Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (35 page)

Not only did such influential contemporaries clearly believe in a German threat to Britain. The whole thrust of German historiography since Fritz Fischer published his seminal
Griff nach der Weltmacht
has been that they were right to do so. Even if they got the details wrong and exaggerated the likelihood of a German invasion, it seems, Saki and the other scaremongers were fundamentally correct that a Germany dominated by militaristic elites was planning an aggressive ‘bid for world power’ which made war inevitable.
⁴¹
Recent German writing has, albeit with some notable exceptions, tended to refine but not to revise Fischer’s argument. A classic illustration of the teleological accounts which have resulted is Immanuel Geiss’s recent synthesis, entitled (revealingly)
The Long Road to Catastrophe: The Prehistory of the First World War 1815-1914
, which argues, essentially, that the First World War was the inevitable consequence of German unification nearly half a century before.
⁴²

Yet it is hard not to feel a certain unease about the notion of a preordained war between Britain and Germany - if only because, eighty years on, the costs of the war seem to loom so much larger than its benefits. The loss of British life far exceeded the death toll of the Second World War, especially if one considers the figures for the British Empire as a whole: 908,371 deaths (more than a tenth of all those mobilised to fight) and total casualties of more than three million. Small wonder ‘the Great War’ continues to haunt the British imagination, inspiring modern writers of fiction like Pat Barker. Moreover, the financial costs of the war - which increased the national debt from £650 million to £7,435 million - burdened the subsequent, troubled decades with a crushing mortgage, gravely limiting politicians’ room for manoeuvre in the depression. Britain entered the war ‘the world’s banker’; at the end it owed the United States some $5 billion.
⁴³
In recent years, some social historians have sought to emphasise the ‘progressive’ side-effects of the war on the home front. They leave out of the account unquantifiable psychological wounds which blighted the subsequent lives of millions of survivors and dependants.

If all the sacrifices of the ‘Great War’ were supposed to prevent German hegemony in Europe, the achievement was short-lived. Within just twenty years, a far more serious German threat to Britain, and indeed the world, had emerged.
⁴⁴
And, because of the costs of the first war, Britain was far worse placed to resist that threat. Quite apart from its own relative decline, its former allies in Europe were weaker too: France politically divided, Russia in the grip of Stalinism, Italy under fascism. It is therefore tempting to ask whether the four years of slaughter in the trenches were indeed as futile as they seemed to the poet Wilfred Owen and others. Certainly, Liberals like Lloyd George and Keynes - whose contributions to the British war effort had been second to none - came very quickly to believe that the defeat of Germany had been a waste of blood and treasure. If the policy of appeasement had any rationale, it might be said, then the war of 1914-18 can have had little, and vice versa.

Conscious of the underlying inconsistency of British policy, a few historians have questioned the notion of an inevitable Anglo-German war, arguing that British politicians in fact had more room for manoeuvre than they subsequently (and apologetically) claimed. However, the alternatives contemplated have tended to be variations on the theme of intervention. Writing in the thick of the Second World War, Liddell Hart argued that Germany could have been defeated in the First without embroiling Britain in a prolonged continental campaign if the British Expeditionary Force had been sent to Belgium rather than France, or if more troops had been made available for the Dardanelles invasion.
⁴⁵
Essentially, this merely repeated two of the many arguments about strategy which had raged in political and military circles after 1914. Hobson, by contrast, has recently suggested that a bigger continental commitment
before
1914 could have deterred the Germans from attacking France in the first place.
⁴⁶
This too is a development of contemporary arguments. The French government always argued that a clear statement of British support for France at an early stage would have sufficed to deter Germany, a claim subsequently repeated by critics of Grey including Lloyd George and Lansdowne.
⁴⁷
Grey’s defenders, however, have with justice questioned whether the BEF was large enough to worry the German General Staff.
⁴⁸
Hobson’s solution to this problem is to imagine an increase in the size of the British army, making it a conscript army of between one and two million men on the continental model. As he rightly says, this could have been financed relatively easily by higher taxes or borrowing.
⁴⁹
But such a counterfactual scenario is far removed from what contemporaries regarded as politically possible under a Liberal government.

