The Sleepwalkers (59 page)

Given the very limited options available to Germany in the global imperial arena, and the relatively closed situation in the Europe of the alliance blocs, one region above all attracted the attention of statesmen interested in a ‘world policy without war': the Ottoman Empire.
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German policy had traditionally been rather restrained in this part of the world, where inter-imperial rivalries were especially fierce, but during the 1880s Berlin became more active. It was encouraged to do so by the government in Constantinople, which, alienated by the British occupation of Egypt (1882), actively courted partners in Berlin.
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German banks, construction firms and railway companies began to move into the less developed areas of the Sultan's empire, acquiring concessions and spheres of interest. Work on a largely German-financed and -built Anatolian Railway began in 1888 to link Constantinople with Ankara and Konya; both lines were complete by 1896. Government support for these ventures, initially rather fitful, gradually became more pronounced and consistent. By 1911, it was possible for the German ambassador in Constantinople to speak of the Empire as a German ‘political, military and economic sphere of interest'.
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By investing in the Ottoman lands – especially in crucial infrastructural projects – the Germans hoped to stabilize the Ottoman Empire in the face of the threat posed to it by the other imperial powers, most importantly Russia. And should the collapse of the Ottoman Empire open the door to a territorial partition among the world empires, they wanted to be sure of a seat at the table where the spoils were divided.
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High hopes were invested in the Anatolian Railway. The Ottoman authorities in Constantinople intended to pacify and integrate the Anatolian ‘wild east', still prey at this time to the depredations of Circassian bandits, and to civilize the most underdeveloped of the Ottoman lands. They viewed Anatolia through orientalist spectacles as a colony in need of improvement. New food crops were introduced in the areas opened up by the railway – including some, such as sugar beet and potatoes, that turned out to have been grown in the region for some time – and efforts were made to establish industrial plants, such as esparto grass, which could be processed to manufacture paper. Many of these projects made it no further than the experimental stage, either because the climate and soils were unsuitable, or because the locals refused to adopt the new techniques. For the inhabitants of rural Anatolia, some of whom brought bushels of grass to the stations to feed the horses that they had assumed would be pulling the trains, the appearance of steam locomotives was an unforgettable sensation.
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In Germany, too, the Anatolian venture had an inflaming effect on the colonial imagination. Some pan-Germans saw Anatolia (improbably enough) as a possible field for future German mass settlement; others were more interested in access to markets, trade routes and raw materials.
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Railways (like hydroelectric dams in the 1930s–50s, or space travel in the 1960s) held a special place in the imperial imaginary at the turn of the twentieth century. In Britain and the Cape Colony plans were afoot to build a Cape to Cairo railway; at around the same time the French were planning a rival west–east African super-railway from Senegal to Djibouti. The history of the great global telegraph networks had already established the intimate connection between infrastructure and power, especially in those areas of the British Empire where telegraph stations were miniature outposts of imperial authority and discipline.

There was thus consternation in 1903 when it became known that a company owned by German banks had been entrusted by the Ottoman government with the construction of a gigantic railway line that would extend from the Ankara end of the Anatolian Railway via Adana and Aleppo across Mesopotamia to Baghdad and (ultimately) Basra on the Persian Gulf. The project, which in theory would one day make it possible to travel by train directly from Berlin to Baghdad, met with suspicion and obstruction from the other imperial powers. The British were concerned at the prospect of the Germans acquiring privileged access to the oil fields of Ottoman Iraq, whose importance was growing at a time when the British navy was planning the transition from coal-to oil-fired ships.
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They feared that the Germans, freed through a land route to the east from the constraints imposed by British global naval dominance, might come to threaten Britain's pre-eminence in colonial trade. Although the route of the railway had been laid – at great inconvenience to the engineers and investors – as far as possible from Russian areas of interest, St Petersburg still feared that it would place the Germans in a position to pose a threat to Russian control of the Caucasus and northern Persia.

