Conservative revisionism of WW1

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.
 
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.
 
The German colonial empire was a rather reluctant creation, bourne mostly out of peer pressure. Bismarck was opposed to colonialism, fearing it would distract from European issues.
 
Flying Pig said:
Britain was perhaps being a little more energetic about acquiring colonies than France and Germany mind: they had twice sent warships to Thailand in a rather failed attempt at gunboat diplomacy, and within the past few decades had taken over large amounts of Asia and annexed parts of China. It would certainly have been easier to believe that Britain was a threat to 'world stability' than it may appear. Observers would probably have looked at them rather like we do at the United States today: although we don't consider United States an enemy or something dangerous, we are much more ready to believe the worst of them than we would be of other countries.

Fixed.
 
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.
 
If they are misinformed, then, they are willfully misinformed.

When something becomes political, being willfully misinformed is an occupational hazard (where it's been shown that proving someone's position as false makes them likely to more strongly cling to it).

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.

Is there any argument that Germany had to take a more aggressive stance in order to "catch up" to the other powers or is it your view that they simply didn't take a more aggressive stance?


Great post as always. Very helpful in understanding what was going on. That being said, I could see the haze of mutual distrust causing the British to legitimately believe Germany wanted an Atlantic port. Even if that doesn't make sense to everyone else, I can still see it being an honest belief (similar to my point above about politics and cognitive dissonance). Certainly, the British had an irrational fear about anything that could remotely threaten naval superiority, but it's the one area they clung to as indicating that they were stronger and more secure than the other powers.
 
Is there any argument that Germany had to take a more aggressive stance in order to "catch up" to the other powers or is it your view that they simply didn't take a more aggressive stance?


I would say thats a logical conclusion of coming to the party late. France, Britain, Spain, Portugal and Holland had already carved up most of the world before the German state even existed. The same is true of Italy. Having colonies was like a sign that you had made it and were a big player on the world stage. Today of course its slightly different. Now countries aspire to having a permanent seat on the UN security council and a nuke. But back then getting colonies was only possible via diplomacy, both the hard and soft versions. As Britain and france were the big players in colonial matters, Germany was always going to antagonise them more, especially because geographically they were so much closer. America largely got a free rein in everything it did because it was the other side of the world.

Certainly, the British had an irrational fear about anything that could remotely threaten naval superiority, but it's the one area they clung to as indicating that they were stronger and more secure than the other powers.

Yes, true, although i wouldnt say it was irrational. In many ways, it was quite a sensible view. Britains navy had acted as the guarantor of the kingdom/nation ever since the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was also seen as (and was) the protector of the empire. This was one of the principal reasons why the naval arms race with germany took place - because the kaiser knew that in order to have colonies, you needed a big navy.
 
Is there any argument that Germany had to take a more aggressive stance in order to "catch up" to the other powers or is it your view that they simply didn't take a more aggressive stance?
The latter.

Now, to be fair, plenty of people, including many Germans, some of whom were politicians (or emperors), articulated the notion that Germany should be trying to catch up, and that German diplomacy should be more aggressive in order to facilitate this. In reality, however, that rarely intersected with government policy.
Louis XXIV said:
Great post as always. Very helpful in understanding what was going on. That being said, I could see the haze of mutual distrust causing the British to legitimately believe Germany wanted an Atlantic port. Even if that doesn't make sense to everyone else, I can still see it being an honest belief (similar to my point above about politics and cognitive dissonance). Certainly, the British had an irrational fear about anything that could remotely threaten naval superiority, but it's the one area they clung to as indicating that they were stronger and more secure than the other powers.
Sure. Most things have a reason. It's just that, in constructing this reason and applying it to policy, the imperialist part of the Liberal Cabinet consistently acted with fairly outrageous hypocrisy, conveniently turning a blind eye to its own aggression while inflating any opposition on the part of another power into a vast conspiracy to destroy Britain.