There nevertheless remains a third possibility, which has been all but ignored by historians: that of British non-intervention.
⁵⁰
Unlike Hobson’s counterfactual, this was far from being politically unrealistic, a point which can be gleaned even from the memoirs of Asquith and Grey. Both men strongly emphasised that Britain had
not
been obliged to intervene by any kind of contractual obligation. In Asquith’s words, ‘We kept ourselves free to decide, when the occasion arose, whether we should or should not go to war.... There was no great military convention [with France]: we entered into communications which bound us to do no more than study possibilities.’
⁵¹
Nor did Grey make any secret of the political opposition to any ‘precipitate attempt to force a decision’, which had prevented him making any commitment to France in July.
⁵²
If Grey’s hands were tied, in other words, it was by his Cabinet colleagues, not by the force of destiny. He himself made clear in his memoirs that there
had
been a choice (even if he naturally insisted that his had been the right one):

The neglect of the neutrality ‘counterfactual’ is a tribute to the persuasiveness of such emotive postwar apologies. Britain, we have come to accept, could not have ‘stood aside’ for both moral and strategic reasons. Yet a careful scrutiny of the contemporary documents - rather than the relentlessly deterministic memoir accounts - reveals how very near Britain came to doing just that. While it seems undeniable that a continental war between Austria, Germany, Russia and France was bound to break out in 1914, there was in truth nothing inevitable about the British decision to enter that war. Only by attempting to understand what would have happened had Britain stood aside can we be sure the right decision was made.

The story of the allegedly inexorable Anglo-German confrontation can be traced back to the crisis of confidence which beset the British Empire at the turn of the century. Despite the intellectual vigour of Conservative and Liberal brands of 1890s imperialism, the Boer War dealt a profound blow to British morale. Rhetoric about ‘national efficiency’ and popular enthusiasm for militaristic ‘leagues‘
⁵⁴
could not compensate for official and political anxieties about the costs of maintaining Britain’s vast overseas
imperium
.
⁵⁵
In fact, contemporaries tended to exaggerate the fiscal costs of the empire and to overlook the benefits of maintaining a vast international free-trade area. The real burden of defence averaged around 3.4 per cent of net national product between 1885 and 1913, including the cost of the Boer War. After 1905, the figure held steady at around 3-3.3 per cent - a remarkably low figure by post-1945 standards and less than the comparable figures for Russia, France and Germany.
⁵⁶
But the
perception
of ‘overstretch’ - Balfour’s hyperbolic claim that ‘we were for all practical purposes at the present moment only a third-rate power’
⁵⁷
- was what counted. Out of the increasingly complex institutional framework within which imperial strategy was made (and which the Committee of Imperial Defence and the new Imperial General Staff did little to streamline),
⁵⁸
there emerged a consensus. Because it seemed financially and strategically impossible for Britain simultaneously to defend its empire and itself, isolation could no longer be afforded - and therefore diplomatic understandings had to be reached with Britain’s imperial rivals.

At this point, it is worth asking once again an older counterfactual question which German liberals used endlessly to ponder: what if Britain had reached such an understanding, if not a formal alliance, with Germany? Despite some contemporary British anxieties about German commercial rivalry as German exporters began to challenge Britain in foreign markets and then to penetrate the British consumer market itself, the idea that economic rivalry precluded good diplomatic relations is a nonsense. Disputes about tariffs are only harbingers of war to the incurable economic determinist.
⁵⁹
German economic success inspired admiration as much as animosity. Moreover, there were numerous overseas areas where German and British interests potentially coincided. In 1898 and 1900 Chamberlain argued for Anglo-German cooperation against Russia in China. There was serious though inconclusive discussion of an Anglo-German-Japanese ‘triplice’ in 1901. After much British grumbling, agreement was reached to give Germany Samoa in 1899. The period also saw cooperation between Britain and Germany over Portuguese Mozambique and Venezuela (in 1902). Even in the Ottoman Empire and the former Ottoman fiefdoms of Egypt and Morocco, there seemed to be opportunities for Anglo-German collaboration, though here opinion in London was more divided.
⁶⁰
A priori
, there is no obvious reason why an ‘overstretched’ power (as Britain perceived itself to be) and an ‘under-stretched’ power (as Germany perceived itself to be) should not have cooperated together comfortably on the international stage. It is simply untrue to say that ‘the fundamental priorities of policy of each country were mutually exclusive’.
⁶¹

