The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (46 page)

Fisher became First Sea Lord and the Navy's professional head in October 1904.
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He was determined to match the French and Russians in the Mediterranean, where Britain's imperial communications were most vulnerable, and was passionately committed to equipping the Navy with the fast, armoured ‘all big gun’ warships made possible by technical advance. The price, as Fisher saw with brutal realism, was the scrapping of large numbers of older, less powerful ships – ‘too weak to fight, too slow to run away’ – and the concentration of resources and manpower in a modern battle-fleet in European waters. In December 1904, Selborne announced a drastic redeployment. The South Atlantic station was wound up, the China, East Indies and Australian stations effectively merged. In place of the scattering of cruisers around the world, four cruiser squadrons, kept mainly in Europe, would be ready ‘to show the flag in imposing force, wherever it may be deemed to be politically or strategically advisable’.
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In the following year, the five battleships on the China station were brought home. Large numbers of gunboats, Fisher's ‘bugtraps’, were swept away. The dreadnought age had dawned.

The naval policies initiated by Selborne and Fisher were a response to the weakness revealed by Britain's isolation during the South African War and the growth in German, French and Russian sea-power. By 1907, the strategic situation had markedly improved, or so it seemed. The threat of a Franco-Russian attack had all but disappeared; the danger of a combined assault by the three great European powers had vanished. The reason lay in diplomatic success and vicarious military good fortune. In April 1904, Salisbury's successor as foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, at last succeeded where Salisbury had failed in persuading France to agree to a comprehensive settlement of outstanding disputes in the imperial sphere. At the heart of the ‘Entente Cordiale’ was the mutual recognition of each other's primacy in two zones of great diplomatic sensitivity: Egypt, where the British ‘temporary occupation’ had been an open sore in Anglo-French relations since 1882; and Morocco, whose proximity to French Algeria made its external connections a matter of intense concern to governments in Paris. The British hoped that the Anglo-French entente would open the way to an agreement with Russia, the real threat to their position in India and East Asia. The prospect looked bleak, and when Russia and Japan (Britain's regional partner in East Asia) went to war in 1904 over the future of Korea and Manchuria, the danger of an Anglo-Russian clash briefly seemed acute. But, in a dramatic reversal of expectations (Fisher expected Russia to beat Japan),
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Russian naval power was shattered at the battle of Tsushima – Japan's Trafalgar – in May 1905. The British regained a clear margin of naval superiority over Germany, France and Russia combined. In 1907, the Tsarist government, weakened by defeat and revolution, accepted a diplomatic compromise in Persia and Central Asia – where friction with Britain had been greatest – that left southern Persia and Afghanistan, the ‘gates to India’, firmly in the British sphere.
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The Anglo-Russian entente completed the rapprochement between London and its long-standing rivals in the Outer World. Meanwhile, in the diplomatic crisis of 1905–6, when Germany had tried to disrupt the Anglo-French agreement over Morocco and revive British isolation, the new alignment had held firm – just.

The promise of a new international equilibrium did not last long. By the end of 1908, there was growing alarm in Britain at the open challenge now posed by the ship-building programme of the German navy. While fears about the German plans were somewhat exaggerated, the schedule for dreadnought construction by Germany's Mediterranean allies, Italy and Austria-Hungary, meant that a new round of the arms race had begun. In February 1909, the Asquith cabinet agreed to build eight new dreadnoughts, four more than their original estimate, on the assumption that proof would be forthcoming of German plans. By March, a full-blown ‘scare’ was under way, rapidly reaching Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
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An agitation sprang up in Australia to give a dreadnought to the Royal Navy.
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The New Zealand government offered two dreadnoughts. The Canadian government under Laurier compromised with a scheme for a Canadian Naval Service.
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At a special imperial conference on defence held in July, the British Admiralty urged the formation of dominion ‘fleet units’, recognising that, in the Pacific dominions, public opinion would demand some local control over the ships for which it had paid – even if they came under Imperial command in time of war. But the centre-piece of British policy was the remorseless drift towards a single-minded concentration on the naval race with Germany. Already in 1909, the Admiralty had quietly accepted that it could no longer match the two next strongest naval powers combined (the ‘two power standard’) and must settle instead for a margin of 60 per cent over Germany. By 1912, even this looked ambitious as a new German naval law was broached. When the Haldane Mission failed to reach agreement with Berlin on a standstill, the need to preserve superiority in the decisive battleground of any Anglo-German naval war – the North Sea – forced the Asquith government into a strategic revolution.

The revolution was a naval withdrawal from the Mediterranean announced in July 1912 by Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty. The most powerful ships of the Mediterranean fleet were to be redeployed to the North Sea: the rest would be no match for the Austrian or Italian dreadnoughts of Germany's allies. To protect her vast Mediterranean interests, her marine highway to the East and the naval approaches to Egypt, Britain would rely instead on the goodwill of France, whose Atlantic squadron was transferred from Brest to Toulon in September. The clear implication was a deepening commitment to the support of France in any European conflict – the subject of secret ‘military conversations’ between the two general staffs since the Moroccan crisis of 1905–6. Britain's army, like her navy, now seemed to be focused not on the defence of a far-flung empire, but on deterring a German bid for primacy in Europe.

