the administration of President Cleveland. It was by all accounts a very successful marriage.

Energetic, driven and ambitious, the young Chamberlain had built the business into the biggest of its kind in England and retired a very rich man at the age of thirty-six. He did not like sports and had few hobbies save an unlikely passion for orchids, which he raised in special greenhouses. (He always wore one in his buttonhole.) He took up politics with the same drive as he had business and became mayor of Birmingham. He worried about primary education for all, about drains and clean water, slum clearance and the provision of libraries. Even when he went to the House of Commons as a Liberal he remained the city’s undisputed ruler. In Parliament he surprised his colleagues by not being a wild demagogue but a highly polished debater making concise and pointed speeches. ‘The performance’, according to the British journalist, J. A. Spender, ‘was, if anything, too perfect. “It is all very nice, very nice, Mr. Chamberlain,” said an old member whose advice he
sought, “but the House would take it as such a great compliment, if now and again you could manage to break down.”’
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Chamberlain remained a radical, advocating social reforms, and attacked such privileged institutions as landlords and the established Church of England. Yet he also developed a passionate attachment to the British Empire which he believed was a force for good in the world. That conviction led him to break with the Liberals in 1886 when they proposed Home Rule for Ireland; Chamberlain and his supporters argued that it would undermine the unity of the empire. In time, the Liberal Unionists, as they were known, moved towards the Conservative Party.
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Chamberlain never defended himself to his former colleagues. He simply moved on. He had, said Spender, ‘a deadly concentration’ on what he was doing and that was mainly politics: ‘Everything to his vision was black or white, with clear-cut outlines and no half-tones.’
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