The Sleepwalkers (29 page)

Early in January 1905 a French delegation travelled to Fez in the Moroccan interior to demand control over the Moroccan army and police; the Sultan refused. On 31 March 1905, Kaiser Wilhelm II made a surprise visit to the city of Tangier. Amid delirious cheers from the population of the city, who saw in the German sovereign a welcome counterweight to the French, Wilhelm rode to the German legation, gave the cold shoulder to the third secretary of the French legation, who had welcomed him to Morocco ‘in the name of M. Delcassé', and made a speech in which he asserted that German commercial and economic interests, together with the independence and integrity of Morocco, should be maintained.
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After scarcely two hours in the city, he returned to his ship and sailed off.

In the short term, this spectacular exercise in gesture politics was a great success. The landing prompted outrage in France, but the British showed no interest in intervening and after a phase of mutual threats and brinkmanship, the French government opted to pursue a peaceful resolution. Théophile Delcassé was dismissed and his policy of provocation temporarily discredited; his responsibilities were assumed by the new and inexperienced French premier Maurice Rouvier, who proposed bilateral negotiations over the future of Morocco. But the Germans, unwisely in retrospect, tried to press their advantage, turning down Rouvier's proposal and insisting instead that the dispute be resolved at an international conference, as required under the terms of the treaty of 1881. The request was eventually granted, but the German triumph was shortlived. At the conference that convened in the Spanish port town of Algeciras in January 1906, the quasi-independence of Morocco was confirmed in general terms, but the German negotiators failed to gain any support from the other great powers (except for the Austrians) for their further proposals regarding the internationalization of the Moroccan police and financial institutions. Britain, Italy and Spain, who had all been bought off through compensation deals and Russia, which had been promised a further French loan in return for its support, sided firmly with France. The Russian delegates travelled to Algeciras with instructions to support ‘energetically' every French proposal.
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The uselessness of the Triple Alliance was revealed for all to see. It was, it turned out, a gross error to seek the multilateral resolution of an issue that had already been resolved by France bilaterally with most of the interested powers. The German policy-makers had bungled. On 5 April 1906, Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow, chief architect of the German policy on Morocco, turned white and collapsed in the Reichstag shortly after making a speech on the outcome of Algeciras. He was to remain in convalescence until October.
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The efforts of the German government to probe eastern and western options as a means of overcoming German isolation were thus a resounding failure. The Anglo-French Entente was strengthened rather than weakened by the German challenge to France in Morocco.
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In the east too, the opportunities created for Germany by the Russo-Japanese War turned out to be illusory. The eastern option was shut off for the foreseeable future in the summer of 1907, when Britain and Russia signed a treaty resolving all their disputes over Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet.

