Good post. Im less of a cynic than you though. I think that conservative polticians genuinely believe in what they are saying, rather than looking to score short term political points.
Perhaps they are misinformed, or poorly informed, sure. But because the primary goal of the exercise is to score political points, they are not particularly interested in actually engaging with dissenting viewpoints, regardless of whether these viewpoints are possibly correct or not. If they are misinformed, then, they are
willfully misinformed.
I disagree with Dach here. Britain was exhausted by the war and wanted a way out, as did nearly every other allied government (especially those who had suffered more than Britain, which certainly included France). Reparation payments simply mirrored those imposed on Russia in the treaty of Brest Litovsk. An armistice had to come with terms, and reparation payments seemed like a logical thing to impose. The general view is that America wanted a lean peace, France a harsh peace, Britain something in between, and Italy was ignored.
That's not really a disagreement. (Although
I can't imagine why you want to pick a fight with
the roof so badly.) All I was saying was that the British were both more and less susceptible to financial pressures than other participants in the war, meaning that there's no particular reason to suggest that reparations were a
uniquely and specifically British war aim.
Germany was perhaps being a little more energetic about acquiring colonies than Britain and France, mind: they had twice sent warships to Morocco in a rather failed attempt at gunboat diplomacy, and within the past few decades had taken over large amounts of Africa and set up a naval base in China. It would certainly have been easier to believe that Germany was a threat to 'world stability' - meaning Anglo-French supremacy - than it may appear. Observers would probably have looked at them rather like we do at China today: although we don't consider China an enemy or something dangerous, we are much more ready to believe the worst of them than we would be of other countries.
Well...
Surely the Venezuela and Second Moroccan crises demonstrate that Britain and France were just as capable in engaging in "energetic" foreign policy as the Moroccan crises do of Germany? And, like Germany, Britain and French acquired most of their African territories in the period of ~1880-1914, the only difference being that they were expanding on an existing but far more limited presence, rather than starting from scratch. Not to mention that French and British acquisitions were considerably more substantial than Germany's; British Nigeria alone contained more people than the entire German colonial empire, and French Indochina a greater number still. So it's still not clear what the great difference was between French and British imperialism on the one and German on the other, beyond the fact that the former met with Anglo-French approval and the latter with Anglo-French disapproval.
This, this, a thousand times this. Any assertions that German efforts at colonialism were more "energetic" or "aggressive" than those of the other Great Powers are blatantly false. This doesn't merely apply to Britain and France, either: Italy, Russia, Japan, and the United States also qualify.
Let's take the Moroccan Crises as examples. You - Flying Pig - chose to portray them as exercises in German 'gunboat diplomacy', which wasn't untrue (in fact, with respect to the second crisis it was
literally true, because of the presence of SMS
Panther), but doesn't actually indicate anything about the nature of the crises. You were clearly attempting to show that the Germans were intent on extracting some sort of unwonted concession (from Morocco?) with a show of military force. Do the Moroccan Crises meet this definition?
I would say that they emphatically do not. The First Crisis, in 1905-06, resulted directly from a French effort to secure new colonies. A series of Europe-wide conventions had assigned France a more or less 'predominant' place in Moroccan affairs while ensuring that the sultanate remained independent and that any change in the status of Morocco would necessitate confirmation by the other signatories to the conventions. Intent on expanding France's position in Morocco, Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé spent the first few years of the twentieth century secretly bartering with the other parties to the Moroccan agreements, offering recognition of rights in exchange for promises to support French control over the Moroccan government. The
only signatory that Delcassé did
not negotiate with was Germany.
This was a bizarre, yet clearly intentional omission. Many of the Italian, Spanish, and British delegates with whom Delcassé negotiated his pact believed that the French were specifically doing this to keep the Germans out. Britain's price was the 1904
entente cordiale. Spain's was a chunk of northern Moroccan territory for its own, to add to the extant coastal exclaves. Italy got French acquiescence for territorial claims against the Ottoman Empire. Germany...not so much. Leaving aside the question of whether countries should have received compensatory rights at all (and diplomatic practice at the time took that as a given), German rights were clearly being ignored in a circumstance where other countries' were being respected.
In January 1905, the French dispatched a mission to Fez to demand control of the Moroccan military and
gendarmerie from the Sultan. (Surprisingly, he turned this generous deal down.) This was a situation where the 1881 Moroccan agreement clearly would have applied, but the Germans' mailbox, so to speak, was empty, and the Bülow government rightly perceived the entire affair as a snub toward Germany. Hence the kaiser's yacht trip to Tangiers, his two-hour visit to the city, and his speech to the public there before skiving off back to Europe. This was hardly "gunboat diplomacy"; Wilhelm's speech denounced any infringements on Moroccan independence, although the kaiser did mention that Germany's economic interests in the country (which
did exist) along with its diplomatic rights gave Berlin a say in the current dispute.
