The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (43 page)

Its time for revenge came ten years later, when its Korean and Manchurian ambitions clashed with those of czarist Russia.
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While naval experts were impressed by Admiral Togo’s fleet when it destroyed the Russian ships at the decisive battle of Tsushima, it was the general bearing of Japanese society which struck other observers. The surprise strike at Port Arthur (a habit begun in the 1894 China conflict, and revived in 1941) was applauded in the West, as was the enthusiasm of Japanese nationalist opinion for an outright victory, whatever the cost. More remarkable still seemed the performance of Japan’s officers and men in the land battles around Port Arthur and Mukden, where tens of thousands of soldiers were lost as they charged across minefields, over barbed wire, and through a hail of machine-gun fire before conquering the Russian trenches. The samurai spirit, it seemed, could secure battlefield victories with the bayonet even in the age of mass industrialized warfare. If, as all the contemporary military experts concluded, morale and discipline were still vital prerequisites of national power, Japan was rich in those resources.

Even then, however, Japan was not a full-fledged Great Power. Japan had been fortunate to have fought an even more backward China and a czarist Russia which was militarily top-heavy and disadvantaged by the immense distance between St. Petersburg and the Far East. Furthermore, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 had allowed it to fight on its home ground without interference from third powers. Its navy had relied upon British-built battleships, its army upon Krupp guns. Most important of all, it had found the immense costs of the war impossible to finance from its own resources and yet had been able to rely upon loans floated in the United States and Britain.
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As it turned out, Japan was close to bankruptcy by the end of 1905, when the peace negotiations with Russia got under way. That may not have been obvious to the Tokyo public, which reacted furiously to the relatively light terms with which Russia escaped in the final settlement. Nevertheless, with victory confirmed, Japan’s armed forces glorified and admired, its economy able to recover, and its status as a Great Power (albeit a regional one) admitted by all, Japan had come of age. No one could do anything significant in the Far East without considering its response; but whether it could expand further without provoking reaction from the more established Great Powers was not at all clear.

Two factors ensured that the rise of imperial Germany would have a more immediate and substantial impact upon the Great Power balances than either of its fellow “newcomer” states. The first was that, far from emerging in geopolitical isolation, like Japan, Germany had arisen right in the center of the old European states system; its very creation had directly impinged upon the interests of Austria-Hungary
and France, and its existence had altered the relative position of
all
of the existing Great Powers of Europe. The second factor was the sheer speed and extent of Germany’s further growth, in industrial, commercial, and military/naval terms. By the eve of the First World War its national power was not only three or four times Italy’s and Japan’s, it was well ahead of either France or Russia and had probably overtaken Britain as well. In June 1914 the octogenarian Lord Welby recalled that “the Germany they remembered in the fifties was a cluster of insignificant states under insignificant princelings”;
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now, in one man’s lifetime, it was the most powerful state in Europe, and still growing. This alone was to make “the German question” the epicenter of so much of world politics for more than half a century after 1890.

Only a few details of Germany’s explosive economic growth can be offered here.
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Its population had soared from 49 million in 1890 to 66 million in 1913, second only in Europe to Russia’s—but since Germans enjoyed far higher levels of education, social provision, and per capita income than Russians, the nation was strong both in the quantity and the quality of its population. Whereas, according to an Italian source, 330 out of 1,000 recruits entering its army were illiterate, the corresponding ratios were 220/1,000 in Austria-Hungary, 68/1,000 in France, and an astonishing 1/1,000 in Germany.
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The beneficiaries were not only the Prussian army, but also the factories requiring skilled workers, the enterprises needing well-trained engineers, the laboratories seeking chemists, the firms looking for managers and salesmen—all of which the German school system, polytechnical institutes, and universities produced in abundance. By applying the fruits of this knowledge to agriculture, German farmers used chemical fertilizers and large-scale modernization to increase their crop yields, which were much higher per hectare than in any of the other Great Powers.
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To appease the Junkers and the peasants’ leagues, German farming was given considerable tariff protection in the face of more cheaply produced American and Russian foodstuffs; yet because of its relative efficiency, the large agricultural sector did not drag down per capita national income and output to anything like the degree it did in all the other continental Great Powers.

