5

The primacy of domestic politics

In the previous three chapters we have looked at the decisions to go to war in the light of the diplomatic and strategic factors that influenced them. It has been assumed that each government was largely motivated by foreign political purposes – to preserve the balance within the international system, to gain territory or influence, to protect the fatherland against attack or encirclement. But there is another dimension to all foreign policy decisions, namely that provided by domestic politics and internal social and economic pressures.

Each of the European Great Powers was passing through a political and social crisis in 1914, and in some cases the problems that confronted them were solved or at least postponed by the outbreak of war. It does not necessarily follow, however, that it was in order to solve or postpone these problems that governments declared war. Indeed, many of them were well aware that a declaration of war might create more social problems than it would solve. In the period before the war as well as at the moment of its outbreak the governments of Europe had had to pay some attention to public opinion in formulating their foreign policies, but this does not necessarily imply that they used foreign policy primarily in order to manipulate public opinion or to achieve internal political aims. In some cases, notably that of Germany, as we shall see, foreign policy was sometimes used as a way of providing a focus for national feelings so as to distract attention away from the divisions and tensions in German society. However, the relationship between domestic and foreign policy was a very complex one, and it was often by no means clear whether a policy that risked involving a country in war would be more likely to create a mood of national solidarity or to provoke a revolution.

Germany

The supporters of the view that it was domestic, political and social pressures that determined the nature of foreign policy and consequently the decision for war have made their strongest case in the analysis of the situation in Germany, and it is into the relationship between foreign policy and domestic politics in Germany in the 40 years before the war that the most research has been done.¹ Certainly the internal political situation and constitutional arrangements have features that are not to be found in the other belligerent countries. We have already seen that in the crisis of 1914 it is not easy to determine where the final responsibility for taking decisions lay, with the kaiser formally being the ultimate authority and receiving advice from civil and military officials who were not bound by any principle of collective responsibility. As in Russia with Nicholas II, the situation was complicated by the personality of Wilhelm II who regarded himself as the ultimate power but who was influenced in contrary directions by his own successive whims and the policies of some of his advisers, and still more by his belief that he represented and embodied the aspirations of most of his subjects. Nevertheless, the constitutional position in Germany was sufficiently complex for there to be a number of ways in which public opinion, including opinion critical of government policies, could make itself felt. The German Empire was not a unitary state. The individual Länder still possessed important powers over the day-to-day life of their citizens, the susceptibilities of their rulers and governments had to be respected by the imperial authorities, and their financial contributions to the central exchequer were essential for the functioning of the empire. There is evidence that, at least from the 1890s, members of the imperial government believed that a vigorous foreign policy and the encouragement of an aggressive nationalist spirit would be one way of overcoming the particularist sentiments in the individual states and producing a mood of national unity comparable to that of 1870.

More important still was the existence of the imperial parliament, the Reichstag, elected by universal male suffrage. Its powers were limited, however. This was partly because many of the functions of government were still performed by the Länder, so that the policies of Prussia, the largest and most powerful of them, were in many respects as important as those of the central government. In several states, notably Prussia again, the local diet (the Landtag) was elected on a very restricted franchise that guaranteed a majority to the conservatives. The imperial government – or rather the chancellor and the state secretaries, since they were not constitutionally a collective body – was not responsible to the Reichstag, so there was no parliamentary government in the sense in which it was known in Britain and France. Nevertheless, the Reichstag was important because its vote was needed for the passage of legislation and, more important still, for the passing of the budget, while Reichstag elections provided some sort of indication of the political mood in Germany. From Bismarck onwards, therefore, successive imperial chancellors had needed to secure and maintain majorities in the Reichstag, and on several occasions an initiative in foreign policy had been an effective means of doing so. When a new nationalist fervour swept through France in 1886–7 in the form of support for a Napoleon-like general, Georges Boulanger, Bismarck decided that he could use this to his advantage, and called elections in February 1887 in the belief that this would secure him a majority in the Reichstag and ensure the passage of his proposed Septennat (a seven-year army bill). Although he succeeded, the manoeuvre backfired in Alsace-Lorraine, where deputies hostile to the Septennat in particular and to rule from Berlin in general won all the Reichstag seats representing the province; Bismarck interpreted this as a failure of German rule in the provinces.² One of his successors as chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, successfully fought the Reichstag elections of 1907 with slogans that combined nationalism, colonialism and anti-socialism.

However, the supporters of the view that it was concern for domestic politics that determined the conduct of German foreign policy would argue that this was more than just a matter of using foreign political issues for the immediate purpose of winning a particular election: foreign policy was deliberately used as a means of manipulating public opinion so as to create a sense of solidarity among the German people and overcome the social and political divisions that were seen as a threat to the very existence of the German Empire. The attraction of a colonial empire, a large fleet and an active foreign policy would serve both as a basis for rallying the ‘loyal’ (Staatserhaltende) elements around the kaiser and government and as a means of countering the threat of a growing socialist movement. It might even also serve as a means of integrating the socialists themselves into German society. One of the problems of this explanation is indeed to determine which of these contradictory aims was foremost in the minds of those who pursued this policy: were imperialism and Weltpolitik being used to rally opposition to the socialists or were they intended to integrate the socialists into the German Volksgemeinschaft?

There are two distinct phases in which the question needs to be discussed. First, there is the general problem of the motives that led the German government in the 1890s to take the decision to embark on Weltpolitik and to construct a fleet that could if necessary challenge the British navy – a decision that, as we have seen, changed the whole basis of Anglo-German relations and contributed much to the atmosphere that made war possible in 1914. We also need to look at the pressures on the German government immediately before the war, and especially after the Reichstag elections of 1912 that had shown that one elector in three was voting socialist and that the Social Democratic Party was the biggest single party in the new Reichstag.

The decision by the kaiser and his advisers to build a large navy and to turn Germany into a world power makes a clear dividing line in German foreign policy so that Germany’s imperialism seems to be the result of a specific decision rather than of a chain of events over at least several decades, as was the case with Britain and France. It is true that Bismarck had in the 1880s given limited encouragement to colonial activity as a means of winning popular support, and it has been argued that this was part of an overall strategy to weaken the appeal of the socialists by a combination of expansion abroad and social welfare at home.³ However, the imperialist movement of the 1880s in Germany, although it led to the foundation of what was to develop over the next years into an influential pressure group, did not go very deep or last very long and its immediate political consequences were not very important. But the decision for Weltpolitik and the introduction of the first Navy Law in 1897 had profound effects on both domestic and foreign policy. How far was this explicit decision to turn Germany into a world power the result of domestic political pressures and was it intended to serve the purposes of internal policy as much as of foreign?

In trying to find the profounder causes of the decision for Weltpolitik one must be careful not to underestimate the effects of the personal and contingent, and in this case particularly the position and predilections of Kaiser Wilhelm II himself. Some historians have talked about the ‘personal rule’ of the kaiser and have overlooked the extent to which his powers were nevertheless dependent on the collaboration of others within the German constitutional system;⁴ it is, however, certain that the circle of his immediate advisers and confidants was a small one (so that his critics accused him of running Germany through a camarilla), and that, particularly in the early years of his reign, his own prejudices and caprices were very important. It is unlikely that German naval building would have been pursued so enthusiastically without the kaiser’s personal commitment to the creation of a German battle fleet. This was no doubt partly the result of his own psychology: his emotional need to show himself the equal of his royal British relatives, and his country the equal of the Britain that he both loved and hated. Without Wilhelm II’s personal backing, Admiral Tirpitz, whom he appointed state secretary for the navy in 1897, would never have been able to carry through his programme and win the public support required to overcome the political opposition to the idea of a big navy. He was, however, also motivated by his reading of Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon History (1890) in which the American naval strategist and historian argued that modern navies provided governments with an offensive weapon for engaging in conflict with their adversaries (mainly trading rivals in the colonial world), and that control of the seas could be achieved either by great naval battles or by deterring potential adversaries by threatening their navies with destruction if they chose to launch a war. The kaiser reported that he was ‘not reading, but devouring Captain Mahan’s book’.

Weltpolitik, supported by Wilhelm’s emotions and intellect, struck a resonant chord with the German people. Politicians and industrialists were quick to see the advantages they could derive from supporting it. The sense that the fall of Bismarck in 1890 marked the end of an era led many people, especially the supporters of the National Liberal Party, to look for a new national cause to support and new national goals for which to work. The answer lay in Weltpolitik, though there were several different ideas of what this meant in practice. The anxiety that was felt about the direction of German foreign policy and Germany’s place in the world was accompanied by a growing fear about the problems created by urbanization and industrialization. Politicians talked of the necessity of a Sammlungspolitik, a ‘rallying together’ through policies that would produce a solid body of support for the state and the kaiser and in particular a solid body of opposition to the growing socialist movement. As Johannes Miquel, the deputy prime minister of Prussia, put it in 1897: ‘The great task of the present is without prejudice to gather together all the elements that support the state and thereby to prepare for the unavoidable battle against the Social Democratic movement.’⁵

Although Tirpitz himself was primarily concerned with the creation of the navy for its own sake and as a means of achieving a not very clearly defined position as a world power, he was also aware of the role the navy might play in providing a new rallying point for German opinion: ‘In the great new national task and the economic gains associated with it lies a strong antidote to educated and uneducated Social Democracy.’ ⁶ Tirpitz’s more immediate political aim fitted in with his general suspicions of democracy. This aim was to safeguard the naval programme against disruption by the Reichstag, and much of his planning was intended to ensure that the building and replacement of ships should take place without the necessity of parliamentary approval. He was, in Volker Berghahn’s phrase, constructing a fleet ‘against parliament and England’,⁷ and hoped that naval building would favour an authoritarian system of government at home while abroad tipping the world balance of power in Germany’s favour.

Yet there were difficulties in the way of using the navy as a focus for a new conservative alliance, the chief of which being that many of the Prussian landowners, the truest conservatives in Germany, were unenthusiastic about the new policy and in some cases actively opposed to it. The situation grew worse as the naval programme increased in scope and cost, since the agrarian conservatives firmly rejected any financial measures such as inheritance or income tax, which would touch their own pockets; it was not until 1913, in the face of their opposition and with the support of the socialists, that an income tax was introduced. Although, like Bismarck, Bülow succeeded temporarily in 1903 in patching up a conservative bloc based on a bargain between the economic interests of agrarians and industrialists, it lacked firm foundations and its break-up in 1909 led to Bülow’s fall.

The ‘natural’ popular support for the government on the political Right was not without its complications. Mobilizing groups such as the Pan-German League implied that the public at large had an important role to play in promoting national security. It also implied that the government itself was not sufficiently attentive to the dangers faced by Germany and that it was unwilling to take the necessary steps to meet these dangers by ‘building up armaments on land and sea, in encouraging colonial expansion, in supporting ethnic Germans fighting for cultural survival around the world, and in combating subversion at home’.⁸ Tirpitz’s active encouragement of propaganda in favour of his naval programme led to the creation of effective pressure groups, notably the Flottenverein, which themselves became bodies whose views had to be taken seriously by the government and which provided an opportunity for ambitious members of the middle class to achieve positions of influence that had hitherto been the preserve of aristocrats.⁹ The growth of the navy and Tirpitz’s ambitious programme were signs of the way in which Germany was changing socially and economically. It can nevertheless be argued that, so far from serving as a rallying point for a divided nation, the navy emphasized the divisions and brought out the contradictory forces in Germany’s social and institutional structure while pushing the German government in the direction of a foreign policy that was bound to end in conflict with Britain and very probably war. The idea of Weltpolitik and support for the fleet appealed to circles far wider than the industrialists who stood to gain directly from naval expansion. Even if it never succeeded in winning the working class away from the Social Democratic Party and integrating them into the German Volksgemeinschaft, as some of its supporters had hoped it would, the effectiveness of navalist propaganda did not leave the workers untouched: those social democratic politicians who received an invitation to visit a battleship did not conceal their satisfaction, and at least one of them remembered it all his life.¹⁰

The building of the German navy not only exposed some of the contradictions in German politics and society but also led to the creation of a body of nationalist opinion and the development of an aggressive imperialist rhetoric that contributed to making war seem acceptable and even desirable. The existence of such a body of opinion was one of the factors that the German government between 1911 and 1914 had to take into account. It was not the only problem confronting Bethmann Hollweg, who became chancellor in 1909. His predecessor, Bernhard von Bülow, had followed a foreign policy that had resulted in Germany’s isolation and in an increasing fear that it was being ‘encircled’ by hostile powers. This in turn contributed to the pressure to increase the size of the army and navy and consequently increased Germany’s financial difficulties. Bülow’s fall had been the direct result of a vain attempt to cope with the problem by imposing an inheritance tax, and the situation was to get worse. There were signs that the left-wing liberals and some of the social democrats were looking for an opportunity that would make the Reichstag more powerful, and they were also starting to agitate for a reform of the restricted franchise for the Prussian Landtag. Any government was going to have to find some way of working either with this new potential grouping of the moderate Left or else with an ever more strident nationalist Right. Although Bülow had been successful in forming a conservative bloc to fight the Reichstag elections of 1907 and inflicting a temporary check on the steady growth of the social democrats, the ground was lost again in the next elections in 1912 when the SPD increased its representation from 43 to 110 seats, making it the single largest party. The results shocked the kaiser and his supporters: the social democrats were mostly republicans and one of their leaders, Gustav Noske, told a party meeting in 1910 that they would call for a republic at the next election.¹¹ This generated fears that led to vociferous new demands on the Right for a campaign against them, including calls for a coup d’état from above, the abolition of universal suffrage and the introduction of some sort of authoritarian government – ideas that had the active support of the crown prince and his circle and with which the kaiser in his wilder moments expressed some sympathy.

Bethmann Hollweg aimed at pursuing what he called ‘a policy of the diagonal’ between these opposing forces. He did not want to alienate the social democrats from the German state still further, especially in view of what he saw as a worsening international situation, and he hoped at the same time to create some sort of new national consensus by providing what in his view would be a government ‘above party’. In fact, his room for manoeuvre was very limited, and certainly this cautious, high-minded, gloomy, conservative bureaucrat was hardly the man to challenge directly the established power of the army leaders and industrialists who denounced as weakness any liberal gesture at home or attempts at compromise abroad.

This became very clear after the Moroccan crisis of 1911, when the various nationalist pressure groups were indignantly attacking Bethmann for failing to get adequate compensation for Germany’s acquiescence in the establishment of French control over Morocco and for disappointing the hopes aroused by the dispatch of a German warship to Agadir. The nationalists had hoped that this initiative in provoking a major international crisis would be the first step towards establishing a new German empire in Africa and an opportunity to demonstrate Germany’s imperial power. As one of their papers wrote on 3 July 1911, two days after the gunboat Panther arrived at Agadir: ‘In Germany the whole nation has breathed a deep sigh of relief as if a bad dream had vanished, as if a nightmare of discontented resignation had been chased away by the rays of the morning sun.’ ¹² The people who felt that Germany’s troubles could only be removed by a dramatic act of national self-assertion even at the risk of war were naturally disappointed when the gains won by Germany’s gunboat diplomacy were limited to two small pieces of the French Congo, contemptuously described by the German secretary of state for the colonies as ‘partly completely worthless, partly almost worthless territory’,¹³ mostly either swamp or jungle and where the inhabitants were perishing from sleeping sickness. It was typical of the mood of that time that a French nationalist journalist, complaining about French concessions to Germany, described the same territory as ‘marvellous shores frequented by all the beasts of the Garden of Eden, by all the magical beauty with which painters liked to fill their pictures of the creation of the world’.¹⁴ Moreover, the price for what the Germans considered small gains had been an intensification of anti-German feeling in France and what was regarded as an open expression of British support for France in Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech.

Although a new attempt at an agreement with Britain was made at the time of Haldane’s visit to Berlin in March 1912, it was clear that the German admiralty was not prepared to modify its shipbuilding programme except for an unequivocal promise of British neutrality in a European war. Thus that part of Bethmann’s foreign policy that depended on improving relations with Britain was making no progress, while he was now under increased pressure to win the Reichstag’s consent to further naval increases. By the time of the Haldane mission, the Reichstag elections of January 1912 had taken place and had been a defeat for the Right and a triumph for the SPD. Bethmann had deliberately refrained from using Bülow’s tactics of 1907 of fighting elections on nationalist slogans because he did not wish to encourage the Right by appearing to be reacting to their criticisms. As he put it to a friend:

We must do everything for our defence by sea and land that our finances allow, but not with threatening shouts but as far as possible in quiet silence. Then we can arrange things with England in spite of naval increases so that it doesn’t come to a war. That is what I am working for, but the resistance on every side can hardly be overcome.¹⁵

In fact, he was soon faced with demands for naval increases that he was unable to resist, with the kaiser declaring that ‘My and the German people’s patience is at an end’¹⁶ and expressing the greatest contempt for any arguments that financial considerations might limit naval expansion. Meanwhile, the nationalist associations – now joined by a new one, the Wehrverein, committed to strengthening the army and preparing all sections of the nation, especially the young, for war – were becoming increasingly strident in their criticisms of the government. By 1913 a new increase of the army was added to that of the navy.

From 1911 until the outbreak of war – and indeed until his fall in 1917 – Bethmann Hollweg was faced with repeated calls for his resignation; the punning slogan ‘Bethmann soll Weg’ (Bethmann Must Go) was a kind of German parallel to the British Conservative Party’s ‘BMG’ (Balfour Must Go) campaign against their leader Arthur Balfour in the autumn of 1911. Indeed, in March 1912 Bethmann had offered his resignation to the kaiser because the latter, in one of his recurrent fits of anti-English panic, had telegraphed direct to the ambassador in London that, if the English were to strengthen their North Sea fleet by withdrawing ships from the Mediterranean, this would immediately lead to Germany’s mobilization. By the time Bethmann’s resignation was offered the kaiser had calmed down, but the episode gave the chancellor the opportunity to summarize his policy: any failure in the attempt to reach agreement with Britain must be attributable to the English, otherwise

not only will our relationship with England significantly deteriorate, but also French chauvinism which is already virulent will be encouraged to form the wildest hopes. France will become so provocative and overbearing that we shall be compelled to attack her. In such a war France will certainly have the help of Russia and doubtless also England … I cannot take the responsibility of working for such a situation. If a war is forced on us, then we will fight it and with God’s help not be defeated. But for us to provoke a war without our honour or vital interests being affected I would regard as a sin against Germany’s destiny, even if we could hope as far as we can foresee for victory.¹⁷

It was a position that depended on many imponderables, especially the meaning to be attached to words like ‘honour’ and ‘vital interests’ and on how far Bethmann’s conception of these coincided basically with that of his nationalist critics; one sometimes has the impression that his differences with them were about means rather than ends.

The difficulty of following a ‘policy of the diagonal’ was illustrated by the row over the Zabern affair (see p.136), when the attempts by a majority of the Reichstag, including the National Liberals and the Catholic Centre Party as well as the left-wing Liberals and the Social Democrats, to censure the army leadership and criticize the chancellor’s handling of the affair only showed the impotence of the Reichstag and the difficulties involved in an open confrontation with the military authorities. While it would have been unthinkable 20 years earlier for the kind of criticism of the army that the Zabern incident provoked to be expressed publicly in the Reichstag and the press, this apparent increase in parliamentary and popular freedom to criticize was offset by the demonstration that the chancellor could still ignore a parliamentary vote of censure, while the army leaders made only token gestures to discipline the officers responsible for the insults and injustices inflicted on the Alsatian population. It was characteristic that the unfortunate governor of Alsace saw his attempts to assert his authority openly snubbed by the kaiser, and equally characteristic, since he was himself a general, that he should have kept silent rather than allow the prestige of the army to suffer.

Bethmann was not the man to go against the power of the army and the prejudices of the kaiser, partly at least because he shared much of their contempt for the professional politicians in the Reichstag. ‘It was a madhouse’, he said of the Zabern debate:

By their temper tantrums these people believe they can hide their political innocence. The vainglorious Bassermann [National Liberal] arm in arm with Scheidemann [SPD] and Erzberger [Centre] lack any dignity… . Hence I stood in the fiery rain. That is even not so bad. The inner revulsion was much too great for me to feel the cinders.¹⁸

It was also partly that, for all his abstract respect for the rule of law, he was also convinced of the special role of the army and navy. ‘I shall rather accept a dent in my own reputation than permit the denigration of the army’, he said about the Zabern affair,¹⁹ and on the subject of the navy he was even more positive:

A really Great Power with a seaboard could not be a Landratte: she must have a fleet, and a strong one … not merely for the purpose of defending her commerce but for the general purpose of her greatness.²⁰

For all his doubts about the methods and style of the Prussian military class, and in spite of his own genuine idealism and culture (he complained to the British ambassador that during the Agadir crisis he had not had time to play his usual Beethoven sonata before going to bed: ‘How can I play my beloved old music with the air full of modern discords?’),²¹ Bethmann Hollweg was limited in his freedom of action both by his own origins and temperament and by the system within which he was operating. His pessimistic, reserved and sensitive nature was susceptible to accusations of cowardliness: Fritz Stern in a perceptive essay reminded us that in his memoirs Bethmann wrote that for Germany to have followed a different course in 1914 would have amounted to Selbstentmannung (self-castration).²² His fatalism increasingly led him to believe that there was not much to be done about anything. But even if he had been less fatalistic, there is little he could have done in the face of the entrenched power of the more nationalistic conservatives. His policy of the diagonal was constantly distorted by the pull to the right, and he was powerless to resist.

Between the elections of 1912 and the outbreak of war, much nationalist propaganda explicitly linked calls for the preparation for war with the hope that a war might put an end to social democracy.²³ The journalists of the Right were not only preparing for a war of Teuton against Slav; they were also making remarks such as ‘A fresh and uninhibited war would immediately decimate the 110 Social Democrats in the Reichstag’, or, elsewhere, ‘War is the only remedy to cure existing illnesses’.²⁴ The view of Germany as following a Sonderweg (special path of development) in which pre-modern and anti-democratic elites wielded disproportionate power in the era before the First World War has been countered by historians who have found abundant evidence of co-operation between aristocratic landowners and bourgeois industrialists and businessmen. The German bourgeoisie was eager to ‘man the ramparts against democracy’.²⁵

While some Germans on the right argued that a war would buttress their cause, the chancellor disagreed. Bethmann Hollweg countered the view of conservatives who ‘expected a war to turn domestic politics in a conservative direction’, with his prediction ‘that a world war with its unforeseeable consequences will greatly strengthen the power of social democracy since it preaches peace and will topple many a throne’.²⁶ The consequences of this for German foreign policy were expressed by the chancellor in November 1913 as follows:

In a future war which is undertaken without a compelling reason, not only will the crown of the Hohenzollerns be at stake but also the future of Germany. Certainly our policy must be conducted boldly. But to rattle the sword in every diplomatic complication unless the honour, security and future of Germany is threatened, is not only foolhardy but criminal.²⁷

Moreover, the history of Bethmann’s chancellorship demonstrates that he was not overly worried about a socialist threat, that even after the electoral success of the SPD in 1912 his government became more effective rather than less so, and finally that he anticipated that a general war would likely overturn the status quo in Germany, rather than maintain it.²⁸

Whereas other members of the German government and high command believed that there was little point in postponing a war that they considered to be inevitable, Bethmann, with his eyes on the internal situation, was concerned that if war came it should appear to be one in which Germany was attacked by Russia, and also if possible one in which Britain would remain neutral. He failed in the second part of his policy, but had considerable success in the first, partly because of the attitude of some of the leading social democrats. From the time of Marx and Engels onwards, socialists had always believed that a war against Russia, the most reactionary power in Europe, would be justified, however much they might criticize militarism at home. And although some of the left-wing social democrats, notably Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, in the years immediately before the war had launched a vigorous campaign against militarism and war, the party leadership was more restrained on these issues, pressing for reforms in the system of national defence rather than attacking national defence as such. In spite of the emphasis both by the socialists and by their opponents on the gulf between them – illustrated by the refusal of bourgeois politicians to serve as president or vice president of the Reichstag when a socialist was elected one of the vice presidents, and by the refusal of socialist members of parliament to stand and join in the ritual cheers for the kaiser or to attend court functions – the chancellor retained contact with some of the right-wing socialists, and the socialists had supported the government by voting for the taxation needed to finance the army increases in 1913. In the July Crisis of 1914, Bethmann was able to persuade the army leaders not to carry out their intention to arrest the socialist leaders, because he had been assured by his contacts in the Social Democratic Party that, in spite of their demonstrations in favour of peace, the socialists would do nothing to oppose the preparations for war. What has been called the ‘negative integration’²⁹ of the German socialists was demonstrated by the unanimity with which the parliamentary party voted for the emergency war credits on 4 August 1914. Fritz Fischer’s argument that a ‘constitutional crisis’ in Germany compelled the government to back Austria has been discredited by Mark Hewitson, who has demonstrated that there was no significant pressure on Bethmann Hollweg coming from the Reichstag.³⁰

The idea of the primacy of foreign policy (Primat der Aussenpolitik) derived from the writings of the great nineteenth-century German historian Leopold von Ranke. He had argued that it was the foreign policy of a state that enabled it to achieve the independence from interference by other powers that would allow it to develop its own national character and institutions so that its very existence and nature depended on the success of its foreign policy. His ideas were less simple than some later writers believed; he was too intelligent a historian not to see that, as he put it, ‘It is natural and inevitable that external and internal affairs interact with each other’.³¹ In Germany many influential historical thinkers were by the beginning of the twentieth century reviving some of Ranke’s ideas: about the interplay of the Great Powers and the balance of power, and especially about the importance of external relations in determining internal developments so that domestic policy would have to be subordinate to foreign policy. Such ideas were also expressed by political leaders, as for example by Bernhard von Bülow, who wrote in 1890: ‘Everything must be subordinated to our unity and our position as a European Great Power, and even our internal politics must be tailored to this.’ ³²

Moreover, Ranke had stressed the importance of maintaining the balance of power and opposing the hegemony of any one state; and his successors in the age of imperialism were pointing to Britain’s naval hegemony and the necessity of challenging it so as to restore a balance of power that must now be worldwide and no longer confined to Europe. As one leading historian and publicist, Otto Hintze, put it in an essay published in 1916:

Our intention was to develop gradually in peaceful competition with England, until the older power would one day be forced to recognize us as an equal competitor in world politics. England is still far from granting any such equality to the continental powers, and the German refusal to admit England’s sole supremacy at sea was certainly the main cause that drove the island kingdom into a war with Germany. Our aim in this war can only be to force England to abandon her claim to absolute supremacy at sea, and thus to create a state of equilibrium within the world system of states.³³

These are ideas that almost exactly coincide with Tirpitz’s theories about the aims of the German naval programme.