Some French politicians, even the extremists of the Colonial Party, had cautioned Delcassé before the crisis that his behavior was sure to draw Germany's ire. Now that the crisis had begun, the very same people ignored their own sage warnings and mindlessly rallied round the flag. This spawned a strange war crisis in which both sides seemed to be play-acting. German defeat was preordained, albeit for not the reasons you might think. Instead of demanding a direct
quid pro quo, Bülow foolishly argued that a conference should be called along the lines of the one envisioned by the 1881 agreement. This, however, would place parties willing to support German claims in a clear minority. The French still got everything that they wanted, and the Germans still got bupkiss.
An important coda to the 1906 Algeciras conference, at which France secured an easy majority in favor of its control of Moroccan law enforcement, was the 1909 Moroccan agreement between Germany and France. The French foreign ministry was riven by a conflict between the Quai d'Orsay bureaucrats and the ambassadors and consuls in the field. The conflict itself is fairly complicated, but one of the upshots was that the French ambassador to Germany, Jules Cambon, became convinced that French policy toward Germany was unnecessarily aggressive and caused most of the problems in the relationship between the two countries. In order to smooth things over, he orchestrated the aforementioned 1909 deal, in which Germany agreed to abstain from any political involvement in Morocco whatsoever while France agreed to refer any changes in the Moroccan
status quo to Germany; both countries also affirmed their willingness to foster economic cooperation in the sultanate.
Fast-forward to April 1911, when yet another French mission showed up to Fez. This time, however, the mission was made up of regulars from the metropole, and they were there to annex the country outright. They were armed with a bogus request for French assistance signed by the Sultan; his signature was real enough, but the request had been written out by the French embassy's staffers. Ostensibly, the French were there to protect the European community in Fez from a recent rebellion. The rebellion, however, had occurred in the country's interior, and Fez was in zero danger. It was merely a pretext of the sort that occurred so often during the New Imperialism.
Once again, the French had broken their diplomatic agreements with Germany. This time, France had contravened both the Act of Algeciras and Cambon's 1909 convention. However, the Germans did not act first. Spain did: in June, the Spanish dispatched troops to points in their sphere of influence in the northern part of the country, in order to secure the concessions that had been promised back in Delcassé's day - possession being nine-tenths of the law, and Spain's government being unsure of exactly how much French promises were worth. These movements drew no criticism from any of the other powers involved, because why would they?
Germany's efforts to secure its rights in the country were almost as contrived as France's. SMS
Panther, a venerable light vessel in the German Navy, was dispatched to Agadir to protect a businessman who, as it happened, didn't even get into the country until a few days after
Panther dropped anchor on 1 July. Ultimately, however, the ostensible reasons for the
Panther's appearance off Morocco were irrelevant. So were its military capabilities, which were relatively negligible. The point was that the German foreign ministry wanted to demonstrate that German diplomacy and German rights in Morocco were backed by more than just a scrap of paper - since the French seemed exceptionally unimpressed by mere diplomacy. The German foreign minister, Alfred von Kiderlen-Wächter, explicitly described the
Panther as a symbol, and specifically recommended (successfully) against dispatching any more ships to Morocco to escalate the crisis.
This isn't to say that the entire French government was possessed of those opinions. Hell, the entire French government wasn't even complicit in its own actions. Premier Joseph Caillaux was the apostle of
détente with Germany, and his background in business and finance had disposed him positively toward the Franco-German economic cooperation in Morocco. The primary architects of the Moroccan intervention were the aforementioned hawks at the Quai d'Orsay, like Maurice Herbette, the chief of communications. Foreign Minister Justin de Selves was newly emplaced in his position and therefore functioned as a mouthpiece for Herbette and his allies. De Selves was the primary exponent in Cabinet of the option of escalation, whereby France would dispatch cruisers of its own to Agadir. Caillaux rightly derided this as ludicrous. But throughout the month of July, de Selves and Herbette managed to block any effort to open formal negotiations with Germany over Morocco. The premier ultimately had to resort to backchannel talks with the Germans via contacts he had developed in finance before he finally managed to pressure de Selves into giving Cambon his marching orders.
