Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (38 page)

Nor was Churchill alone in discerning Germany’s financial weakness. As early as April 1908, Grey himself had ‘pointed out that finance might in the course of the next few years prove a very serious difficulty to Germany and exercise a restraining influence on her’. The German ambassador Metternich actually drew his attention to domestic political ‘resistance’ to naval expenditure the following year.
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Goschen too commented on Germany’s fiscal problems in 1911 and was sceptical of the Kaiser’s protestations to the contrary.
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At the time of the controversial 1913 Army Bill, he noted that ’each class would ... be glad to see the financial burden thrust onto shoulders other than its own’.
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In March 1914, Nicolson went so far as to predict that ‘unless Germany is prepared to make still further financial sacrifices for military purposes, the days of her hegemony in Europe [
sic
] will be numbered’.
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There was also a strong awareness of the vulnerability of Germany’s alliances with Austria and Italy. In short, British observers admitted that Germany was weak, not strong, and that it was financially and politically incapable of winning a naval arms race against Britain, or a land arms race against France and Russia. The only danger Churchill discerned was that the German government, rather than try to ‘soothe the internal situation‘, might ’find an escape from it in external adventure’. Grey himself twice commented in July 1914 on the logic, from a German point of view, of a pre-emptive strike against Russia and France, before the military balance deteriorated any further.

Why then did he and the most senior officials in the Foreign Office and the General Staff nevertheless conjure up a German design for Napoleonic power, posing a direct threat to Britain? The possibility arises that they were exaggerating - if not fabricating - such a threat in order to justify the military commitment to France they favoured. In other words, precisely
because
they wished to align Britain with France and Russia, it was necessary to impute grandiose plans for European domination to the Germans.

This brings us to the crucial question: what
were
Germany’s ‘war aims’ in 1914? According to Fritz Fischer, of course, they were every bit as radical as the British Germanophobes feared. The war was an attempt ‘to realise Germany’s political ambitions, which may be summed up as German hegemony over Europe’ through annexations of French, Belgian and possibly Russian territory, the creation of a Central European customs union and the creation of new Polish and Baltic states directly or indirectly under German control. In addition, Germany was to acquire new territory in Africa, so that its colonial possessions could be consolidated as a continuous Central African area. There was also to be a concerted effort to break up the British and Russian empires through fomenting revolutions.
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Yet there is a fundamental flaw in Fischer’s reasoning which too many historians have let pass. It is the assumption, typical of determinist historiography, that Germany’s aims as stated after the war had begun were the same as German aims beforehand.
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Thus Bethmann Hollweg’s ‘September Programme’ - ‘provisional notes for the direction of our policy’ for a separate peace with France, drafted on the assumption of a swift German victory in the west - is portrayed as the first open statement of aims which had existed before the outbreak of war.
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If this were true, then the argument that war was avoidable would collapse; for it is clear that no British government could have accepted the territorial and political terms which the September Programme proposed for France and Belgium,
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as these would indeed have realised the ‘Napoleonic nightmare’ by giving Germany control of the Belgian coast. Yet the inescapable fact is that no evidence has ever been found by Fischer and his pupils that these objectives existed
before
Britain’s entry into the war. It is possible that they were never committed to paper, or that the relevant documents were destroyed or lost, and that those involved subsequently lied rather than concede legitimacy to the ‘war guilt’ clause of the Versailles Treaty. But it seems unlikely. All that Fischer can produce are the pre-war pipedreams of a few pan-Germans and businessmen (notably Walther Rathenau), none of which had any official status, as well as the occasional bellicose utterances of the Kaiser, an individual whose influence over policy was neither consistent nor as great as he himself believed.
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To grasp Germany’s pre-war objectives, it is necessary first to realise how right Churchill had been about the weakness of Germany’s position. For primarily financial reasons, it had indeed lost the naval arms race against Britain, and it was losing the land arms race against Russia and France. It also had good reason to fear for the reliability of its principal ally Austria, and little reason to have confidence in such other powers as it had been wooing (notably Italy and Turkey). By contrast, the strength of the Triple Entente seemed to be confirmed by the rumours of Anglo-Russian naval talks. In these circumstances, the long-held belief of the Chief of the General Staff, Moltke, that some kind of pre-emptive military strike against Russia and France might be preferable to continuing military decline, had begun to win influential converts even before the Sarajevo assassination. In the first instance, to be sure, Bethmann Hollweg’s objective in July 1914 was to score a diplomatic success. His hope was that a swift Austrian military strike against Serbia would cement the Dual Alliance and split the Triple Entente, because he doubted that Britain would be willing to support a Russian intervention on behalf of Serbia.
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But from the outset he was sanguine about the possibility of a war against Russia and France. Provided Russia could be made to appear the aggressor, he was ready for continental war, calculating that under those circumstances Britain would not intervene - or at least not ‘immediately’.
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The critical point is that, had Britain not intervened immediately, Germany’s war aims would have been significantly different from those set out in the September Programme. Bethmann Hollweg’s statement to Goschen of 29 July 1914 shows clearly that he was prepared to guarantee the territorial integrity of both France and Belgium (as well as Holland) in return for British neutrality.
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Had Britain in fact stayed out, it would have been madness to have reneged on such a bargain. So Germany’s aims would almost certainly not have included the territorial changes envisaged in the September Programme (except perhaps those relating to Luxemburg, in which Britain had no interest); and they certainly would not have included the proposals for German control of the Belgian coast, which no British government could have tolerated. The most that would have remained, then, would have been the following proposals:

To these points - in effect, the September Programme without annexations from France and Belgium - should be added the detailed plans subsequently drawn up to ‘thrust [Russia] back as far as possible from Germany’s eastern frontier and [break] her domination over the non-Russian vassal peoples’. These envisaged the creation of a new Polish state (joined to Habsburg Galicia) and the cession of the Baltic provinces (which would either be independent, incorporated in the new Poland or annexed by Germany itself).
¹⁵⁰
Even this edited version of the September Programme probably exaggerates the pre-war aims of the German leadership. Bülow, of course, was no longer Chancellor; but his comments to the Crown Prince in 1908 were not so different from Bethmann Hollweg’s view that war would strengthen the political left and weaken the Reich internally:

Would the limited war aims outlined above have posed a direct threat to British interests? Did they imply a Napoleonic strategy? Hardly. All that the economic clauses of the September Programme implied was the creation, some eighty years early, of a German-dominated European customs union not so very different from the one which exists today - the European Union. Indeed, many of the official statements on the subject have a striking contemporary resonance, for example Hans Delbrück’s ‘It is only a Europe which forms a single customs unit that can meet with sufficient power the over-mighty productive resources of the transatlantic world’; or Gustav Müller’s enthusiastic call for a ‘United States of Europe’ (a phrase used before the war by the Kaiser) ‘including Switzerland, The Netherlands, the Scandinavian states, Belgium, France, even Spain and Portugal and, via Austria-Hungary, also Rumania, Bulgaria and Turkey’; or Baron Ludwig von Falkenhausen’s aspiration ‘to match the great, closed economic bodies of the United States, the British and the Russian Empires with an equally solid economic bloc representing all European states ... under German leadership, with the twofold purpose: (1) of assuring the members of this whole, particularly Germany, mastery of the European market, and (2) of being able to lead the entire economic strength of allied Europe into the field, as a unified force, in the struggle with those world powers over the conditions of the admission of each to the markets of the other’.
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The difference is that in 1914 Britain would not have become a member of the Kaiser’s ‘EU’. On the contrary, with its maritime empire intact, Britain would have remained a super-power in its own right.

Of course, it was not to be: the bid for British neutrality was, as we know, rejected. Yet German historians have been too quick to dismiss Bethmann Hollweg’s proposal as wild miscalculation; or even to argue that the Germans themselves did not expect to secure British neutrality. The documentary record does not bear this out. On the contrary, it shows that Bethmann Hollweg’s hopes of British non-intervention were far from unreasonable. He can be forgiven for not anticipating that, at the very last minute, the arguments of Grey and Crowe would prevail over the numerically stronger non-interventionists.

For it would be quite wrong to conclude that British pre-war military planning on the assumption of intervention in a Franco-German war actually made war inevitable. The majority of Cabinet members (to say nothing of Parliament) had at first been kept in ignorance of the discussions with the French. As Sanderson put it to Cambon, the notion of a military commitment to France ‘gave rise to divergences of opinion’ - ‘anything of a more definite nature would have been at once rejected by the Cabinet’. Extraordinarily, even the Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman was initially kept in the dark. When he was told, he expressed his anxiety that ‘the stress laid upon joint preparations ... comes very close to an honourable undertaking‘. Haldane accordingly had to make it ‘clear’ to the Chief of the General Staff, Lyttleton, ‘that we were to be in no way committed by the fact of having entered into communications’.
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Under these circumstances, it was quite impossible for Grey to take the step towards a formal alliance with France favoured by the Foreign Office hawks Mallet, Nicolson and Crowe.
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As the more cautious Permanent Secretary Hardinge emphasised in his testimony before the CID sub-committee meeting of March 1909, ‘We had given
no
assurance that we would help [the French] on land, and ... the only grounds upon which the French could base any hopes of military assistance were the
semi
-
official
conversations which had taken place between the French military attaché and our General Staff.’ Accordingly, the sub-committee concluded that ‘in the event of an attack on France by Germany, the expedient of sending a military force abroad, or of relying on naval means only, is
a matter of policy that can only be determined, when the occasion arises, by the Government of the day
’.
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The option of military intervention was merely being considered (and its logistical implications explored), just as the option of nuclear retaliation in the event of a Soviet attack on Western Europe was considered by the US during the Cold War. In both cases the same distinction must be made: simply because plans for war were drawn up, war was not inevitable. Even the Germanophobe Eyre Crowe had to concede, as he did in February 1911, ‘the fundamental fact ... that the Entente is not an alliance. For purposes of ultimate emergencies it may be found to have no substance at all. For an Entente is nothing more than a frame of mind, a view of general policy which is shared by the governments of two countries, but which may be, or become, so vague as to lose all content.’
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