Unless, therefore, we are to take the view that nobody ever means what they say and that their statements are always mere pretexts to conceal deeper reasons, we must admit that even in the case of Germany it would be wrong to analyse foreign policy solely in terms of a theory of the Primat der Innenpolitik or to attribute the decision for war to domestic pressures alone. Niall Ferguson has produced a new formula to explain this relationship: he argues that the decisive factor in pushing Germany over the brink and into war in 1914 was the conviction of both military and civilian leaders that Germany could not win the arms race against its continental neighbours. This would not have been the case had Germany been ‘more militaristic’ and spent greater sums on the army, but domestic political pressures prevented the German government from spending more. Thus, it is legitimate to speak of the ‘domestic origins’ of the war because of the sense of insecurity that drove Germany over the brink – and one can adopt this perspective without adopting the ‘primacy of domestic politics’ view.³⁴

There is certainly much evidence to suggest that German politicians, generals and admirals were very conscious of the connection between domestic and foreign policy, not only because at certain moments they believed that foreign ventures might contribute to a mood of national solidarity at home, but also because they feared the strength of socialist opposition to warlike policies. The balance between the awareness of internal problems and dreams of world power was always a delicate one, and recent historical writing has stressed the importance of the internal contradictions of German society in determining German foreign policy and the decision for war and has thus drawn attention to factors that had been largely overlooked by an older generation of historians. We must not forget, however, that for many leading Germans the positive pursuit of world power or the negative securing of Germany’s position in what was regarded as a hostile world was something to be undertaken for its own sake regardless of the domestic profit and loss. The ‘policy of the diagonal’ was a question not only of balancing between Left and Right but also of balancing between internal and external problems.

Austria-Hungary: the dual monarchy

The foreign policy of one country at least, Austria-Hungary, was primarily the product of its internal problems. Austria-Hungary depended for its very existence on its international relations. Since the days of Metternich, it had been essential for the Austrian government and the House of Habsburg to persuade other countries that the preservation of the Empire was an international necessity and that its disappearance would produce a situation in central Europe that would be fatal to the stability of the international system.³⁵ By 1914 this international consensus was beginning to break down. Some of the subject nationalities of Austria-Hungary were looking for outside support for their national claims and in some cases were in contact with foreign governments. This situation was further complicated by the challenging constitutional arrangements that had created the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867, in the wake of the crushing defeat of Austria in the Austro-Prussian War. In order to save the Empire from disintegration, the Austrians had agreed to make the Hungarians their equal partners, with their own parliament, self-government within Hungary and an equal say in matters of foreign policy and defence.³⁶ In practice, this proved so complicated that a system of ‘bureaucratic absolutism’ was employed rather than have the process grind to a complete halt. This meant that the government got essential legislation passed by decree – but there was an invisible line beyond which it could not go without parliamentary sanction, such as major tax increases or increased conscription quotas. Franz Josef was not prepared to risk what could be interpreted as a coup d’état, so he avoided major increases in taxation, army funding or conscription, with the result that the armed forces fell further behind those of other Great Powers.³⁷

By the early twentieth century the growing influence of independent national states on the borders of Austria-Hungary gave a new focus for national movements within the monarchy. The South Slavs – Serbs, Croats, Slovenes – began to look to Serbia for support and to forget their own religious and cultural differences because of their grievances against the Habsburg state. The mood was expressed at its simplest by a Croat sergeant on trial for desertion in 1916: ‘The Croats were always loyal to the Emperor, but he did not love them and delivered them over to the Magyars, so that they were forced to turn to the Serbs, who at least spoke their language.’³⁸ This indication of an underlying faith in Franz Josef was echoed by some of the Monarchy’s other minorities, particularly those who, in the decades before the war, ran up against policies of ‘magyarisation’. In 1892 a coalition of Romanian nationalists in Transylvania submitted a memorandum to the emperor, pleading for a measure of national autonomy to enable them to escape Magyar domination. Since the 1870s the government in Budapest had instituted a series of measures to quash the separate identity of the Romanians in Transylvania: the schools of both the Orthodox and the Uniate Churches were brought under direct state control and textbooks that promoted ‘hostility toward the Hungarian state’ were banned, including A.T. Laurian’s Istoria romanilor (The History of the Romanians, 1873), which argued that Transylvania was the original home of the Romanians, that they had lived there continuously, that the Magyars were latecomers and therefore hardly entitled to predominance.³⁹ Most of the reformers were far from demanding independence from the Empire and unification with Romania: rather, they wanted greater participation in the affairs of the Monarchy, the right to use the Romanian language in the schools, the courts and in public administration. They also asked the emperor to grant universal suffrage and the secret ballot. Magyar politicians opposed these reforms because they feared they would make it possible for ‘the Rumanians to become the new majority in Transylvania’; even limiting the suffrage to those who were literate would not stem the tide because illiteracy rates were decreasing among the Romanian peasants. Count István Bethlen feared that a cohesive Romanian political movement would then form alliances with Vienna and the Left in Hungary; suffrage reform ‘would expose the Hungarians of Transylvania to the nationalities’.⁴⁰ The Hungarian authorities confiscated copies of the memorandum and launched criminal prosecutions against its authors and distributors, thus confirming the complaints of the nationalists. Those who had placed their faith in Franz Josef were badly disappointed, but the ‘Tribunists’, who were committed to the cause of a greater Romania, were satisfied: the occasion demonstrated that the Romanian cause would not be supported from Vienna.

Budapest’s centralizing policies produced international complications. King Carol of Romania, along with his government, was more concerned with the threat of an expansionist Russia than with the wishes of the Romanians in Transylvania and had, accordingly, adhered to the Triple Alliance in 1883 through separate agreements with Austria-Hungary and Germany. But the agreements were kept secret and were not presented to parliament for ratification because the government knew they would be unpopular and might be rejected. The Hungarians were increasingly convinced that the Romanian government was supporting the movement for independence within Transylvania: the ‘Ministry of Education and Cults’, for example, provided regular subsidies to Romanian churches and schools in Transylvania. The Austrian foreign minister, Count Gustav Kálnoky, was convinced that, in spite of the alliance with Romania, the most they could actually rely upon in the event of war was Romanian neutrality. In 1914, therefore, it was anybody’s guess whether Romania would honour the alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, remain neutral, or throw in its lot with the Triple Entente and attempt to ‘redeem’ their compatriots in Transylvania.⁴¹

Of the national problems confronting the Habsburg state, it was the South Slav question that had the most serious international repercussions. The relations between Czechs and Germans in Bohemia and Moravia were more intractable but they did not yet have an international dimension, and negotiations for some compromise at a local level were unsuccessfully dragging on in 1914. Yet although a few of the Czech and Slovak national leaders looked to Russia and were even in secret contact with the Russian government, the majority were not yet seeking outside support for their claims and the Russians were not yet prepared to take the risk of giving them open and practical encouragement. In Hungary, although dissent among the Romanians was worrisome because they might be able to look to Romania for support, that among the Poles was less so because they could not look to Russia for any meaningful support. The prime minister of Hungary, Count István Tisza, regarded the South Slav question as more worrying. Although he opposed compounding the Monarchy’s problems by incorporating more Slavs, his preferred solution to the problem they posed was to place the small, independent Balkan states under the protection of a benevolent Dual Monarchy.⁴²

Although Franz Ferdinand favoured some form of autonomy for the Croats within Austria, any change of this kind was bitterly opposed by Tisza and the Magyars so that by 1914 very little had been done to meet the grievances of the Croats, and consequently they had increased their contacts with other South Slavs. In 1905 a number of Croat and Serb politicians inside the Monarchy had agreed on a common programme, but this had achieved little. Then in 1908 the annexation of Bosnia had increased Serb discontent both within and outside Austria-Hungary so that, with the growth of national feeling inside Serbia and the movement towards South Slav unity, Serbia seemed to the Austrian government an increasing threat to the very existence of the Habsburg state.⁴³ As a conflict between Austria and Serbia was likely to involve Russia, anxious to use its traditional role as protector of the Balkan Slavs for its own ends, the Austro-Hungarians’ failure to solve their internal national problems inevitably had international ramifications. The Austro-Hungarian government believed that the establishment of some sort of control over Serbia was essential for the survival of their state. After trying economic pressure between 1906 and 1910 they decided to use more direct methods, and the decision for war in 1914 was the result of a mistaken belief that only vigorous action against Serbia could solve the problem of the Slav nationalities within the Empire and that Austria-Hungary’s internal problems could only be solved by an active and aggressive foreign policy. For all the complexities of the Austro-Hungarian state, the relation between its domestic problems and its foreign policy is comparatively clear, even if one may be surprised at the misconceptions and illusions that led Conrad, Berchtold and their colleagues to think that an attack on Serbia would solve the Habsburg Monarchy’s difficulties.⁴⁴ But to what extent would Russia’s response to such an attack be determined by its domestic situation?

Russia

In Russia both the internal situation and Russia’s foreign relations were dominated by the effects of the disastrous experiences of 1904–5: the defeat by Japan in the Far East and the revolution at home. The tsar and his advisers had considered Japan an easy target: a small, backward, inferior Asiatic state. A short, successful war, they believed, would mobilize support for the government and dissipate the groundswell of complaint against the autocratic system and its failure to provide its subjects with an adequate standard of living. Although the Russians did not embark on the war against the Japanese for primarily domestic reasons, they believed that such a war would work to their advantage at home. Russian officials in Siberia regarded an emerging regionalist consciousness there as evidence of a growing revolutionary and secessionist sentiment that they believed should be countered by a policy of economic modernization, the primary instrument of which would be the Trans-Siberian railway. Thus, as one historian has recently concluded, ‘Russia embraced economic modernization and innovation not only to maintain its rank among the great powers but also to shore up the autocracy at home’.⁴⁵ Ironically, it was this very policy that precipitated the disastrous war with Japan, which in turn increased the discontent with the autocracy, rather than dissipating it, as the system now seemed unable to defend the empire against even a second-rate enemy. The marches and strikes in St Petersburg and Moscow were directly connected with the failures in the Far East and, when the state itself seemed to be on the brink of destruction, the tsar and his advisers reluctantly agreed to a series of political reforms in order to quell the threat of revolution.⁴⁶ The new foreign minister appointed by Nicholas II in the wake of the war, Izvolsky, who took the lesson to heart, believed that he understood the connection between the two realms of foreign policy and domestic politics: the grandiose railway project launched by Count Sergei Witte in 1891 was ‘of a purely artificial character, satisfactory only to the unbounded ambitions of that statesman and anything but helpful to the true welfare of Russia, underpopulated as it was and undeveloped technically and economically’.⁴⁷ The reforms instituted in 1905 were greeted by liberals everywhere as a victory for constitutional democracy and as a promise of progressive social reform. They also appeared to open the door to an accommodation with Britain. As Lord Hardinge, the British ambassador in St Petersburg, put it, the autocracy was ‘an anachronism existing now only in semi-civilised and barbarous states, and must inevitably be modified to meet the requirements of the great advance in civilization made in Russia during the past 20 years’.⁴⁸ Certainly, compared with the autocratic system itself, they seemed revolutionary.

Before 1905 the tsar enjoyed complete legal freedom to do as he pleased. The Fundamental Laws recognized that, as both head of state and head of government, he was free to do with ‘his’ state whatever he pleased. Although a state council had been created almost a century earlier (in 1810, in response to demands for reform during the Napoleonic Wars) the tsar remained free to accept or reject the advice offered by the senior bureaucrats that he himself appointed to advise him. The tsar’s power before 1905 was complete and unlimited; there was no mechanism for making (or breaking) laws other than through the personal authority vested in him.⁴⁹ That was the essence of the autocratic system, and this was why liberals and progressives everywhere, including within the Russian empire itself, regarded it as the greatest barrier to political and social reform in Europe. Compared with the Romanov autocracy, the system in which the Hohenzollern and Habsburg emperors operated seemed ‘constitutional’, progressive and modern.

The October Manifesto (17 October 1905) that announced the creation of the Duma deliberately left many of the details vague, but it was clear that however the electoral system was instituted, however the exact functions and responsibilities of the parliamentary assemblies were defined, the new system would mean a limitation on the powers of the tsar. Nicholas II, who was not pleased with the diminution of his authority, insisted that his powers remained ‘unlimited’ and, from October onwards, did his best to overcome even the modest limitations imposed on him by the new system. Nevertheless, the Duma was established as the sole legislative body for the empire, and revision of the Fundamental Law in 1906 came close to giving the empire its first formal constitution, setting out the steps in the legislative process and defining the roles of those involved. Legislation was to be initiated by the Duma; it would then go to the state council for approval and then, finally, to the tsar. But the Duma was limited in a number of ways: certain areas of government were not debatable within it; certain areas of the budget were beyond its jurisdiction; and, most importantly, matters of defence and foreign affairs were to remain solely the preserve of the tsar and his ministers.⁵⁰

In the years following the upheavals and reforms of 1905–6, the tsar succeeded in re-establishing much of his authority, and liberal demands for a parliamentary system were only partly satisfied. But the existence of the Duma did provide an organ for the expression of opinion to which the tsar and his advisers had to pay some attention. The franchise was a narrow one and the upper house, the Council of State, could nullify much of the work of the Duma, but parliament had some control over the budget and could express views on a wide range of topics. Outside parliament, too, public opinion was more vociferous and more broadly based than before, even if there were still restrictions on the freedom of expression that would have seemed intolerable in Western Europe. On the other hand, the experience of revolution had left the conservatives and the tsar himself extremely apprehensive about a possible new outbreak and deeply suspicious of any demands for an increase in the power of the Duma. However, in spite of recurrent and growing industrial unrest – there was a major strike in St Petersburg at the moment of the French president’s visit in July 1914 – the Russian economy had by the outbreak of war expanded remarkably since 1905 and had become increasingly integrated in the global economy and had become competitive with other states.⁵¹ Some political and social stability also seemed to have been attained, especially as a result of the land reform carried out by Pyotr Stolypin, president of the council of ministers from 1906 to 1911, though his assassination in 1911 was perhaps a reminder of how precarious the apparent stability was. Although there was again some talk of ‘revolution’ in 1914, the countryside was quiet after several years of good harvests, the strikes in Moscow and St Petersburg collapsed and the army and the police remained completely loyal to the regime.⁵²

Because of the structure of the Russian governmental system, it is hard to evaluate the relative strength of the various pressures forming Russian foreign policy. The tsar was still ‘autocrat of All the Russias’ (although the liberals had objected to the use of the title).⁵³ Nicholas II was both obstinate and impressionable, sometimes easily swayed by the latest advice he had received, sometimes clinging stubbornly to a decision rather than face argument and confrontation. The council of ministers had no collective responsibility and the ministers individually were not responsible to the Duma but only to the tsar. Moreover, the council remained representative of the traditional Russian elite of the landowning and official classes: of those appointed to it by Nicholas II between 1894 and 1914, over 90 per cent were of noble origin – only 6 per cent came from the professional and commercial classes.⁵⁴ Their influence therefore depended very much on their personalities and on their relations with their colleagues. Nevertheless, the new council used the argument that disasters in Russia’s foreign and imperial policies necessitated their close attention to this sphere, lest the revolutionary ferment of 1905 be reignited.⁵⁵ Stolypin, while president of the council, had been able to carry through his policies and had also tried to work to some extent with the Duma. His successor, Kokovtsov, who had been a competent minister of finance, was increasingly criticized by his colleagues for being insufficiently reactionary and he had lost the confidence of the tsar, or rather, even more important, that of the tsarina, because he had dared to criticize the influence at court of the staret (holy man) Rasputin, a dissolute sectarian monk on whose healing powers and apparent ability to control the haemophilia of the young tsarevich the future of the dynasty was believed by the royal couple to depend. Certainly, Wilhelm II believed that the tsar was too susceptible to the anti-Prussian prejudices of both his wife – the tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria who regarded herself as ‘English’ – and his mother – the Danish princess Maria Feodorovna, whom he believed to be obsessed with revenge on Prussia for the seizure of Schleswig and Holstein.⁵⁶

Kokovtsov was replaced by a former president of the council of ministers, an elderly nonentity, I.L. Goremykin, who was described by a British observer as being ‘acceptable to both the sovereigns for his attitude of a butler, taking instructions to the other servants’,⁵⁷ and who described himself as

like an old fur coat. For many months I have been packed away in camphor. I am being taken out now merely for the occasion, when it is passed I shall be packed away again till I am wanted the next time.⁵⁸

Although he succeeded in maintaining reasonable relations with the Duma, he certainly did not determine the general lines of Russian policy. A minor episode in March 1914 is a good illustration of the confusion within the Russian government. A German newspaper had published an article attacking Russian rearmament and accusing Russia of aggressive intentions. Two replies were published in the Russian papers, one directly inspired by the war minister, Sukhomlinov, the other by the foreign minister, Sazonov. The first said that ‘Russia desires peace but is prepared for war’ and that the Russian army would at once take the offensive if necessary; the second was much more conciliatory and argued that Russo-German friendship should be maintained in spite of the press war. As the British ambassador commented

It is not perhaps surprising that the Ministers of War and Foreign Affairs should advocate different methods of meeting the attack by the German Press; but it is curious that they should both have been received in Audience by the Emperor on the 10th of this month and that two such contradictory articles should have been published two days later.⁵⁹

The tsar was also receiving recommendations of a contrary kind from members of his own family and household (including, of course, Rasputin) as well as from various unofficial advisers. Moreover, however reluctantly, he also had to take account of the opinions of the Duma, where, even after Stolypin had held fresh elections under a much restricted franchise and curtailed its powers, critical opinions were expressed, including comments on the competence of ambassadors and military and naval commanders, even when these were members of the imperial family. But there were also a number of other bodies – councils of representatives of trade and industry and of finance and agriculture, the Council of the United Nobility and others – that were expressing their views and hoping to exercise influence, while a vigorous press reflected the views of the various parties represented in the Duma.

The Fourth Duma was elected in the autumn of 1912 and seemed to provide a basis of support for the existing regime. The two liberal parties – the more conservative Octobrists and the more radical Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) – were divided from each other and among themselves. The former were prepared to accept the limitations of the existing constitution and to work within it, whereas the Kadets were committed to constitutional reform that would give the Duma real power over the council of ministers. Even the most moderate demands for reform were too much for the various conservative groups that formed the largest section of the Fourth Duma; some of them were repeatedly urging the tsar to reduce yet further the powers of parliament and – as some of their German counterparts were pressing on Wilhelm II – to make a coup d’état from above to deal with the opposition once and for all.⁶⁰ This was advice that the tsar was tempted to take, especially after there had been some criticism in the Duma of the influence that Rasputin was exercising at court (although there is no evidence that he had any political role or influence before 1914),⁶¹ but he finally accepted the warning of the majority of his ministers not to act against the constitution. Thus, in 1914 Russia was still an autocracy, but an autocracy in which there was opportunity for the expression of a number of views and a number of channels by which influence could be exerted on the tsar, with whom in the last resort the final decision lay and who believed himself to be directly responsible to God and to his people, who were certainly not in his view the same as their parliamentary representatives. (Indeed, one of the sources of Rasputin’s hold over the imperial family was that the tsar tended to regard him as ‘just a good religious, simple-minded Russian’ who kept him in touch with ‘the tears of the life of the Russian people’.)⁶² Both the tsar and the tsarina believed that they represented the interests of ‘real’ Russia – peasant Russia – against the urbanized liberal democrats of the Duma; when travelling the countryside in the grandiose celebrations of the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913 they were impressed by the crowds of peasants who came out to greet them: ‘You see how cowardly our ministers are. They spend their time frightening the tsar by talking to him of revolution, while it’s enough for us to appear for all hearts to surrender to us.’ The tsarina assured Nicholas that ‘we have seen the true Russia, the Russia that is loyal to us’.⁶³

Although almost everybody in the political class in Russia was convinced of the intimate connection between domestic stability and domestic reform and foreign policy, there were considerable differences of view about what that connection actually was. Thus, there were many on the Right who were suspicious of a close association with France and Britain because of the danger that such an alignment might encourage liberal ideas in Russia, and who would have preferred, in the interest of monarchical solidarity, an alliance with Germany against what they would have called western Jewish liberalism.⁶⁴ The views of this group were expressed most cogently in a famous memorandum presented to the tsar in 1913 by an elderly conservative, P.N. Durnovo, who argued that Russia had no real conflict of interests with Germany, that both were interested in keeping the Poles calm, that Russia had no maritime interests that challenged Germany’s, that their economic interests were closely tied and, finally, that the two of them were representatives ‘of the conservative principle in the civilized world’ against the democratic states of Britain and France.⁶⁵ Other, more populist groups on the Right, such as the Union of Russian Men, favoured the Slavophile doctrine of popular autocracy and wished to revive ‘the intimate relationship between the tsar and his people that they imagined had once existed in old Muscovy’.⁶⁶ These groups extolled the official trilogy of ‘autocracy, Orthodoxy, and nationality’, and lamented the cosmopolitanism of Russian intellectual life and the perfidy of Jews and other non-Russians within the empire. After 1907, Rightists and moderates joined to form the Nationalist Party (mainly from the western borderlands), upholding the unity of the empire, Russian precedence among the various nationalities and opposition to Jewish equality. Many on the Right also believed, with the example of the war with Japan in mind, that war might once again lead to revolution. Stolypin was convinced that it would ‘not be desirable to be drawn into a European war’,⁶⁷ while Kokovtsov told the British ambassador in 1913 ‘that the reports current about the internal situation are much exaggerated, and said that there was nothing to fear so long as peace could be main-tained’.⁶⁸ On the other hand, many conservative nationalists were also convinced that, if Russia were to survive and the autocracy were to be maintained, it must reassert its position as a Great Power to compensate for the humiliation of the defeat by Japan.

After 1909 the Octobrists began to lose power and the party to disintegrate, leading Stolypin to believe that the adoption of more vigorous nationalist policies might enable him to rally together the Right, the moderate Right and the nationalists in support of the government’s policies. Combined with the Octobrist commitment to maintaining Russian prestige and international standing, making them unlikely to oppose such measures, he might be able to rely on majority support in the Duma. Stolypin thus began to promote policies that asserted the rights of Russians over other nationalities, particularly in Poland and Finland. Reform was gradually abandoned in favour of the assertion of Russian ascendancy. Far from producing hesitation and uncertainty in Russia, the success of the regime in quelling widespread public discontent after 1905 revived the government’s self-confidence, engendering ‘a feeling of complacency among much of Russia’s political and social elite: they had vanquished the most serious threat to their position for generations’.⁶⁹ Russia’s ally was less optimistic. French intelligence believed that in the event of a crisis there would be a revolt in Finland, that the Swedes would send an army to assist the Finns and that this scenario would require the Russians to constitute a Baltic army to defend their position.⁷⁰

In spite of these concerns, a few years after what had appeared to be a devastating military defeat in the Far East that rocked the regime to its foundations, Russia’s governing elites believed they had succeeded in strengthening the political and administrative system to the extent that they could once again envision establishing control over Constantinople and the Straits. Thus, although many on the Right favoured the traditional dynastic connections with Germany and Austria for political reasons, the revival of nationalist-imperialist ambitions was likely to lead to conflict with them and greater reliance upon republican France and, possibly, liberal Britain.