Why then did the famous alliance discussions - which began between Chamberlain and the Germans Hatzfeldt and Eckardstein in March 1898 and continued intermittently until 1901 - come to nothing?
⁶²
The traditional answer to this question is that the German Chancellor Bülow wished to keep a ‘free hand’, which meant in practice that he wished to build a navy capable of challenging Britain’s maritime supremacy. It is certainly true that Bülow, perhaps exaggerating British decline even more than the British, was reluctant to conclude a formal alliance with England (though no more reluctant, as it transpired, than the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury).
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And one reason for this was undoubtedly the belief that an alliance with England might impede the German naval build-up.
⁶⁴
Yet the notion that Anglo-German rapprochement was sunk by German
Weltpolitik
is misleading. Of equal importance at least was the petulant behaviour of Chamberlain, who allowed a diplomatic initiative which ought to have remained behind closed doors to become the stuff of speeches and editorials. Bülow’s Reichstag speech of 11 December 1899 - in which he expressed his readiness and willingness ‘on the basis of full reciprocity and mutual consideration to live with [England] in peace and harmony’ - was interpreted by the intemperate Chamberlain as ‘the cold shoulder’. He later complained that he had ‘burnt his fingers’ by proposing the alliance.
⁶⁵

But this too is only part of the story. Of far more importance in explaining the failure of the Anglo-German alliance project was not German strength but German
weakness
. It was, after all, the British who killed off the alliance idea, as much as - if not more than - the Germans. And they did so not because Germany began to pose a threat to Britain, but, on the contrary, because they realised it did
not
pose a threat. The British response to the German naval programme illustrates this point well. In 1900, Selborne, the First Lord of the Admiralty, had gloomily told Hicks Beach that a ‘formal alliance with Germany’ was ‘the only alternative to an ever-increasing Navy and ever-increasing Navy estimates’.
⁶⁶
Yet by 1902 he had completely changed his view, having become ‘convinced that the new German Navy is being built up from the point of view of a war with us’.
⁶⁷
This realisation was disastrous for the Germans, who had always been well aware of their vulnerability while their navy was under construction. From the outset, Bülow had insisted on the need to operate carefully with regard to England ‘like the caterpillar before it had grown into a butterfly’.
⁶⁸
But the chrysalis had been all too transparent. By 1905, with the completion of the First Sea Lord ‘Jackie’ Fisher’s initial naval reforms, the Director of Naval Intelligence could confidently describe as ‘overwhelming’ Britain’s ‘maritime preponderance’ over Germany.
⁶⁹
A sudden realisation of German vulnerability explains the panic about a pre-emptive British naval strike which gripped Berlin in 1904.
⁷⁰

The primary British concern had, of course, been to reduce rather than increase the likelihood of such expensive overseas conflicts. Despite German paranoia, these were in fact much more likely to be with powers which
already
had large empires and navies - rather than a power which merely aspired to have them. For this reason, it is not surprising that rather more fruitful diplomatic approaches ended up being made to France and Russia. As the Assistant Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office Bertie put it in November 1901, the best argument against an Anglo-German alliance was that if one were concluded ‘we [should] never be on decent terms with France, our neighbour in Europe and in many parts of the world, or with Russia, whose frontiers are coterminous with ours or nearly so over a large portion of Asia’.
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Salisbury and Selborne took a very similar view of the relative merits of France and Germany. German reluctance to support British policy in China in 1901 for fear of antagonising Russia merely confirmed the British view: for all its bluster, Germany was weak.
⁷²