I mean, let's get real, here. The Panther was one gunboat. It was explicitly designed not as a show of force, but as a symbol of German interests in the country which French policy was deliberately trying to marginalize. Germany was not threatening anybody by sending a ship to Agadir. To turn that into a threat to British security requires an incredible amount of unreasoning hysteria. This is from the country that, again, repeatedly and directly threatened German leaders with a 'Copenhagen' attack on the High Seas Fleet.
America largely got a free rein in everything it did because it was the other side of the world.
I don't think this is true. America got free rein because the British regarded the Americans as too powerful to antagonize. This was a consistent theme in British diplomacy before the war: grouping serious threats into alliances against less serious threats. Japan posed a potential threat to British colonies, so the British allied with it in 1902. Then France posed a threat to the colonies, so Britain agreed to the entente cordiale. Then Russia started posing a threat to India again, so the two powers came up with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

Germany was the perfect enemy for Britain precisely because it wasn't that threatening. The High Seas Fleet was big enough to be easy fodder for war scares without being big enough to seriously threaten British security. (With that said, it came reasonably close to altering the scales of the naval war in Germany's favor in 1914-15; a little luck might have narrowed the margin considerably. But that's true of many things.) The German army would do no good against Britain without naval support. By contrast, Britain would face serious problems in defending territory against the likes of the US, Japan, Russia, or France.

In fact, insofar as the Germans can reasonably be charged with having committed errors in their handling of Britain, it is safe to say that those errors lay in not threatening Britain enough. In the 1890s, the Holstein faction at the foreign ministry made a concerted effort to exchange Germany's Russian ties for British ones. That was part of the reason that Germany abandoned the Reinsurance Treaty. The problem was that Russia was one of the main reasons that Salisbury and Rosebery were at least temporarily interested in coming to terms with Germany. When Holstein et al. dumped Russia, Germany was no longer capable of posing a threat to Britain through Russia. In that case, there would be no reason for Britain to align with Germany.

The High Seas Fleet was probably Germany's best shot at recreating the sort of threat that British leaders would be compelled to neutralize with a friendly diplomatic agreement. Unfortunately for the Germans, they were unable to maintain a rate of naval construction comparable to Britain's for a variety of reasons (need to invest proportionately greater resources in plant instead of production, difficulty of securing funding from the Reichstag, dissension within the German Navy about production priorities, etc.). Germany unilaterally abandoned the naval arms race with Britain in 1912, something that was widely recognized in both countries at the time. (Churchill, for instance, noted it explicitly. He ought to have known, since he was the First Sea Lord.) Without a naval threat, there was correspondingly less of a reason for Grey and Haldane to bother with good relations in Berlin.

With that said, of course, Britain's diplomacy had some fairly serious drawbacks. There was always a strong possibility that Britain's alliances would only cover its rivals' efforts to increase their own strength, and that they would then return to menacing British possessions at a later date. Australian and Kiwi fears of Japan doing precisely that dominated the decade leading up to the Great War, and, as noted earlier in this thread, it's one reading for the reason that the Anglo-Japanese alliance ultimately fell apart. Russia, too, seemed to be embarking on a similar policy in Iran and Central Asia in 1913 and 1914 that may have led to a break with Britain in the near future, absent the war. And then there was the most serious drawback, namely that alliances designed to neutralize the possibility of war through deterrence would in fact act as pressures on Britain to enter a war.
sherbz said:
Yes, true, although i wouldnt say it was irrational. In many ways, it was quite a sensible view. Britains navy had acted as the guarantor of the kingdom/nation ever since the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was also seen as (and was) the protector of the empire. This was one of the principal reasons why the naval arms race with germany took place - because the kaiser knew that in order to have colonies, you needed a big navy.
It is unquestionably irrational to respond to a diplomatic crisis between two unrelated powers involving a single gunboat in a colony nowhere near one's own possessions by mobilizing the entire fleet and threatening war.
 
The latter.

Now, to be fair, plenty of people, including many Germans, some of whom were politicians (or emperors), articulated the notion that Germany should be trying to catch up, and that German diplomacy should be more aggressive in order to facilitate this. In reality, however, that rarely intersected with government policy.

Sure. Most things have a reason. It's just that, in constructing this reason and applying it to policy, the imperialist part of the Liberal Cabinet consistently acted with fairly outrageous hypocrisy, conveniently turning a blind eye to its own aggression while inflating any opposition on the part of another power into a vast conspiracy to destroy Britain.