On the face of it, the change in Britain's strategic fortunes since the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899 had been dramatic. Indeed, the new pattern of world politics suggested that between 1900 and 1914 Britain and its world-system had experienced a sharp phase of relative decline. The symptoms seem obvious. In regions once thought vital to British interests, their protection had been left to others or to luck. Once, governments in London had cut a lordly dash, treating European diplomacy with insouciance and basing British power on seaborne self-reliance. Now they had been dragged into the European maelstrom as reluctant players in a volatile game of competing alliances. The Army had been remodelled for convenient deployment on the European mainland, almost unthinkable before 1900. The old priorities of global power had shrunk to a continental commitment. Britain could no longer afford the luxury of ‘splendid isolation’ because British opinion would no longer pay for it. Indeed, as great power competition hotted up, British industrial power had slipped back. In a period of relative economic decline, the strain of upholding a worldwide pre-eminence and safeguarding the regional security of the British Isles had become too great. Over-extension abroad and under-performance at home forced a strategic change. The question was: if Britain gave up its role as the strategic guardian of the British system, how long would it be before its cohesion began to falter, its subject peoples became restless and its enemies closed in?

Plausible in its own terms, this description is too apocalyptic. ‘Splendid isolation’ was a romantic fiction. An active diplomacy in Europe had always been vital to imperial interests: nowhere more so than in Egypt and the Near East. It was certainly true that there had been a fundamental shift in the theory and practice of British grand strategy. There was a new strategic setting. Britain's world interests were less secure. The margin of safety was narrower. The brittle alignments and fractious diplomacy of pre-1914 Europe can be seen with hindsight to foreshadow a catastrophic war. But the scale of pre-war change should not be exaggerated. The real question was not whether there had been a relative decline from some imaginary benchmark of mid-Victorian ‘primacy’, but whether the British were still strong enough to protect their system against rival powers – by whatever means. To answer this properly, and to take a more realistic view of Edwardian strategy, requires some account of the wider geopolitical scene.

Britain in world politics

The new shape of world politics after 1900 affected all the great powers competing to be ‘world states’. To none of them did it offer unequivocal advantage, or a clear road to primacy and hegemonic status. Each faced political risks at home and abroad that drastically reduced the scope for forceful action on the international stage. This applied to Germany, Russia and the United States, the powers that were best placed to take the initiative. Germany was the strongest. A sustained programme of naval expansion had made it the principal threat to British sea-power. Germany's foreign trade had expanded rapidly and its new merchant fleet, like its navy, was second only to Britain's. German investment had begun to penetrate regions like Latin America, long the preserve of British capital.
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Not surprisingly, in some naval, shipping and colonial circles, as well as among conservatives hostile to the liberal capitalism with which London was so closely identified, antagonism to Britain was commonplace. But, while German policy was committed to the Tirpitz plan, and a high seas fleet strong enough to enforce neutrality on Britain in the event of continental war, there was little enthusiasm in Berlin for a frontal assault on the British system. German diplomacy shifted uneasily between Bismarckism and the
Weltpolitik
favoured by the Kaiser. The Bismarckian tradition looked coolly on imperial self-assertion and the German nationalism with which it was associated. For Bismarck, the gravest threat to the new German Empire had been the growth of national feeling among the subject peoples of Eastern and Central Europe: Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Ukrainians and South Slavs.
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Hence German security required good relations between the three great imperial monarchies ruling over this vast multi-ethnic
Mitteleuropa
: the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanovs. British goodwill should be cultivated as a counterpoise to France whose hope of
revanche
and the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine made it the joker of European diplomacy. This more conservative view of German interests grew stronger in the last years before 1914. After 1909, there was no question of outbuilding Britain in dreadnoughts, not least because the revenue base of the German central government was much more limited than that of its British counterpart.
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As the means to imperial expansion, the high seas fleet became a broken reed. Meanwhile, the fate of
Mitteleuropa
had become more pressing – and Austro-Russian antipathy more dangerous. By the time of the First Balkan War (1912–13), Berlin was anxious to mend its fences with London and came to terms over the future disposal of Portugal's colonies (should Lisbon's bankruptcy bring them on the ‘market’) and the railway line to the Persian Gulf (the
Bagdadbahn
). But one crucial element of
Weltpolitik
remained embedded in German policy. The Kaiser's government refused to abandon its naval programme without the promise of British neutrality in a European conflict. It was exactly the concession which (as we shall see) the logic of Edwardian diplomacy was bound to reject.

The novelty and seriousness of Germany's naval challenge – and the reason why it aroused so fierce a reaction in Britain – was that it threatened to nullify the British claim to be a great power in Europe, a claim founded ultimately on the possession of sea-power. But for more than a century it had been the insidious threat of Russian expansion that had haunted British thinking on imperial defence. What made Russia so dangerous, thought the policy-makers, was its ability to exert pressure on four different regions of great strategic or commercial importance to Britain: the maritime corridor between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (the ‘Straits’); Persia and the Persian Gulf; Afghanistan and the inner Asian frontiers of India; and North China and Peking. In British eyes, the danger was compounded by the brute scale of Russia's resources, especially in manpower, and the erratic, inscrutable processes of Russian policy. In a secretive hothouse atmosphere, periodically scorched by the gusts of pan-Slav emotion, rival court camarillas competed for the Tsar's capricious sympathy. Careerist soldiers, unscrupulous concessionaires and religious mystics touted their reckless projects amid grandiloquent talk of the Romanov mission. With so insatiable and unpredictable a power, the partition diplomacy that was Salisbury's forte stood little chance of success. This was a gloomy and misleading view of the Russian polity. But it reflected the feeling of impotence in the face of the northern leviathan: the ‘invulnerable power’ of Selborne's warning, the ‘inland tyranny’ immune to naval chastisement in Lord Salisbury's regretful phrase. It was fuelled by the paranoid fear that a Russian attack on the Indian frontier would spark a second Mutiny and bring down the Raj from within. It was grudging acknowledgment that Russian empire-building was on a scale as vast as Britain's and that the colonising drive, celebrated by Russian historians as much as by British, had accelerated in the late nineteenth century. As its railways reached further, tightening its grip on its vast peripheries, Russia's domination of North Asia seemed certain to grow.
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