One of the oddest responses came from Britain; British politicians of the era were apparently contractually obligated to go nuclear as soon as ships were involved in something. Britain mobilized its entire fleet in July and August, a rather hilariously disproportionate response to one gunboat showing up in a country that wasn't even in Britain's sphere of influence. Combined with the appointment of notorious lunatic Winston Churchill to the position of First Sea Lord, the British were sending strong signals of aggressive action, to the point where the German naval attaché in London wrote to the kaiser that he believed the British were merely waiting for a signal from France as an excuse to fall upon Germany and 'Copenhagen' the High Seas Fleet. This tallied nicely with the explicit comments of some British diplomats, such as Sir Francis Bertie (who had once threatened Germany with war because the Germans had had the temerity to protest at Britain's invasion of the Transvaal in 1899).
On 21 July, our good buddy Edward Grey baldly informed the German foreign ministry that any effort by Germany to secure an 'Atlantic port' in Morocco through this crisis would necessitate the deployment of British warships. The only Germans who were suggesting that Germany gain Moroccan territory were in the jingoist press - of which Kiderlen had long since lost control after an early effort to condition public opinion - but the British government either did not know that or did not care. That night, Lloyd George gave his famous Mansion House speech, with its bizarre forecast of Continental war. The speech was both not approved by the Cabinet (which was inconveniently full of radical Liberal doves) and carefully planned by Lloyd George, Grey, and Grey's puppet PM Asquith. It obviously didn't play well in Germany; Arthur Zimmermann, one of Kiderlen's subordinates, complained that Lloyd George was a nobody who knew nothing of diplomacy and who was deliberately trying to sabotage the talks with Caillaux.
As Germany and France continued to negotiate, Britain ramped up preparations for war. Grey and Asquith found ever more inventive ways of circumventing the Cabinet's doves, like Esher, Morley, Loreburn, and Harcourt. None of them was invited to the Committee of Imperial Defence in August, which featured Henry Wilson's famous presentation and the fraught decision to dispatch a British Expeditionary Force to the Continent in the event of any war. Even Asquith was taken aback by the extent of the preparations Grey and Wilson wished to make; by September, the foreign minister and the staff chief were collaborating on secret mobilization talks with the French army against Asquith's explicit orders. The Royal Navy remained mobilized even as France and Germany made no military preparations whatsoever. Russia, too, remained quiescent. Britain's strange efforts to escalate the crisis in spite of the plans of the two principal parties in it convinced Austria-Hungary to firmly side with Germany over Morocco in mid-August, even though Foreign Minister Ährenthal had initially planned to avoid the dispute as "not Austria's business".
Once formal negotiations were started between Germany and France, it soon became obvious that there really weren't grounds for a crisis, and those negotiations continued to move forward despite British efforts to start a war. In November, Caillaux and Cambon sensibly agreed to compensate the German government in exchange for recognition of France's new colony (with a few shreds of Congolese territory, in the event), and promised to allow German business to continue in Morocco as it had before. Crisis averted. Unfortunately, the upshot was that Caillaux's secret negotiations with the Germans were discovered by the Foreign Ministry hawks, who leaked it to the press in response to Caillaux's efforts to convene a disciplinary hearing on Herbette's actions during the crisis. Furthermore, the treaty was widely denounced in the French press for conceding too much to the Germans, even though Delcassé's original blueprint from ten years before actually would've given Germany significantly more territory. For the sin of failing to get something for nothing, and for preventing the outbreak of war over an issue that was embarrassingly easy to solve, Caillaux's ministry fell in early 1912. (Problematically, he remained the most popular man in the Chamber of Deputies, meaning that for two years a succession of weak governments rose at the behest of President Poincaré, who extraconstitutionally governed through them until they broke up, then rinsed and repeated. This situation obtained until the eve of the First World War.)
Now, I don't know about you, but I find myself incapable of coming away from a discussion of the Moroccan Crises with the opinion that
Germany was the aggressive party. In fact, any effort to do so flies in the face of any unbiased approach to the historical record. Back around the turn of the twentieth century, some prominent British diplomats (such as Eyre Crowe, who wrote an amazing thirty-page memorandum on the subject in 1907) insisted on depicting German policy as underhanded, aggressive, disruptive, and overweening to an extent no other powers matched. Crowe, Bertie, and the rest did this not by discussing
specific German actions that were evidence of this supposed policy, but by speaking in the abstract and referring to the overall sense that they got from the Germans. Not only did Crowe and his ilk succeed in swaying Asquith, Grey, Haldane, and Churchill to their point of view, they managed to color most of the subsequent English-written history of prewar diplomacy into the bargain. Flying Pig's post is just another example of the insidious effect that that campaign has had on public opinion.