The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (39 page)

With France isolated, Austria-Hungary cowed, and the intermediate “buffer states” of southern Germany and Italy now merged into their larger national units,
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the only substantial checks to the further aggrandizement of Germany seemed to lie with the independent “flank” powers of Russia and Great Britain. To British administrations oscillating between a Gladstonian emphasis upon internal reforms (1868–1874) and a Disraelian stress upon the country’s “imperial” and “Asian” destinies (1874–1880), this issue of the European equilibrium rarely seemed very pressing. This was probably not the case in Russia, where Chancellor Gorchakov and others resented the transformation of their Prussian client-state into a powerful Germany; but such feelings were mingled with the close dynastic and ideological sympathies that existed between the courts of St. Petersburg and Potsdam after 1871, by the still-pressing Russian need to recover from the Crimean War disasters, by the hope of obtaining Berlin’s support for Russian interests in the Balkans, and by the renewal of interest in central Asia. On the whole, however, the flank powers’ likelihood of intervening in the affairs of west-central Europe would depend heavily upon what Germany itself did; there was certainly no need to become involved if it could be assumed that the second German Reich was now a satiated power.
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This assurance Bismarck himself was all too willing to give after 1871, since he had no wish to create a
gross-deutscher
(“Greater German”) state which incorporated millions of Austrian Catholics, destroyed the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and left Germany isolated between a vengeful France and a suspicious Russia.
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It therefore seemed to him far safer to go along with the creation of the Three Emperors’ League (1873), a quasi-alliance which stressed the ideological solidarity of the eastern monarchies (as against “republican” France) and simultaneously cemented over some of the Austro-Russian clashes of interest in the Balkans. And when, during the “war-insight” crisis of 1875, indications arose that the German government might be contemplating a preventive war against France, the warnings from both London and (especially) St. Petersburg convinced Bismarck that there would be strong opposition to any further alterations in the European balance.
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For internal-political as well as external-diplomatic reasons, therefore, Germany remained within the boundaries established in 1871—a “half-hegemonial power,” as some historians have termed it—until its military-industrial growth and the political ambitions of a post-Bismarckian leadership would once again place it in a position to question the existing territorial order.
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However, to pursue that transformation would take us well into the
next chapter
. For the period of the 1870s and into the 1880s, Bismarck’s own diplomacy ensured the preservation of the status quo which he now deemed essential to German interests. The chancellor was partially helped in this endeavor by the flaring-up, in 1876, of another acute phase in the age-old “eastern question” when Turkey’s massacre of the Bulgarian Christians and Russia’s military response to it turned all attention from the Rhine to Constantinople and the Black Sea.
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It was true that the outbreak of hostilities on the lower Danube or the Dardanelles could be dangerous even to Germany, if the crisis was allowed to escalate into a full-scale Great Power war, as seemed quite possible by early 1878. However, Bismarck’s diplomatic skills in acting as “honest broker” to bring all the Powers to a compromise at the Congress of Berlin reinforced the pressures for a peaceful solution of the crisis and emphasized again the central—and stabilizing—position in European affairs which Germany now occupied.

But the great Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878 also did a great deal for Germany’s
relative
position. While the small Russian fleet in the Black Sea performed brilliantly against the Turks, the Russian army’s 1877 campaigning revealed that its post-Crimean War reforms had not really taken effect. Although bravery and sheer numbers produced an eventual Russian victory over the Turks in both the Bulgarian and the Caucasian theaters of operation, there were far too many examples of “extremely inadequate reconnaissance of the enemy positions, lack of coordination between the units, and confusion in the high command”;
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and the threat of British and Austrian intervention on Turkey’s behalf compelled the Russian government, once again aware of a looming bankruptcy, to agree to compromise on its demands by late 1877. If the Pan-Slavs in Russia were later to blame Bismarck for supervising the Berlin Conference which formalized those humiliating concessions, the fact remained that many among the St. Petersburg elite were more than ever aware of the need to maintain good relations with Berlin—and even to reenter, in a revised form, another Three Emperors’ understanding in 1881. Similarly, although Vienna had threatened to break away from Bismarck’s controls at the peak of the crisis in 1879, the secret Austro-German alliance of the following year tied it again to German strings, as did the later Three Emperors’ alliance of 1881, and the Triple Alliance between Berlin, Vienna, and Italy of 1882. All of these agreements, moreover, had the effect of drawing the signatories away from France and placing them in some degree of dependence upon Germany.
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Finally, the events of the late 1870s had reemphasized the longstanding Anglo-Russian rivalry in the Near East and Asia, which inclined both of those powers to look toward Berlin for benevolent neutrality, and turned public attention even further away from Alsace-Lorraine
and central Europe. This tendency was to become even stronger in the 1880s, when a whole series of events—the French acquisition of Tunis (1881), the British intervention in Egypt (1882), the wholesale “scramble” for tropical Africa (1884 onward), and the renewed threat of an Anglo-Russian war over Afghanistan (1885)— marked the beginnings of the age of the “New Imperialism.”
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Although the longer-term effects of this renewed burst of western colonialism were going to profoundly alter the position of many of the Great Powers, the short-term consequence was to emphasize Germany’s diplomatic influence within Europe and thus aid Bismarck’s endeavors to preserve the status quo. If the peculiarly tortuous system of treaties and countertreaties which he devised during the 1880s was not likely to produce lasting stability, it nonetheless seemed to ensure that peace prevailed among the European powers at least in the near future.

