Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (37 page)

What made Grey shift in this way from the overseas ententes of his predecessors to a more or less explicit ‘continental commitment’ to France? The traditional answer is that Germany’s
Weltpolitik
had come to be viewed in London as a growing threat to British interests in Africa, Asia and the Near East; and, more importantly, that Germany’s naval construction constituted a serious challenge to British security. Yet, on close inspection, neither colonial issues nor naval issues were leading inevitably to an Anglo-German showdown before 1914. As Churchill later put it, ‘We were no enemies to German colonial expansion.’
¹⁰⁵
Indeed, an agreement between Britain and Germany which would have opened the way to increased German influence in the Portuguese colonies in southern Africa came close to being concluded.
¹⁰⁶
Grey himself said in 1911 that it did not ‘matter very much whether we ha[d] Germany or France as a neighbor in Africa’. he was eager to bring about a ‘division’ of the ‘derelict’ Portuguese colonies ‘as soon as possible’ ‘in a pro-German spirit’.
¹⁰⁷
Only his officials’ reluctance to renege publicly on British commitments to Portugal made thirteen years before prevented a public deal; but the German blanks (notably M. M. Warburg & Co.) which had become involved evidently regarded this as a mere formality.
¹⁰⁸
Even where Grey inclined to give French interests primacy - in Morocco - there was not a complete impasse with respect to Germany. In 1906, Grey had been willing to consider giving Germany a coaling station on the country’s Atlantic coast.
¹⁰⁹
It is true that the government took an aggressive line following the Agadir crisis, issuing a clear warning to Berlin against treating Britain ‘as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations’. But even Asquith had to admit that a Franco-German agreement involving territory and influence in non-British Africa had little to do with him. In any case, the German government backed down after Agadir; and when they then turned their attentions to Turkey, it was much harder for Grey to take an anti-German line without playing into the hands of the Russians with respect to the Straits.
¹¹⁰
Grey was pleased with the way the Germans acted during the Balkan wars of 1912/13 and was relatively unworried by the Liman von Sanders affair (the appointment of a German general as Instructor General to the Turkish army). Relations were further improved by Germany’s conciliatory response to British concerns over the Berlin-Baghdad railway.
¹¹¹
In this light, it was not unreasonable of the
Frankfurter Zeitung
to speak, as it did in October 1913, of ‘rapprochement’ between Britain and Germany and an ‘end to the sterile years of mutual distrust’.
¹¹²
The FO view as late as 27 June 1914 - the eve of the Sarajevo assassination - was that the German government was ’in peaceful mood and ... very anxious to be on good terms with ‘England’. Even on 23 July, Lloyd George could be heard pronouncing Anglo-German relations ‘much better’ than they had been ‘
^a
few years ago’.
¹¹³

Likewise, it is quite misleading to see the naval race as a ‘cause’ of the First World War. There were strong arguments on both sides for a naval agreement. Both governments were finding the political consequences of increasing naval expenditure difficult to live with. The Liberals had come in pledged to cut arms spending and could not easily sell increases in the naval estimates to their backbenchers and the radical press. At the same time, rising defence spending made the task of financing a more progressive social policy significantly harder. The German government was under even greater fiscal pressure. The rising cost of defence placed the Reich’s federal system under intense strains which threatened to estrange the government from its traditional Conservative supporters and strengthen the Social Democrats’ case for more progressive taxation at the national level.
¹¹⁴
So why was there no deal? The possibility surfaced on numerous occasions: in December 1907, when the Germans proposed a North Sea convention with Britain and France; in February 1908, when the Kaiser explicitly denied that Germany aimed ‘to challenge British naval supremacy’; six months later, when he met the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office Sir Charles Hardinge at Kronberg; in March 1911, when the Kaiser called for ‘a naval agreement tending to limit naval expenditure’; and, most famously, in February 1912, when Haldane travelled to Berlin, ostensibly ‘bout the business of a university committee’, in reality to discuss the possibility of a naval, colonial and non-aggression agreement with Bethmann Hollweg, Tirpitz and the Kaiser.
¹¹⁵
The traditional answer is that the Germans refused to make concessions. Much blame for this has been heaped on Tirpitz and the Kaiser, who have been accused of torpedoing the Haldane mission by introducing a new naval increase on the eve of his arrival. In addition, it is argued the Germans were willing to discuss naval issues only after they had received an unconditional British pledge of neutrality in the event of a Franco-German war.
¹¹⁶
Yet this is only half the story. Asquith later claimed that the German formula of neutrality would ‘have precluded us from coming to the help of France should Germany on any pretext attack her’. In fact, Bethmann Hollweg’s draft stated:

The most that Grey was willing to offer was a commitment not to ‘make or join in any unprovoked attack upon Germany’ because, in his words, ‘the word neutrality ... would give the impression our hands were tied’.
¹¹⁸

