The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (76 page)

In France, the signing of the treaty with Germany was seen as a victory, as great, said some, as the taking of Algeria in 1830.
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Caillaux’s
government fell, however, helped on its way by revelations that he had been in secret contact with the Germans, and a new government came in under the anti-German nationalist Raymond Poincaré. The crisis, which was seen as evidence that Germany was prepared to use war to get what it wanted, also had a profound impact on French opinion and stimulated France’s own preparations for war.
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The French military attaché in Berlin was later to warn that the German public was in a warlike mood and bitterly resented what it saw as a defeat over Morocco, and that it was not prepared to compromise or accept compensation in a future crisis. In his view a military confrontation between France and Germany was inevitable. Stephen Pichon, who had been Foreign Minister between 1906 and 1911 and who came back into office in 1913, Joffre, and a number of his leading generals, were strongly influenced by such reports.
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In Germany, the treaty was seen as another defeat, comparable to the one in the first Morocco crisis. When Bethmann had to defend the agreement in the Reichstag he got angry comments from the right: ‘
a defeat, whether we say so or not
’. The crown prince was seen in the gallery applauding demonstrably.
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The empress, who normally did not interfere in politics, said reproachfully to Kiderlen: ‘Are we always going to retreat before the French and put up with their insolence?’
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The Kaiser himself received much of the blame. ‘What has happened to the Hohenzollerns’, asked a right-wing newspaper, ‘from whom once a Great Elector, a Friedrich Wilhelm I, a Friedrich the Great, a Kaiser Wilhelm I have emerged?’
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An American politician travelling in Germany heard army officers say that the Kaiser had made them look foolish in 1905 and 1911 and they would not let him do it again.
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The very real prospect of war in the summer of 1911 had brought home to Germans that Germany’s strategic position was not good. The crisis further served to confirm the view in the minds of many Germans that their country was encircled by enemies.
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It might well have to fight a three-front war, against France and Russia on land and Britain at sea, and it was not clear that its resources were adequate.
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There were increasing doubts about whether the navy was ever going to be up to the task of taking on the British. And the widening of the Kiel Canal to allow the big battleships to go safely back and forth from the Baltic to the North Sea and make it possible for Germany to have a presence
in both would not be finished until 1914. (The canal was opened on 24 June 1914, four days before the assassination at Sarajevo.) Tirpitz, as he had done before, took the opportunity of the crisis to demand a new naval bill. He wanted six more big ships over the next few years and to add a third active squadron to the navy. This, he argued, would rally the right wing and the middle classes against the left and ‘take the wind out of the social-democratic and left-liberal parties’.
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He met resistance from many of his own admirals who argued that to announce that Germany was building more dreadnoughts at a time of international tension might well lead to war with Britain. Bethmann too opposed Tirpitz, on grounds of both cost and the dangers. In the end he could not prevail against the Kaiser, who called him a coward and said he himself was not going to be intimidated by Britain. ‘I told the Reich Chancellor’, Wilhelm boasted to the chief of his Naval Cabinet, ‘to remember that I was a successor to the Great Elector and Frederick the Great, who never hesitated to act when the time seemed to come. I also told the Chancellor that he should reckon with political Providence, which would see to it that a people with so much on their conscience as the English would one day be brought low.’
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The army, which over the years had watched quietly as increasing resources went to the navy, now made their own demands for enlargement. It was a question of ‘self-preservation’, Moltke said.
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The Kaiser agreed to a compromise whereby both the army and navy got their new bills but with some cuts. German public opinion and the Reichstag, which had resisted increased expenditure, were now in a mood to approve them. The new Navy Law of 1912 provided for three new dreadnoughts and two light cruisers while, under the Military Law, the peacetime army was to expand over the next five years by some 30,000 men with changes in organisation such as a strengthened military transport system.
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As a sop to Bethmann, he was allowed to reopen talks with Britain. Not surprisingly, the British approached these with some scepticism.

The Morocco crisis left another dangerous residue in the minds of Europe’s leaders. It also led directly to a war between Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the autumn of 1911 which in turn paved the way for the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Italy, which had watched the worldwide scramble for colonies with envy, now decided the time had come
to add to its small collection of overseas territories. The Ottoman Empire was weak, torn as it was by internal divisions and fighting rebellions in Albania and Yemen, and the other powers were preoccupied by Morocco. Over the years Italy had obtained promises from Britain, France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia which recognised that Italy had special interests in two provinces of the Ottomans in North Africa: Cyrenaica and Tripoli. (Today we know them as Libya.) If the status in North Africa changed, as it clearly was about to with Morocco in 1911, then Italy could make a good argument for consolidating a hold, in some form or other, over Libya. Acquiring colonies also seemed a good deal easier than fulfilling that other dream of Italian nationalists – the seizing of Italian-speaking areas such as the great port of Trieste and the Trentino from Austria-Hungary – something which Italian weakness made a long way off in the future, if ever.
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Austria-Hungary itself was more than happy to think of Italy directing its attention towards the southern shore of the Mediterranean and away from the Alps and the Adriatic.
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Italy’s previous attempts at building an empire had, however, been spectacularly unsuccessful. Italian nationalists still resented France’s seizure of Tunisia in 1881. History (after its defeat of Carthage, Rome had turned the region into its breadbasket), geography (the coast of Tunisia was directly across from Sicily), and emigration (there were some 130,00 Italians living in Tunisia by the time of the Great War) all made Tunisia Italian and not French. True, Italy had managed to establish two small and backward colonies in Eritrea and Somaliland on the Horn of Africa, but its attempt to take Ethiopia had resulted in a stunning defeat at the hands of the Ethiopians at Sadowa in 1896. It was a deep humiliation for Italy, which had a strong desire to play a part on the European and world stage.