I mean, let's get real, here. The Panther was one gunboat. It was explicitly designed not as a show of force, but as a symbol of German interests in the country which French policy was deliberately trying to marginalize. Germany was not threatening anybody by sending a ship to Agadir. To turn that into a threat to British security requires an incredible amount of unreasoning hysteria. This is from the country that, again, repeatedly and directly threatened German leaders with a 'Copenhagen' attack on the High Seas Fleet.

I don't think this is true. America got free rein because the British regarded the Americans as too powerful to antagonize. This was a consistent theme in British diplomacy before the war: grouping serious threats into alliances against less serious threats. Japan posed a potential threat to British colonies, so the British allied with it in 1902. Then France posed a threat to the colonies, so Britain agreed to the entente cordiale. Then Russia started posing a threat to India again, so the two powers came up with the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907.

Germany was the perfect enemy for Britain precisely because it wasn't that threatening. The High Seas Fleet was big enough to be easy fodder for war scares without being big enough to seriously threaten British security. (With that said, it came reasonably close to altering the scales of the naval war in Germany's favor in 1914-15; a little luck might have narrowed the margin considerably. But that's true of many things.) The German army would do no good against Britain without naval support. By contrast, Britain would face serious problems in defending territory against the likes of the US, Japan, Russia, or France.

In fact, insofar as the Germans can reasonably be charged with having committed errors in their handling of Britain, it is safe to say that those errors lay in not threatening Britain enough. In the 1890s, the Holstein faction at the foreign ministry made a concerted effort to exchange Germany's Russian ties for British ones. That was part of the reason that Germany abandoned the Reinsurance Treaty. The problem was that Russia was one of the main reasons that Salisbury and Rosebery were at least temporarily interested in coming to terms with Germany. When Holstein et al. dumped Russia, Germany was no longer capable of posing a threat to Britain through Russia. In that case, there would be no reason for Britain to align with Germany.

The High Seas Fleet was probably Germany's best shot at recreating the sort of threat that British leaders would be compelled to neutralize with a friendly diplomatic agreement. Unfortunately for the Germans, they were unable to maintain a rate of naval construction comparable to Britain's for a variety of reasons (need to invest proportionately greater resources in plant instead of production, difficulty of securing funding from the Reichstag, dissension within the German Navy about production priorities, etc.). Germany unilaterally abandoned the naval arms race with Britain in 1912, something that was widely recognized in both countries at the time. (Churchill, for instance, noted it explicitly. He ought to have known, since he was the First Sea Lord.) Without a naval threat, there was correspondingly less of a reason for Grey and Haldane to bother with good relations in Berlin.

With that said, of course, Britain's diplomacy had some fairly serious drawbacks. There was always a strong possibility that Britain's alliances would only cover its rivals' efforts to increase their own strength, and that they would then return to menacing British possessions at a later date. Australian and Kiwi fears of Japan doing precisely that dominated the decade leading up to the Great War, and, as noted earlier in this thread, it's one reading for the reason that the Anglo-Japanese alliance ultimately fell apart. Russia, too, seemed to be embarking on a similar policy in Iran and Central Asia in 1913 and 1914 that may have led to a break with Britain in the near future, absent the war. And then there was the most serious drawback, namely that alliances designed to neutralize the possibility of war through deterrence would in fact act as pressures on Britain to enter a war.

It is unquestionably irrational to respond to a diplomatic crisis between two unrelated powers involving a single gunboat in a colony nowhere near one's own possessions by mobilizing the entire fleet and threatening war.

This all makes sense to me, but I recall elsewhere seeing similarly detailed and well-argued claims that Germany came extremely close to winning the Great War on numerous occasions. If Germany was so non-threatening to the British, how was it able to stand a serious chance of defeating the three Entente powers?
 
This all makes sense to me, but I recall elsewhere seeing similarly detailed and well-argued claims that Germany came extremely close to winning the Great War on numerous occasions. If Germany was so non-threatening to the British, how was it able to stand a serious chance of defeating the three Entente powers?
If you think that Britain had trouble when it was just fighting Germany, imagine the trouble that the likes of France or Russia would have caused it.