Similarly, the subsequent British claim that the naval escalation was the fault of the German side alone needs to be treated with scepticism. The Germans in fact offered real concessions during the Haldane mission; it was on the neutrality issue that the talks foundered, more than the naval issue.
¹¹⁹
And arguably it was the British position which was the more intransigent - not surprisingly, as it was based on unassailable strength. For despite the ‘panic’ of 1909, there was never much chance of the Germans being able to close the huge gap in naval capability.
¹²⁰
Nor did the Admiralty ever doubt that its strategy of blockading Germany would be effective in the event of war. Indeed, there was a clear blueprint for naval war against Germany which was far more ruthless in conception than anything drafted by Tirpitz. In the first weeks of a war with Germany, as Fisher predicted in 1906, the Royal Navy would ‘mop up’ hundreds of German merchant ships around the world; and then impose a tight blockade without the slightest regard to the limits imposed by the London Convention agreed at the Hague Conference. So clear did the British superiority appear that senior naval figures including Fisher, Esher and Wilson found it hard to imagine Germany risking war against Britain.
¹²¹
Grey’s view was accordingly uncompromising: any naval agreement could only be on the basis of ‘permanent’ British superiority.
¹²²
In practice, as Churchill saw after his move to the Admiralty, the German government had been obliged to accept this by 1913. His concern as First Lord was to maintain the ’60 per cent standard ... in relation not only to Germany but to the rest of the world’. ‘Why‘, he asked bluntly, ’should it be supposed that we should not be able to defeat [Germany]? A study of the comparative fleet strength in the line of battle will be found reassuring.’
¹²³
By 1914, as Churchill recalled, ‘naval rivalry had ... ceased to be a cause of friction.... We were proceeding inflexibly ..., it was certain we could not be overtaken.‘ Even Asquith later admitted that ’the competition in naval expenditure was not in itself a likely source of immediate danger. We had quite determined to maintain our necessary predominance at sea and we were well able to make that determination effective.’
¹²⁴

It is therefore not difficult to see why Bethmann Hollweg’s proposed deal - accepting British naval supremacy in return for continental neutrality - was rejected out of hand by Grey: quite simply, Britain could have the former without giving the latter. What is harder to understand is Grey’s belief that almost any expression of Anglo-German rapprochement was out of the question. Why, if Germany posed neither a colonial nor a naval threat to Britain, was Grey so relentlessly anti-German? The answer is simply that, even more than his Tory predecessors, Grey cared more about good relations with France and Russia - with the difference, as we have seen, that he was willing to do more to conciliate them (and therefore less to conciliate Germany). ‘Nothing we do in our relations with Germany’, he had declared in October 1905, ‘is in any way to impair our existing good relations with France.’ ‘The danger of speaking civil words in Berlin’, he wrote the following January, ‘is that they may be ... interpreted in France as implying that we shall be lukewarm in our support of the entente.’
¹²⁵
He made the point unambiguously to his ambassador in Berlin, Edward Goschen, in April 1910: ‘We cannot enter into a political understanding with Germany which would separate us from Russia and France.’
¹²⁶
However, when Grey said that any understanding with Germany had to be ‘consistent with the preservation of [our existing] relations and friendships with other powers’, he was effectively ruling out any meaningful understanding.
¹²⁷
In this he was at one with senior Foreign Office officials like the Permanent Under-Secretary Nicolson, who opposed the idea of an agreement with Germany in 1912 mainly because it would ‘seriously impair our relations [with France] - and such a result would at once react on our relations with Russia’.
¹²⁸

On close inspection, Grey’s reasoning was deeply flawed. Firstly, his notion that bad relations with France and Russia might actually have led to war was preposterous. There was a big difference in this respect between his situation and that of his Tory predecessors. At the time, Grey himself acknowledged that Russia’s recovery from the ravages of defeat and revolution would take a decade. Nor did he see France as a threat: as he put it to President Roosevelt in 1906, France was ‘peaceful and neither aggressive nor restless’.
¹²⁹
The original point of the ententes had been to settle overseas differences with France and Russia. This having been done, the chances of war between Britain and either power were remote. It was simply fantastic for Grey to suggest to the editor of the
Manchester Guardian
C. P. Scott, as he did in September 1912, ‘that if France is not supported against Germany she would join with her and the rest of Europe in an attack upon us’.
¹³⁰
Only slightly less chimerical was the fear that France or Russia might ‘desert to the Central Powers’.
¹³¹
This was a constant Foreign Office preoccupation. As early as 1905, Grey feared ‘losing France and not gaining Germany, who won’t want us if she can detach France from us’. If Britain did not respond to French overtures over Algeciras, warned Bertie, ‘We shall ... be looked upon as traitors by the French and ... be despised by the Germans.’ Typically, Nicolson argued for a formal alliance with France and Russia ‘to deter Russia from moving towards Berlin ... [and] prevent [France] from deserting to the Central Powers’. Obsessively, Grey and his officials dreaded losing their ‘value as friends’ and ending up ‘standing
alone
’ - ‘without friends’. Their recurrent nightmare was that Russia or France would succumb to ‘the Teuton embrace’. For this reason, they tended to see all German policy as aimed at ‘smashing ... the Triple Alliance’.
¹³²
Characteristically, Grey reasoned that ‘if ... by some misfortune or blunder our Entente with France is to be broken up, France will have to make her own terms with Germany. And Germany will again be in a position to keep us on bad terms with France and Russia, and to make herself predominant upon the Continent. Then, sooner or later, there will be a war between us and Germany.’
¹³³
Yet, in his determination to preserve the Entente with France, Grey was willing to make military commitments which made war with Germany
more
rather than less likely, sooner rather than later. By a completely circular process of reasoning, he wished to commit Britain to war with Germany - because otherwise there might be war with Germany.

The strongest justification for all of this, of course, was that Germany had megalomaniac ambitions which posed a threat not only to France by to Britain itself. As we have seen, this view was widely held by Conservative journalists and Germanophobe diplomats. Yet it is a striking fact that their alarmist claims were at odds with much of the intelligence the Foreign Office actually received from Berlin before the war. This is a point which has hitherto been overlooked by historians. True, there was little in the way of good military intelligence on Germany before 1914 in the absence of a modern espionage network.
¹³⁴
But the reports from British diplomats and consuls in Germany were of a high quality. A far better analysis than Crowe’s of 1907 was Churchill’s of November 1909. Churchill was scarcely a Germanophile. But he argued - evidently on the basis of such intelligence - that ‘the increasing difficulties of getting money’ were ‘becoming terribly effective’ as ‘checks upon German naval expansion’: