Prelude, 1900-14
I.I. States, Armies, and Navies
1.4. The Balance of Power
Of the eight world powers in 1914, the linchpin of unrestrained militarism was Germany. The reason was not so much the national character as the country’s exceptional dynamism and the central geographic position it occupied; no other power combined those qualities to the same extent. A latecomer among nations, united Germany had been created by the sword in three short, limited, and decisive wars, and this was a fact that nobody either in- or outside its borders was ever allowed to forget. Had not the coronation of Wilhelm I in Versailles been a military ceremony in which Bismarck (who put on uniform for the occasion) was the only civilian present?
Once it had been created, the Reich’s economic development was second only to that of the United States. By 1914, it was producing more steel, the most important raw material on which military power depended, than France and Britain combined.”48
Just as tectonic movements result in earthquakes, so Germany’s growing power vis-a-vis its neighbors was ominous in itself.
Bismarck himself looked at Germany as a status quo nation whose aspirations had been achieved—indeed, his chief concern was to keep the Junkers, the class from which he himself came, in power.
By manipulating the other powers and refraining from attempts at overseas expansion, he managed to keep the pieces in place;
however, his successors proved much less adept at playing the game.
During the last years before 1914, Germany’s rulers were forever moving between saber rattling, as when the kaiser, wearing “shining armor,” promised to support Austria-Hungary in regard to the latter’s annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908–9, and fear of
what might happen if the powers that surrounded their country would unite against it. An antiquated political system that did not re ect the new social realities born out of economic development—
in particular, the growing importance of the working classes—
o ered little help. Some thought that the need to escape this contradiction was the real engine behind Germany’s aspirations to expand its borders, acquire colonies, and increase its power generally.49 Others, such as the British economist John A. Hobson and an obscure Russian agitator by the name of Vladimir I. Lenin, expanded the explanation to account for not only Germany’s actions but also those of all the “capitalist” powers and, in fact, the existence of war as such.
Germany’s hereditary enemy, its Erbfeind as the Germans themselves used to say, was France. The struggle between the ruling houses of Habsburg and Valois (later, Bourbon) for supremacy in Europe had its origins in the sixteenth century—although some would trace it all the way back to the battle of Bouvines in 1214.
Though the chief protagonist on the German side now carried the name Hohenzollern and was based in Berlin rather than Vienna, the last major war that had taken place in Europe, namely that of 1870–
71, was waged over just that issue. The war left la grande nation, as France had been known from the late seventeenth century on, truncated, humiliated, and longing for la revanche; “never speak of it, always think of it,” as Prime Minister Leon Gambetta (1881–82) put it. In French history textbooks, the Prussian eagle was presented as swooping on the Gallic cock and tearing o his feathers.
Until the second half of the nineteenth century, France had been the most populous country west of the Vistula River, easily eclipsing both the German principalities and Britain. Since then, however, it had fallen behind in terms of both demographic and economic resources. Despite their reputation for quick-wittedness, the bulk of the French people proved remarkably conservative. They were reluctant to move from the countryside to the towns; even when they did do so, they showed a strong preference for small family rms and workshops over large-scale corporations. France’s relative
decline meant that the only way it could maintain its position as a great power was by looking for allies. Albeit that its regime was notoriously despotic and reactionary, geography dictated that the most likely ally would be Russia, and in 1894 the two countries did, in fact, conclude a formal treaty.
Russia’s own power had grown signi cantly only from about the eighteenth century, during which it had swallowed most of Poland and gained outlets to the sea in both the north and south, feats that turned it from a remote, almost unknown country into an important player in European politics. As a result, it was able to assume a major role in the post-Napoleonic settlement. In 1815, Tsar Alexander I actually rode into Paris, and for more than thirty years thereafter he and his successor, Nicolas I, acted as the real guarantors of the existing European order. Nevertheless, in terms of internal development, Russia was the most backward of all the Great Powers by far, the majority of its population consisting of illiterate peasants, a legacy of serfdom that was not completely abolished until 1861.
This reluctance to modernize goes some way to explain the setbacks Russia su ered in its war against Japan, and during the earlier Crimean War—when its troops, marching on foot across the country, died in their thousands before ever reaching the theater of operations. Still, Russia was by far the largest and most populous among the European powers, and it clearly had the potential to dwarf everybody else. From the 1890s, the time when it began to industrialize very rapidly, it appeared bent on doing exactly that.
During most of the nineteenth century, rst Russian–Prussian and then Russian–German relations had been amicable; as also manifested by the fact that, in the period from 1909 to 1914, German-made goods formed no less than 42 percent of Russian imports. After about 1880, however, the rise of Southern Slav nationalism in Austria-Hungary, which was supported by Russia, forced Germany to choose another ally. In opting for their Austrian cousins, they drove the Russians into France’s arms.
For over three centuries after 1500, the Empire of the Habsburg family with its capital in Vienna, had occupied center stage in European politics. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the dynastic principle on which it had been built was clearly out of date. Its decay became almost visible; some thought the only factor that still held it together was the highly e cient, German-dominated o cer corps. Economically speaking, as we saw, it was near the bottom of the list, and indeed some of its provinces resembled what we today call developing countries more than they did the thriving, highly industrialized lands farther west. Another source of weakness was the fact that its access to the sea was limited to a piece of the Adriatic coast that could be blocked at the Straits of Otranto. As a result, the empire neither had overseas possessions nor any aspirations to acquire them.
Since 1813–15, when it had played a key role in defeating Napoleon and restoring the Old Order in Europe, the empire had gone from one defeat to another. In the face of the Hungarian rebellion of 1848–49, it had to be saved from collapse by Russian military intervention. In 1859, it lost a major war against France. In 1866, it took another beating at the hands of Prussia and also lost additional provinces to Italy; by that time, so accustomed to defeat had Emperor Franz Josef become that he allegedly selected his commander in chief, Field Marshal Ludwig von Benedek, for no better reason than that he could be trusted to keep the empire from collapsing altogether.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Habsburg Empire, though still ruled by one of the most e cient administrative systems in the world, was being torn apart by the aspirations of Polish, Czech, Slovak, Ruthenian, Romanian, Italian, and, most dangerous of all, Serb nationalists. Despite a lingering resentment that had its origins in the war of 1866, the alliance with Germany was in some respects natural and appeared to give the empire a new lease on life.
At the same time it meant that, should the Southern Yugoslav nationalists continue to stir up trouble, the greatest military power in Europe would be involved.
Situated on the periphery of the system were Britain and Italy.
Having been the rst to industrialize, and having played a key role in Napoleon’s defeat, until 1870 Britain was arguably the greatest power in the world, with an economy that dwarfed everybody else.
As others—Germany and the United States in particular—began catching up, its relative position declined even though, on a per capita basis, it remained the most industrialized country by far.
During the 1890s, Britain, after a series of diplomatic failures, found itself in a state of isolation that, in a typical show of arrogance, it called splendid. Nonetheless, the rst decade of the twentieth century saw Britain busily mending its fences with France (over colonies), Japan (with which it concluded an alliance), Russia (which had long been considered a threat to India), and the US.
At the same time, relations between Britain and Germany, which appeared bent on dominating Europe and whose colonial ambitions were considered dangerous, worsened; in particular, the German decision to build a navy contributed to this result. Britain was in a unique position in that it controlled most of the world’s strategic waterways, including Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, Aden, the Singapore Strait, the Cape of Good Hope, and, through its presence on the Falkland Islands, the Straits of Magellan. Above all, it controlled both the English Channel and the gap between Scotland and Norway. It was therefore able to cut o its enemies’ trade while preserving its own.
By the dawn of the twentieth century, the smallest of the European powers was less than half a century old. Italy had been created with French and some British aid out of a rib of the Habsburg Empire. Later, claiming that France had unfairly stolen Tunisia from it, it arrayed itself on the side of Germany and that of Austria-Hungary When the war broke out in 1914, it nevertheless remained neutral; as the kaiser put it, Italy dropped away “like a rotting pear.” Next, encouraged by British money and promises of territorial gains at the expense of the Austrian-Hungarians and the Turks, it chose sides once more, one of the most vociferous
proponents of the change being a young, rather uncouth agitator by the name of Benito Mussolini.
In 1911, Italy went to war against the Ottoman Empire and succeeded in occupying Libya and the Dodecanese. These events, however, added little to the country’s power and even less to its prestige, and the net result was to detract from Italy’s strength, not add to it. Italy was a fairly small, fairly poor country that did not have what it took to be a Great Power in terms of either population, mineral resources, or industry. What military might it was able to develop was bottled up in the Mediterranean, which its ships could leave and enter only with British permission. The most it could do was subvert world politics to its own purposes and join one side or another in the hope of acting as the balance.
The six European powers interacted very closely, watching for the slightest change in the balance of power and reacting accordingly.
This was much less true of the two extra-European powers, the United States and Japan, which formed worlds unto themselves.
With the largest economy by far, the US had started building a navy second to none. The Spanish-American War of 1898 provided remarkable proof of its ability to wage war simultaneously in places as far apart as Cuba and the Philippines. The exibility the American navy enjoyed in being able to move quickly from the Atlantic to the Paci c and vice versa, through the Panama Canal, in operation just before the outbreak of World War I, only added to its power. On the other hand its army, adapted to long years of ghting Native Americans, was so small as to nearly preclude it as a threat to any of the other world powers. And though American relations with most other powers were reasonable, a tradition dating back to George Washington precluded the United States from forming
“entangling” alliances peacetime. Mutatis mutandis, the powers that faced one another in Europe felt they could deal with one another and ght one another almost regardless of what the US might say or do.
Finally, Japan was a true upstart. Long isolated from the rest of the world, it was only in 1858 that it was opened to trade, and only
in 1867–68 that it adopted its rst modern, nonfeudal political system. From that point on, Japan proved remarkably adept at quickly building its economy and modernizing its armed forces. Its successful war against China in 1895 brought it the respect of the world and convinced at least one other power, Britain, that a Japanese alliance was worth having. To underscore the gains in world prestige that Japan achieved, this was the rst time Britain had entrusted, at least partly, the defense of its far- ung empire to the goodwill of a foreign government. Fighting Russia in 1904–5, Japan bene ted greatly from its alliance with Britain, given that the latter closed the Suez Canal to the Russian Baltic eet and forced it to sail all the way around Africa to the Far East, where it was sunk.
Among the world powers, it would be dangerous for a modern observer to conclude that international relations were any more Hobbe-sian than they have since become or that individual decision makers were particularly more aggressive. If anything, the opposite was the case. This was, after all, a time when Europeans were proud of their civilization, a pride that also proved useful in justifying their dominance over the rest of the world. Following centuries of intermarriage among all the leading families, many rulers were related to one another, forming a sort of international class, its members circulating freely throughout the Continent.
Crown Prince Edward VII of Britain spent much of his time in France, where he could entertain his numerous mistresses without drawing the attention of the public (and, before 1901, his mother).
The July 1914 crisis found the Serb chief of sta , General Putnik, taking the waters in Bohemia—hardly something one would expect from a sworn enemy of the empire. The kaiser’s brother, Prince Henry of Prussia, was on vacation in England and he himself was about to pay his annual visit to Norway. As late as July 1914, the kaiser was still corresponding with his imperial cousin, Tsar Nicholas of Russia, in what became known as the “Willie and Nicky”
exchange. Both wrote in English, and both had often gone behind their ministers’ backs to do so. A few years earlier in the same correspondence, “Willie” had complained about the intrigues
allegedly woven against him by “my royal uncle” (Edward VII); it was as if government were still a family business.
To be sure, there was no shortage of re-eaters. The ones perhaps best remembered by posterity were the Austrian-Hungarian chief of sta , Konrad von Hoetzendorf, and his German opposite number, Hel-muth von Moltke Jr. The former’s attitude, like that of his colleague Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold, must be judged against the clear understanding of both that the empire for which they were responsible was disintegrating and there was little they could do to halt the process. The latter lived in fear of what he saw as growing Russian military power and declared that, the sooner war came, the better for Germany. Still, such people were no more numerous than those with a deserved reputation for moderation.
One was Prime Minister Herbert Asquith of Britain, another Chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg of Germany. Bethmann- Hollweg’s refusal to consider a “peace without annexations” in 1915–16 gave him bad press among subsequent historians, but there was, however, another side to his character. In 1912, the year when Moltke made his declaration in front of the kaiser, Bethmann- Hollweg said he felt “sick of war, the clamor for war, and those eternal armaments.” On pain of rushing toward a catastrophe, he thought, everybody had to calm down again.50 The following year, when the twenty- fth anniversary of Wil-helm’s accession was celebrated, the chancellor made good on his word by naming his sovereign “the peace Emperor.”
Much more ominously, in Britain, Germany, and the United States, the in uence of Social Darwinism was at its peak. Some, including in uential writers with a desire to shock might nd peace boring and long for a nice ght in which they could play out their heroics, as d’Annunzio later did; some of them came closer to anarchism than to nationalism. However, there was also a long line of thinkers, going back at least as far as Hegel, who looked at war as the supreme test by which states and nations proved their right to exist. Whether many people actually read Hegel may be questioned
but there is no doubt that he found numerous followers both in Germany and abroad.51
Indeed, war was considered a perfectly legitimate means of international politics. True, most countries no longer actively sought territorial expansion in Europe, and apparently even the Germans were prepared to accept existing borders, provided they could dominate the continent economically;52 but still, when it came to colonial ambitions, the gloves routinely came o . And if and when shots were red, there would be little doubt about the righteousness of one’s country, since almost everywhere fervent nationalism was considered a virtue, not a sin. The self-styled peace-loving socialist countries had not yet been born, and the day when every country replaced its war ministry with a ministry of defense was still far o . Casting an interesting sidelight upon this entire matter, members of the Japanese government around the turn of the century studied what “civilized” behavior in international relations might mean.
Somewhat to their disappointment, they reached the conclusion that, among “civilized” nations, almost the only factor that mattered was armed force and the readiness to use it.53 Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that, only a few years later, Japan attacked Russia without a declaration of war. Rulers may not have necessarily been eager to slaughter one another, but once the war started they, for the most part, did so with a perfectly good conscience.