Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (36 page)

The basis for improving relations with Russia was the conviction that a war with Russia over
any
imperial issue must be avoided. In quick succession, Britain indicated its readiness to appease Russia over Manchuria and Tibet, and to avoid unnecessary friction over the Black Sea Straits, Persia - even (to Curzon’s dismay) over Afghanistan.
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It is possible that this drive for good relations might have led to a formal understanding, as it did in the case of France, had it not been for Russia’s defeat by Japan, with which Britain had concluded an alliance in 1902. It is a good indication of the rationale of British policy - appease the strong - that this alliance came to be seen as taking precedence over any agreement with Russia.
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In the case of France, there was a similar list of imperial issues over which agreements could be reached: principally Indo-China, Morocco and Egypt.
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There matters might well have rested had it not been for Chamberlain, who, still smarting from being jilted by the Germans, wished such colonial deals to form the basis of a fully fledged alliance.
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The Anglo-French ‘Entente Cordiale’ of 8 April 1904 amounted to colonial barter; but it proved to have three important implications. Firstly, it reinforced the tendency to improve relations with Russia: good relations with one implied good relations with the other
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Secondly, it further demoted the importance of good relations with Germany, as became evident during the First Moroccan Crisis.
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Finally, and most importantly, it meant that military planners on both sides of the Channel began to think for the first time in terms of British naval and military support for France in the event of a war with Germany. The idea of using naval force to blockade Germany had been discussed before. However, it was in 1905 that the idea of a naval division of responsibility was devised which would concentrate the French navy in the Mediterranean and the British navy in ‘home waters‘. At the same time, the General Staff began to think in terms of deploying an expeditionary force on the continent in support of France, precipitating a heated debate as to the relative merits of defending the Franco-German frontier with an expeditionary force or launching an amphibious invasion of North Germany.
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It was in conjunction with the former strategy that the old question of Belgian neutrality came up,
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though, as the former Permanent Under-Secretary Sanderson noted, the 1839 treaty was not ‘a positive pledge ... to use material force for the maintenance of the guarantee [of neutrality]
in any circumstances and at whatever risk
’. That would, he added, be ‘to read into it what no government can reasonably be expected to promise’.
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In short, Tory foreign policy was to conciliate those powers which appeared to pose the greatest threat to Britain’s position, even at the expense of good relations with less important powers. The key point is that Germany (like Belgium) fell into the latter category; France and Russia into the former. The obvious exception to the rule might be said to have been Japan. But an alliance with Japan could be concluded without creating European complications, especially in view of Russian weakness after 1905. The same could not be said of an alliance with Germany. If the Tories had followed Chamberlain’s initial strategy of concluding an alliance with Germany, the consequence would have been worsening imperial relations with France and Russia.

Would that have led one day to another kind of world war, with Britain on the side of Germany, fighting against its encirclement by - to adopt contemporary parlance - the Anglo-Saxons’ traditional foes, the Latin and Slav Empires? It strikes us as fantastic. But at the time such a scenario was no more or less fantastic than the notion of British alliances with France and Russia, both of which had for years seemed impossible - ‘foredoomed to failure’, in Chamberlain’s phrase. The task of diplomacy between 1900 and 1905 appeared to be to choose between these two options: some kind of rapprochement overseas with France and Russia, or the risk of a future war with one or both - a war which Britain would have had to fight not only in the Channel but in theatres as far afield as the Mediterranean, the Bosphorus, Egypt and Afghanistan.