The liberals, on the other hand, hoped that a strengthening of the ties with France and Britain would increase the pressures for internal reform; they were also prepared to envisage concessions in Poland, for example, in order to win liberal support in France and Britain, where left-wing opinion had remained critical of the Russian alliance, especially since the curtailment by Stolypin of the initial gains of the 1905 revolution. Both liberals and conservatives believed that Russia had a direct interest in the Balkans, though for rather different reasons. These different attitudes have come to be labelled ‘panslav’ and ‘neoslav’. For the panslavs, in the tradition of their predecessors of the 1870s and 1880s, the aim of Russian policy should be to spread Russian influence to the Straits and to exercise the role of protector of the Christian Slavs so that the Slavs freed from Turkish rule would be wholly dependent on Russia. Politically, the slavophiles were neither liberal nor conservative, but reactionary, looking back to Russia before Peter the Great as their ideal – that is, to the time before Russia attempted to Europeanize and modernize itself. An important section of the liberal intelligentsia rejected this backward-looking vision and preferred to speak of a ‘Russian soul’ that set them apart from the West: they believed that Russia had the potential for a glorious future that would simultaneously liberate them from European influence and the dead hand of the Russian past. They believed that traditional Russian nationalism had failed and that the emergence of the Russian peasant from the legal bondage of serfdom would result in a new, collective soul in a new Russia that would inspire their fellow Slavs.⁷¹ Among this new generation of liberals were some who saw Russia’s relations with the other Slavs in a more flexible way and had visions of Russia taking the lead in a free association of independent Slav peoples. For them, support of Slav aspirations abroad was linked with the idea of reform at home. As a Russian journalist remarked to the French ambassador, ‘Le parti panslaviste est réactionnaire, le parti néoslaviste est constitutionnel (“the panslavist party is reactionary, the neoslavist is constitutional”)’.⁷² The tsar himself was sometimes influenced by similar ideas for the reconstruction of Central Europe. He told a rather bewildered British ambassador in April 1913 that he believed the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire was only a matter of time:

He spoke of the day when we should see a kingdom of Hungary and a kingdom of Bohemia, while the southern Slavs might be absorbed by Serbia, the Roumanians of Transylvania by Roumania and the German provinces incorporated in the German Empire. The fact that Germany would then have no Austria to entangle her in a war about the Balkans would, His Majesty said, make for peace.⁷³

By 1914, therefore, there was an influential body of opinion in Russia convinced that Russia must expand its influence in south-east Europe. There were differences about when Russia might be ready for war; there were differences about whether Russia’s goals were better pursued in cooperation with Germany or with France and Britain; but within the ruling circles of Russia, however apprehensive some politicians were about the effects of war, there was a growing feeling that Russia’s internal development depended on a successful and expansionist foreign policy. The foreign ministry (the Ministerstvo inostrannykh del, or MID) had been working to extend its influence in the Balkans and to encourage the alliance between the two rival Slav states in the Balkans, Bulgaria and Serbia; this alliance had led to the outbreak of the First Balkan War. The victory of the Balkan League states was welcomed by the Russians, and the Duma passed an enthusiastic motion congratulating the Bulgarians on their success. The breakdown of the Balkan alliance and the war between Bulgaria and its former allies made the government all the more anxious to re-establish a new base for Russian influence in the Balkans. The MID tried to persuade the French to make a loan to the Bulgarians, but the Germans got in first. The lack of support shown by Russia’s French allies at the time of the Liman von Sanders’ mission was regarded as a serious blow to Russian policy, and the failure, because of international pressure, to give Serbia total backing in the territorial negotiations at the end of the Second Balkan War convinced many Russians in July 1914, including the tsar himself, that the government’s credit both internally and internationally depended on Russia giving Serbia its unequivocal support this time. If he made any concessions, the tsar believed ‘Russia will never forgive the sovereign’.⁷⁴ For the rest,

If you see me so calm, it is because I have a firm and resolute faith that the fate of Russia, of myself and my family is in the hands of God who has placed me where I am. Whatever happens, I shall bow to His will conscious of having had no other thought than that of serving the country He has entrusted to me.⁷⁵

The complicated balance between the belief that a vigorous foreign policy and even a war might bring out reserves of loyalty to the tsar and the opposite belief that a war might provoke a revolution, between a conservative preference for a traditional alliance of the three emperors (the tsar, the German kaiser and the Austrian emperor) and a liberal hope that an alliance with France and Britain would benefit the cause of domestic reform, means that it is very hard to assess the relative weight of the pressures to which the tsar was subjected. However, by February 1914, when Kokovtsov was replaced by Goremykin as president of the council of ministers, there seems to have been a general belief in government circles that war was inevitable. At a conference on 21 February 1914 detailed plans were discussed for a Russian landing to seize Constantinople in the event of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, though it was hoped that this was not immediately imminent. Sazonov, the foreign minister, pointed out that ‘we could not assume that our operations against the Straits would proceed without a European war’, while the military leaders declared that it would not be possible to launch an attack on the Straits at the same time as fighting on the western front. Nevertheless, ‘a successful outcome to the struggle on our western frontiers would decide the question of the Straits in our favour’.⁷⁶ While they still hoped that it might be possible to seize Constantinople before the outbreak of a European war and agreed to go ahead with plans for such an expedition, it is clear that the Russian foreign minister and military leaders now felt a general war to be very likely and that it might enable them to win their long-desired control of the Straits, even though they would prefer the crisis to be delayed for two or three years so as to complete their preparations.

The immediate background to this meeting was a growing fear that the Balkan situation was still very unstable and that internal developments in Turkey would lead to the final collapse of the Ottoman state. However, more important perhaps was the growing popular belief, as in Germany, of the inevitability of a conflict between Slav and Teuton. For some months, the Russian press had been carrying anti-German articles: for example, at the beginning of 1914, Novoe Vremya, the leading right-wing daily, was writing: ‘The chief object of our foreign policy should from now on be to break the tightening Teutonic ring around us which threatens Russia and the whole of Slavdom with fatal consequences.’⁷⁷

The atmosphere in which decisions on Russian foreign policy were taken was one in which the rational calculations of profit and loss played little part. Vague beliefs, hopes and fears about the consequences of a war and its effect on the internal situation were more important than accurate assessments of Russia’s strategic position, and, since in the comparatively small circle of what can be called public opinion in Russia attitudes towards foreign policy and Russia’s relations with the outside world were inextricably linked with attitudes to the domestic situation, it is hard to distinguish between a ‘primacy of internal policy’ and a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ or even to say which of the opposing influences to which the vacillating and fatalistic tsar was subjected was the more important in the decision for war. Almost more than in the case of any of the other Great Powers, it is difficult to point to any single factor determining Russia’s entry into the war or to fit Russia into any model that can also be applied to the other states that went to war in 1914.

France

The domestic politics of republican France were profoundly different from those of tsarist Russia. There was little debate in France concerning the fundamentals of the republican system, which had been re-established following the collapse of the Second Empire in 1871. Although the party system made politics highly unstable, the system itself was not challenged in any significant way. The period between 1911 and the outbreak of war was a period of considerable political tension not only because industrial unrest, which had reached its peak in the rail strike of 1910, continued to smoulder, but also because French politics were dominated by three major controversies. These were the debate about electoral reform and the proposal to introduce proportional representation, the question of an income tax and, above all, the move to introduce, or rather reintroduce, a three-year term of compulsory military service instead of the two-year period adopted in 1905. The fragmentation of the centre groups in parliament because of these issues meant that between January 1912 and the outbreak of war there were seven different governments and six different prime ministers – a rapid turnover even by the standards of the Third Republic. It was only in the elections of May and June 1914 that the lines appeared, perhaps misleadingly, to become clearer, with a marked swing to the Left and notable gains for the Socialist Party.

Since the Agadir crisis in 1911 there had been a revival of popular nationalism directed against Germany, reawakening memories of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine. As the atmosphere of tension in Europe grew, many Frenchmen became more aware of their restless neighbour across the Rhine and more sensitive than for several years about the lost provinces. The German representatives in Paris were constantly reminded of this by the success in the Paris theatres of patriotic shows with titles such as Coeur de Francaise or Servir or Alsace (in which, as the British ambassador also noticed, the tirades against the Germans were ‘received with rapturous applause’),⁷⁸ and by the nervousness of the French public over episodes such as the forced landing of a German zeppelin near Luneville in April 1913 and the attacks on German businessmen in Nancy that followed. On the other hand, the vociferous opposition to the three-year law and the repeated assertions by the Left that they would resist what they regarded as the threat of militarism might suggest a different conclusion about the state of public opinion in France. Any French government if it was to survive had somehow to base its foreign policy on a balance between these two extremes of opinion.

The revival of popular nationalism had found expression in the election of Raymond Poincaré to the presidency of the republic in January 1913. Although Poincaré’s move from the office of prime minister, which he had held for the past year, was the result of the usual political intrigues and parliamentary manoeuvres, to the French public his election seemed to promise a tough line towards Germany and the assertion of France’s position in Europe. Poincaré was a native of Lorraine, a fact that explains much about his foreign policy before, during and after the war. He was always contemptuous of the foreign ministry and some of the ambassadors and was determined to influence foreign policy himself and to reorganize the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. As prime minister he had aimed at strengthening the army and tightening the alliance with Russia. Although anxious to ensure immediate military action by the Russians in the event of war with Germany, at the same time he wanted to avoid involving France in a war in the Balkans in circumstances that would not be popular in France and would only serve Russian interests. If war was to come, it would have to be over an issue that would appear to the French public as involving a direct threat to France. For this reason, the French government sometimes appeared to the Russians to be rather unreliable allies in the crises in the Balkans or at the moment of the arrival of the German military mission at Constantinople, just as the Russians had seemed to the French to be unreliable allies in the Agadir crisis. Poincaré was convinced that the Russian alliance was essential for France and that, if war was provoked by Germany, France would, with Russian support, stand a chance of recovering the lost provinces. He needed, therefore, to reassure the Russians that, even if France seemed lukewarm about some of Russia’s Balkan concerns, it was nevertheless serious about its obligations to the alliance. This was the reason for the new loan to Russia in 1913, which was intended to enable the Russians to extend their strategic railways; it was also one reason for the alacrity with which the French government seized on the German army increases in January 1913 to expand the period of conscript service; and it perhaps also explains Poincaré’s willingness, after a year as prime minister, to run for the presidency of the republic, even though this might seem to be giving up real political power for purely ceremonial functions. He was convinced that he could produce a mood of national unity and was prepared to use his presidential prerogatives as far as they could possibly be stretched in order to do so. Domestic politics were to be subordinated to foreign policy.

Accordingly, in March 1913 the government announced that it would introduce a bill in the chamber to increase the length of military service to three years. Much was made of the widespread public fear of a mass invasion by the Germans, but the military leaders had more precise anxieties. They were worried that the Germans, with more troops immediately available on mobilization, might be able to launch a sudden attack before the French army was organized and ready to open the all-out offensive envisaged by Plan XVII; it was thus essential for the French to have more trained soldiers actually serving in the army on the outbreak of war. The passage of the bill would also give definite proof to the Russians of France’s loyalty, determination and military capacity.

The bitter public debate that followed seemed to some people, both at the time and subsequently, to reflect a division in French opinion as deep as that over the Dreyfus case. The German ambassador in Paris, for example, reported in June 1914:

The struggle for and against the three years’ service has in fact become identical with the guaranteeing of a strong state system respected at home and abroad or else the socialist state of the future with the breakdown of the concept of patriotism, just as at the time the decision for or against Dreyfus had become identical with declaring allegiance to reaction or to republican progress. France then stood at an important decisive point of internal development which was also bound to affect her foreign policy.⁷⁹

Yet for all the vigour with which the Left opposed the three-year law, the situation was more complicated than it at first appeared to be. Some people were prepared to support the law as a short-term emergency measure to be repealed in due course: the army leaders themselves would have been satisfied with a less drastic increase of the number of men to the colours, and they were worried that they would not have enough barracks available to house the new conscripts. Many socialists, including their leader Jean Jaurès, were in favour of national defence but wanted a measure that would be part of a complete reorganization of the whole system. The supporters of an increase in the size of the army were divided between those who thought that a shorter extension of the period of service would be enough or that the call-up could be more selective, while others were totally opposed to any measure that appeared to distinguish between one class of citizen and another. Moreover, the problem of cost meant that the prolongation of the period of service was closely connected with the need to increase revenue by means of an income tax so that there were, especially among the various radical groups, many people who willed the end but were not prepared to vote the means.⁸⁰

But even if the division of opinion over the three-year law was not as clear-cut as it sometimes seemed, there is no doubt that the result of the 1914 elections was extremely worrying for the supporters of the law and especially for President Poincaré himself, who sometimes talked of resigning if there were any move to repeal the law. In choosing a prime minister in June 1914 he was determined to find one who would, in spite of the socialist gains in the new Chamber, wholeheartedly commit himself to the maintenance of the three-year period of service. However, when Poincaré’s first nominee had been defeated in parliament after only three days in office, the president was forced to settle for René Viviani, a former socialist and now an independent, whose commitment to the cause of the three-year law was somewhat ambiguous. His vacillation, moodiness and inexperience in foreign affairs led Poincaré to criticize him bitterly over the next few weeks: in his diary entry for 27 July 1914, while at sea on the way back from his and Viviani’s visit to St Petersburg, he wrote that he

passed part of the day explaining to Viviani that weakness towards Germany always resulted in complications and that the only way to remove the danger was to show firm perseverence and impassive sangfroid. But he is nervous and agitated and doesn’t stop pronouncing imprudent words or phrases which reveal a black ignorance of matters of foreign policy.⁸¹

Up to the outbreak of the war, the future of the three-year law still seemed to be in doubt, since Viviani’s government, in order to secure the support of the chamber, announced that it envisaged an eventual shortening of the period of service.