These projections of strategic anxiety appear far-fetched in retrospect, but they had a powerful hold on policy-makers at the time, who tended to assume that economic investment would inevitably be followed by geopolitical leverage. Kaiser Wilhelm II's intermittent pro-Ottoman and pro-Islamic political posturing did nothing to allay such suspicions. In 1898, during his second visit to the Middle East, Wilhelm had delivered an impromptu toast in the City Hall of Damascus that was cited in newspapers around the world: ‘May His Majesty the Sultan and the 300 million Muslims living around the world who see in him their Caliph be assured that at all times the German Kaiser will be their friend.'
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This effusion, the result of a euphoric mood brought on by the cheering of the Arab crowds, awakened fears of a Germany aligned with the forces of pan-Islamism and Arab nationalism that were already gaining ground in the British and Russian empires.
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In reality, German economic involvement was not disproportionate in international terms. There was intensive German investment in electrical utilities, agriculture, mining and municipal transportation; trade between Germany and the Ottoman Empire was on the increase. Yet the Germans still (in 1913) lagged behind Britain, France and Austria-Hungary in imports from, and behind Britain and Austria-Hungary in exports to, the Ottoman Empire. French investments still exceeded those of Germany by around 50 per cent. Nor could it be said that German capital behaved more aggressively than the European and British competition. In the race to secure strategic control of the prized oil concessions of Mesopotamia, for example, British banks and investors, backed by London, easily manoeuvred the Germans into positions of disadvantage with a combination of hard bargaining and ruthless financial diplomacy.
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Even in the sphere of railway building, where more than half of all German investment was tied up (340 million gold francs), the French contribution was comparable in size (
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. 320 million gold francs). While the French owned 62.9 per cent of the Ottoman Public Debt administered by an international agency on behalf of the Empire's creditors, Germany and Britain held roughly equal shares of most of the rest. And the most powerful financial institution in Constantinople, the Banque Impériale Ottomane, which in addition to controlling the lucrative tobacco monopoly and numerous other enterprises also possessed the exclusive right to issue bank notes in the Ottoman Empire, was a Franco-British enterprise, not a German one; it was also an instrument of French policy, in the sense that its credit and fiscal operations were steered from Paris.
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After long negotiations, a sequence of international accords did much to neutralize tension over the Baghdad Railway. A Franco-German agreement of 15 February 1914 marked out the boundaries between the spheres of interest of the key German and French investors (French capital was crucial to the financing of the project), and on 15 June, the Germans were able to overcome British objections by conceding, among many other things, British control of the crucial Basra–Persian Gulf section of the future railway – a concession that robbed the project of much of its supposed geostrategic value to the Germans. These and other episodes of collaboration, where political questions were laid aside in the interest of securing pragmatic arrangements in the economic sphere, gave reason to hope that the Ottoman Empire might indeed provide the theatre for a ‘world policy without war' that would in time create the basis for a partnership of some kind with Britain.
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Much more serious than the wrangling over control of the Baghdad Railway was the crisis that broke in December 1913 over the arrival of a German military mission in Constantinople. After its disastrous campaigns in the Balkans, the Ottoman government looked desperately for foreign assistance in strengthening its armed forces through root-and-branch reform. Although the Ottoman military command did briefly consider inviting a French military mission, the Germans were the more obvious partners. German military advisers had been a fixture in Constantinople since the late 1880s and 90s, when ‘Goltz Pasha' had run training courses for Turkish officer cadres.
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But this mission was to be on a larger scale than earlier efforts. Its chief was to be assigned a command role (the refusal to cede such authority to the previous advisers was seen as a key reason for the failure of earlier efforts) and would be responsible for the entirety of Ottoman military education, including the training of the General Staff. He also possessed unlimited powers of military inspection and he would be accompanied by a phalanx of forty German officers on active service. Most importantly: as commanding general of the Ottoman 1st Army Corps, he was also to be responsible for the defence of the Straits and of Constantinople itself.
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The man chosen to head up the mission was Lieutenant General Liman von Sanders, commander of the 22nd Division in Kassel.