With the important exception of the American Civil War, the period 1815–1885 had not witnessed any lengthy, mutually exhausting military struggles. The lesser campaigns of this age, like the Franco-Austrian clash in 1859 or the Russian attack upon Turkey in 1877, did little to affect the Great Power system. Even the more important wars were limited in some significant ways: the Crimean War was chiefly a regional one, and concluded before Britain had fully harnessed its resources; and the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars were over in one season’s campaigning—a remarkable contrast to the far lengthier conflicts of the eighteenth century. No wonder, then, that the vision which military leaders and strategic pundits entertained of Great Power struggles in the future was one of swift knockout victories
à la Prussienne
in 1870—of railways and mobilization schedules, of general staff plans for a speedy offensive, of quick-firing guns and mass, short-service armies, all of which would be brought together to overwhelm the foe within a matter of weeks. That the newer, quick-firing weapons might, if used properly, benefit defensive rather than offensive warfare was not appreciated at the time; nor, alas, were the portents of the American Civil War, where a combination of irreconcilable popular principles and extensive terrain had made for a far lengthier and deadlier conflict than any short, sharp European conflict of this period.

Yet all of these wars—whether fought in the Tennessee Valley or the Bohemian plain, in the Crimean Peninsula or the fields of Lorraine—pointed to one general conclusion: the powers which were defeated were those that had failed to adopt to the “military revolution” of the mid-nineteenth century, the acquisition of new weapons, the mobilizing
and equipping of large armies, the use of improved communications offered by the railway, the steamship, and the telegraph, and a productive industrial base to sustain the armed forces. In all of these conflicts, grievous blunders were to be committed on the battlefield by the generals and armies of the winning side from time to time—but they were never enough to cancel out the advantages which that belligerent possessed in terms of trained manpower, supply, organization, and economic base.

This leads to a final and more general set of remarks about the period after about 1860. As noted at the beginning of this chapter, the half-century which followed the battle of Waterloo had been characterized by the steady growth of an international economy, by large-scale productive increases caused by industrial development and technical change, by the relative stability of the Great Power system and the occurrence of only localized and short-term wars. In addition, while there had been some modernization of military and naval weaponry, new developments within the armed forces were far less than those occurring in civilian spheres exposed both to the Industrial Revolution and to constitutional-political transformation. The prime beneficiary of this half-century of change had been Britain; in terms both of productive power and of world influence, it probably reached its peak in the late 1860s (even if the policies of the first Gladstone ministry tended to conceal that fact). The prime losers had been the nonindustrialized peasant societies of the extra-European world, which were able to withstand neither the industrial manufactures nor the military incursions of the West. For the same fundamental reason, the less industrialized of the European Great Powers—Russia, the Habsburg Empire—began to lose their earlier place, and a newly united nation, Italy, never really made it into the first rank.

From the 1860s, moreover, these trends were to intensify. The volume of world trade and, even more important, the growth of manufacturing output increased swiftly. Industrialization, formerly confined to Britain and certain parts of continental Europe and North America, was beginning to transform other regions. In particular, it was boosting the positions of Germany, which in 1870 already possessed 13 percent of world
industrial
production, and of the United States, which even then had 23 percent of the total.
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Thus the chief features of the international system which was emerging by the end of the nineteenth century were already detectable, even if few observers could fully recognize them. On the other hand, the relatively stable Pentarchy of the post-1815 Concert system was dissolving, not merely because its members were more willing to fight against each other by the 1860s than a few decades earlier, but also because some of those states were two or three times more powerful than others. On the other hand, Europe’s own monopoly of modern industrial production was being
broken across the Atlantic. Steam power, railways, electricity, and other instruments of modernization could benefit any society which had both the will and the freedom to adopt them.

The absence of major conflicts during that post-1871 period in which Bismarck dominated European diplomacy may have suggested that a new equilibrium had been established, following the fissures of the 1850s and 1860s. Yet away from the world of armies and navies and foreign offices, far-reaching industrial and technological developments were under way, changing the global economic balances more swiftly than ever before. And it would not be too long before those alterations in the productive/industrial base would have their impacts upon the military capacities and external policies of the Great Powers.

     I
n the winter of 1884–1885, the Great Powers of the world, joined by a few smaller states, met in Berlin in an attempt to reach an agreement over trade, navigation, and boundaries in West Africa and the Congo and the principles of effective occupation in Africa more generally.
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In so many ways, the Berlin West Africa Conference can be seen, symbolically, as the zenith of Old Europe’s period of predominance in global affairs. Japan was not a member of the conference; although modernizing swiftly, it was still regarded by the West as a quaint, backward state. The United States, by contrast,
was
at the Berlin Conference, since the issues of trade and navigation discussed there were seen by Washington as relevant to American interests abroad;
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but in most other respects the United States remained off the international scene, and it was not until 1892 that the European Great Powers upgraded the rank of their diplomatic representatives to Washington from minister to ambassador—the mark of a first-division nation. Russia, too, was at the conference; but while its interests in Asia were considerable, in Africa it possessed little of note. It was, in fact, in the second list of states to be invited to the conference,
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and played no role other than generally giving support for France against Britain. The center of affairs was therefore the triangular relationship between London, Paris, and Berlin, with Bismarck in the all-important middle position. The fate of the planet still appeared to rest where it had seemed to rest for the preceding century or more: in the chancelleries of Europe. To be sure, if the conference had been deciding the future of the Ottoman Empire instead of the Congo basin, then countries such as Austria-Hungary and Russia would have played a larger role. But that still would not gainsay what was reckoned at the time to be an incontrovertible truth: that Europe was the center of the world. It was in this same period that the Russian general Dragimirov would declare that “Far Eastern affairs are decided in Europe.”
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