3

The alliance system and the old diplomacy

The Prussian victory over France in the war of 1870–1 and the creation of the German Empire led to a change in the balance of power in Europe and to an international system in which Germany, by now the strongest military power on the continent and one with large and expanding industrial resources, necessarily played a leading role. Consequently, the methods of conducting international relations and the basic structure of international alignments were to a large extent those devised by Bismarck to meet Germany’s needs in the 1870s and 1880s.¹ Bismarck’s name has become associated also with a particular style of diplomacy: an unprincipled and unscrupulous Realpolitik. ‘It is the lees left by Bismarck that still foul the cup’, Sir Edward Grey wrote in December 1906, and he accused German diplomacy of ‘deliberate attempts to make mischief between other countries by saying poisoned things to one about the other’.² This is perhaps unfair: as A.J.P. Taylor has pointed out, Bismarck was no worse in this respect than some other nineteenth-century statesmen, notably Napoleon III.³ But it was Bismarck who seemed to contemporaries and to subsequent historians to be the great master of diplomatic intrigue – bluffing and frightening the ambassadors and foreign ministers of other countries into doing his will, sometimes by a calculated indiscretion, as when in 1887 he read out to the Russian ambassador the exact text of Germany’s alliance with Austria in order to persuade the Russians to agree to a ‘reinsurance’ treaty with Germany that would guarantee Russian neutrality in the event of a Franco-German war without committing Germany to anything specific in return. On other occasions, he could accept the failure of his bluff with a certain bonhomie: ‘All I can say is: consider carefully what you do’, he said to the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister during the negotiations for the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1879. ‘For the last time I advise you to give up your opposition. Accept my proposal, or else – or else I shall have to accept yours.’⁴ More serious, however, than the actual methods by which Bismarck conducted diplomacy was the underlying assumption that all international negotiations and all international undertakings were to be interpreted in terms of national interest so that raison d’état could always provide an excuse for going back on international commitments. Bismarck believed that Austria and Prussia were states too great to be bound by the texts of treaties. No agreement could be expected to last forever; and, as Bismarck put it, all treaties should contain the phrase rebus sic stantibus (things remaining as they are). Lord Salisbury’s views were much the same: at the end of his life, he wrote on the question of Belgian neutrality: ‘Our treaty obligations will follow from our national inclinations and will not precede them.’ ⁵

The details of the alliance treaties and other international agreements were in many cases kept secret and were only published in full after the wars and, as even those that were published contained secret clauses, they were often believed to contain more than they actually did. Bismarck’s ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ with Russia in 1887 was concluded without the knowledge of Germany’s ally Austria-Hungary, and it was Bismarck himself in embittered retirement who revealed its existence and the fact that his successor Count Georg von Caprivi had not renewed it. Some of the details (as opposed to the existence) of the Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy were learned in 1915 when Italy declared war on its former allies, but were not published in their entirety until 1920. Speculation about secret agreements and hidden commitments was encouraged by the press. The famous journalists (Sir Valentine Chirol of The Times or Theodor Wolff of the Berliner Tageblatt, for example) and editors, in an age when the popular press was beginning to be regarded as a power that governments had to take into account, were on friendly terms with members of governments and were often used as a channel for deliberate disclosures; this in turn encouraged further speculation. In France at least one foreign minister, Stephen Pichon, had been a journalist and returned to the profession on leaving office in 1911. ‘The diplomacy of nations’, the British prime minister Lord Salisbury wrote resignedly, ‘is now conducted as much in the letters of foreign correspondents as in the despatches of the Foreign Office’.⁶

If newspapermen were fishing for sensational disclosures, governments too were as anxious to find out the secrets of other foreign ministries as they were to discover details of military plans. The French foreign ministry had maintained, with brief interruptions, a cabinet noir (black chamber or office) since the time of Richelieu, a secret office that worked to break the diplomatic ciphers of other governments, and which from the 1880s was regularly doing so.⁷ During the Moroccan crisis of 1905 the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé discovered through clandestine monitoring of the German embassy’s communications that his own prime minister, Maurice Rouvier, was negotiating secretly with Berlin.⁸ Most of the telegrams sent to Rome from the Italian embassy in Paris were intercepted, leading the French to discover the existence of a secret naval convention concluded by the members of the Triple Alliance in the spring of 1913; and during the July Crisis the Austrians were reading the telegrams sent from the Italian embassy in Vienna to Rome.⁹ The Germans had a spy in the Russian embassy in London in 1914 who gave them information about (and seems to have exaggerated the importance of) the inconclusive naval talks between the British and Russian admiralties in June 1914, and this information strengthened the Germans’ conviction that their opponents were tightening a ring around Germany and that it would be better to break out of this encirclement sooner rather than later. The secrecy of diplomatic agreements as well as of military plans encouraged the powers to spend money and energy on developing their secret services; documentation, however, is fragmentary and it was only when espionage caused political scandals, of which the most famous is the Dreyfus affair in France, that something of these activities came to light.¹⁰

Liberals and radicals all over Europe, but especially in Britain, denounced the secrecy of diplomatic methods, though at the same time the belief was spread by many diplomats that theirs was an arcane profession that no outsider was qualified to understand and whose members must come from a particular class or caste. As one senior official of the British foreign office put it in 1914:

I think your Board of Selection will generally take what one may call perhaps one type of man, because he is the type of man who is fit for this international career called diplomacy. Allspeaking metaphorically, speak the same language; they have the same habits of thought, and more or less the same points of view, and if anybody with a different language came in, I think he would be treated by the whole diplomatic service more or less with suspicion.¹¹

Although conventions concerning recruitment and training of diplomats varied from country to country, they shared a reputation for being – and perhaps a desire to be – members of an exclusive club. It was everywhere the most difficult branch of the civil service to move into, especially if one did not come from the correct social background. Examinations could be daunting but were sometimes used (as in Russia) ‘more as a means of sifting out socially undesirable candidates than incompetent ones’.¹² Candidates were almost universally expected to have a private income sufficient to maintain themselves in style if they were to serve abroad. Although social exclusivity characterized most of the diplomatic corps of European states before the First World War, and although diplomats were more likely to come from the old aristocracy, an increasing emphasis on education in the nineteenth century was gradually opening the doors to the sons of the upper middle class. Nowhere was the foreign ministry or the diplomatic corps socially homogeneous, but social rank nevertheless remained important: officials in the various foreign ministries tended to be of lower social standing than the diplomats who were sent abroad; consuls and diplomats in the less attractive posts tended to be less aristocratic than ambassadors in the capitals of Europe. In the German foreign service noble birth was almost essential: only the embassies in Peru, Venezuela, Colombia and Siam were run by men of bourgeois birth; 8 princes, 29 counts, 20 barons, 54 untitled nobles and only 11 commoners made up the foreign service of Germany in 1914.¹³

Whether international relations would have been more successfully conducted if the diplomats had been recruited from a less exclusive class or whether international tension would have been lessened by exposing diplomatic negotiations to full publicity or to close control by parliaments is very doubtful; there is, however, no doubt that the practitioners of what after the war came to be called the ‘old diplomacy’ contributed to the belief that there was always more to every international negotiation than met the eye. Arno J. Mayer’s thesis that the war erupted because the ‘old regime’ saw it as its only chance of salvation relies, in part, on the aristocratic monopoly of important positions in the foreign offices and diplomatic corps of Europe. But the extent to which this was true varies considerably: Mayer’s contention that the French foreign office remained an aristocratic stronghold even after the Dreyfus affair does not stand up to scrutiny; by the 1880s an épuration (purification or purging) of officials had been conducted and a set of trained, middle-class professionals took control from the aristocrats. Their positions were closely connected with their educational qualifications, and graduates of the intellectual, elitist École Libre supplied 249 of 284 individuals admitted to the diplomatic service between 1899 and 1936.¹⁴ Ironically, perhaps, it was easier in autocratic Russia than it was in Germany for a young man from the prosperous middle class to have a diplomatic career – especially if he graduated from the celebrated Imperial Alexander Lycée.¹⁵ The relationship between social status, professionalism and policy is never as simple or as straightforward as some imagine.¹⁶

Alliances and the balance of power

With treaties of alliance often negotiated in an atmosphere of distrust and with many unspoken reservations on all sides, why were they considered important and what effect did these formal agreements have on the policies of the states involved? In what way can it be said that the existence of the system of alliances contributed to causing the outbreak of war in 1914? The theory, if that is not too grand a term, by which contemporaries justified the alliance system was that it would maintain the balance of power. This phrase, which had been common in diplomatic language since the eighteenth century, could be interpreted both as an objective assessment of the actual military and economic strength of the powers and as a subjective evaluation by statesmen of where their own national interest lay. The idea was expressed by Sir Eyre Crowe of the British Foreign Office in a famous memorandum of 1907:

The only check on the abuse of political predominance has always consisted in the opposition of an equally formidable rival, or of a combination of several countries forming leagues of defence. The equilibrium established by such grouping of forces is technically known as the balance of power.¹⁷

Bismarck, whose diplomacy after the achievement of German unification aimed at maintaining the balance of power in Germany’s favour, put it more succinctly and with his usual realism: ‘All politics reduces itself to this formula: Try to be a trois as long as the world is governed by the unstable equilibrium of five Great Powers.’ ¹⁸ Many statesmen and diplomats believed that the maintenance of the balance of power would itself prevent war by deterring an aggressor, either directly or by providing machinery by which, as Bismarck himself believed, one power could control its allies and stop them doing anything to upset the balance.¹⁹

This aspect of the theory of the balance of power was expressed in a leading article in The Times in April 1914:

The division of the Great Powers into two well-balanced groups with intimate relations between the members of each, which do not forbid any such member from being on the friendliest terms with one or more members of the other, is a twofold check upon inordinate ambitions or sudden outbreaks of race hatred. All Sovereigns and statesmen – aye, and all nations – know that a war of group against group would be a measureless calamity. That knowledge brings with it a sense of responsibility which chastens and restrains the boldest and most reckless. But they know, too, that to secure the support of the other members of their own group and to induce them to share the responsibility and risks of such conflict, any Power or Powers which may meditate recourse to arms must first satisfy those other members that the quarrel is necessary and just. They are no longer unfettered judges in their own cause, answerable to none but themselves.²⁰

It was this system that broke down in 1914 when it became clear that the balance of power was not a built-in regulator of the international system and that the division of Europe into rival alliance systems would not necessarily work as beneficently as the editor of The Times hoped.

The two treaties of alliance that were of central importance in the July Crisis of 1914 were the German-Austrian treaty which had been signed in 1879 and the Franco-Russian alliance of 1893. Italy had made an alliance with Germany and Austria in 1882, known as the Triple Alliance, which had been renewed as recently as 1912. These were formal alliances, but equally important were the less formal ententes reached between Britain and France in 1904 and Britain and Russia in 1907. The combination of Britain, Russia, France and Japan in a series of agreements reached over a period of 15 years established what one historian has called the ‘Quadruple Entente’, though the extent to which it posed a counterbalance to the pre-existing Triple Alliance remained to be seen.²¹ If we look at the circumstances in which these various agreements were negotiated and the situations they were intended to meet, we can see how their nature changed over the years. At the same time, the fact of their existence led other countries to frame their own policies in accordance with what seemed to be the permanent alignments with which they might be confronted in a war. Thus, both political expectations and military plans were conditioned by the existence of the alliance system and strengthened the divisions that the alliances themselves tended to produce.

The German-Austrian alliance had by 1914 changed its emphasis significantly since it was first negotiated by Bismarck in 1879. In the diplomatic circumstances of that year, when Russia was still suffering from what the panslav publicists regarded as the humiliation inflicted by the other powers at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Bismarck believed that an alliance with Austria-Hungary would have the effect of deterring Russia from any action against Germany, and that it would therefore sooner or later force Russia to seek improved relations with Germany – as indeed happened in 1881 and again in 1887. But Bismarck also always regarded the alliance as a means of restraining Austrian policy in the Balkans and of avoiding a situation in which Germany would be drawn by Austria into a war with Russia to defend Austro-Hungarian interests in south-east Europe. The alliance, in Bismarck’s mind, was an element of stability in Europe since it would both alarm the Russians sufficiently to make them want better relations with Germany and provide Germany with the power to control Austrian policy towards its Slav neighbours.

For Austria-Hungary the German alliance meant an additional guarantee of the empire’s stability. At least since 1815, the survival of the Habsburg Monarchy had depended to a large extent on convincing the other Great Powers that Austria was an essential element in the European balance of power that they could not allow to disappear. This claim seemed to be shattered in 1866 when, following the disastrous defeat at the hands of the Prussians at Königgrätz in 1866, Pope Pius IX had declared that the Habsburg Empire had been reduced ‘to the status of a second-rate Oriental Power’.²² Therefore, there was among the German-speaking inhabitants of Austria a sense of relief that the alliance with Germany had brought an end to the fatal division between them and the Germans that had resulted from that war. The formal diplomatic terms of the alliance were reinforced by an emotional feeling that Germany and Austria were now bound together in a community of fate, a Schicksalsgemeinschaft. Thus, the alliance met not only immediate diplomatic requirements but also an emotional need among many people in both countries at a time when, as never before, the public (or at least the press) responded immediately to diplomatic moves so that treaties could acquire a significance with which their actual contents had little to do. The fact that an alliance existed was more important than its exact terms, the precise details of which were still kept secret. The essential part of the German-Austrian alliance was in fact an agreement that, if either were attacked by Russia, each would support the other ‘with the whole strength of their empires’.

In Bismarck’s day, both the Germans and Austrians had regarded the alliance as a way of ensuring stability. Bismarck revealed the terms of the alliance to the Russian ambassador in 1887 when he hoped to persuade the Russians to sign a treaty with Germany. By the time this ‘Reinsurance Treaty’ became due for renewal in 1890 Bismarck had fallen from power – but even he appears to have had misgivings about Russian intentions and was perhaps moving even closer to a more binding arrangement with Austria-Hungary. During discussions of a Zollverein or customs union with the Austrians in 1889 he told their ambassador that:

I and all German and Prussian statesmen have never regarded Austria as totally a foreign country… . The expansion of Slavism is indeed a great and imminent danger – a fact that I did not at first perceive but which was already forecast at the beginning of the century. It is an historical fact that from time immemorial Prussia, which increasingly felt within herself the basis for becoming a leading power of a Germany hemmed in between Slavdom and the French, has regarded as a vital necessity the durability of Austria as a strong great power.²³

The heir to the Habsburg throne, Crown Prince Rudolf, was not persuaded. In 1888 he had written anonymously to his father, the Emperor Franz Josef, to warn him of the dangers he foresaw: ‘You have put one foot forward into the Balkans; that is putting one foot into the grave, which your supposed friend [Bismarck] has dug for you.’ ²⁴

Within a few years of Bismarck’s departure, the international situation had changed fundamentally. The signature in August 1892 of a military agreement between France and Russia, which was converted into a full alliance in the following year, divided Europe into two camps and the Bismarckian policy of keeping eastern Europe quiet through the dynastic ethos of the three emperors disappeared forever.

A rapprochement between France and Russia, in spite of the differences of political systems between the French republic and the tsarist autocracy, had been a logical consequence of the new balance of power established in 1870. As Karl Marx had put it at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, ‘If Alsace and Lorraine are taken, then France will later make war on Germany in conjunction with Russia’.²⁵ The annexation by Germany of the two French provinces meant that there could be in the long run no reconciliation between France and Germany; although at some moments the French government and public temporarily forgot about the lost provinces; the hope of recovering them was always likely to ensure that in a European war France would join the side opposed to Germany.

The advantages for Russia of a French alliance seemed clear: it would give the Russians a freer hand in south-east Europe. Faced with the possibility of a war on two fronts, Germany would be less likely to back Austria-Hungary in a conflict with Russia and so Austria would not be able to resist Russia’s moves. The alliance would also give, it was hoped, security for Russia in Europe while the tsar’s government was engaged in vast operations to extend control across Siberia to the Pacific (the decision to construct the Trans-Siberian railway was taken in 1891). But, independently of these strategic and diplomatic considerations, closer financial links between France and Russia were developing from 1887 onwards, which were to give the Franco-Russian alliance a firmer foundation than most other diplomatic alignments of the period. The Russian government needed foreign capital, not only for investment in its expanding industries and growing transport system, but also to carry out a major conversion of Russian government stock in order to rationalize and economize. French bankers were interested in expanding their share of the Russian money market and conducted active campaigns to sell Russian bonds to small savers in France, to which the French middle classes responded enthusiastically. Although the French government had not expected or intended that these loans would supply an essential element of support for a military and diplomatic alliance, this turned out to be the case; moreover, the interest in Russia that the promotion of these sales had aroused helped to prepare the way for the popular success of the visit of the French fleet to Russia in 1891 and that of the Russian navy to Toulon in 1893. Nor was this new relationship limited to governments and loans: direct French investment in Russian mining rose from 31.2 million francs in 1888 to 274.1 million in 1900; in metallurgy from 70.6 to 298.8.²⁶ By 1914 the interdependence of French investment and the Russian economy provided an essential underpinning of the Franco-Russian diplomatic and military alliance.

Germany had, perhaps unwittingly, contributed to this change in international politics. Bismarck, who had never shown much awareness of the wider political significance of international financial links, banned the sale of Russian bonds on the Berlin Stock Exchange in November 1887 because he was annoyed with the Russian government for imposing a tax on foreign owners of estates in Russia, a measure that affected important members of the German aristocracy who owned properties on both sides of the border between Russia and Prussia. His almost reflexive support of the Prussian Junkers was repeated by his successors a few years later when the new German chancellor, in the continuing tariff war begun by Bismarck, granted import concessions to everyone but the Russians. The Russians responded by imposing a 20–30 per cent increase in existing tariffs against any state that discriminated against Russian trade. Although their trade dispute was settled by an agreement in 1894, the Russians were encouraged by their experience to rely increasingly on French support for their programme of economic development.

Military men had their own motives for encouraging a Franco-Russian rapprochement. Generals N.N. Obruchev and Raoul de Boisdeffre, chiefs of the Russian and French general staffs, began pressing hard for a military arrangement in 1890.²⁷ There had been some contact between the respective staffs going back to 1870, and it was as a military instrument that the alliance was primarily regarded. The agreement negotiated in 1892 and ratified during the winter of 1893/4 laid down:

If France is attacked by Germany or by Italy supported by Germany, Russia will use all her available forces to attack Germany. If Russia is attacked by Germany or by Austria supported by Germany, France will use all available forces to attack Germany.

In spite of this clause, at least one historian of the alliance has interpreted it as an offensive one that aimed at the break-up of Germany ‘or in any case to weaken and humble it;’ General Obruchev envisaged ‘the destruction of both the German and the Austro-Hungarian empires’.²⁸ By the mid-1890s the existence of the alliance, though not the precise terms, was widely known. And the existence of the alliance was enough to generate opposition to it in both France and Russia. In France, radical deputies were horrified by it, denounced it and indicated that they would reject it were they ever in a position to do so. Nevertheless, popular support for the Russian alliance slowly grew in France – with the guidance of the government. In 1896 Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra visited Paris, where they received a jubilant reception from over a million Parisians who gathered to welcome them, and at which they were joined by the French premier, Jules Méline, in dedicating the new bridge spanning the Seine – naming it for the tsar’s father, Alexander III, one of the most reactionary Russian rulers of the nineteenth century.²⁹ In Russia, opposition to the alliance came from the opposite camp, from the reactionaries who feared that the connection with republicanism would encourage radical and revolutionary elements within Russia.

The alliance system

Henceforth, the Dual Alliance of France and Russia was seen as confronting the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy. The immediate consequence of this confrontation was that the German general staff at once began to make plans for a war on two fronts, but for the moment this still seemed a remote possibility. The Russians were preoccupied with their expansion across Asia; the Austrians were anxious for a period of calm while they tried to damp down the national tensions within the Monarchy, while the French for the moment were more preoccupied with imperial rivalries in Africa and south-east Asia than with the question of Alsace-Lorraine. The Germans under Wilhelm II were eagerly looking for ways of asserting their position as a potential world power and seemed less concerned with the prospect of war in Europe against France and Russia. Although they took crucial steps in 1897 towards creating a battle fleet designed for the high seas, 15 years earlier Germany already had the third-largest armoured fleet in the world. And, from the start, German naval strategy was predicated in part on thinking about it in terms of relations with allies or potential allies: when Albrecht von Stosch was appointed chief of the German admiralty by Wilhelm I in January 1872 (when the Imperial Admiralty was created) he contended that ‘in a major war against a power with superior naval strength’ Germany would have to hold its own at sea, as otherwise ‘Germany can have no value for maritime allies’.³⁰

Throughout the 1890s the imperialist activities and interests of all the powers except Austria cut across the lines that the Triple and Dual Alliances seemed to be establishing. In the Far East, the French and Russians were prepared in 1895 to work with the Germans to impose a settlement at the end of the war between Japan and China. In 1901 the French were even ready to send a contingent to participate in an international force under the command of a German general to put down the Chinese nationalists (the ‘Boxers’) who seemed to be threatening the privileged position of Europeans in China. For the French in Africa and the Russians in the Far East, Britain seemed a more immediate rival than Germany.