Since neither the Kaiser nor Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg saw this mission as a fundamental departure from previous practice, and since the details were drawn up internally between the Ottoman and German military commands, it was not viewed as a matter for formal diplomatic negotiation with Russia. Instead, the Kaiser raised the question informally in May 1913 during a meeting with Nicholas II and George V on the occasion of the wedding of Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia and Prince Ernst August of Hanover. Neither sovereign raised any objections to the planned mission. No mention was made of it when Bethmann and Sazonov met for brief talks in November 1913, the chancellor assuming that Sazonov had been informed by the Tsar.
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When news began to leak out about the details of Liman's assignment, however, there was a roar of protest from the Russian newspapers. Underlying the public outrage, which was encouraged by the Russian foreign ministry, was the apprehension that the mission would not only strengthen German influence in Constantinople, increasingly seen as a strategic choke-point of immense importance for Russia, but would renew the viability of the Ottoman Empire itself, whose collapse and partition were becoming an axiomatic element in Russian strategic thinking on the near and medium-term future.
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The Russian military plenipotentiary in Berlin described Liman in a letter to the Tsar as a ‘very energetic and self-aggrandising' character.
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It did not help that the Kaiser, in a secret audience for the members of the mission, had urged its departing members to build him ‘a strong army' that would ‘obey my orders' and form a ‘counterweight to the aggressive designs of Russia'. These words were passed back to St Petersburg by the Russian military attaché in Berlin, Bazarov.
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Sazonov therefore saw in the German mission a matter of ‘eminently political significance'.
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There was consternation in St Petersburg – ‘I have never seen them so excited,' Edward Grey confided to the German ambassador in London.
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Why did the Russians react so strongly to the Liman mission? We should recall that even during the crises of 1912–13, when Sazonov's policy had appeared to prioritize the Balkan peninsula over a bid for control of the Dardanelles, the Straits had remained at the centre of Russian strategic thinking. The importance of the Straits to Russian economic life had never been more obvious. In the years 1903–12, 37 per cent of Russian exports passed through the Dardanelles; the figure for wheat and rye exports, both vital to Russia's cash-hungry industrializing economy, was much higher, at around 75–80 per cent.
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The urgency of this linkage was driven home by the two Balkan Wars. From the beginning of the conflict, Sazonov made numerous representations both to the belligerent states and to the allied great powers to the effect that a closure of the Straits to neutral commercial shipping would inflict ‘enormous losses' on Russian exporters, and that measures must be avoided that might bring this about.
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As it happened, the wars did cause two temporary closures of the Dardanelles, seriously disrupting Russian trade.

Disruptions were one thing, the permanent loss of influence in an area of crucial geopolitical interest was another, much more serious, concern. In the summer of 1911, Sukhomlinov had worried lest the Germans establish a foothold on the Bosphorus: ‘Behind Turkey,' he warned, ‘stands Germany.'
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In November 1912, it was the Bulgarians who seemed close to seizing Constantinople. At that time, Sazonov had instructed Izvolsky to warn Poincaré that if the city were captured, the Russians would be obliged to deploy the entire Black Sea Fleet there immediately.
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During the weeks that followed, Sazonov discussed with the General Staff and the Admiralty plans for a landing of Russian troops to protect Constantinople and project Russian interests. He rejected a British proposal to internationalize the Ottoman capital on the grounds that it was likely to dilute Russian influence in the region. New plans were drawn up to seize Constantinople and the entirety of the Straits by force.
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In a paper prepared for Kokovtsov and the service chiefs on 12 November, Sazonov explained the advantages of a Russian seizure: it would secure one of the centres of world trade, the ‘key to the Mediterranean Sea' and ‘the basis for an unprecedented development of Russian power'. Russia, he argued, would be established ‘in a global position that is the natural crown of her efforts and sacrifices over two centuries of our history'. In a revealing allusion to the importance of opinion, Sazonov concluded that an achievement of such grandeur would ‘unite government and society' behind an issue of ‘indisputable pan-national importance' and thereby ‘bring healing to our internal life'.
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