The Convention of 1907 was not driven by hostility towards, or fear of, Germany. It was rather the other way around: since Russia posed the greater threat to Britain across a greater range of vulnerable points, it was Russia that must be appeased and Germany that must be opposed. This had been the dominant British thinking on a rapprochement with Russia since before the turn of the century and it remained valid after the Convention was signed. In March 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge put the matter succinctly. ‘We have no pending questions with Germany except that of naval construction,' he told Sir Arthur Nicolson, who would soon succeed him, ‘while our whole future in Asia is bound up with maintaining the best and most friendly relations with Russia. We cannot afford to sacrifice in any way our entente with Russia, even for the sake of a reduced naval programme.'
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The same point can be made for the Russian decision-makers who agreed the Convention: this was not, for them, a policy directed against Germany, but rather a retrenching move designed to secure breathing space for domestic consolidation or (depending on whom you asked) greater freedom of external action. Of particular interest was the link between a deal over Persia and the prospect of British support for improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. For Izvolsky and his ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, the Straits question was ‘the core of the Convention' and the key to securing favourable revision of Russian access rights at a ‘suitable time' in the near future.
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In other words: while the new international system that emerged from 1907 chiefly disadvantaged Germany, we should not assume that this outcome faithfully reflected the designs that brought it about. Only in the case of France can one speak of a policy that consistently assigned a high priority to containing Germany. It makes more sense to think of this array of agreements as the European consequence of world-historical transitions – the Sino-Japanese War and the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the fiscal burdens imposed by African conflicts and the Great Game in Central Asia, the retreat of Ottoman power in Africa and south-western Europe, and the rise of the China Question, meaning not just the great-power competition there but also the high levels of Chinese domestic turbulence that resulted. Germany's ‘restlessness' and its parvenu importuning were part of the picture, but they were perceived within a field of vision that encompassed broader concerns. The once widely held view that Germany caused its own isolation through its egregious international behaviour is not borne out by a broader analysis of the processes by which the realignments of this era were brought about.
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In fact the causal relationship between antagonism to Germany and the new alliance system ran to some extent in the other direction: it was not that antagonism to Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. In Russia's case, for example, the victory of Japan in the East and the provisional settlement of the imperial quarrel with Britain in Central Asia inevitably refocused foreign policy on the sole remaining theatre in which it could still pursue an imperial vision – the Balkans, an area where conflict with Austria-Hungary and, by extension, Germany was going to be difficult to avoid. The old factional divide within the Russian foreign policy community between ‘Asianists' and ‘Europeanists' was resolved in the latter's favour. Under Izvolsky and Sazonov, Europeanists, who tended to distrust Germany and to favour good relations with Britain and France, always occupied a majority of the key positions.
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The Anglo-French Entente likewise neutralized the anti-British sentiment that before 1904 had intermittently diluted the Germanophobia of French statesmen.

Particularly striking is the case of Britain. It is astonishing how aggressively a number of key British policy-makers responded to the German challenge to French penetration of Morocco. On 22 April 1905, Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne informed the English ambassador in Paris that he believed the Germans might seek a port on the West African coast in compensation for the French seizure of Morocco and that England was prepared to join with France ‘in offering strong opposition to this proposal'.
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The British ambassador in Paris was none other than Sir Francis ‘the Bull' Bertie, Viscount of Thame, the former parliamentary under-secretary who had browbeaten the German chargé d'affaires Eckardstein with threats of war over the Transvaal. In passing Lansdowne's message of support to Delcassé, who had heard nothing of German designs on a Moorish port, Bertie used much firmer language, conveying the sense of a categorical and unconditional support for French measures: ‘The Government of His Britannic Majesty,' the French Foreign Office was told, ‘considers that the conduct of Germany in the Moroccan question is most unreasonable in view of the attitude of M. Delcassé, and it desires to accord to His Excellency all the support in its power.'
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In a private conversation with Delcassé, Bertie stiffened the foreign minister's back with belligerent talk; a day or so later the foreign minister informed a close associate that France's position was now impregnable, using language that recalled Bertie's earlier threats to Eckardstein:

[Germany] knows that she would have England against her. I repeat that England would back us to the hilt and not sign peace without us. Do you think that the Emperor Wilhelm can calmly envisage the prospect of seeing his battle fleet destroyed, his naval commerce ruined and his ports bombarded by the English fleet?
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There were militant signals from other parts of the British decision-making establishment as well. General Grierson, director of military operations, accompanied by his deputy, made a personal inspection tour of the Franco-Belgian borderlands in March 1905 in order to appraise conditions for the landing of a British expeditionary force. In April, the First Sea Lord, Sir John ‘Jackie' Fisher, who had been ‘longing to have a go' at the Germans since the beginning of the crisis, went so far as to propose that the British navy deploy to the Kiel Canal and land an expeditionary force on the coast of Schleswig-Holstein.
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These strikingly belligerent responses had nothing to do with the rights or wrongs of the position adopted by Germany vis-à-vis the French penetration of Morocco; they resulted from the apprehension that Germany was testing the strength of the new Entente, which was founded, after all, on an agreement to exchange British dominance in Egypt for French dominance in Morocco.