At the same time, it was the problems caused by its imperial commitments that brought Britain, gradually and unintentionally, into the European alliance system. Until the late 1890s, British governments had refused to consider any formal alliances with other powers. They had ignored suggestions by Bismarck for a closer association with his international system, limiting themselves to the so-called Mediterranean Agreements of 1887, which remained secret and which did little more than declare Britain’s already well-known interest in the stability of the eastern Mediterranean area and promise consultation and possible joint action with Austria and Italy in time of crisis. A landmark arrangement in 1890 suggested the closeness of their relationship in 1890: the British ceded to the Germans the rocky north Frisian Island of Heligoland in the North Sea in exchange for recognizing their right to Zanzibar in east Africa. By 1900, after several years of a virtual Cold War with the French in Africa, and faced with what was seen as a Russian threat to British influence in China, the British also found themselves at war with the Boer republics in South Africa. The strains of acquiring and running a worldwide empire were beginning to tell. Some British leaders, notably Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary, were beginning to think that Britain might have to abandon what some people believed to be a tradition of isolationism:

All the powerful States of Europe have made alliances … and as long as we keep outside these alliances, as long as we are envied by all, and as long as we have interests which at one time or another conflict with the interests of all, we are likely to be confronted at any moment with a combination of Great Powers so powerful that not even the most extreme, the most hotheaded politician would be able to contemplate it without a certain sense of uneasiness.³¹

There were indeed discussions in 1898 and again in 1901 about the possibility of an Anglo-German alliance, but the interests of both sides were too far apart. The British wanted diplomatic support against Russia in the Far East: the Germans wanted British help, or at least benevolent neutrality, in a possible war in Europe. Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, in his last major foreign policy decision before his retirement, put a stop to these discussions in May 1901 when he declared that ‘This is a proposal for including England within the bounds of the Triple Alliance’. And he went on to talk of British isolation:

Have we ever felt that danger [of isolation] practically? If we had succumbed in the revolutionary war, our fall would not have been due to our isolation. We had many allies, but they would not have saved us if the French Emperor had been able to cross the Channel. Except during his reign, we have never been in danger and therefore, it is impossible for us to judge whether the ‘isolation’ under which we are supposed to suffer, does or does not contain in it any elements of peril. It would hardly be wise to incur novel and most onerous obligations, in order to guard against a danger in whose existence we have no historical reason for believing.³²

But although British politicians continued to talk as if Britain could avoid continental commitments, they were, sometimes almost without realizing it, becoming increasingly involved in the alignments of the European powers. Britain’s immediate need for diplomatic support in the Far East seemed in fact to be satisfied by an alliance with Japan, signed in January 1902. Britain’s first formal move away from so-called isolation was not the admission of weakness that some commentators have suggested, but a sensible way of guaranteeing its interests in the Far East while meeting the threat of a Franco-Russian combination by enabling it to concentrate its naval resources in European waters.³³ The Anglo-Japanese alliance was a move in Britain’s global strategy.

Britain and the end of isolation

The Russo-Japanese war that followed two years later threatened to upset British calculations. The prime minister, Arthur Balfour, believed that Japan would either be crushed or severely weakened and he resisted the recommendations of his foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, that Britain provide assistance to the Japanese.³⁴ Both feared that, if France aided Russia, Britain would be drawn into the war on the side of Japan. The French were equally fearful of such an outcome, and thus the two traditional antagonists had a new incentive to improve their relations. The Anglo-French Convention of April 1904 marked the culmination of this policy. This Entente (the Entente Cordiale) was, as Maurice Paléologue, the head of the political division of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs was later to describe it, ‘un grand tournant de la politique mondiale’.³⁵ Yet this is not how it seemed at the time, and the agreement was another of those international arrangements that gradually changed into something different from what the people who had originally made them envisaged. Throughout the 1890s the British and French had been quarrelling over their colonial differences in West Africa, on the upper Nile and in Siam. In 1898 the crisis at Fashoda on the upper Nile, when a small French force had confronted a British army that had just re-established control over the Sudan, had led to talk of war between the two countries, and the British Channel Fleet was sent to the Mediterranean. At the same time, Théophile Delcassé, the new French foreign minister and the architect of French foreign policy until 1905, realized that France’s ally, Russia, was not prepared to provide assistance against Britain in Africa and that, with France in the midst of the domestic political crisis caused by the Dreyfus case, a direct confrontation with Britain would have to be avoided. Gradually – and reluctantly, because he had been closely involved with the anti-British colonial party in France – Delcassé came to realize that there might be advantages for France in a colonial deal with Britain. The basis for such a deal was provided by the fact that the French were hoping to extend their north African empire by gaining control over Morocco, while the British, who had been in occupation of Egypt since 1882, wanted to consolidate their position there and to carry out a reform of the Egyptian finances, a step for which French approval would be essential since the French occupied a key position in the Caisse de la Dette, the international commission responsible for supervising Egypt’s financial affairs.

The Anglo-French agreement of 1904 was therefore essentially a settlement of outstanding colonial differences aimed at strengthening France’s hand in an attempt to win Morocco and at confirming Britain’s position in Egypt. There was also an agreement to leave Siam as an independent buffer state between French Indo-China and the British possessions in Burma. Small territorial adjustments were made in Africa, and a dispute about fishing rights off Canada that had lasted for nearly 200 years was settled. But this hard bargaining about specific points of dispute outside Europe has a different significance when it is seen against the changes that had taken place in the general international scene in the previous 10 years.

With the hindsight of the July Crisis and the outbreak of war in 1914, most observers have seen in the Anglo-French Entente the first decisive step taken by the British on the road to war with Germany. By 1904 many in Britain had begun to interpret the creation of a large German navy as posing a serious threat to Britain’s position as a world power. Heligoland, consigned to Germany in the treaty of 1890, came to be seen as a ‘dark rock symbolizing Germany’s threat to Britain’.³⁶ A few years earlier it had seemed that Britain and Germany had no serious differences and that a formal alliance between them might be possible, but by 1902 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, who had previously regarded France and Russia as the greatest threats to Britain, now proposed a détente with them in order to counter the growing threat posed by Germany.³⁷ In March 1903 the admiralty decided to create a North Sea fleet and to construct a base for it at Rosyth on the east coast of Scotland to counter German naval expansion. Thus, although the agreement with France was strictly limited to a settlement of colonial differences, old and new, the changing position and policies of Germany were at the back of the minds of those involved in the negotiations. But so too were those of Russia where, prompted partly by the Franco-Russian alliance, partly by calm in the Balkans, an ambitious new ‘Asian’ policy was formulated – most dramatically symbolized by the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway, and which would lead ultimately to the disastrous war with Japan in 1904–5. The prime minister of Britain at the time of the Anglo-French Entente, Arthur Balfour had, in fact, not Germany but Russia in mind before and during the negotiations with France. As he pointed out to the foreign secretary who negotiated the agreement, Lord Lansdowne:

We possess a good deal that she would like to have and even if India is too big a mouthful for her to swallow, her statesmen believe that if she could secure a position of strategical superiority along our Indian frontier we should be so much afraid of her in Asia as to be her very humble servant in Europe.³⁸

Although Delcassé, in a moment of irritation after the French withdrawal from Fashoda, had considered seeking German help against Britain in Africa, he had by 1903 come round to the idea that both France’s ambitions in Morocco and its position in relation to Germany could be best served by an agreement with Britain. At the same time, important sectors of French opinion in commercial circles and the press, which during the South African war had been uniformly hostile to Britain, now began to welcome the idea of better relations between the two countries; thus, the successful visits of King Edward VII to Paris in May 1903 and of President Loubet to London in July seemed to be symbols of a new and improved climate of opinion in both countries.

It was, however, the German government that was responsible for the rapid development of the Entente Cordiale into something that, though never becoming a formal alliance, seemed to be moving in that direction. The presupposition of German diplomacy since the 1890s had been that the imperial rivalries between Britain and France and Britain and Russia were so deep that they could never be overcome, and so Britain would sooner or later be obliged by the pressures of power politics to seek an alliance with Germany on Germany’s terms. For this reason, the German foreign ministry had not been too disappointed by the failure of the discussions about an alliance in 1898 and 1901. Time, the Germans believed, was on their side. The conclusion of the Anglo-French Convention in 1904 did little to shake this belief. Officials within the foreign ministry still believed that Anglo-French differences were insuperable and that any rapprochement was bound to be a superficial one that could easily be broken. Between 1904 and 1906 the Germans were trying to test the Entente and to demonstrate its hollowness. At first it appeared indeed that France’s existing alliance with Russia might conflict with its new friendship with Britain.

A few weeks before the signature of the Anglo-French Entente, war had broken out in the Far East between Japan and Russia. It was an incidental episode in this war that provided the first test of the Entente. The Russian fleet, on its way from the Baltic to the Far East, shot at and sank some British fishing boats on the Dogger Bank in the North Sea, apparently mistaking them for Japanese submarines. There was a moment of violent anti-Russian feeling in Britain, and the German government suggested to the Russians that now was the moment to form a continental league against Britain, which it was hoped the French might also join. But Delcassé refused to choose between France’s ally Russia and its new friend Britain, and he used all his diplomatic skill to mediate between Britain and Russia and to persuade the Russians to hold the inquiry and give the compensation the British government was demanding.

The most serious test of the Entente Cordiale came not in the Far East but in North Africa on the question of Morocco, where Germany’s decision to challenge France and weaken the Entente had the opposite effect. The Marokkanische Gesellschaft, the Kolonialverein and the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) had been complaining for years that the government was not doing enough to defend Germany’s growing economic interests in Morocco, but their complaints had fallen on deaf ears. In March 1905, however, the kaiser, who was on a Mediterranean cruise, was, somewhat against his will, persuaded by his foreign ministry to land at Tangier and, in an obvious criticism of French ambitions in Morocco, declare that he was visiting an independent sovereign state and that Germany demanded equal treatment for its commerce there. The effect was to produce the most acute crisis between France and Germany for nearly 20 years, and there was much talk of the possibility of a war. The result was that the British and French were obliged to think a little more closely about the implications of the agreement of the previous year. It is still not clear exactly what was said in the talks in the spring of 1905 between Lord Lansdowne, the British foreign secretary, and Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London. It is clear, however, that Lansdowne’s views of Germany had altered dramatically since taking over the Foreign Office and that he was now convinced that Germany’s aggressive foreign policy posed a direct threat to Britain.³⁹

Nor is it clear exactly what promises were given to Delcassé by Sir Francis Bertie, the British ambassador in Paris. Delcassé seems to have given his colleagues in the French Cabinet the impression that the British had offered an offensive and defensive alliance, while the British were convinced that all they had promised was that the two governments would confer together to discuss what steps might be taken to meet any German threat. Bertie certainly encouraged the French to resist making concessions to the Germans: ‘I hope that we shall not do anything to smooth matters between the French and German Governments… . Let Morocco be an open sore between France and Germany as Egypt was between France and ourselves.’ ⁴⁰ If Delcassé hoped to bluff his colleagues into adopting a tougher line with the Germans over Morocco by hinting at the promise of a British alliance, he failed, for by now Rouvier, the prime minister, was alarmed by the seriousness of German intentions and worried that France might be embroiled with Germany because of the British wish to ensure that the Germans did not gain a naval base on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. This was a sign of the way in which the new Anglo-German naval rivalry was beginning to affect Britain’s position with regard to the Franco-German rivalry in Morocco, in which until then Britain had had little interest. Delcassé found himself isolated in the Cabinet and was forced to resign.

