The Sleepwalkers (24 page)

Not everyone in Berlin was persuaded of the wisdom of this course. Given the aggressive tone of the Russian press and the increasingly confrontational flavour of German–Russian relations, many were sceptical of the value of the Reinsurance Treaty. Even Bismarck's son, Herbert, secretary of state for the Foreign Office, doubted the value of the latest treaty with Russia. ‘If the worst came to the worst', Bismarck Junior confided to his brother, the Reinsurance Treaty might ‘keep the Russians off our necks for 6–8 weeks'.
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Others, particularly within the military, succumbed to a mood of paranoia and began calling for a preventive war on the Russia Empire. An anti-Bismarck faction emerged within the senior echelons of the administration, driven by, among other things, a growing frustration with the baroque complexity and inner contradictions of the chancellor's diplomacy. Why, the critics asked, should the Germans undertake to protect Austria-Hungary against Russia and Russia against Austria-Hungary? No other power behaved like this; why should Germany always be hedging and balancing, why should it alone among the great powers be denied the right to an independent policy founded upon its own interest? In the eyes of the anti-Bismarck
fronde
, the chancellor's remarkable web of transcontinental commitments looked less like a system than a creaking Heath-Robinsonian contraption, a flimsy joist-work of ‘plasters and patches' designed to avoid the pressing choices that confronted the German Empire in an increasingly dangerous world.
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It was in response to this current of feeling that Bismarck's successor, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, allowed the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia to lapse in the spring of 1890.

With the non-renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia, the door was open for a Franco-Russian rapprochement. But there were still many obstacles. The autocrat Alexander III was an unpalatable political partner for the republican French political elite – and the converse was equally true. It was also doubtful whether Russia would gain much from an alliance with France. After all, in a serious conflict with Germany, the Russians would probably in any case be able to count on French support; why should they sacrifice their freedom of action in order to secure it? Were war to break out between Russia and Germany, it was virtually inconceivable that the French government would simply stand aside. At the very least, the Germans would be obliged to maintain a substantial defensive force on the French frontier, a measure that would reduce the pressure on the Russian front – and these advantages could be had without the inconvenience of a formal treaty. Although France and Russia shared an interest in opposing the imperial designs of Britain, their spheres of influence on the imperial periphery were too far apart to permit close cooperation. The French were not in a good position to support Russian objectives in the Balkans, and it seemed doubtful that Russia would ever gain from supporting French objectives in, say, North Africa. On some questions, Russian and French interests were diametrically opposed: it was French policy, for example, to block Russian designs on the Turkish Straits that might ultimately compromise French influence in the Eastern Mediterranean – this was an area where common interests grouped France with Britain, rather than Russia.
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It was also difficult to see why the Russians should compromise their good relations with Germany. There were periodic tensions between the two empires, most importantly over the question of German tariffs on Russian grain imports, but little in the way of direct clashes of interest. Russia's arguments with Berlin arose for the most part from the Balkan rivalry with Vienna. And the very fact of German power seemed an argument for tethering the two neighbours together, especially in the sphere of Balkan policy, where it was hoped that a good understanding between St Petersburg and Berlin might have a restraining effect on Vienna. This was the formula that had intermittently worked in the era of the Three Emperors' Leagues. German neutrality was thus potentially more useful to Russia than French support. The Russians had long recognized this – this is why they had chosen to base their continental security policy on pacts with Germany in the first place. And this was why Tsar Alexander III, though he felt no personal sympathy for Germany or the Germans, had turned a deaf ear to the raging of the press and pushed ahead with the Reinsurance Treaty in 1887.

Why, then, did the Russians welcome French overtures in the early 1890s? The Germans certainly facilitated the reorientation of Russian policy by declining to renew the treaty, despite the offer of improved terms from the pro-German Russian foreign minister, Nikolai Giers. The modest German army bill of June 1890, which increased the peacetime strength of the armed forces by 18,574 men, also played a part inasmuch as, coming on the heels of non-renewal, it generated a sense of threat in St Petersburg. The departure of Bismarck and the increasing political prominence of the excitable Kaiser Wilhelm II, whom Tsar Alexander described as a ‘rascally young fop', raised unsettling questions about the future orientation of German foreign policy.
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The prospect of large French loans on good terms was also attractive. But the crucial catalyst lay elsewhere, in Russian fears that Britain was about to join the Triple Alliance.

The early 1890s were the highpoint of pre-war Anglo-German rapprochement. The Heligoland–Zanzibar Treaty of 1 July 1890, by which the British and the Germans exchanged or ceded various African territories and Germany acquired the tiny North Sea island of Heligoland, triggered alarm in St Petersburg. Russian anxiety surged in the summer of 1891, when the renewal of the Triple Alliance and a visit by the German Kaiser to London prompted Germanophile effusions in the British press. Britain, trumpeted the
Morning Post
, had in effect ‘joined the Triple, or rather the Quadruple Alliance'; England and Germany, the
Standard
observed on 11 July 1891, were ‘friends and allies of ancient standing' and future threats to European peace would be met ‘by the union of England's naval strength with the military strength of Germany'.
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Press cuttings of this stripe fattened the dispatches of the French and Russian ambassadors in London. It seemed that England, Russia's rival in the Far East and Central Asia, was about to join forces with her powerful western neighbour and, by extension, with Austria, her rival on the Balkan peninsula. The result, as the French ambassador in St Petersburg warned, would be a ‘continental rapprochement between the Cabinets of London and Berlin' with potentially disastrous consequences for Russia.
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The apparently deepening intimacy between Britain and Germany threatened to fuse Russia's Balkan predicament with the tensions generated by its bitter global rivalry with Britain – a rivalry that was played out in multiple theatres: Afghanistan, Persia, China, and the Turkish Straits. To balance against this perceived threat, the Russians put aside their reservations and openly pursued an arrangement with France. In a letter of 19 August 1891 to his ambassador in Paris, Giers, who had earlier pressed for renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty with Germany, set out the thinking behind the quest for an arrangement with France: it was the renewal of the Triple Alliance in combination with the ‘more or less probable adhesion of Great Britain to the political aims that this alliance pursues', that had motivated Russia and France to seek ‘an exchange of ideas to define the attitude [. . .] of our respective governments'.
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The Definition of Understanding signed between the two states in the summer of 1891 duly incorporated Giers's reference to the threat posed by British accession to the Triple Alliance. A Franco-Russian military convention followed on 18 August 1892 and two years later the two countries signed the fully-fledged alliance of 1894.

Two points about this sequence of events deserve emphasis. The first is that the motives for forming this alliance were complex. While the desire to contain Germany was the key factor for Paris, the Russians were more concerned with blocking Austria-Hungary in the Balkans. But both powers were also deeply concerned at what they saw as a growing intimacy between Britain and the Triple Alliance. For the Russians in particular, whose foreign policy was at this time moderately Germanophile, it was the global confrontation with the British Empire that topped the agenda, not hostility to Berlin. There was, to be sure, a vein of vivid Germanophobia in parts of the Russian leadership – Nikolai Giers was horrified to be told by Tsar Alexander III that if a war were to break out between Russia and Austria, the aim of the Franco-Russian Alliance would be to ‘destroy' Germany in its current form and replace it with ‘a number of small weak states'.
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But on the whole, Russian hostility to Germany was still primarily a function of Germany's relationship with Austria and of its supposedly deepening link with Britain. As late as 1900, supplementary military provisions were added to the Franco-Russian treaty, stipulating that if an Anglo-Russian war broke out, France would move 100,000 men to the Channel coast, while if an Anglo-French war broke out, Russia would move troops to the Indian frontier along railways that Russia promised to improve with the aid of French finance.
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Secondly, it is worth noting the novel quality of the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894. By contrast with the earlier alliances of the European system, such as the Dual and Triple Alliances and the League of the Three Emperors, this one came into life as a military convention, whose terms stipulated the combined deployment of land forces against a common enemy (a naval convention was added in 1912).
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The aim was no longer to ‘manage adversarial relations'
between
alliance partners, but to meet and balance the threat from a competing coalition. In this sense, the Franco-Russian Alliance marked a ‘turning-point in the prelude to the Great War'.
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The formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance did not in itself make a clash with Germany inevitable, or even likely. The alliance soon acquired an anchorage in the popular culture of both countries, through the festivities associated with royal and naval visits, through postcards, menus, cartoons and merchandising.
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But the divergences in French and Russian interests remained an obstacle to close collaboration: throughout the 1890s, French foreign ministers took the view that since the Russians were unwilling to fight for the return of Alsace-Lorraine, the alliance with St Petersburg should impose only minimal obligations on France.
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The Russians, for their part, had no intention of allowing the alliance to alienate them from Germany; on the contrary, they saw it as placing them in a better position to maintain good relations with Berlin. As Vladimir Lamzdorf, chief assistant to the Russian foreign minister, put it in 1895, the purpose of the alliance was to consolidate Russia's independence of action and to guarantee France's survival, while at the same time restraining her anti-German ambitions.
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During the first decade of the alliance, Russian policy-makers – chief among them the Tsar – were preoccupied not with Central or south-eastern Europe, but with the economic and political penetration of northern China. More importantly, the shared suspicion of
Britain
that had helped to bring about the Franco-Russian Alliance also prevented it – for a time at least – from acquiring an exclusively anti-German orientation. Russia's interest in securing informal control over Manchuria brought St Petersburg into conflict with British China policy and ensured that relations with London would remain far more tense for the foreseeable future than those with Berlin.