Such was the diplomatic legacy inherited by the Liberals following Balfour’s resignation in December 1905. It is vital to emphasise that it in no way doomed Britain to fight the First World War. Certainly, it arranged Britain’s diplomatic priorities
vis-à-vis
the other great powers in the order France, Russia, Germany (with Austria, Italy and Turkey trailing behind). But it did not irrevocably commit Britain to the defence of France, much less Russia, in the event of a German attack on one or both. It did not, in short, make war between Britain and Germany inevitable, as a few pessimists - notably Rosebery - feared.
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What is more, a Liberal government - particularly of the sort led by Campbell-Bannerman - seemed at first sight less likely to fall out with Germany or to fall in with France or Russia than its predecessor. Although attempts have been made to import the notion of ‘the primacy of domestic politics’ from German to British historiography, few observers in 1905 would have argued that the change of government increased the likelihood of war.
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The non-conformist conscience, the Cobdenite belief in free trade and peace, the Gladstonian preference for international law to
Realpolitik
, as well as the Grand Old Man’s aversion to excessive military spending and the historic dislike of a big army - these were just some of the Liberal traditions which seemed to imply a pacific policy, to which might be added the party’s perennial, distracting preoccupations with Ireland and parliamentary reform.
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To these, the ‘New Liberalism’ of the Edwardian period added a new concern with redistributive public finance and ‘social’ questions, as well as a variety of influential theories - such as Norman Angell’s - about the economic irrationality of war.
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If nothing else, the new government seemed likely to try (in Lloyd George’s words) ‘to reduce the gigantic expenditure on armaments built up by the recklessness of our predecessors’.
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The law of unintended consequences, however, is never more likely to operate than when a government is as fundamentally divided as the Liberal government by degrees became. As early as September 1905, Asquith, Grey and Haldane (who became War Minister) had agreed to act in concert as a ‘Liberal Imperialist’ or ‘Liberal League’ faction within the new administration, in order to counter the Radical tendencies feared by, among others, the King.
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The appointment of Grey as Foreign Secretary was one of the faction’s first and most important successes. Grey was certainly far from being an ardent imperialist. He was evidently familiar with the arguments of Angell about the illusory rationale of war.
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He shared the Radical desire ‘to pursue a European policy without keeping up a great army’ and welcomed the support of the Gladstonians like John Morley when trying to rein in the Government of India. On the other hand, his enthusiasm for continuing and deepening the Entente with France and concluding a similar agreement with Russia was at odds with the aversion of the ‘peace at any price’ group within the Cabinet to continental entanglements. This fundamental division ought to have caused trouble sooner than it did. However, Asquith - who succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as Prime Minister in April 1908 - was adept at covering Grey’s position.
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It suited both men - not to mention the diplomats at the Foreign Office - to limit the direct influence of the Cabinet and Parliament over foreign policy. It was typical of Grey to complain, as he did in October 1906, about Liberal MPs having ‘now acquired the art of asking questions and raising debates, and there is so much in foreign affairs which attracts attention and had much better be left alone’. When Cabinet colleagues pronounced on foreign affairs, Grey sought ‘to convince them that there are such things as brick walls’ against which they were merely ‘run[ning] their own heads’.
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In this, he was unquestionably aided and abetted by the Opposition’s tacit approval of his policy. It must always be remembered that the Liberals’ majority was steadily whittled away between 1906 and 1914. At the last pre-war general election of December 1910, the Liberals and Tories had won 272 seats apiece, so that the government relied on 42 Labour MPs and 84 Irish Nationalists for its majority. Because the Conservatives won sixteen out of the twenty by-elections which followed, by July 1914 that majority had been reduced to just twelve. This helps explain the government’s floundering over both the budget and Home Rule in that fateful month.
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Under such circumstances, the influence of the Opposition was bound to increase. Had the Conservative leadership disagreed with Grey’s policy, they could have made life as difficult for him as they made it for Lloyd George, with whose fiscal policy they disagreed, and Asquith, whose Irish policy they abhorred. But they did not. They believed that Grey was continuing their policy. As the Tory Chief Whip Balcarres put it in May 1912, his party had ‘supported Grey for six years on the assumption that he continues the Anglo-French Entente which Lord Lansdowne established and the Anglo-Russian Entente Lord Lansdowne began’.
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True, Balfour had to be careful not to offend the right of his party by appearing to ‘love’ the government too much.
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Still, the fact remains that there was more agreement between Grey’s faction of the Cabinet and the Opposition front bench than within the Cabinet itself. What this meant was that the detail of Grey’s policy (and the Devil lay there) was not subjected to close enough parliamentary scrutiny. Moreover, where such scrutiny might have occurred - within the civil and military services - there reigned confusion. Despite the endeavours of Esher, the Committee of Imperial Defence declined in importance under the Liberals. In place of strategic planning, over which agreement between the Admiralty and the War Office seemed impossible, there developed a technocratic obsession with logistics as set down in the famous ‘War Book’ - the precision of which was matched only by its complete imprecision as to the objectives and economic implications of mobilisation.
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All of this in fact gave Grey far greater freedom of action than his memoirs subsequently suggested. Nor, it should be noted, was he a man unused to freedom, a point nicely illustrated by one of his less well-known pre-war publications. Fly-fishing - Grey’s passion from childhood to blind old age - is not an occupation conducive to a deterministic cast of mind. In his book on the subject, published in 1899, he waxed lyrical about its uncertain, unpredictable pleasures. One passage in particular, in which he describes landing an 8-lb salmon, deserves quotation:

It is with this Grey in mind - the excited, anxious fisherman on the riverbank, rather than the broken, disappointed self-apologist of the memoirs - that we should interpret British foreign policy between 1906 and 1914. At the risk of pushing the analogy too far, it might be said that much of the time - and especially in the July Crisis - Grey conducted himself exactly as he had on that occasion. He hoped he might land the fish, but knew the risk of ‘catastrophe’. In neither case was the outcome a foregone conclusion.

In one sense, it must be said, the analogy is misleading. For, in his dealings with Russia and France, it was arguably Grey who was the fish others hooked and landed. In the case of Russia, Grey later maintained that he had effectively continued his predecessor’s policy of detente, despite the distaste of the Radicals and the doubts of the War Office.
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On closer inspection, however, Grey went significantly further than Lansdowne. This was partly because he could rely on backbench support for cuts in spending on the defence of India, and so could more easily override traditional ‘North-West Frontier’ sentiment.
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In addition, he made substantial concessions to Russia over Persia. He even showed signs of favouring Russia’s traditional ambitions in Turkey and the Balkans as a counterweight to Germany’s growing influence. Such concessions may have encouraged the Russian Foreign Minister Sazonov to count on British support in the event of war. The decision in May 1914 to hold joint conversations on naval issues certainly did nothing to discourage him.
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It was much easier for a Liberal Foreign Secretary to pursue a Francophile policy than a Russophile policy, and Grey had signalled his intention to pursue the former even before taking office.
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Again, it appeared that Tory policy was being continued. But again - as he himself admitted - Grey went significantly ‘further than the late Government here were ever required to do’.
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The military discussions between Britain and France which were initiated at the end of 1905 marked a new departure. Here, it has been argued, was Grey’s gravest error - the moment at which he was effectively hooked by the French ambassador Paul Cambon. By allowing the military planners to discuss joint action not only at sea but also on land in the event of a Franco-German war, he implied a much stronger commitment to the defence of France than had hitherto been considered. Of vital importance was the General Staff’s success in arguing for the immediate despatch of an expeditionary force of at least 100,000 men to France or Belgium in the event of a Franco-German war, on the grounds that naval operations alone would not prevent a successful German invasion of France.
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It could be argued that these talks, and the subsequent development of British military planning, gave the Entente Cordiale what amounted to a secret military protocol. That was certainly what the hawks in the Foreign Office wanted. As early as January 1906, Bertie (now ambassador in Paris) was talking about giving ‘more than diplomatic support’ to defend French interests in Morocco, meaning an explicit ‘promise of armed assistance’. This meant much more than was implied in the naval division of responsibility between Mediterranean and North Sea.
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Indeed, it might even be suggested - to turn Fritz Fischer on his head - that the CID meeting of 23 August 1911 (rather than the notorious meeting between the Kaiser and his military chiefs sixteen months later) was the real ‘war council’ which set the course for a war between Britain and Germany. Certainly, it appeared to mark a triumph for the General Staff’s expeditionary force strategy over the Admiralty’s envisaged combination of a close blockade and joint amphibious operations on the North German coast.
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Outside the committee room, General Sir Henry Wilson, the Director of Military Operations, was energetic in selling the General Staff’s strategy to Grey and other ministers, including - significantly - Lloyd George. Grey thus had a very clear idea of what he was promising when he gave Cambon a private assurance in early 1914 that ‘no British government would refuse [France] military and naval assistance if she were unjustly threatened and attacked’.
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