There was, however, little change in French policy after Delcassé’s resignation. The crisis was eventually resolved by an international conference held at the Spanish port of Algeciras between January and April 1906. It was, however, in the course of the Moroccan crisis that informal staff talks began between British and French officers (the military implications of which are discussed in Chapter 4). The important thing to note is that, within two years of signing the agreement of April 1904, plans were being made for common military action against Germany. Thus, however much the British government protested that the staff talks were unofficial and implied no commitment, nevertheless some moral obligations were being assumed, and the Entente was already something much closer than the original settlement of outstanding colonial differences had implied. When the Conservative government fell in December 1905 and was replaced by a Liberal one, Sir Edward Grey, the new foreign secretary, made it clear that the change of government would involve no change in foreign policy.⁴¹ He authorized Reginald Brett, Viscount Esher, and George Clarke of the Committee of Imperial Defence to hold systematic conversations with the French beginning in January 1906, and later that month the prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, formally sanctioned the continuation of the discussions between the two staffs. This was kept secret from the Cabinet as a whole for the next five years, although a small inner circle of ministers knew about them.⁴² Grey recognized that, although no binding commitments were being made, there was a moral aspect to the agreement with France.⁴³ He wrote in February 1906:

If there is a war between France and Germany, it will be very difficult for us to keep out of it. The Entente and still more the constant and emphatic demonstrations of affection (official, naval, political, commercial and in the Press) have created in France a belief that we shall support them in war… . If this expectation is disappointed, the French will never forgive us. There would also I think be a general feeling that we had behaved badly and left France in the lurch… . On the other hand the prospect of a European war and of our being involved in it is horrible.⁴⁴

At the same time, he allowed the unofficial talks between the War Office and the French military attaché to continue. A 1999 study of Britain and ‘isolationism’ argues that Grey’s diplomacy was fundamentally flawed from this point forward, that it was Germany whose position was deteriorating, but that this passed Grey by ‘as his assumptions remained fixed in the 1890s’.⁴⁵

The crisis over Morocco died down after the Algeciras conference, and although France’s influence in Morocco was confirmed at the conference and Germany suffered a diplomatic defeat, nevertheless the two countries were able to cooperate in various economic enterprises over the next few years; it was not until 1911 that their rivalry in Morocco led to a second acute crisis. Meanwhile, the consolidation of the Anglo-French Entente continued, though perhaps not as fast as some of the French leaders would have liked. Against the flow of events, only the French ambassador to Berlin, Jules Cambon (brother of Paul, one of the leading architects of the Entente), spoke out clearly. He argued that France’s future lay in empire outside Europe, and in this Germany was much more of a ‘natural ally’ than Britain was. Moreover, friendly relations with Germany could offer France a degree of security on the continent that would not otherwise be possible. If only France would ignore the handful of vociferous nationalists who demanded the return of Alsace and Lorraine, a détente with Germany could offer France much more than the Entente with Britain. His was a voice in the wilderness, however, increasingly drowned out by the young germanophobes who came to dominate the Quai d’Orsay in the decade before the war.⁴⁶

The triple entente

In 1907 the apparent division of Europe into two rival camps was carried a stage further. On 31 August 1907 the British and Russian governments signed an agreement that was intended to settle old differences between them on the borders between their two empires, particularly in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.⁴⁷ For more than 10 years there had been those in the British Foreign Office who believed that it would be possible to achieve an agreement based on mutual recognition of spheres of influence and that this would be preferable to risking a major confrontation as a result of the escalation of minor incidents.⁴⁸ There had been some discussions in 1903, but the outbreak of war in the Far East impeded their progress. However, the defeat by Japan made the Russian government anxious to improve relations with Britain, and at the same time Izvolsky, the new Russian foreign minister, was hoping that he might win British support for a revision in Russia’s favour of the international regulations closing the exit from the Black Sea in time of war. He aimed to shift the focus of Russia’s ambitions back to Europe from the Far East, and in this he had the advantage of good timing: in the reformed Russia of the years immediately following 1905, the foreign minister was able to act on his own initiative to a greater extent than previously; moreover, the tsar, following the defeat by Japan, the revolutionary upheavals and the concessions to demands for reform, had (temporarily at least) retreated into the private world of family and friends.⁴⁹ Moreover, Izvolsky supported the new constitutional arrangements for the making of policy and believed that Russia could regain its international status through the support of the moderate liberal elements in the Duma for a revitalized foreign policy; those elements, led by the Kadets, in turn believed that closer ties with Britain and France would strengthen the fledgling parliamentary system in Russia.⁵⁰ Izvolsky initiated discussions with Britain to resolve possible conflicts in Asia, and particularly in Persia.

Britain had been striving for an agreement to settle differences with Russia as far back as 1894, but it was the change in Russian policy following the war with Japan that finally led to the agreement of 1907. Keith Neilson argued that the growing potential of Germany to threaten Britain’s interests (particularly in destroying the balance of power in Europe), demonstrated in the first Moroccan crisis, further motivated the British in seeking an entente with the Russians but was not the primary cause of it.⁵¹ ‘An entente between Russia, France and ourselves’, Grey wrote on 20 February 1906, ‘would be absolutely secure. If it is necessary to check Germany it could then be done.’ ⁵² Grey also assumed that Germany might now pose a greater danger than Russia. This view has long been contested by Keith Wilson and more recently by Andreas Rose, who argue that Grey was more concerned about the security of the empire – particularly in central Asia – than about the European balance of power.⁵³ Consequently, forging closer ties with France and Russia was designed to reduce the threat they posed rather than a response to German Weltpolitik. There had to be a thorough reassessment of Britain’s position in the Middle East and India. The demands of the military commanders in India that the army there should be strengthened to meet a threat from Russia were finally rejected, and it was now realized that Germany was likely to be Britain’s main rival. However, British liberals were suspicious of any move that looked like aligning Britain with the tsarist autocracy. As the minister in Persia commented

It was easy for two civilized and liberal nations like France and England to come to terms and to act together [but] … common action between an English liberal and a Russian bureaucrat is a pretty difficult thing to manage. A wild ass and a commissary mule make a rum pair to drive.⁵⁴

The Russians, although they knew that British consent would be essential if the agreements concerning Constantinople and the Straits were to be revised, were anxious to avoid antagonizing Germany as they had still not recovered from the military, economic and political strains resulting from the defeat by Japan. The agreement with Britain remained for them primarily one that would strengthen their hold on their Asiatic empire without fear of British interference – even though in fact disagreements about Persia and the Far East never completely disappeared. The agreement, however, also gave the Russians hopes of British support for their aspirations in the Balkans. Within little more than a year after the signature of the Anglo-Russian Convention it became clear that the satisfaction of Russia’s Balkan aspirations was likely to lead to a confrontation with Germany.

During the 15 years after Bismarck’s fall, the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary had been, so to speak, a passive factor in international relations, something that was taken for granted but that did not involve any positive action. The problems of south-east Europe and the future of the Ottoman Empire were temporarily less important than the imperial rivalries of the powers outside Europe, rivalries in which Austria-Hungary was not involved. As a result, with the Russian government concentrating on its expansion in the Far East, the crises in Turkey caused by the massacre of the Armenians in 1894–6, the revolt in Crete in 1897 and the war between Turkey and Greece that resulted from it did not cause a conflict between the Great Powers and sometimes led to cooperation between them. But the situation began to change after 1905. The Moroccan crisis and the conference of Algeciras had shown the Germans that their alliance with Austria was all that stood between them and complete diplomatic isolation, since Austria alone gave them any support over the Moroccan question: the kaiser, with characteristic tactlessness, had thanked Emperor Franz Josef by referring to his ‘brillanten Sekundantendienst’ (brilliant services as a second). The maintenance of Austria-Hungary as a Great Power became a major foreign policy goal for Germany, both on diplomatic grounds, since Austria was seen as Germany’s only reliable ally, and because any internal crisis in Austria-Hungary might have repercussions in Germany. In 1906, as a result of a constitutional crisis over the relations of Hungary with the rest of the Monarchy, there was much talk of an impending dissolution of the empire so that the German chancellor wrote to German representatives abroad, pointing out that it would in such an event be dangerous if the Austrians were to become part of Germany:

We shall thereby receive an increase of about fifteen million Catholics so that the Protestants would become a minority … the proportion of strength between the Protestants and the Catholics would become similar to that which at the time led to the Thirty Years War, i.e. a virtual dissolution of the German empire… [the question] compels attention whether the German Reich, today so well balanced and therefore standing so strong and powerful ought to let itself be brought into such a horrible position. In the interests of the preservation of a powerful Germany this question must unconditionally be answered in the negative.⁵⁵

The conclusion was that the Austro-Hungarian empire must somehow be preserved at all costs.

In 1908 the implications of the German-Austrian alliance became clearer. The internal crisis in the Ottoman Empire caused by the Young Turk revolution once more raised the question of the future of the Turkish possessions in Europe. Count Alois von Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister, decided that this was an opportunity for the Monarchy to annex the two provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Austria had occupied since 1878 but which were still formally under Turkish suzerainty. He regarded it as a ‘holy mission’ to preserve the Habsburg monarchy and believed that an active foreign policy could restore its prestige.⁵⁶ And he was convinced that a vigorous foreign policy was one way out of the problems caused by the aspirations of the subject nationalities within the Monarchy: the incorporation of the two provinces would be a blow to Serbian ambitions to make Serbia ‘the Piedmont of the southern Slavs’ – to serve, that is, as a focus for the unrest among the Serbs and Croats inside Austria-Hungary. In fact, before becoming foreign minister he contemplated the creation of ‘a clear-cut Austro-Hungarian sphere of influence in the Balkan peninsula, with Serbia becoming an Austro-Hungarian protectorate’.⁵⁷ Aehrenthal also seems to have believed that a bold initiative would demonstrate that Austria was not wholly dependent on its German ally – and indeed, the kaiser was understandably irritated at learning of the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by reading about it in a newspaper. Paradoxically, the result of the annexation crisis was in fact to demonstrate both Austria’s dependence on Germany and the extent to which initiative within the alliance had passed to Austria.

The Russian foreign minister, Izvolsky, who was hoping to restore Russia’s international position by gains in the Balkans and at the Straits, had secretly agreed with Aehrenthal to accept the Austrian move on the understanding that Austria would support Russia’s demands for a revision of the treaties governing the closure of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Aehrenthal had, however, announced the annexation before Izvolsky had had time to muster diplomatic support in the other capitals of Europe. Izvolsky was extremely indignant and felt, rightly or wrongly, personally betrayed by Aehrenthal: ‘The dirty Jew has deceived me. He lied to me, he bamboozled me, that frightful Jew.’