Even if the extreme anti-militarism of the previous decade was now on the wane, a sufficient number of people had signed petitions against the three-year law to give the authorities ground for anxiety, while the trade unions and the Socialist Party were, in theory at least, committed to a general strike against war. It is, however, easy to overemphasize the significance of the extreme expressions both of militarism and anti-militarism in France in the three years before the war. Perhaps that shrewd observer of the French political scene, the German ambassador Baron von Schoen, was right when he wrote in February 1914:

The bellicose desire for revenge … is now outmoded. It only exists to a certain extent in theory. The wound of 1871 still burns in all French hearts, but nobody is inclined to risk his or his son’s bones for the question of Alsace-Lorraine, unless circumstances arose which might open up exceptionally favourable, and reasonably comfortable prospects for the venture.⁸²

As Rachel Chrastil has argued, ‘révanche’ does not explain the mood of the French people in the era before the First World War. The link between 1914 and the defeat of 1871 was in fostering the belief ‘that the citizens of a nation could and should prepare for a future conflict’.⁸³

The aim of Poincaré’s policy was to ensure that if war came it would be in a situation that would provide just the ‘exceptionally favourable and reasonably comfortable prospects’ to which the German ambassador referred. In Poincaré’s view and that of the ministers who consulted him assiduously after he had become president, such prospects could only be obtained by strengthening the alliance with Russia and consolidating the ties with Britain. But he was also committed to the creation of a mood of national unity, and the two aims of his policy sometimes appeared to be incompatible. In any case, domestic and foreign policy were inextricably intermixed and it is very hard for the historian to give primacy to one over the other. The opposition to the three-year law and the success of the Left in the elections of 1914 showed how essential it was for any French government to present its policies in a peaceful light. Poincaré’s policy seems to have been accurately summed up in a remark reported by the Russian ambassador in 1912, even though Poincaré himself later denied having made it: ‘France is unquestionably peace-loving: she neither seeks nor desires a war, but the intervention of Germany against Russia would immediately alter this frame of mind.’ ⁸⁴

The limitations on Poincaré’s foreign policy and his freedom of manoeuvre were imposed by the political divisions in the country at large, but the events of July and August 1914 showed that his policy had been after all successful, and that the divisions in French opinion were not as deep as had been feared. The murder of Jaurès on 31 July by a nationalist fanatic, even though Jaurès had publicly supported the government’s handling of the crisis, not only deprived the Left of its most effective leader but also gave Poincaré and Viviani the chance of making sentimental gestures towards the socialists.⁸⁵ When the government decided not to arrest the militant agitators on the Left whose names were on the list of those to be detained when mobilization was declared, it was already clear to them that the strength of anti-militarism had been exaggerated and that mobilization would proceed without interference from socialists or syndicalists. However, these internal divisions had till then made it logical for Poincaré to adopt a passive waiting attitude in order to achieve his goal, so in a sense the initiative had been left to Russia and to Germany to create a situation in which France could decide that the moment was favourable. In fact, the political divisions within France that had produced chronic ministerial instability had also placed the officials of the French foreign ministry at the Quai d’Orsay in the position of being the most powerful and independent in Europe – and they were resolutely pacific throughout the July Crisis.⁸⁶ The French government had not provoked or worked for a war, but Poincaré’s policies aimed at ensuring that when the expected war came it would be under circumstances that offered France the greatest chance of victory.

Great Britain

In Britain, the entente with France had proved to be a popular success and a political asset for the Liberal government – just as that with Russia was attacked by the Left as an abandonment of liberal principles. The Liberal government that had come to power in Britain in 1905 counted among its supporters many who held to the tradition of Richard Cobden, John Bright and to some extent Gladstone himself, and believed that the balance of power was a dangerous concept, that expenditure on armaments was both wasteful and wicked and that Britain’s policy should be to maintain the freedom of trade and to keep itself free of foreign entanglements. Although there had been inroads on these Liberal beliefs, the issue was still very much alive in 1914. There had been bitter debates within the Liberal government about the priorities of expenditure between social welfare and naval construction, and in those tense discussions in the Cabinet in the last days of July 1914 it was uncertain almost to the last minute whether the government might not break up if a decision were taken to go to war on the side of France and Russia.

The British government in the years before 1914 faced a series of internal political crises. There had been a major constitutional conflict caused by the House of Lords’ rejection of the budget, and the consequent passage, in the face of bitter opposition, of a bill to limit its powers. There had been an increase in industrial disputes and signs of a new militancy in the trade unions. The tactics adopted by the radical wing of the movement for women’s suffrage introduced new problems in the administration of justice, since women arrested after violent demonstrations – chaining themselves to railings, disrupting public functions, setting fire to official buildings and to postboxes – then went on hunger strike, obliging the authorities either to feed them forcibly or to release them only in order to rearrest them, both proceedings repugnant to a liberal society and a Liberal government. Finally, the introduction of a bill to grant Home Rule to Ireland led to deadlock over the future of the province of Ulster and to talk of an armed insurrection and the possible disloyalty of British military forces in Ireland. Arno J. Mayer argued that there was a parallel between this situation and that in Germany in that the ‘superpatriots’ who felt threatened by socialists and radicals on the Left joined organizations such as the Tariff Reform League, the Navy League and the National Service League (just as the German Right joined the Pan-German League, the Navy League and the Colonial Society) and vigorously supported a pro-Entente policy. But David French has argued that these groups on the Right, as well as the ministers in Asquith’s Cabinet, believed that a war would produce economic chaos and increase the political dissent that might lead to the breakdown of the public order that they were keen to preserve, and that ‘War might present Great Britain with the very problem they wished to avoid by presenting the working classes with a practical test of their patriotism’.⁸⁷

Conversely, the years immediately prior to the final crisis in 1914 had hardened British Cabinet ministers: they had listened to the dire warnings about economic dislocation arising from labour unrest but had weathered successive storms on that front ‘and managed to stay in the saddle’.⁸⁸ When arriving at their decisions in July ministers saw little to gain by going to war – but little to fear as well. In the years before 1914, it is in fact hard to find any links between these domestic problems in Britain and decisions about foreign policy; and divisions within the government on questions of foreign policy did not always correspond to divisions on other questions. Sir Edward Grey, for example, was regarded by the radicals in the government as taking too hard a line over commitments to France and antagonism to Germany but was criticized by more conservative colleagues for his support of women’s suffrage. Domestic issues tended to distract attention from international affairs so that the conduct of foreign policy was left to the Foreign Office and the professional diplomats; for much of the time criticism of that policy was limited to the small group of radicals whom A.J.P. Taylor called ‘the troublemakers’.⁸⁹ There were disputes within the government about the rival claims of expenditure on naval armaments and expenditure on social services, and, while the Conservative opposition was pressing for still more naval increases, the government’s main problem was with its own radical supporters who called for arms reduction and an understanding with Germany.⁹⁰

At the time of the Agadir crisis in 1911, there was a moment of anxiety in the Liberal party that their leaders were undertaking commitments of which the public was ignorant. ‘There is a considerable amount of discontent against Grey in the Liberal Party’, Lord Sanderson, the retired permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, noted in January 1912. ‘A good deal of it is the inevitable result of the enthusiastic philanthropy which insists in messing about in other people’s affairs which it does not understand. But part also arises from lack of information.’ ⁹¹ Lloyd George later complained bitterly that Grey did not inform the Cabinet about the European situation, but one suspects that at the time Lloyd George did not always pay attention when foreign affairs were being discussed, at least until after the Agadir crisis. Still, Grey sometimes certainly preferred to discuss his policies with a small group of close colleagues rather than in the Cabinet as a whole, and, as a result of his failure to communicate with a wider circle, he was on at least one occasion, in November 1911, obliged to reassure parliament that he had not been committing Britain to go to war without the knowledge of his colleagues and his party:

No British government could embark upon a war without public opinion behind it, and such engagements as there are which really commit Parliament to anything of that kind are contained in treaties and agreements which have been laid before the house. For ourselves we have not made a single secret article of any kind since we came into office.⁹²

Opinions differ as to the extent of Grey’s own disingenuousness and capacity to mislead his colleagues, and his refusal to enquire into the details of what had been arranged by the military leaders has been interpreted both as a sign of incompetence and as evidence of dishonesty. The fact remains that the political pressures to which Grey was most directly subjected were against any policy that might involve Britain in a war on the Continent, even though he himself envisaged circumstances when this might be necessary.

At the outbreak of war the worst domestic problem confronting the British government was that of Ulster, and it was a problem that had direct implications for Britain’s defence policy. Resistance to the government’s proposals for Home Rule for Ireland was growing with the active support of the Conservative opposition in parliament so that a civil war between the Protestant Ulster Unionists, determined to resist government by a Roman Catholic majority in Dublin, and the supporters of Home Rule seemed probable. General Sir Henry Wilson, the director of military operations at the War Office, noted on 31 December 1913: ‘Ulster is rapidly becoming the sole governing and immediate factor in the national life.’ ⁹³ With the coming of the July Crisis, the relationship between Ulster and the international situation was much in Asquith’s mind: ‘We are within measurable, or imaginable, distance of a real Armageddon, which would dwarf the Ulster and Nationalist Volunteers’, he wrote on 24 July. ‘Happily there seems to be no reason why we should be anything more than spectators. But it is a blood-curdling prospect, is it not’?⁹⁴ Two days later he noted, ‘It is the most dangerous situation of the last forty years. It may incidentally have the effect of throwing into the background the lurid pictures of civil war in Ulster.’⁹⁵ This does not, however, suggest that the government’s actions in July 1914 were deliberately intended to use the international crisis to distract attention away from the conflict in Ireland.

The crisis over Ulster reminded the British government how vulnerable Ireland would be in the event of war and what a strain on the loyalty of the subjects of the United Kingdom the Home Rule problem had imposed. The officers of the garrison at The Curragh, the military base outside Dublin, had made their position quite clear early in 1914 when they had threatened to resign their commissions rather than impose by force a solution on the Protestant majority in Northern Ireland. By the middle of 1914 the situation had become even more acute. As far as the south of Ireland was concerned, the government had recognized that the assumptions of five years earlier no longer applied. In 1909 the general commanding in Ireland had written: ‘The time has now come when the Irish soldiers can safely be entrusted with the local defence of Ireland.’⁹⁶ But in 1914 it was accepted that the 24,000 Irish reservists should be used for service abroad, while troops from Britain should go to garrison Ireland. The result was that a substantial portion of the BEF was Irish, and their conduct belied any fears that might still have been felt on the subject.⁹⁷

Still, there was in July 1914 a real threat of revolt in Ireland. On 26 July, when the full gravity of the international situation was becoming apparent, 25,000 German rifles were landed near Dublin. The arms had been bought in Hamburg by the militant Irish nationalist Erskine Childers who was, ironically, the author of the most effective of the popular novels dealing with German machinations against Britain, The Riddle of the Sands. But on the Ulster side, too, activists had been busy buying arms in Hamburg at least as early as January 1914, and in April a cargo of 30,000 rifles had been delivered. Unionist politicians, including members of Parliament, had not been above using phrases such as ‘If the Ulstermen were put out of the Union I would infinitely prefer to change my allegiance right over to the Emperor of Germany or anyone else with a proper and stable government’. Or again: ‘Germany and the German Emperor would be preferred to the rule of John Redmond, Patrick Ford and the Molly Maguires’, a view summed up in the phrase: ‘If Protestant Georgie won’t, then Protestant Willie will.’⁹⁸ In fact, the German government, although following the Irish question with interest and indeed concern, rejected suggestions made in some quarters (notably by Irish Americans) that they should intervene in order to foster the incipient civil war in Ireland. Nevertheless, the notion that the Irish situation would restrain Britain during the July Crisis was a serious miscalculation in both Berlin and Vienna.⁹⁹

The strongest pressures that the Liberal government had to face were pressures for peace, not pressures for war. Grey had never had any doubt in his own mind that, if it came to a conflict between France and Germany, Britain would have to support France. His reasons were based not on internal political pressures but on conventional thinking about foreign policy and Britain’s place as a world power. However, one effect of the British system of government is that it forces ministers to be devious and disingenuous. A liberal statesman in a liberal democracy – and we have had the more recent examples of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939–41 and of Lyndon B. Johnson in the Vietnam War – who is himself convinced that circumstances demand entry into a war, often has to conceal what he is doing from those who elected him. The charge levelled against Grey by the radicals on the left of his party was that those who had voted for a Liberal government had not realized the extent of the commitments in foreign policy that that government had undertaken. However much the British government stressed that the arrangements with the French did not commit Britain to war on the side of France, many of the members of that government believed that they did, but that their supporters would not stand for it if they knew the whole truth. In 1914 the German violation of Belgian neutrality gave the British government the moral grounds they needed for calling on their Liberal followers to support the war. If we look for the responsibility for the First World War in the political and constitutional arrangements of the belligerent states, then the structure of the British government can be held responsible for Grey’s reluctance openly to commit Britain to support France and Russia before he was absolutely convinced he could carry his party with him.