But it was in its industrial expansion that Germany really distinguished itself in these years. Its coal production grew from 89 million tons in 1890 to 277 million tons in 1914, just behind Britain’s 292 million and far ahead of Austria-Hungary’s 47 million, France’s 40 million, and Russia’s 36 million. In steel, the increases had been even more spectacular, and the 1914 German output of 17.6 million tons was larger than that of Britain, France, and Russia combined. More impressive still was the German performance in the newer, twentieth-century industries of electrics, optics, and chemicals. Giant firms like Siemens and AEG, employing 142,000 people between them, dominated
the European electrical industry. German chemical firms, led by Bayer and Hoechst, produced 90 percent of the world’s industrial dyes. This success story was naturally reflected in Germany’s foreign-trade figures, with exports tripling between 1890 and 1913, bringing the country close to Britain as the leading world exporter; not surprisingly, its merchant marine also expanded, to be the second-largest in the world by the eve of the war. By then, its share of world manufacturing production (14.8 percent) was higher than Britain’s (13.6 percent) and two and a half times that of France (6.1 percent). It had become the economic powerhouse of Europe, and even its much-publicized lack of capital did not seem to be slowing it down. Little wonder that nationalists like Friedrich Naumann exulted at these manifestations of growth and their implications for Germany’s place in the world. “The German race brings it,” he wrote. “It brings army, navy, money and power.… Modern, gigantic instruments of power are possible only when an active people feels the spring-time juices in its organs.”
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That publicists such as Naumann and, even more, such rabidly expansionist pressure groups as the Pan-German League and the German Navy League should have welcomed and urged the rise of German influence in Europe and overseas is hardly surprising. In this age of the “new imperialism,” similar calls could be heard in every other Great Power; as Gilbert Murray wickedly observed in 1900,
each
country seemed to be asserting, “We are the pick and flower of nations … above all things qualified for governing others.”
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It was perhaps more significant that the German ruling elite after 1895 also seemed convinced of the need for large-scale territorial expansion when the time was ripe, with Admiral Tirpitz arguing that Germany’s industrialization and overseas conquests were “as irresistible as a natural law”; with the Chancellor Bülow declaring, “The question is not whether we want to colonize or not, but that we
must
colonize, whether we want it or not”; and with Kaiser Wilhelm himself airily announcing that Germany “had great tasks to accomplish outside the narrow boundaries of old Europe” although he also envisaged it exercising a sort of “Napoleonic supremacy,” in a peaceful sense, over the continent.
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All this was quite a change of tone from Bismarck’s repeated insistence that Germany was a “saturated” power, keen to preserve the status quo in Europe and unenthused (despite the colonial bids of 1884–1885) about territories overseas. Even here it may be unwise to exaggerate the particularly aggressive nature of this German “ideological consensus”
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for expansion; statesmen in France and Russia, Britain and Japan, the United States and Italy were also announcing
their
country’s manifest destiny, although perhaps in a less deterministic and frenetic tone.

What
was
significant about German expansionism was that the country either already possessed the instruments of power to alter the status quo or had the material resources to create such instruments.
The most impressive demonstration of this capacity was the rapid buildup of the German navy after 1898, which under Tirpitz was transformed from being the sixth-largest fleet in the world to being second only to the Royal Navy. By the eve of war, the High Seas Fleet consisted of thirteen dreadnought-type battleships, sixteen older ones, and five battlecruisers, a force so big that it had compelled the British Admiralty gradually to withdraw almost all its capital-ship squadrons from overseas stations into the North Sea; while there were to be indications (better internal construction, shells, optical equipment, gunnery control, night training, etc.) that the German vessels were pound for pound superior.
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Although Tirpitz could never secure the enormous funds to achieve his real goal of creating a navy “equally strong as England’s,”
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he nonetheless had built a force which quite overawed the rival fleets of France or Russia.