The Serbs were equally indignant: all political parties in Serbia were united in their ambition of ‘liberating’ all Serbs and bringing them within a unified Serbian state, and as long as their brethren were under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Turks it seemed reasonable to anticipate that unification could be achieved sometime soon; the passing of Bosnia and Herzegovina to full Habsburg control made this goal much more remote.⁵⁸ And finally, the Italians were also outraged, leading them to initiate discussions with the Russians aimed at preventing future Austrian gains in the Balkans – which should have been a warning of how fragile the alliance would be during the crisis of July 1914.⁵⁹

Aehrenthal was triumphant; a few months after the annexation he declared that ‘success is only certain if the strength is there to get one’s way… . We are no quantité négligeable. We have reconquered again the place that belongs to us among the Powers.’ ⁶⁰ Relations between Austria-Hungary and Russia became very strained and there was talk of war. The result was an unequivocal declaration by the German chief of staff, Moltke, to his Austro-Hungarian counterpart, Conrad, that ‘The moment Russia mobilizes, Germany will also mobilize’.⁶¹ This was followed by a German demand that Russia should accept the annexation, and the kaiser was able to declare that he had stood by his ally the Austrian emperor ‘in shining armour’.⁶² Much of this was bluff. Neither the Austrians nor the Russians were militarily or economically in a position to go to war, but the effect was to show both the nature and the limitations of the alliance system because, while the extent of Germany’s commitment to Austria was made clear, the Russians had found only lukewarm support in Paris and London for their ambitions at Constantinople. Moltke remained steadfast in his commitment to the alliance with Austria-Hungary, although he knew from the reports of the German military attaché in Vienna that the effectiveness of the Austrian army was declining each year up to 1914.⁶³

The alliance system and crisis diplomacy

In the years between the Bosnian crisis and the outbreak of the First World War, four things were forcing a reassessment and a tightening up of the alliance system in Europe: the upheavals in Turkey that encouraged Russian hopes of compensating for their humiliation in the Far East by gains in the Balkans and strengthened the Austrians’ conviction that they must act vigorously against Serbia to prevent the danger of the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy; the growing realization by many people in British government circles that German naval building was a threat to Britain’s imperial interests; the German belief that they must take some foreign political action both for domestic reasons and in order to ensure that the world balance of power should be tilted in their favour; the hopes of the French (and especially of Raymond Poincaré, prime minister in 1912 and then president from 1913) that they could use the alliance with Russia to obtain the return of Alsace and Lorraine and at the same time be in a position to establish their control of Morocco without German interference.

In April 1911, increasing internal unrest in Morocco gave the French the opportunity they wanted to send troops into Fez and to prepare for the establishment of a protectorate over the country. The Germans saw in this action a chance to win some colonial concessions from France, if not in Morocco itself, then in the French Congo; and at the same time the German government recognized that a successful confrontation with France would strengthen their hands in the parliamentary elections of 1912. They sent a gunboat to the Moroccan port of Agadir and demanded compensation from the French for what was claimed to be a breach of the Algeciras agreement of 1906. In fact, the German plan misfired. It demonstrated that the alliance with Austria-Hungary would not be worth much unless Austria’s own interests were directly threatened, for the Austrian government refused to give even diplomatic support. On the other hand, the British government, in spite of the reluctance of some members of the Cabinet, proclaimed its solidarity with France in a speech by the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, a man till then thought to be one of the ministers most opposed to any involvement in continental alignments. He issued a warning, assumed by everyone at the time to be directed at Germany, that:

If a situation were to be forced upon us, in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated, where her interests were vitally affected, as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.⁶⁴

Privately, Lloyd George confided his fears of Germany’s ambitions in Europe. He told the editor of the Manchester Guardian that the Germans ‘could be in Paris in a month’ – and then

Germany would ask not 200 millions but 1,000 millions as an indemnity and would see to it that France as a Great Power ceased to exist. This was a real danger that Prussia (and it was Prussia really, not Germany, which was in question) should seek a European predominance not far removed from the Napoleonic.⁶⁵

The fears of those who anticipated that Germany’s naval building programme was designed to threaten the British Empire overseas began to coalesce with those – like Lloyd George above – who foresaw that a war in Europe might lead to the creation of a German hegemony on the continent. Within a few months of Lloyd George’s speech, in April 1912, an informal naval agreement was concluded between France and Britain, by which the British navy would be responsible for the security of the English Channel and the French fleet would be concentrated in the Mediterranean. The Entente had become still more like an alliance.

The German leaders were probably not surprised by the lack of support from Austria-Hungary during the Agadir crisis. A few months before the crisis, Bethmann had admitted to the kaiser

If it comes to a war, we must hope that Austria is attacked so that she needs our help and not that we are attacked so that it would depend on Austria’s decision whether she will remain faithful to the alliance.⁶⁶

But the extent of Britain’s support for France came as a shock, and German nationalist opinion held the British responsible for the failure of Germany’s African gamble. The perception that Germany had been humiliated by the Anglo-French coalition and that it stood alone in such a crisis did not produce an anti-imperialist or antimilitarist backlash; on the contrary, a group of retired military officers formed the German Army League, which, within two years, had 78,000 individual members, 190,000 corporate members and over 400 local units.⁶⁷ On the other hand, some, such as the great historian, influential strategic commentator and sometime politician, Hans Delbrück, strongly criticized the chauvinists who stirred up popular passions: the next war, he believed, would be devastating – a deluge unparalleled in all history, with the unleashing of the most terrible weapons of death ever invented. Germany, he warned, was incapable of scoring a quick victory over France as it had done in 1871: massive French fortifications, armaments that favoured the side standing on the defensive and the difficult logistics of manoeuvring a million-man army would mean that both sides would fight until they were exhaused, international borders would remain unchanged and the continent would be in ruins.⁶⁸ Thus, German opinion was divided between those who began to view war as likely and looked forward to it, and those who sought some way out.

British opinion was no less divided between those who sought to improve relations with Germany by negotiating agreements on questions outside Europe, and those who believed that British interests could only be maintained by cooperating more closely with France and Russia. The Agadir crisis showed how deep the divisions between Germany and Britain now were. Senior officials in the Foreign Office in particular believed that it was essential for Britain to maintain its close relations with France as otherwise there might be a danger that, if the French felt isolated, they would do a direct deal with Germany at the expense of the British Empire.

Britain’s decision to bolster France’s resolve to resist German pressure was not without its unintended and unforeseen consequences. In spite of Italy’s continuing commitment to the Triple Alliance, it had been widely assumed (and at times incorporated within the terms of the alliance itself) that Italy could not, or would not, contemplate the possibility of a war with Britain: Italy’s coastline was simply too vulnerable to attack from the vastly superior British Mediterranean fleet. But with the redeployment of British naval strength to the Channel and the North Sea, Britain ceased to be the supreme naval power in the Mediterranean and, as a consequence, Italy for the first time began to contemplate the possibility of an Anglo-Italian naval conflict.⁶⁹ The Italians initiated talks with Austria-Hungary to plan for combined naval action against what was now the strongest fleet in the Mediterranean, the French. Although they recognized that the French fleet alone was superior to even the combined forces of theirs and Austria-Hungary’s, they believed that they could take the offensive against it if the British Mediterranean fleet grew no stronger and if the Russian Black Sea fleet remained behind the Dardanelles. They therefore planned to launch a campaign against French colonies in North Africa and against the British trade flowing through the Suez Canal. The combined fleet was to assemble in the Ionian Sea in order to threaten Malta and cut off the western Mediterranean from the eastern.⁷⁰ France’s diplomatic victory in the Agadir crisis also encouraged Italy to seek compensation while they had the opportunity to do so. On 29 September 1911 Italy declared war on Turkey and sent troops to occupy Tripoli. This blow to the stability of the Ottoman Empire was followed within weeks by the signature of an agreement between Serbia and Bulgaria, directed against Turkey and aiming at the conquest of Macedonia and its partition between the two countries. In May 1912 Greece was brought into this alliance, which became known as the Balkan League. The negotiations between Serbia and Bulgaria had been actively encouraged by the Russians, and especially by their ministers in Belgrade and Sofia who worked hard to persuade the Serbs and Bulgars to forget their old feuds and to join forces against Turkey. The events of 1911 and 1912 raised problems for the Great Powers concerning their relations with the small states of the Balkans, which were showing their capacity to take the initiative and which could not be immediately or easily fitted into the alliance system. At the same time, the confidence of Germany and Austria-Hungary in Italy’s commitment to the Triple Alliance was badly shaken.

The Triple Alliance had been renewed three times since it was first signed in 1882, and was due for a further renewal in 1912. Italy’s involvement in the Libyan War therefore made the exact timing of the renewal of some importance. Some members of the Italian government argued that after a successful war Italy would carry more weight in the renegotiation of the alliance. Others were worried that Austria might claim compensation in the Balkans for Italy’s gains in North Africa, since the treaty specifically allowed for this if ‘the maintenance of the status quo in the regions of the Balkans or of the Ottoman coasts and islands in the Adriatic and in the Aegean sea should become impossible’,⁷¹ and presumably it might be argued that Libya and Tripolitania counted as part of the Ottoman coasts. The Italians also believed that there might be an advantage in the early renewal of the alliance so as to make sure that this was completed before the death of Emperor Franz Josef, now aged 81, since his heir, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was believed, rightly, to be hostile to Italy. At the same time, the German and Austrian governments were annoyed by Italy’s unilateral action against Turkey and by the fact that they were given no warning of Italy’s formal annexation of Libya in November 1911 or its occupation of the Dodecanese Islands. Ironically, Sir Edward Grey was more supportive: ‘It is most important’, he told the British ambassador in Rome, ‘that neither we nor France should side against Italy now’, and he was prepared to tell the Turks that they had brought the attack upon themselves.⁷² Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1912 and the outbreak of the war between the Balkan League and Turkey, all three signatories to the Triple Alliance saw some advantage in the renewal of the alliance and this was formally signed on 5 December 1912.⁷³

Italy’s alliance with Germany and Austria can be seen as an extreme case of a treaty entered into with numerous reservations and considerable cynicism – at least on the part of Italy. The Italians had welcomed the original alliance in 1882 because it appeared to give the recently united kingdom the status and prestige of a Great Power; it had seemed to offer them the prospect of support in an attempt to win some colonial compensation for France’s acquisition of Tunisia the year before; to the king of Italy it appeared to offer the chance, through association with the Austrian emperor – the senior Catholic sovereign in Europe, of improved relations with the pope and therefore of a greater likelihood of going to heaven when he died. For Bismarck, Italy’s alignment with Germany and Austria was one more step in his policy of keeping France diplomatically isolated, and for Austria the alliance seemed to provide one way of controlling Italian nationalist hostility to Austria arising from the number of Italians who remained under Austrian rule in South Tyrol and Trieste.

For the Italians, then, the Triple Alliance had always been a means of using other powers to further Italian interests; and, as with the other European alliances, both those interests and the international situation that the alliance had originally been intended to meet had changed. By 1911, Italy was not only involved in establishing an empire in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean but also actively interested in what was happening in the Balkans and anxious to establish influence there. Popular feeling against Austria had not diminished, although the strident new nationalism of the past decade was aiming more widely than just at the winning of Italia irredenta from Austria. It had always been understood that the Triple Alliance would in no case be regarded as directed against Britain – and indeed this had been declared formally at the time of the signature of the original alliance. Moreover, although the text of the treaty as renewed in 1891 had given it a specifically anti-French emphasis, by the beginning of the century the economic and colonial rivalry between Italy and France had so far abated that in 1902 the Italian foreign minister had declared that Italy would remain neutral if France were attacked; and in the following year a commercial treaty between the two countries had been signed. Thus, although the renewal of the Triple Alliance in 1912 might seem to be a success for German and Austrian diplomacy, there was still much uncertainty about the extent of Italy’s actual commitment to it. Indeed, Conrad, the Austrian chief of staff, is said to have thought the alliance ‘a pointless farce’, and ‘a burden and a fetter which he would fain cast off at the first opportunity’.⁷⁴

The Balkan challenge to the alliance system

During the upheavals in the Balkans in 1912–13, Italian and Austrian interests were often opposed, particularly in their rival attempts to establish a predominant influence in the newly created state of Albania.⁷⁵ Yet the very existence of the alliance forced an uneasy compromise, with all three governments continuing to behave as if the alliance were an important element in their strategic planning. For any side to admit that the alliance had lost its meaning would have been an admission of diplomatic failure and the abandonment of a diplomatic instrument that might still have its uses. Italy’s alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary was indeed an example of an alliance that, for many Italians, was never intended to be more than a diplomatic device to help Italy succeed in its ambition to become a great European – or at least Mediterranean – power in the twentieth century. For Germany and Austria even an unreliable and unpredictable ally seemed preferable to no ally at all. In spite of some measure of military cooperation, it was far from certain that the alliance would translate into meaningful military cooperation in time of war. As Richard Bosworth put it, ‘The Triple Alliance remained a diplomatic arrangement likely to work in peace and not in war’.⁷⁶

Nevertheless, although Germany’s bold initiative at Agadir had pushed the British and the French closer together, the nearer entente came to an alliance, the closer became the cooperation between the two lesser powers of the Triple Alliance, particularly in the eastern Mediterranean. Whereas much attention has focused on Italian ambitions in North Africa and on Conrad’s aggressive military schemes, less attention has been paid to Austria’s increasingly ambitious designs for the Adriatic. The idea that naval power was an essential component of power in the twentieth century had gained ground everywhere since the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power in History. An Austrian Naval League had been formed in 1905 and in the inaugural issue of its monthly publication, Die Flagge, the League laid down its manifesto in a declaration entitled ‘What We Want’, which explained that Austria-Hungary ought to follow the path taken by Germany. Although Germany was powerful on land, which provided the foundation of its strength, the Germans had recognized that this was no longer sufficient: ‘history teaches us that no nation can maintain its great power status in the long run without naval prestige, without sea power’. At the time of the Bosnian annexation crisis and Italy’s decision to invade Libya, Austria-Hungary decided to embark on an ambitious naval building programme, which included the construction of four dreadnoughts and six destroyers; the first Austrian dreadnought, the Prinz Eugen, was laid down in January 1912, completed in the spring of 1914 and commissioned that July. The largest naval budget in Austro-Hungarian history was approved almost without dissent in 1914, and even Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse (previously a liberal opponent of the fleet) agreed that naval expansion was vital, referring to the Adriatic as ‘one of the main arteries through which the monarchy draws its blood’.⁷⁷

The Italians seemed willing and eager to cooperate with Austria-Hungary in the Adriatic. In April 1913, the new chief of the Italian navy’s general staff, Thaon di Revel, despatched the former head of Italian naval intelligence to Berlin and Vienna with the aim of securing Austria-Hungary’s agreement to Italy’s war plans, which now called for its fleet to deploy in the western Mediterranean against the French. In exchange for Austrian naval assistance Italy would commit at least one army corps to fight on the front in southern France, thereby enabling the German army to divert one or more army corps from the western front to the east, thus helping Austria-Hungary against Russia. Thaon di Revel at the same time ordered the first Italian naval manoeuvres in a year to be held in the Tyrrhenian Sea in a manner that was obviously aimed against France (the goal was to intercept a simulated French convoy moving troops from North Africa to Toulon). The notion that the Italians had no intention of fulfilling their commitments to the Triple Alliance is one derived largely from hindsight: between 1911 and 1914 there was good reason to believe that the alliance would offer the Italians sufficient rewards to keep them on side.⁷⁸ How far the Italians would go in cooperating with the Austrians was one of the two great uncertainties of European diplomacy in the years immediately prior to the war; the other was whether British cooperation with the French and the Russians would translate into military and naval support if war broke out.

The almost unremitting crises in the Balkans between 1911 and 1914 provided observers with the opportunity to judge how far the Italians and the British would go in assisting their partners. Events there also demonstrated both the nature and limitations of the alliance system and the nature and limitations of the ‘old diplomacy’. The two Balkan Wars – that between the Balkan League and Turkey was followed by one in which Bulgaria fought Serbia, Greece and Romania in the hope of winning territories conquered from Turkey in the first war – were localized. They did not escalate into a European war, partly because the Great Powers were not ready for a war and partly because, given the desire to find a solution, it was possible to create the diplomatic machinery to achieve one. Sir Edward Grey was able to take the initiative in organizing a conference of ambassadors in London that dealt with such questions as the frontiers of the new state of Albania and the unsuccessful attempts by Serbia to win a port on the Adriatic. Grey’s successful diplomacy – and the belief that he could repeat that success – was an important factor in his policy in July 1914.⁷⁹ But his success had only been possible because (to the annoyance of the Austrians) the Germans decided that they would not put their whole weight behind the Austrian efforts to limit Serbia’s gains. The German government was indeed convinced of the ultimate likelihood or even the inevitability of war: there was much talk in court and army circles about the forthcoming struggle between Teuton and Slav, and in December 1912 the kaiser had given instructions for a propaganda campaign to prepare public opinion for war. But the Balkan crisis did not seem the right moment to risk a general war. This was partly because of the complexity of the local issues and the difficulty that any government would have in explaining to its subjects how they would justify a war, and partly too from a feeling that the small states were showing a dangerous amount of initiative. ‘It is the first occasion in the history of the Eastern Question’, a French diplomat wrote, ‘that the small states had won a position so independent of the Great Powers that they feel they are in a position to act completely without them and indeed to carry them along with them’.⁸⁰ Then, of the Great Powers most involved, neither Russia nor Germany was militarily quite ready for war. The Russians needed three or four more years to complete their remarkable military recovery from the disasters of the war with Japan; Admiral Tirpitz, during the discussions of December 1912, insisted that Germany could not fight a war at sea until the widening of the Kiel Canal was completed and a submarine base was constructed on the island of Heligoland. When the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal was finally capable of allowing the passage of dreadnoughts in July 1914, an important reservation against a ‘preventive’ war disappeared.⁸¹

German policy was also strongly influenced by the fact that, in the view of the chancellor and the foreign ministry, there was still a chance of securing British neutrality in a war, since Britain’s ententes with France and Russia had still not become a firm alliance.⁸² Bethmann believed that, if war broke out in such a way that it could be claimed that Russia had made the first move, then Britain would not intervene. In February 1912 there had been an attempt, with the visit to Berlin of Lord Haldane, the lord chancellor, to reach an agreement on the limitation of naval armaments; although this had come to nothing, negotiations on other questions – cooperation in the construction of a railway across Turkey to Baghdad, the disposal of the Portuguese colonies in Africa, should Portugal’s financial collapse lead to these coming on the market – proceeded in an amiable atmosphere right down to the outbreak of war. Some people in the British Foreign Office were beginning to wonder whether a rearmed Russia might not after all be an even greater threat to the balance of power than Germany so that it was not unreasonable for Bethmann to believe that an Anglo-German rapprochement might be possible and that it was worth avoiding a major crisis until this possibility had had time to develop. Both the French government and those people in Britain who remained convinced of the German danger were apprehensive about a policy of rapprochement with Germany and were anxious for still closer ties between Britain and France and for the relationship to be made even more explicit. Sir Eyre Crowe had written at the beginning of 1911:

The fundamental fact of course is 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.⁸³

Although since Eyre Crowe had written this the Agadir crisis and the Anglo-French naval talks of 1912 had made common action in war more likely, the French were quick to see any improvement of relations between Britain and Germany as a sign of how precarious the Anglo-French Entente was. They would have been more alarmed had they known of the plans for a secret mission to Berlin for Grey’s private secretary in the summer of 1914, which was symptomatic of the British desire to place relations with Germany on a friendlier footing.⁸⁴

The Austrians too, in the particular situation in south-east Europe in 1912–13, felt that even their formal alliance with Germany did not seem to be giving them the support they expected. Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, the state secretary in the German foreign ministry, remarked in October 1912 that the time had come to reassert German predominance within the alliance and to prevent ‘the leadership in policy passing from Berlin to Vienna as Aehrenthal had unfortunately been able to achieve as against Bülow’ (the German chancellor at the time of the Bosnian crisis in 1908).⁸⁵ For the Austrians, however, more than ever determined to reduce the influence of Serbia, this attitude was very unsatisfactory and there seemed an ironical contrast between the regular references to the loyalty – the Nibelungentreue (the loyalty of the Nibelungs, the supernatural race from which the Germanic peoples were supposed to have descended), whatever that meant – between the two countries and the actual support offered in a specific situation. Although the Germans had given the Austrians some diplomatic support at certain points in the crisis, the Balkan quarrels had not escalated into a European war because the Germans were not prepared to give their ally a free hand against Serbia. At the same time the Russians, whose Balkan diplomacy had failed to stop their Slav protégés, Serbia and Bulgaria, from fighting each other in the Second Balkan War, were at this time more concerned with the future fate of Constantinople than with supporting Serbia. In these circumstances, Grey’s diplomacy was successful because none of the Great Powers wanted a war at that time and on those issues. For the last time the old nineteenth-century Concert of Europe worked.