Italy was a great power largely by courtesy rather than in reality. In everything but poverty, it lagged behind the others. Its population was only 35 million; that of its neighbour and rival Austria-Hungary was 50 million. And it was losing large numbers, 873,000 in 1913 alone, through emigration.
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Its railway network was undeveloped; it was less industrialised and more agricultural than the other Western powers; and it spent less on its military than all the others including Russia.
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It was a new country, where the different regions and cities often inspired,
as they do today, stronger loyalties than to Italy itself. There were deep divisions between the new working classes and their employers, between north and south and between the Catholic Church and the state. The dominant figure in politics in the years before 1914 was Giovanni Giolitti, a liberal reformer who tried to modernise Italy’s economy, society and politics, but there was a feeling among the political classes and the public that it was all something of an improvisation and not terribly effective. At the highest levels of government, key officials such as the military and the civilian leaders simply did not communicate with each other. Italian chiefs of general staff, for example, did not know the terms of the Triple Alliance which they might one day have to go to war to uphold. In theory the king was in charge of foreign affairs and the military, but in practice Victor Emmanuel III, who succeeded his assassinated father in 1900, largely left his ministers alone. A small, fussy man he devoted his attentions to his beloved family, including his much larger Montenegrin wife, and his coin collection.

Foreigners came to Italy for its climate and its many beauties but they also laughed at it. Italians were seen as charming, chaotic, childlike but not a people to be taken seriously. In international affairs, the other powers, even its own allies in the Triple Alliance, tended to treat Italy as negligible. During the crisis over the Bosnian annexation, for example, Italy’s suggestions for a settlement were brushed aside and there was no thought of giving it any compensation in the Balkans. (The dreadful earthquake at Messina made 1908 a particularly grim year for Italy.) Italian diplomats, who were increasingly drawn from old southern aristocratic families, were seen by their colleagues abroad as men of culture who were not always up to complicated negotiations, especially in matters involving trade or economics, and conservative in outlook, such as the Italian ambassador who hated motorcars and always had himself driven in a coach and four to meetings in Vienna with his Austrian-Hungarian counterparts. While Italy did in fact have capable diplomats, its poverty made their work difficult; embassies frequently did not have such modern basic equipment as typewriters.
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Italy’s foreign relations were determined in part by its own weakness and its strategic position. It had potential enemies on either side, both on land and seaborne; its long coastline was impossible to defend properly and the navy admitted that it could not protect all the major ports.
Its armies were concentrated in the north to meet attacks from either France or Austria-Hungary, leading one deputy to remark that Italy’s head was protected by a steel helmet but its body was naked.
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Italian leaders tended, understandably, to be nervous, seeing malevolence everywhere and assuming, less reasonably, that Italy’s enemies were irrational and likely to attack suddenly without good reason. After 1900 evidence of Austrian preparations along the common frontier heightened Italian fears; 1911 brought some relief when Conrad was removed – as it turned out only for a short time – from office.
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As Europe divided itself into two power blocs, successive Italian Foreign Ministers tried desperately to manoeuvre between the two. As a deputy remarked in parliament in 1907: ‘Unbreakable faithfulness to the Triple Alliance, sincere friendship for England and France, and cordial relations with the other powers always remain the bases of our foreign policy.’
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Italian foreign and military policy was cautious and defensive by necessity, but that did not stop Italian nationalists from dreaming that it might be different and that foreigners were wrong about Italy. They found some consolation in Social Darwinism: Italian soldiers because of the hardships of their lives were bound to be tougher than the decadent French or the soft Austrian-Hungarians.
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More importantly, nationalists were determined to show that unification had produced a country that worked and that counted in the world. Italian governments insisted that Italy be represented in all major foreign developments; Italy even sent a handful of soldiers to China to be part of the international force putting down the Boxer Rebellion in 1900.
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And since powers in the world of 1900 had empires, Italy should continue to build its own. Italian public opinion, which as in other countries was becoming more important with the spread of newspapers and the growth of special-interest lobbies, was generally in favour. Even the socialists, whose rhetoric was anti-imperialist, were not completely opposed.

During the summer of 1911, as the Morocco crisis intensified, there was increasing nationalist agitation in Italy. The press, colonial and nationalist societies, all talked about Libya. Since it also happened to be the fiftieth anniversary of the last stage – so far – of Italy’s unification it seemed a good time to do something even more dramatic than building the gigantic Victor Emmanuel memorial in Rome. The Foreign Minister, Antonino di San Giuliano, found himself at the same hotel as
the deputy chief of the naval staff and the two men discussed the logistics of the invasion. (The subtle and cynical San Giuliano, who came like so many of his colleagues from the Sicilian aristocracy, was there for his health; he blamed his many illnesses on his mother for leading too upright a life.)
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When he returned to Rome, San Giuliano told Giolitti that the best time to move against the Ottomans in Libya was the autumn or the spring. The two men decided on September, only bothering to tell the army itself at the last moment.
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In what came to be nicknamed the ‘policy of the stiletto’, Italy delivered an impossible ultimatum to the Ottoman Empire on 28 September 1911 and announced that it would in any case have to go ahead and occupy the two provinces of Libya whatever the reply was. The Italian ships were already preparing to sail. Italy used the excuse of protecting Italian interests and Italian nationals with what can only be described as flimsy evidence. San Giuliano told the British ambassador in Rome, for example, that Italian flour mills in Tripoli were having trouble getting grain from local growers as a result of the machinations of the Ottoman authorities.
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The left in Italy called for strikes in protest but as the British ambassador reported to London: ‘even in the Socialist party opinions are divided and agitation is half-hearted’.
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