For this reason, his attitude to the staff talks and the naval agreement with France and the naval discussions with Russia was deliberately ambiguous. He had to take account of the political attitudes and traditions within his own party; and the government’s tactics in the crisis were in part determined by the need to reconcile what Grey, Asquith, Haldane and some others believed to be necessary on grounds of foreign policy with the pressures inside the Liberal Party that placed obstacles in the way of that policy. The government’s decision to go to war was based on their view of Britain’s international standing and their belief that it was essential to intervene in order to maintain it. This decision had to be presented to the members of the Liberal Party both inside and outside the government in such a way as to overcome their instinctive repugnance to a policy of involvement on the Continent. In the immediate crisis of July 1914 domestic politics were acting as an obstacle to the execution of foreign policy rather than as a spur to warlike action – which was surprisingly similar to the state of affairs that led Italy to choose neutrality rather than war.

Italy

Italy’s decision to remain neutral in 1914 was at least in part the result of the internal situation, though in any event the government of Antonio Salandra, and especially the foreign minister Antonino di San Giuliano, found ‘public opinion’ a useful pretext to justify Italian policy to Italy’s disillusioned allies. The real political battle for peace or war only began in earnest some two months after the outbreak of the European conflict. Nevertheless, many of the dividing lines in Italian opinion that were hardening between August 1914 and the ‘radiant May’, when Italy entered the war on the side of France and Britain, already existed earlier; indeed, the war for Libya had shown fairly clearly where these divisions lay.

1914 marked the beginning of the end of classical liberalism in Italy, during which the dominant figure was Giovanni Giolitti. It is a period that has been judged critically by many historians: an era of corruption, parliamentary jobbery and trasformismo in the worst sense. Others have seen it as a period in which Giolitti was creating the conditions for Italy’s survival in the twentieth century, educating the electorate – universal male suffrage was introduced in 1912 (although a literacy qualification excluded approximately 35 per cent of them) – allowing the growth of a modern economy and integrating the working class into Italian society. Although Giolitti resigned as prime minister in March 1914 in spite of having a parliamentary majority, as a result of divisions among his supporters, it was expected that he would be back before long, and at his insistence San Giuliano reluctantly stayed on as foreign minister. Even when out of office Giolitti remained the most important parliamentary figure in Italy, so his support for neutrality in July 1914 was of crucial importance.

The foreign policy of the Giolittian era had been one of demonstrating Italy’s position as a Great Power while at the same time avoiding actions that might strain its economic and military capacity. The invasion of Libya had satisfied the desire for prestige and had pleased the increasingly vociferous body of nationalists who were attacking the liberal system as being incapable of asserting Italy’s greatness in the world. On the other hand, the war had been expensive: the immediate cause of Giolitti’s resignation was the need for increased taxation to balance the budget, a proposal criticized both by those who had opposed the war and those who had supported it and who believed that Giolitti had misled the nation by underestimating the cost of the campaign and then acting too slowly to make good the army’s losses.

Salandra’s government, which had replaced that of Giolitti in March 1914, soon faced a domestic challenge that was a reminder both of the country’s unresolved social and economic problems and of the power of the Left. In June 1914 a demonstration against the draft broke out in Ancona; there were clashes with the police and three deaths, and a wave of revolutionary disturbances spread across the country and turned into a general strike in what became known as ‘Red Week’. Railways and newspapers were shut down, self-constituted republics were declared (some of them issuing passports and planting liberty trees, even though they lasted only a few days); 10,000–12,000 troops were called out to quell the disturbances and the class of 1891 was called to the colours.¹⁰⁰

Italian neutrality over the next 10 months strained the Italian economy to the limit: with few raw materials, little investment capital available and a domestic market incapable of absorbing the goods produced by Italian industry, Italy’s economy was dependent upon international trade. Soon after war broke out in July 1914 the combatant states introduced a series of measures to prohibit the export of raw materials needed for their war effort. The price of coal in Italy trebled in the first few weeks of the war and Italian industry was forced to find other sources of raw materials at much greater cost. Previously ‘neutralist’ industrial organizations soon began to favour intervention as a solution to their economic difficulties, and the nationalists who favoured war gradually began to predominate in the Italian parliament.¹⁰¹

The Italian government had been badly shaken by the upheavals of June and was profoundly conscious of how precarious the maintenance of public order was when the July Crisis erupted. Consequently, they were anxious to avoid any policy that might provoke fresh outbreaks of rioting, as intervention on the side of Austria-Hungary might very well do. The politicians believed that if Italy lost the opening battles in a war they could face a revolution at home – which explains why more money went into the building of fortresses along the northern frontier than into the construction of railways that would enable sufficient troops to be sent to mount an offensive at the outbreak of war.¹⁰² Italy’s membership of the Triple Alliance had been an assertion of its position as a Great Power, but popular attitudes were necessarily complicated by the realization that many Italians still lived under Austrian rule in the Trentino and Trieste. The nationalists themselves were divided; even if the conquest of Libya seemed to demonstrate Italy’s success as a colonial power and opened new and wider horizons for Italian imperial ambitions, the fact that the crisis of July 1914 was centred on the Balkans brought the Italians up sharply against the problems outstanding between Italy and the Habsburg Monarchy.

The July Crisis developed so swiftly that there was little time for public opinion to exercise much direct influence, especially as parliament was not in session, and the decisions on Italy’s attitude were taken by San Giuliano and Salandra in some secrecy. As the foreign minister put it, ‘Prudenza, riserbo, segretezza’ – ‘Prudence, reserve, secrecy’ – were the principles on which he was acting.¹⁰³ The decision to remain neutral was for the time being warmly welcomed except by a few individuals such as the ambassadors in Berlin and Vienna who felt personally committed to Italy’s allies and regarded neutrality as a dishonourable betrayal. Those Catholics whose dislike of French liberal anti-clericalism and fear of the expansion of the Slavs and the Orthodox Church had made them sympathize with Austria were nevertheless relieved that Italy was not immediately involved, though they worried, like many people on the Right, that Germany and Austria, if victorious, would make Italy pay for having abandoned its allies. For the moment, however, they could accept that the European war was an act of divine judgement about which they could do very little. Pope Pius X, who had been sympathetic to Austria’s aims in Serbia, died on 20 August. His successor, Cardinal della Chiesa, elected as Pope Benedict XV on 3 September, preached a strict neutrality and hoped to become a mediator and the sponsor of a just peace. The Catholics and the socialists in fact found themselves in a surprisingly similar position since both saw themselves as international forces aiming at a better world. The extreme Left had suffered a setback with the collapse of the general strike in June, but many of their spokesmen, notably Benito Mussolini, the editor of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, were threatening revolution should the government intervene on the side of Germany and Austria. A majority of the Italian socialists saw neutrality as the logical consequence of their own policies and believed that, almost alone among the socialist parties of the major countries, they were remaining true to their internationalist principles.

For a short time, the general acceptance of a policy of neutrality produced a mood of national solidarity just as in the belligerent countries the declaration of war had resulted in a Union Sacrée or a Burgfrieden.¹⁰⁴ This unanimity did not last long. The arguments about the need to intervene in the war were long, complex and painful, while those states involved in the war were trying to win over the Italian government with offers of territorial gains.

The decision taken in April 1915 to enter the war the following month on the side of France, Britain and Russia was taken by Salandra’s government in the face of a majority of members of parliament for whom the risks seemed too high and the outcome too uncertain. It was a decision based on principles of the strictest Realpolitik, by which Salandra had always made it clear he would be guided. He and his foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, looking at the French success in the battle of the Marne and Russian victories in the Carpathians, believed that an Entente victory was in sight in the spring of 1915. And the ‘realist’ assessment in governing circles was backed by an increasingly clamorous body of extra-parliamentary opinion that swept aside Giolitti’s attempts to uphold a policy of neutrality. The triumph of the interventionists, an incongruous alliance of liberals, revolutionaries, nationalists, futurists and ex-socialists, ended, for better or worse, the era of Giolitti and his brand of liberalism. Moreover, the way in which the decision for war was taken, when the king refused Salandra’s resignation even though he could not command a parliamentary majority, showed that the combination of a ruthless policy of raison d’état and effective demonstrations on the streets could sweep Italy into a war in which it was not originally involved and which was to prove much longer, more traumatic and more costly than anyone had imagined during the ‘maggio radioso’ (the ‘radiant May’ of 1915).

The ambiguity of domestic politics

The brief examination in this chapter of the relations between internal and external policies in the main belligerent countries suggests that no single explanatory model is applicable to all of them, and that in almost every case the decision for war was the result of contradictory hopes, fears, inherited attitudes and previous plans rather than of cool and rational calculation of profit and loss. In the short term, considerations of domestic policy obviously played their part, but it was an ambiguous one and differed much between one country and another. In Germany the government was under pressure from the Right, in Britain and France from the Left, so that such estimates as were made about the effects of war on the internal situation were bound to be different. Still, it is true that the war did in fact appear in its first stages to supply a solution to many problems: in Britain the Irish question could be put in suspense (though only for less than two years), and the suffragette agitation faded out. In France the problem of an income tax and fiscal reform could be postponed, as revenue could be raised by patriotic appeals to invest in government war loans, and the problem of their redemption put off for the duration of the war; at the same time, the dispute about the length of military service also disappeared, since every man of military age was mobilized for an indefinite period. Even in Russia, the disruptive effects of war were not immediately confirmed and the hopes that the war might bring out reserves of loyalty to the regime appeared for the time being to be justified. In Germany above all the war seemed to have made Germans forget their differences and produced a temporary mood of solidarity that those who experienced it never forgot.

It is, however, hard to prove that these results were what the leaders of Europe had in mind when they took the decision to go to war. There will for the historian always be a gap between what happened in July 1914 and the general hopes and fears that politicians expressed before that. A detailed examination of the political and strategic decisions taken in the crisis suggests that the motives of statesmen and generals were far less rational and well thought out than the view that they deliberately embarked on war as a way out of their insoluble domestic social and political problems would suggest.

Yet there remain more profound questions about the nature of European society before 1914 and its relationship to the outbreak of the First World War. How far were the decisions of July 1914 the inevitable outcome of the structure of industrial and capitalist society? Were there long-term contradictions in the capitalist world such that they were bound sooner or later to lead to armed conflict? And if so, what was the relationship of these long-term forces to the actual decisions of July 1914 that led to war at that moment and not sooner or later? This is the next approach to the subject that we must consider.

References

· 1  For an excellent discussion of the arguments, see Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ‘Domestic Factors in German Foreign Policy before 1914’, Central European History 6 (1973), pp. 3–43; Mommsen’s own conclusion is that the German government failed to function effectively in 1914, leaving Bethmann unable to resist the influence of the military. See also Michael R. Gordon, ‘Domestic Conflict and the Origins of the First World War: The British and German Cases’, Journal of Modern History 46 (1974), pp. 191–226.

· 2  Stephen L. Harp, Learning to Be Loyal: Primary Schooling as Nation Building in Alsace and Lorraine, 1850–1940 (De Kalb, IL 1998), p. 93.

· 3  For example, by Hans-Ulrich Wehler, especially in Bismarck und der Imperialismus (Cologne 1969) and his article in English, ‘Bismarck’s Imperialism 1862–1890’, Past and Present 48 (1970), pp. 119–55. See also H. Pogge von Strandmann, ‘Domestic Origins of Germany’s Colonial Expansion under Bismarck’, Past and Present 42 (1969), pp. 140–59.

· 4  For example, Erich Eyck, Das persönliche Regiment Wilhelms II (Zurich 1948). For the kaiser’s methods of government, see J.C.G. Röhl, Germany Without Bismarck (London 1967).

· 5  J. von Miquel, Reden, Vol. IV (Halle 1914), pp. 279 ff. See Geoff Eley, ‘Sammlungspolitik, Social Imperialism and the Navy Law of 1898’, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism (London 1986), pp. 110–53.

· 6  Alfred von Tirpitz, Erinnerungen (Leipzig 1919), p. 52. For Tirpitz’s policies, see especially Volker R. Berghahn, Der Tirpitz-Plan (Düsseldorf 1971); also Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War in 1914 (2nd edn, London 1993).

· 7  Berghahn, Tirpitz-Plan, p. 13 and passim.

· 8  Roger Chickering, ‘War, Peace, and Social Mobilization in Imperial Germany: Patriotic Societies, the Peace Movement, and Socialist Labor’, in Charles Chatfield and Peter van den Dungen (eds), Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville, TN 1988), p. 8.

· 9  See Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven, CT and London 1980).

· 10  Gustav Noske, Erlebtes auf Aufstieg und Niedergang einer Demokratie (Offenbach am Main 1947), P. 40.

· 11  John Van der Kiste, Kaiser Wilhelm II: Germany’s Last Emperor (Stroud 1999), p. 153.

· 12  Kreuzzeitung, 3 July 1911, quoted in Fritz Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen (Düsseldorf 1969), p. 121.

· 13  Johannes Lepsius, Albrecht Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and Friedrich Thimme, Die Grosse Politik der Europäischen Kabinette, Vol. XXIX (Berlin 1926), No. 10770, p. 406. (Hereinafter referred to as GP.)

· 14  Quoted in Jean-Claude Allain, Joseph Caillaux: Le Défi Victorieux 1863–1914 (Paris 1978), p. 415.

· 15  Quoted in Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, pp. 145–6.

· 16  GP XXXI, No. 11386, p. 155.

· 17  A. von Tirpitz, Politische Dokumente, Vol. I, Der Aufbau der Deutschen Weltmacht (Stuttgart and Berlin 1924), pp. 318 ff. See also Fischer, Krieg der Illusionen, pp. 188–9.

· 18  Quoted in Konrad H. Jarausch, The Enigmatic Chancellor (New Haven, CT and London 1973), p. 102.

· 19  Quoted in Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War, p. 186.

· 20  G.P. Gooch and Harold Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War 1898–1914, Vol. X (London 1936) IX (2), No. 47, p. 37. (Hereinafter referred to as BD.) See also Jarausch, Enigmatic Chancellor, pp. 141–2.

· 21  BD VII, No. 763, p. 788.

· 22  Fritz Stern, ‘Bethmann Hollweg and the War’, in Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism (New York 1972), p. 267.

· 23  For a study of the Russian/Slavic side of this view, see Troy R.E. Paddock, Creating the Russian Peril. Education, The Public Sphere, and National Identity in Imperial Germany, 1890–1914 (Woodbridge 2010).

· 24  Quoted in Berghahn, Germany and the Approach of War, p. 195.

· 25  James Retallack, Red Saxony: Election Battles and the Spectre of Democracy in Germany, 1860–1918 (Oxford 2017), p. 372. Retallack provides a detailed study of the struggle between social democracy and the Kaiserreich.

· 26  Quoted in Jarausch, Enigmatic Chancellor, pp. 151–2.

· 27  Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann and Imanuel Geiss, Die Erforderlichkeit des Unmöglichen (Hamburger Studien zur neueren Geschichte Band 2: Frankfurt am Main 1965), pp. 22–3.

· 28  David E. Kaiser, ‘Germany and the Origins of the First World War’, Journal of Modern History 55 (1983), pp. 442–74.

· 29  For a discussion of German socialist attitudes before 1914, see especially Dieter Groh, Negative Integration und revolutionärer Attentismus (Frankfurt am Main 1973).

· 30  Mark Hewitson, ‘The Kaiserreich in Question: Constitutional Crisis in Germany before the First World War’, Journal of Modern History 73 (2001), pp. 725–80. In Germany and the Causes of the War (Oxford 2004) Hewitson goes further, arguing that it was Bethmann Hollweg’s confidence of victory over Russia that led to his bellicose policy during the July crisis.

· 31  Leopold von Ranke, Englische Geschichte, quoted in Friedrich Meinecke, Zur Theorie und Philosophie der Geschichte (Stuttgart 1959), pp. 258–9.

· 32  Quoted in Peter Winzen, ‘Prince Bülow’s Weltmachtpolitik’, Australian Journal of Politics and History 22 (1976), p. 230.

· 33  Quoted in Ludwig Dehio, Germany and World Politics in the Twentieth Century (Eng. tr., London 1959), p. 53.

· 34  Niall Ferguson, ‘Public Finance and National Security: The Domestic Origins of the First World War Revisited’, Past and Present 142 (1994), pp. 141–68.

· 35  On the Habsburgs see Paula Sutter Fichtner, The Habsburgs: Dynasty, Culture and Politics (London 2014).

· 36  For comprehensive overviews see John Deak, Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford, CA 2015) and Pieter M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA 2016).

· 37  Steven Beller, Francis Joseph (London 1996), p. 164.

· 38  C.A. Macartney, The Habsburg Empire 1790–1918 (London 1968), p. 768, fn. 1.

· 39  Keith Hitchins, A Nation Affirmed: The Romanian National Movement in Transylvania, 1860–1914 (Bucharest 1999), pp. 144–200.

· 40  Quoted in Ignác Romsics, István Bethlen: A Great Conservative Statesman of Hungary, 1874–1946 (Boulder, CO 1995), p. 56.

· 41  Hitchins, Nation Affirmed, pp. 299–315.

· 42  Gabor Vermes, István Tisza: The Liberal Vision and Conservative Statecraft of a Magyar Nationalist (New York 1985), p. 213.

· 43  On the Bosnian issue see Edin Hajdarpasic, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca, NY 2015).

· 44  On Berchtold see Samuel R. Williamson Jr., ‘Leopold Count Berchtold: The Man who Could have Prevented the Great War’, in G. Bischof, F. Plasser and P. Berger (eds) From Empire to Republic: Post-World War I Austria (New Orleans, LA 2010), pp. 24–51.

· 45  Steven G. Marks, Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia 1850–1917 (Ithaca, NY 1991), pp. 221–2.

· 46  Two excellent overviews of the revolutionary situation in Russia before 1914 are: Stephen A. Smith, Russia in Revolution: An Empire in Crisis, 1890 to 1928 (Oxford 2017) and Mark D. Steinberg, The Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (Oxford 2017).

· 47  Quoted in John A. White, Transition to Global Rivalry: Alliance Diplomacy and the Quadruple Entente, 1895–1907 (Cambridge 1995), p. 212.

· 48  Quoted in Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford 1995), p. 81.

· 49  See Peter Waldron, Governing Tsarist Russia (Basingstoke 2007).

· 50  Peter Waldron, Between Two Revolutions: Stolypin and the Politics of Renewal in Russia (London 1998), pp. 32–6.

· 51  See Wayne Dowler, Russia in 1913 (DeKalb, IL 2010).

· 52  Dominic Lieven, Nicholas II: Twilight of the Empire (New York 1993), p. 186.

· 53  See the useful tables produced by Dominic Lieven in Russia’s Rulers under the Old Régime (New Haven, CT 1989), pp. 27–55.

· 54  Hugh Seton-Watson, The Russian Empire 1801–1917 (Oxford 1967), p. 629; Geoffrey A. Hosking, The Russian Constitutional Experiment: Government and Duma 1906–1914 (Cambridge 1973), pp. 10, 54.

· 55  A monograph by D.M. McDonald studies the nature of this relationship in detail: United Government and Foreign Policy in Russia 1900–1914 (Cambridge, MA 1992); unfortunately for the purposes of this volume, the author is more interested in the effects of foreign policy issues on the administration of government than the reverse.

· 56  Lamar Cecil, ‘William II and his Russian “Colleagues” ’, in Carole Fink, Isabel Hull and MacGregor Knox (eds), German Nationalism and European Response, 1890–1945 (Norman, OK 1985), pp. 117–23.

· 57  Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (London 1939), p. 157.

· 58  Count Vladimir Nikolayevich Kokovtsov, Out of my Past: The Memoirs of Count Kokovtsov (Stanford, CT 1935), p. 439.

· 59  BD X, Part II, No. 611, p. 493.

· 60  George Gilbert, The Radical Right in Late Imperial Russia: Dreams of a True Fatherland? (Abingdon 2016).

· 61  Lieven, Nicholas II, p. 168.

· 62  Pares, Russian Monarchy, p. 157.

· 63  Quoted in Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, Nicholas II: The Interrupted Transition (London 2000), p. 153.

· 64  See Seton-Watson, Russian Empire, pp. 695–6.

· 65  McDonald, United Government and Foreign Policy, pp. 199–200.

· 66  Don C. Rawson, Russian Rightists and the Revolution of 1905 (Cambridge 1995), pp. 226–30.

· 67  Quoted in I.V. Bestuzhev, ‘Russian Foreign Policy February-June 1914’, Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1966), p. 105.

· 68  BD IX (2), No. 611, p. 493.

· 69  Waldron, Between Two Revolutions, p. 184.

· 70  Keith Armes, ‘French Intelligence on the Russian Army on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of Military History 82 (2018), p. 773.

· 71  Robert C. Williams, Russia Imagined: Art, Culture, and National Identity, 1840–1995 (New York 1997), p. 5.

· 72  Georges Louis, Les Carnets, Vol. I (Paris 1926), p. 87, quoted in Erwin Hölzle, Die Selbstentmachtung Europas (Göttingen 1975), p. 49.

· 73  BD IX, Part II, No. 849, p. 690. See also Hölzle, Selbstentmachtung Europas, p. 54.

· 74  Bestuzhev, ‘Russian Foreign Policy’, p. 104.

· 75  Mémoires d’Alexandre Izvolsky (Paris 1923), quoted in L. Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, Vol. II (London 1953), p. 574.

· 76  Die Internationalen Beziehungen im Zeitalter des Imperialismus: Dokumente aus den Archiven der Zarischen und der Provisorischen Regierung, Vol. 1 (German edn, O. Hoetsch (ed.), Berlin 1931), No. 295, pp. 285–6.

· 77  Bestuzhev, ‘Russian Foreign Policy’, pp. 100–1.

· 78  BD II, No. 461, p. 675.

· 79  GP XXXIX, No. 15674, p. 261.

· 80  See the important work of Gerd Krumeich, Armaments and Politics in France on the Eve of the First World War: The Introduction of Three-year Conscription 1913–1914 (Eng. tr., Leamington Spa 1984).

· 81  France, Archives Nationales, Papiers Poincaré, Vol. XXXVI. Notes Journalières Mars-Aoüt 1914. Fonds Nouvelles: Acquisitions franchises, No. 16027, p. 122. James Joll expressed his gratitude to Professor Arno J. Mayer for generously making available to him his transcript of these unpublished notes.

· 82  GP XXXIX, No. 15667, p. 250.

· 83  Rachel Chrastil, Organizing for War: France, 1870–1914 (Baton Rouge, LA 2010), p. 156.

· 84  Quoted in Albertini, Origins of the War, Vol. I (London 1952), p. 373. See also L.C.F. Turner, ‘The Edge of the Precipice: A Comparison between November 1912 and July 1914’, R.M.C. Historical Journal 3 (Canberra 1974).

· 85  On the nationalist movement in France see Robert Lynn Fuller, The Origins of the French Nationalist Movement, 1886–1914 (Jefferson, NC 2012).

· 86  M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898–1914 (Oxford 1993), pp. 302, 307–8.

· 87  David French, ‘The Edwardian Crisis and the Origins of the First World War’, International History Review 4 (1982), p. 220.

· 88  Avner Offer, ‘The Working Classes, British Naval Plans and the Coming of the Great War’, Past and Present 107 (1985), p. 221.

· 89  A.J.P. Taylor, The Troublemakers (London 1957).

· 90  Frank McDonough, The Conservative Party and Anglo-German Relations, 1905–1914 (Basingstoke 2007).

· 91  Quoted in Zara S. Steiner and Keith Neilson, Britain and the Origins of the First World War (2nd edn, London 2003), p. 152.

· 92  Hansard, 5th series, Vol. XXXII, cols 57–8. See also Keith Robbins, Sir Edward Grey (London 1971), pp. 252–3.

· 93  C.E. Callwell, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, Vol. I (London 1927), p. 139. For British military thinking about Ireland, see the valuable work of Ann Vorce, ‘The Role of Ireland in British Defence Planning 1908–1914’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of London 1975).

· 94  H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, selected and edited by Michael and Eleanor Brock (London 1982), p. 123.

· 95  J.A. Spender and C. Asquith, Life of Herbert Henry Asquith, Lord Oxford and Asquith, Vol. II (London 1932), p. 83.

· 96  General Sir N. Lyttleton to R. Haldane, PRO London W032/7081, quoted in Vorce, ‘Role of Ireland’, p. 4.

· 97  We are grateful to the late E.M. Robertson for this information.

· 98  E. Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, Epilogue, Vol. II, The Rule of Democracy, 1905–1914 (London 1934), p. 548, fn. 4.

· 99  Jérôme Aan de Wiel, ‘1914: What will the British do? The Irish Home Rule Crisis in the July Crisis’, International History Review 37 (2015), p. 676.

· 100  William Renzi, In the Shadow of the Sword: Italy’s Neutrality and Entrance into the Great War, 1914–1915 (New York 1987), pp. 51–3.

· 101  Franklin H. Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–1934 (Cambridge 1996), p. 85.

· 102  John Gooch, Army, State, and Society in Italy, 1870–1915 (New York 1989), pp. 174–5.

· 103  DDI 3rd Series, Vol. 1 (Rome 1974), No. 230, p. 134.

· 104  See David Welch, ‘August 1914: Public Opinion and the Crisis’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), A Companion to Europe, 1900–1945 (Oxford 2006), pp. 197–212.