The Balkan crisis demonstrated that even apparently firm, formal alliances did not guarantee support and cooperation in all circumstances. It might be that in a final emergency the German-Austrian alliance guaranteed German support for Austria; in the meantime, in F.R. Bridge’s words, ‘the eternal problem of the Dual Alliance remained: how effectively could an alliance designed to cope with the contingency of war serve the monarchy’s interests in the day-to-day diplomacy of peace’.⁸⁶ In the autumn of 1913 it also became apparent that the Franco-Russian alliance too was no automatic guarantee of general support for Russia by France. In October 1913 the Germans sent a military mission under General Liman von Sanders to advise the Turkish government on the modernization of their army after its defeat by the Balkan League, and Sanders was appointed to command the Turkish army corps in Constantinople.⁸⁷ The Russians at once protested, asserting that the mission was an openly unfriendly act, and looked to France and Britain for diplomatic support against Germany. Sazonov saw the situation as a ‘test of the value’ of the Triple Entente and urged Grey to use the British fleet if necessary. Grey, however, refused to see the affair in this light and minimized its importance.⁸⁸

The French were in a more embarrassing position. Throughout the Balkan crisis, Poincaré had reaffirmed French loyalty to the Russian alliance and was hoping, as president, to exercise a more direct control over foreign policy than his predecessors had done; he believed that disarray in decision-making had produced an incoherent diplomatic programme during the Agadir crisis of 1911 and he undertook a series of measures designed to reduce the power of bureaucrats at the Quai d’Orsay.⁸⁹ He was determined to make the Russian alliance a central element in his policy and he worried that the support his predecessors had shown for the alliance might be insufficient to keep it intact. The French had not provided meaningful assistance to Russia during the fateful annexation crisis of 1908; reports since then indicated that Russia was seeking a rapprochement with Italy, and there was talk of a revived Dreikaiserbund (Three Emperors’ League) between Russia, Austria-Hungary and Germany.⁹⁰ Poincaré was determined to demonstrate his commitment to Russia and, although not working directly for war, accepted the idea that, if war between Russia and Germany were to come, then France would have a chance of recovering the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. At the same time, he showed more interest in the Balkans than some other French leaders, and wanted to develop French economic influence there. He is reported – though he later denied it – to have declared to Izvolsky (now the Russian ambassador in Paris) just before the outbreak of the First Balkan War: ‘If conflict with Austria brought intervention by Germany, France would fulfil her obligations.’⁹¹ France, the implication was, might intervene on Russia’s side without itself being directly attacked by Germany. By the time of the row over the Liman von Sanders mission, however, the French government was more cautious; although Poincaré was eager to reaffirm loyalty to the alliance, he spoke forcefully against Russia’s request to join in a protest against the appointment. Instead, he suggested that the affair might be used to tighten the Triple Entente by cooperating with Britain in finding a compromise (and eventually it was agreed that von Sanders could retain the rank he had been given as inspector general of the Turkish army) but he was forced to give up command of the army corps in Constantinople. By this time both the French and the British were worried that they did not really know what Russian intentions were or how far the Russians were prepared to go in support of their ambitions at Constantinople, and were therefore reluctant to encourage them. The crisis was successfully defused when the British restrained the Russians and the Germans assisted them in developing the formula that settled the matter.⁹² Once again, the Great Powers agreed that the issue was not worth the risk of war and the prevailing alliances did not lead to confrontation.

Alliances in disarray

By the beginning of 1914, then, the alliance system in Europe appeared to be in some disarray. Both Austria-Hungary and Russia felt that they had, in the recent crises in the Balkans and at Constantinople respectively, not received the diplomatic support from their allies they had the right to expect. Italy’s position still remained ambiguous. The subsidiary alliance between Germany, Austria-Hungary and Romania first signed in 1883 and renewed as recently as 1913 seemed hardly likely to survive the repeated complaints about the oppression of the Romanian inhabitants of the Hungarian province of Transylvania and, like Italy, Romania did indeed eventually enter the war on the side opposed to its formal allies.⁹³ As far as Britain was concerned, the exact nature and implications of the Entente with France remained obscure right down to the beginning of August 1914.⁹⁴ Diplomats recognized that their alliances and alignments were fluid, that they might be on the verge of a realignment. The obstacles facing the British and the Russians in renewing the Anglo-Russian convention appeared almost insurmountable that summer and the stage seemed to be set for ‘a possible Anglo-German rapprochement’.⁹⁵ Most contemporary observers in 1913–14 believed that Europe was moving towards détente rather than war.⁹⁶

The existence of the alliance system and of the less formal ententes nevertheless provided the framework within which the diplomacy of the pre-war years was conducted. It roused expectations about the behaviour of other governments that conditioned the foreign policies and the military plans of the major countries of Europe. Even when the alliances did not provide the immediate diplomatic support for which the governments were hoping, this sometimes made the participants all the more anxious to ensure that the alliance would function more effectively next time. Russian anxieties about France’s attitude during the von Sanders crisis and about Britain’s lukewarm support led during the next months to Russian attempts to consolidate the alliance with France and tighten up the agreements with Britain, by, for example, negotiations for naval cooperation between the two admiralties. The realization by the Germans that Austria-Hungary was their only reliable ally led them to the conclusion that the Austrians must be supported in any policies that they thought essential for the survival of the Habsburg state, and was an important motive for the German decisions of July 1914; however, these decisions have to be seen in terms of the Austrian belief that Germany had not provided sufficient support in the previous year.

Moreover, each Great Power had attempted to build up a clientele of smaller states. As the Balkan countries showed their capacity for initiative, so too the Great Powers were anxious to recruit them into their respective alliance systems; but the price was a promise of support for the local ambitions of the small states. A Great Power could have its policies to some extent determined by the need to retain the friendship of a small power and to keep it within its diplomatic system. The Russian government knew in July 1914 that they had failed to support Serbia in the previous year as warmly as the Serbs had expected and hoped; failure to support Serbia again would mean, the Russians thought, the end of Russian prestige in the Balkans and the beginning of a possible new diplomatic alignment there. Once the governments of Europe came to believe that they were aligned in two rival camps, then the winning of an additional small state to their side seemed to be of great importance, while the wooing of partners in an alliance whose allegiance seemed doubtful or wavering, such as Italy, came to be a major objective of diplomacy.

The existence of the alliance system above all conditioned expectations about the form a war would take if it broke out, and about who were likely to be friends and who enemies. These expectations laid down the broad lines of strategic planning so that the general staffs were taking decisions that often committed them to irreversible military actions if war threatened. Consequently, in a crisis the freedom of action of the civilian ministers was often more circumscribed than they themselves realized. What still seemed a stately and esoteric ritual that only professional diplomats were qualified to perform became something rather different when translated into the logistical calculations of the military planners. However much the foreign ministers and diplomats believed that they were making foreign policy and that foreign policy held prime place in all acts of state, there were many other forces in twentieth-century European society that were limiting their choices, determining their actions and creating the climate of opinion in which they operated.

References

· 1  The literature on Bismarck is voluminous, but for an excellent overview, see Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (Oxford University Press 2011).

· 2  G.M. Trevelyan, Grey of Fallodon (London 1939), pp. 114–15.

· 3  A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe 1848–1914 (paperback edn, Oxford 1971), p. 81, fn. 1.

· 4  E. Wertheimer, Graf Julius Andrassy, Vol. III (Stuttgart 1913), p. 284, quoted in W.L. Langer, European Alliances and Alignments 1871–1890 (New York 1939), p. 284.

· 5  Quoted in Samuel R. Williamson Jr., The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904–1914 (Cambridge, MA 1969), p. 21. On the topic of neutrality in general see the overview by Maartje Abbenhuis, ‘A Most Useful Tool for Diplomacy and Statecraft: Neutrality and Europe in the “Long” Nineteenth Century, 1815–1914’, International History Review 35 (2013), pp. 1–22 or her more comprehensive An Age of Neutrals: Great Power Politics, 1815–1914 (Cambridge 2014).

· 6  Salisbury to Canon MacColl, 1901; G.W.E. Russell, Malcolm MacColl (London 1914), p. 283, quoted in W.L. Langer, The Diplomacy of Imperialism (New York 1951), p. 85.

· 7  David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904–1914 (Oxford 1996), p. 70.

· 8  William A. Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War, 1914–1915 (New York 1987), pp. 18, 64.

· 9  Christopher Andrew, ‘Déchiffrement et diplomatie: le Cabinet Noir du Quai d’Orsay sous la Troisième République’, Relations Internationales 5 (1976), pp. 370–64.

· 10  Also useful on the subject of intelligence generally are the essays in Ernest R. May (ed.), Knowing One’s Enemies: Intelligence Assessment before the Two World Wars (Princeton, NJ 1984). And see also Matthew S. Seligmann, Spies in Uniform: British Military and Naval Intelligence on the Eve of the First World War (Oxford 2006); Richard Dunley, ‘ “Not Intended to Act as Spies”: The Consular Intelligence Service in Denmark and Germany 1906–14’, International History Review 37 (2015), pp. 481–502; and Bruce W. Menning, ‘Russian Military Intelligence, July 1914: What St. Petersburg Perceived and Why It Mattered’, The Historian 77 (2015), pp. 213–68.

· 11  Cd. 7748. Fifth Report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service 1914. See Zara S. Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (2nd edn, London and New York 2003), pp. 189 ff.

· 12  Dominic Lieven, Russia’s Rulers under the Old Regime (New Haven, CT 1989), p. 291.

· 13  John C.G. Röhl, The Kaiser and his Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany (Cambridge 1994), p. 136.

· 14  M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898–1914 (Oxford 1993), p. 306.

· 15  Michael Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution: Britain, Russia and the Old Diplomacy, 1894–1917 (London 2000), p. 135.

· 16  See Peter Jackson, ‘Tradition and Adaptation: The Social Universe of the French Foreign Ministry in the Era of the First World War’, French History 24 (2010), pp. 164–96.

· 17  G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origin of the War 1898–1914, Vol. III (London 1928), Appendix A, pp. 402–3. (Hereinafter referred to as BD.) On Crowe generally and on his memorandum in particular, see Sibyl Crowe and Edward Corp, Our Ablest Public Servant: Sir Eyre Crowe 1864–1925 (Braunton 1993), pp. 110–36.

· 18  Bismarck to Saburoff 1878, Nineteenth Century, Dec. 1917, p. 1119. See also G. Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy 1904–1914 (2nd edn, London 1937), p. 76.

· 19  For Grey and the balance of power see Thomas G. Otte, ‘ “Almost a Law of Nature”: Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Office and the Balance of Power, 1905–1912’, in E. Goldstein and B.J.C. McKercher (eds), Power and Stability: British Foreign Policy, 1865–1965 (London 2003), pp. 77–118.

· 20  ‘The Bulwark of Peace’, The Times, 8 Apr. 1914. See also The History of ‘The Times’, Vol. 4: The 150th Anniversary and Beyond (London 1952), Part 1, p. 168.

· 21  See John A. White, Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895–1907 (Cambridge 1995).

· 22  Quoted in Geoffrey Wawro, The Austro-Prussian War: Austria’s War with Prussia and Italy in 1866 (Cambridge 1996), p. 281.

· 23  Quoted in Bascom Barry Hayes, Bismarck and Mitteleuropa (Rutherford, NJ 1994), p. 431.

· 24  Quoted in Steven Beller, Francis Joseph (London 1996), p. 189.

· 25  Quoted in Karl Kautsky, Sozialisten und Krieg (Prague 1937), p. 200.