The accession of Sir Edward Grey to the office of foreign secretary in December 1905 consolidated the influence of an emergent anti-German faction within the British Foreign Office. Grey's associates and subordinates supplied him with a steady stream of memos and minutes warning of the threat posed by Berlin.
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Dissenting voices within the Foreign Office were marginalized. Dispatches from British envoys in Germany that went against the grain of the dominant view, like those filed by Lascelles, De Salis and Goschen in Berlin, were plastered with sceptical marginalia when they reached London. By contrast, the reports of Sir Fairfax Cartwright in Munich and later Vienna, which never failed to put the maximum negative spin on contemporary developments in Germany and Austria, were welcomed with accolades: ‘An excellent and valuable report in all respects', ‘Most interesting and well worth reading', ‘An interesting and suggestive despatch', ‘A most able despatch', ‘Mr Cartwright is a shrewd observer', ‘a thoughtful review of the situation', and so on.
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In the ‘official mind' of British foreign policy, the history of Anglo-German relations was reconceived as a black record of German provocations. The Foreign Office junior clerk G. S. Spicer came to believe that Germany had been pursuing ‘a line consistently unfriendly to the interests of Great Britain' since the days of Bismarck.
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Looking back in later years, Grey was inclined to view the two decades between 1884 and his instalment in office as an era of fundamentally misguided concessions to an implacable foe.
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‘Vague and undefined schemes of Teutonic expansion' were imputed to the German leadership.
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The Germans were accused of seeking to establish a dictatorship over the continent, of ‘deliberately aiming at world predominance', of wanting, as Bertie put it in the practical language of an Eton boy, to ‘push us into the water and steal our clothes'.
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In November 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge described Germany as ‘the only aggressive Power in Europe'.
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Repeated, mantra-like, at every possible opportunity in dispatches, letters and departmental minutes, such assertions merged to form a new virtual reality, a way of making sense of the world.

Why did these people become so hostile to Germany? Did the Germans behave ‘worse' than the other powers, bullying and pushing in situations where other powers found a more emollient and biddable modus operandi? It is difficult, of course, in an environment where subjective impressions counted for so much and the norms of acceptable behaviour were so variable, to determine exactly how ‘provocative' specific styles and initiatives were. Was the Kruger telegram more provocative than the baldly worded Grover Cleveland message, sent by Washington at around the same time to discourage British incursions into Venezuela? Was the seizure of Kiaochow more provocative than the American acquisition of the Canal Zone or the creation of a Russian protectorate over Mongolia? Was Germany's blundering pursuit of a diplomatic triumph at Agadir more provocative than the unilateral measures by which France broke with the Franco-German Morocco Agreement in 1911 (see
chapter 4
)? Perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. The Germanophobes were rarely very specific about their case against the Germans. They spoke in general terms of the vaunting ambition and bullying ‘demeanour' of Germany, the unpredictability of the Kaiser and the threat German military prowess posed to the European balance of power, but they were coy about identifying actual German offences against good international practice.

The fullest account of British grievances can be found in a famous Memorandum on the Present State of British Relations with France and Germany composed by Eyre Crowe, then senior clerk in the Western Department at the Foreign Office, in January 1907. Crowe was one of the most extraordinary figures in the British foreign-policy world. His father had worked for the British consular service, but his mother and his wife were both German, and Crowe himself, born in Leipzig, was seventeen and not yet fluent in English when he first visited England to cram for the Foreign Office entrance exam. Throughout his life, he spoke English with what contemporaries described as a ‘guttural' accent – one subordinate recalled being dressed down with the words ‘what you have wr-r-ritten on this r-r-report is utter r-r-rot'. The perception that Crowe, though admirably efficient and industrious in his handling of departmental business, remained irredeemably Germanic in style and attitude ensured that he never ascended as far through the ranks of the service as his talent warranted. Despite or perhaps in part because of these personal attributes, Crowe became one of Whitehall's most implacable opponents of a rapprochement with Germany.