Germany mostly didn't attack Britain or British possessions directly. It didn't have the military capability to do so. France and Russia, however, had the ability to do just that.
 
Yes, true, although i wouldnt say it was irrational. In many ways, it was quite a sensible view. Britains navy had acted as the guarantor of the kingdom/nation ever since the Spanish Armada in 1588. It was also seen as (and was) the protector of the empire. This was one of the principal reasons why the naval arms race with germany took place - because the kaiser knew that in order to have colonies, you needed a big navy.

I meant irrational in that the threat was not well-grounded in fact. I didn't mean to say that, were some hypothetical navy strong enough to replace them, they wouldn't be justified in being alarmed.
 
Glassfan said:
Boris Johnson, the Conservative mayor of London, is certain that the Germans started the war. Michael Gove, the Conservative secretary of state for education, concurs, insisting that the ‘ruthless social Darwinism of the German elites’ and their ‘aggressively expansionist war aims’ made ‘resistance more than justified’. Gove, who believes Britain fought a ‘just war’ back in 1914, has denounced ‘left-wing academics’ and cynical TV shows like Blackadder for mocking Britain’s role in the conflict.

Analyzing the chronology of events alone is enough to concur with an opinion by Johnson & Grove, that the Central Powers started WW1:

28.07.1914 - Austro-Hungary declares war on Serbia
31.07.1914 - German ultimatum to France
01.08.1914 - Germany declares war on Russia
02.08.1914 - German forces invade Luxembourg
03.08.1914 - Germany declares war on France
03.08.1914 - German forces invade Belgium
04.08.1914 - Great Britain declares war on Germany
05.08.1914 - the USA announces neutrality in the war
08.08.1914 - Montenegro declares war on Germany
23.08.1914 - Japan declares war on Germany
21.10.1914 - Turkish fleet blocks Bosphorus and Dardanelles
29.10.1914 - Turkish fleet attacks Russian coastline
02.11.1914 - Russia, Great Britain and France declare war on Turkey
05.11.1914 - other Entente states declare war on Turkey
12.11.1914 - Turkey announces Jihad

Etc., etc.

Not necessarily Germany alone, but the Dual Alliance (Germany + Austro-Hungary).
 
Why are you starting the sequence of events with declaration of war and not the circumstances that led up to that declaration?
 
Trying HARD to edit out my sarcastic kneejerk reaction...

But your "by definition" analysis would lead to the conclusion that the Pacific War (in World War II) was an American aggression against the Empire of japan. Japan didn't actutally formally declare war (they severed diplomatic relations and ended ongoing negotiations, but never formally declared war), after all, so by your standard that war only began on December 8th when Roosvelt talked congress into declaring it.

Ergo, clearly a war of American aggression.

Wars have started without declarations of war countless times throughout history, of which this is only one example. They still do today. Mostly because, as Clausewitz put it, war is but the continuation of politics by other means. It's all nice and good to look for a nice clean break, but often you find the killing has already started by the time the involved parties formalize it.

Such as (for a random example) a terrorist attack in Sarajevo murdering the Austrian crown prince. By parties strongly linked to Serbia.
 
after all, so by your standard that war only began on December 8th when Roosvelt talked congress into declaring it.

It was Louis XXIV who mentioned declarations of wars, it is not "my standard".

Wars start either by formal declarations or by military invasions without declaring war (the latter was for example the case on 01.09.1939).

Assassination of Franz Ferdinand was neither a military invasion nor a declaration of war.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was obviously a military invasion.
 
Such as (for a random example) a terrorist attack in Sarajevo murdering the Austrian crown prince. By parties strongly linked to Serbia.

5 Serbian citizens and 1 citizen of Austro-Hungary (0 French, 0 Russian, 0 Luxembourgian, 0 Belgian - i.e. not linked to states invaded by Germany or upon which it declared war shortly thereafter) - terrorists - assassinated 1 person.

Not even comparable to 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in which many hundreds died.

Yet everyone agrees that the war vs. Afghanistan started on 7 October 2001, not on 9/11.
 
So France is responsible for the second World War's western front?

Declarations of war occur due to actions that precede them (in most cases). Causes and responsibility for a war come from those actions. That's why there's the concept of the Casus Belli and a Just War.
 
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