· 26  Susan P. McCaffray, The Politics of Industrialization in Tsarist Russia: The Association of Southern Coal and Steel Producers, 1874–1914 (De Kalb, IL 1996), p. 65.

· 27  Perti Luntinen, French Information on the Russian War Plans 1880–1914 (Helsinki 1984), which includes a useful appendix of over 30 maps illustrating the disposition of troops, planned movements, the use of railways, etc.

· 28  This eccentric interpretation is argued by George Kennan in The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York 1984); quotations from pp. 254–5.

· 29  Judith F. Stone, Sons of the Revolution: Radical Democrats in France, 1862–1914 (Baton Rouge, LA 1996), p. 160.

· 30  Lawrence Sondhaus, Preparing for Weltpolitik: German Sea Power before the Tirpitz Era (Annapolis, MD 1997), p. 143.

· 31  The Times, 14 May 1898.

· 32  BD II, No. 86, pp. 68–9.

· 33  Keith Neilson, ‘ “Greatly Exaggerated”: The Myth of the Decline of Great Britain before 1914’, International History Review 13 (1991), pp. 695–725.

· 34  B.J.C. McKercher, ‘Diplomatic Equipoise: The Lansdowne Foreign Office, the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, and the Global Balance of Power’, Canadian Journal of History 24 (1989), p. 337.

· 35  Maurice Paléologue, Un grand tournant de la politique mondiale 1904–1906 (Paris 1934). On Paléologue see Irwin Halfond, Maurice Paléologue: The Diplomat, the Writer, the Man, and the Third French Republic (Lanham, MD 2007).

· 36  Jan Rüger, Heligoland: Britain, Germany, and the Struggle for the North Sea (New York 2017), p. 109.

· 37  Keith Wilson, ‘Directions of Travel: The Earl of Selborne, the Cabinet, and the Threat from Germany, 1900–1904’, International History Review 30 (2008), pp. 259–72.

· 38  On 21 December 1903; quoted in Jason Tomes, Balfour and Foreign Policy: The International Thought of a Conservative Statesman (Cambridge 1997), p. 110.

· 39  William Mulligan, ‘From Case to Narrative: The Marquess of Lansdowne, Sir Edward Grey, and the Threat from Germany, 1900–1906’, International History Review 30 (2008), pp. 273–302.

· 40  Quoted in Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge 1990), p. 72.

· 41  See Keith Neilson, ‘ “Control the Whirlwind”: Sir Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary, 1906–1916’, in Thomas G. Otte (ed.), The Makers of British Foreign Policy: From Pitt to Thatcher (Basingstoke 2002), pp. 128–49.

· 42  See J.W. Coogan and Peter F. Coogan, ‘The British Cabinet and the Anglo-French Staff Talks, 1905–1914: Who Knew What and When Did He Know It?’, Journal of British Studies 24 (1985), pp. 110–31.

· 43  John Keiger, ‘Sir Edward Grey, France, and the Entente: How to Catch the Perfect Angler?’, International History Review 38 (2016), pp. 285–300.

· 44  BD III, No. 299, p. 266.

· 45  John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain, the Balance of Power and the Origins of the First World War (London 1999), p. 399. The argument is unconvincing.

· 46  John F.V. Keiger, ‘Jules Cambon and Franco-German détente, 1907–14’, Historical Journal 26 (1983), pp. 641–59.

· 47  C. Wyatt, Afghanistan and the Defence of Empire: Diplomacy and Strategy during the Great Game (London 2012).

· 48  On the views of Foreign Office officials generally, see Thomas G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy, 1865–1914 (Cambridge 2011).

· 49  Hughes, Diplomacy before the Russian Revolution, pp. 162–4.

· 50  D.M. McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia 1900–1914 (Cambridge, MA 1992), pp. 97, 104–7.

· 51  Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford 1995).

· 52  BD III, No. 299, p. 267. See also Beryl Williams, ‘Great Britain and Russia 1905–1907’, in F.H. Hinsley (ed.), British Foreign Policy under Sir Edward Grey (Cambridge 1977), pp. 133–47.

· 53  The most recent summation of Wilson’s views can be found in Keith Wilson, ‘Grey and the Russian Threat to India, 1892–1915’, International History Review 38 (2016), pp. 275–84. See Andreas Rose, Between Empire and Continent: British Foreign Policy before the First World War (Oxford 2017).

· 54  Quoted in David H. Burton, Cecil Spring Rice: A Diplomat’s Life (London 1990), p. 141.

· 55  This passage was in 1928 omitted by the editors from Die Grosse Politik, Vol. XIX, Part II, No. 6305, on the grounds that ‘this would mean a heavy blow to the policy of the Anschluss’. See James Joll, ‘German Diplomatic Documents’, Times Literary Supplement, 25 Sept. 1953.

· 56  Solomon Wank, In the Twilight of Empire: Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal (1854–1912), Vol. 1: The Making of an Imperial Habsburg Patriot and Statesman (Vienna 2009).

· 57  Wank, In the Twilight of Empire, pp. 128–9.

· 58  Charles Jelavich, South Slav Nationalism – Textbooks and Yugoslav Union before 1914 (Columbus, OH 1990), p. 20.

· 59  Renzi, Shadow of the Sword, p. 21.

· 60  F.R. Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy among the Great Powers, 1815–1918 (London 1989), p. 295.

· 61  Feldmarschall Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, Vol. I (Vienna 1921), pp. 380–1; Gordon A. Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army 1640–1945 (paperback edn, New York 1964), p. 289.

· 62  Quoted in Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and his Times (London 1964), p. 295.

· 63  Tim Hadley, ‘Military Diplomacy in the Dual Alliance: German Military Attaché Reporting from Vienna, 1906–1914’, War in History 17 (2010), pp. 294–312.

· 64  Quoted in R.C.K. Ensor, England 1870–1914 (Oxford 1936), pp. 434–5. Some later writers have suggested that Lloyd George’s warning was aimed as much at France as at Germany and was intended to frighten the French from making any agreement with Germany without British participation, though this does not seem to have been a view expressed at the time. For a discussion of the Agadir crisis, see Geoffrey Barraclough, From Agadir to Armageddon: Anatomy of a Crisis (London 1982).

· 65  Quoted in Bentley B. Gilbert, ‘Pacifist to Interventionist: David Lloyd George in 1911 and 1914: Was Belgium an Issue?’, Historical Journal 28 (1985), p. 869.

· 66  Quoted in Erich Brandenburg, Von Bismarck zum Weltkrieg (Berlin 1939), p. 342. See also Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf 1969), p. 135.

· 67  Arden Bucholz, Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning (New York and Oxford 1991), p. 262.

· 68  Arden Bucholz, Hans Delbrück and the German Military Establishment: War Images in Conflict (Iowa City 1985), p. 76.

· 69  Richard Bosworth, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers (Cambridge 1979), p. 268.

· 70  Lawrence Sondhaus, The Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, 1867–1918: Navalism, Industrial Development, and the Politics of Dualism (West Lafayette, IN 1994), p. 234.

· 71  A.F. Pribram, The Secret Treaties of Austria-Hungary 1879–1914, Vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA 1920), p. 225.

· 72  Joseph Heller, British Policy towards the Ottoman Empire 1908–1914 (London 1983), p. 53.

· 73  Two important works in German on the Dual and Triple alliances are: Jürgen Angelow, Kalkül und Prestige: Der Zweibund am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Cologne 2000); Holger Afflerbach, Der Dreibund: Europäische Grossmacht-und Allianzpolitik vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg (Vienna 2002).

· 74  Theodor Sosnosky, Franz Ferdinand der Erzherzog Thronfolger (Munich 1929), pp. 143–4, quoted in Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Vol. II (Eng. tr., London 1953), p. 9. See also Bosworth, Least of the Great Powers, p. 196. On Conrad generally, see the brief essay by J.H. Maurer, ‘Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf and the Outbreak of the First World War’, in T.G. Otte and C.A. Pagedas (eds), Personalities, War and Diplomacy: Essays in International History (London 1997).

· 75  Marvin Benjamin Fried, Austro-Hungarian War Aims in the Balkans during World War I (London 2014).

· 76  Bosworth, Least of the Great Powers, p. 215.

· 77  Sondhaus, Naval Policy of Austria-Hungary, pp. 178, 230–1.

· 78  Sondhaus, Naval Policy, pp. 234–5.

· 79  Jared Morgan McKinney, ‘Nothing Fails Like Success: The London Ambassadors’ Conference and the Coming of the First World War’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41 (2018), pp. 947–1000.

· 80  Documents diplomatiques francais, 3me série, Vol. III (Paris 1931), No. 466. See also Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, p. 219.

· 81  Annika Mombauer, Helmuth von Moltke and the Origins of the First World War (Cambridge 2001).

· 82  Samuel R. Williamson Jr., ‘German Perceptions of the Triple Entente after 1911: Their Mounting Apprehensions Reconsidered’, Foreign Policy Analysis 7 (2011), pp. 205–14.

· 83  Quoted in K.A. Hamilton, ‘Great Britain and France 1911–1914’, in Hinsley, Sir Edward Grey, p. 324.

· 84  See T.G. Otte, ‘Détente 1914: Sir William Tyrrell’s Secret Mission to Germany’, Historical Journal 56 (2013), pp. 175–204.

· 85  E. Jaeckh, Kiderlen-Wächter, Vol. II (Stuttgart 1924), p. 189, quoted in Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, p. 226.

· 86  F.R. Bridge, From Sadowa to Sarajevo: The Foreign Policy of Austria-Hungary 1866–1914 (London 1972), p. 360.

· 87  On the German-Turkish relationship see Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge 2008).

· 88  Heller, British Policy, p. 112.

· 89  For a brief overview of Poincaré’s ideas see John F.V. Keiger, ‘Raymond Poincaré’, in Steven Casey and Jonathan Wright (eds), Mental Maps in the Era of Two World Wars (Basingstoke 2008), pp. 1–20.

· 90  John F.V. Keiger, Raymond Poincaré (Cambridge 1997), pp. 137–40.

· 91  F. Stieve (ed.), Diplomatische Schriftwechsel Isvolskis 1911–1914 (Berlin 1926), ii, No. 401, quoted in Taylor, Struggle for Mastery, p. 488.

· 92  William Mulligan, ‘ “We Can’t be More Russian than the Russians”: British Policy During the Liman von Sanders Crisis, 1913–1914’, Diplomacy & Statecraft 17 (2006), pp. 261–82.

· 93  Barbara Jelavich considers Romanian policy in ‘Romania in the First World War: The Pre-War Crisis, 1912–1914’, International History Review 14 (1992), pp. 441–51.

· 94  Keiger, ‘Sir Edward Grey, France, and the Entente’, pp. 285–300.

· 95  Keith Neilson, ‘1914: The German War?’, European History Quarterly 44 (2014), p. 407.

· 96  Friedrich Kiessling, Gegen den “grossen Krieg”? Entspannung in den internationalen Beziehungen, 1911–1914 (Munich 2002).