Germany’s capacity to fight successfully on land seemed to some observers less impressive; indeed, at first sight, the Prussian army in the decade before 1914 appeared eclipsed by the far larger forces of czarist Russia, and matched by those of France. But such appearances were deceptive. For complex domestic-political reasons, the German government had opted to keep the army to a certain size and to allow Tirpitz’s fleet substantially to increase its share of the total defense budget.
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When the tense international circumstances of 1911 and 1912 caused Berlin to decide upon a large-scale expansion of the army, the swift change of gear was imposing. Between 1910 and 1914, its army budget rose from $204 million to $442 million, whereas France’s grew only from $188 million to $197 million—and yet France was conscripting 89 percent of its eligible youth compared with Germany’s 53 percent to achieve that buildup. It was true that Russia was spending some $324 million on its army by 1914, but at stupendous strain; defense expenditures consumed 6.3 percent of Russia’s national income, but only 4.6 percent of Germany’s.
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With the exception of Britain, Germany bore the “burden of armaments” more easily than any other European state. Furthermore, while the Prussian army could mobilize and equip millions of reservists and—because of their better education and training—actually deploy them in front-line operations, France and Russia could not. The French general staff held that their reservists could only be used behind the lines;
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and Russia possessed neither the weapons, boots, and uniforms to equip its theoretical reserve army of millions nor the officers to supervise them. But even this does not probe the full depths of the German military capacity, which was also reflected in such unquantifiable factors as good internal lines of communication, faster mobilization schedules, superior staff training, advanced technology, and so on.

But the German Empire was weakened by its geography and its diplomacy. Because it lay in the center of the continent, its growth
appeared to threaten a number of other Great Powers simultaneously. The efficiency of its military machine, coupled with Pan-German calls for a reordering of Europe’s boundaries, alarmed both the French and the Russians and drove them closer to each other. The swift expansion of the German navy upset Britain, as did the latent German threat to the Low Countries and northern France. Germany, in one scholar’s phrase, was “born encircled.”
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Even if German expansionism was directed overseas, where could it go without trespassing upon the spheres of influence of other Great Powers? A venture into Latin America could only be pursued at the cost of war with the United States. Expansion in China had been frowned upon by Russia and Britain in the 1890s and was out of the question after the Japanese victory over Russia in 1905. Attempts to develop the Baghdad Railway alarmed both London and St. Petersburg. Efforts to secure the Portuguese colonies were checked by the British. While the United States could apparently expand its influence in the western hemisphere, Japan encroach upon China, Russia and Britain penetrate into the Middle East, and France “round off” its holdings in northwestern Africa, Germany was to go empty-handed. When Bülow, in his famous “hammer or anvil” speech of 1899, angrily declared, “We cannot allow any foreign power, any foreign Jupiter to tell us: ‘What can be done? The world is already partitioned,’ ” he was expressing a widely held resentment. Little wonder that German publicists called for a redivision of the globe.
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To be sure, all rising powers call for changes in an international order which has been fixed to the advantage of the older, established powers.
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From a
Realpolitik
viewpoint, the question was whether this particular challenger could secure changes without provoking too much opposition. And while geography played an important role here, diplomacy was also significant; because Germany did not enjoy, say, Japan’s geopolitical position, its statecraft had to be of an extraordinarily high order. Realizing the unease and jealousy which the Second Reich’s sudden emergence had caused, Bismarck strove after 1871 to convince the other Great Powers (especially the flank powers of Russia and Britain) that Germany had no further territorial ambitions. Wilhelm and his advisers, eager to show their mettle, were much less careful. Not only did they convey their dissatisfaction with the existing order, but—and this was the greatest failure of all—the decision-making process in Berlin concealed, behind a facade of high imperial purpose, a chaos and instability which amazed all who witnessed it in close action. Much of this was due to the character weaknesses of Wilhelm II himself, but it was exacerbated by institutional flaws in the Bismarckian constitution; with no body (like a cabinet) collectively possessing responsibility for overall government policy, different departments and interest groups pursued their aims without any check from above or ordering of priorities.
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The navy thought almost solely
of a future war with England; the army planned to eliminate France; financiers and businessmen wished to move into the Balkans, Turkey, and the Near East, eliminating Russian influence in the process. The result, moaned Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in July 1914, was to “challenge everybody, get in everyone’s way and actually, in the course of all this, weaken nobody.”
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This was not a recipe for success in a world full of egoistic and suspicious nation-states.