For France, too, there were difficult decisions to be made about how to balance the imperatives generated by rivalry with Britain with those arising from relations with Germany. During the first four years of the Franco-Russian Alliance, the French foreign minister Gabriel Hanotaux adopted a firmly anti-British policy. Egged on by the leader articles of the French colonialist press, Hanotaux mounted a direct challenge to the British presence in Egypt, a policy that culminated in the surreal ‘Fashoda incident' of 1898, when a French expeditionary force made an epic journey across Africa to stake a claim to the Upper Nile, while British troops marched south from occupied Egypt to meet the French at Fashoda, a ruined Egyptian outpost in the Sudanese marshes. The resulting political crisis took both powers to the threshold of war in the summer of 1898. Only when the French backed down did the danger of a conflict pass.

French policy vis-à-vis Germany had to take account of the priorities imposed by this colonial struggle with Great Britain. In a confidential memorandum of June 1892, Hanotaux noted that current French policy permitted only very limited collaboration with Berlin. The problem with this approach was that it left open the possibility of an understanding between Germany and Britain – the very prospect that had helped to motivate the formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance. One way of avoiding Anglo-German collusion, Hanotaux speculated, might be to seek a broader Franco-German-Russian understanding. This in turn would enable Paris to secure German support against Britain in Egypt and thereby destroy ‘the harmony that has existed for so long between Germany and England'. The resulting link with the eastern neighbour would, of course, be temporary and instrumental: a lasting conciliation with Germany would be possible, Hanotaux wrote, only if Berlin were willing to cede permanently the provinces annexed in 1870.
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The same choices faced Hanotaux's successor, Théophile Delcassé, who came to office in the summer of 1898. Like most politically active Frenchmen, Delcassé was profoundly suspicious of Germany and constantly revisited this issue in his political writings and utterances. His ardour for the lost provinces was so intense that the members of his family dared not mention the names ‘Alsace' and ‘Lorraine' in his presence; ‘we had the confused feeling that it was too sensitive to be spoken of', his daughter later recalled.
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But as an imperial power bent on expanding its influence on multiple fronts, France faced other predicaments that could on occasion eclipse the confrontation with Germany. In 1893, as colonial under-secretary, it was Delcassé who had pressed for the deployment of French colonial forces to challenge Britain on the Upper Nile.
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When he came to office at the height of the Fashoda crisis, his first step was to back down in the hope of securing concessions from London in southern Sudan. But when London simply refused to budge, Delcassé swung back to an anti-British stance and attempted (just as Hanotaux had done) to challenge the British occupation of Egypt. His ultimate goal was the French acquisition of Morocco.
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