What a load of crap. "Balance of Power" isn't a policy or justification for anything - it just is. Its disruption has a number of consequences, however. Nations work in their own best interests, and if these interests are threatened (for example by a neighbour becoming very powerful) then naturally they do what they can to avoid the threat. France discovered during the Franco-Prussian war that they now had a neighbour which was far more powerful than them, and so they sought to find allies to reduce the threat. France's efforts in this regard were far more pertinent to the start of WWI than anything the British did.
This is, of course, one of the key problems with the realist paradigm: treating modern states as some kind of classical personal rule instrument, whereby one state can actually follow a coherent policy and consistently work in what its ruler determines to be its best interests. This does not match up with the
actions of statesmen over time. In addition to the problems of any modern state attempting to follow a coherent and consistent policy in defense of what presumably are its "interests", the actors within states imperfectly understand what those interests even are. Sometimes those actors candidly admit that they are not even working in what they perceive to be a state's best interests, but feel constrained to do as they are for some reason or another (sometimes the "grand force of history" or whatever; that they believe that they are being pushed along by great indescribable forces does not make it
true, of course). You can hardly find a more dramatic description of this than in the decision of the Dual Monarchy go to war in 1914.
To follow on that, French policy was hardly as consistently anti-German in its 'search for allies' as you seem to imply. In the immediate aftermath of the 1870 war, successive French governments seemed more interested in internal or colonial questions than in seeking to 'redress the wrong' of Frankfurt. Even the
Krieg in Sicht crisis was due less to any actual intentions the French had of renewing the contest than of Bismarck's fear of its possibility. I suppose the government of Jules Ferry was assiduously pursuing an anti-German policy when it launched its 1880s entente with Germany, or that the Far Eastern Triple that destroyed the Treaty of Shimonoseki (France + Russia + Germany) was another fruit of consistent anti-German policy. All in France's best interests, of course, a realist might argue, but it's far from clear that those best interests dictated any sort of containment strategy with respect to Germany. Even after the Russo-French dual alliance was formed, even after the crises of the decade of the 1900s began what many authors on the subject have terms an era of confrontational diplomacy (teleologically speeding Europe along towards war), the French government of Caillaux inaugurated a fresh entente with Germany in 1909-10, and even helped Germany achieve an agreement with Russia over the Berlin-Baghdad Railway (earlier portrayed in this thread as an example of the global Anglo-German struggle or some such). If French policy was consistently anti-German, or if France's interests lay in cutting Germany off from potential allies (as some historians have described
Bismarck's policy with regard to France), then why did France facilitate both direct links with Germany and links between Germany and France's own allies? Sure, one can portray the former as "self-interest" as well, since the French government certainly had to deal with lobbyists for industrialists who wanted better trade links with Germany - but what of the latter?
One could certainly say that
some French initiatives might have made war more likely. For instance, the long Balkan crisis of 1912-14 was partially initiated by a renewed French commitment to its treaty links with the Russians, which the Russian foreign minister Sazonov took to be an effective endorsement of a forward Russian policy in the Balkans. Enter the Balkan League, the two wars of 1912-13, and the resultant situation that played a large role in the outbreak of war. This was not some grand plan of the French ministry, not even some grand plan by Poincaré, who initiated it. It certainly did not make war inevitable, as the London Conference demonstrated.
Gangor said:
W...T...F? Have you read history? The Franco-Prussian War? A now-unified and industrialized Germany? Russia may have had a big army, but it was poorly equipped and lead. Hell, they lost a war with Japan.
This is actually gratifying. I have a very tiresome reputation on this forum as being somebody with whom you don't want to pick a fight over history. It's a bit of an albatross, really, because I'm only an undergrad and not all that knowledgeable about a lot of things. It also makes my time on CFC very boring and practically devoid of interesting history-related conversation. It's fun to talk to somebody who doesn't really know about that reputation. Anyway.
I don't entirely understand your message here. On the one hand, you argue that French policy before the war dictated some kind of containment strategy with regard to Germany, and therefore required alliance with Russia as some sort of counterweight. Then you argue that Russia's army was "poorly equipped and lead" - tropetastic, exaggeration, oversimplification, but not
outrageously incorrect - so why, exactly, did the French need them? Even if we are going to play the pissing match of whose army was better or worse qualitatively, one could just figure in the Austro-Hungarian military as even
worse than that of Russia in both qualitative and numerical terms, as some eminent historians (take a look at Norman Stone, for instance, for useful WWI Eastern Front trope-busting) claim. If we just write off the East as a wash, we're still left with German numerical inferiority to Anglo-French numbers on the Western Front. In qualitative terms and in terms of experience, the German military had virtually no recent wars (and thus, no veterans of military command) on which to draw by 1914, whereas the Russians (Manchuria), the French (China, Africa, Indochina), and the British (South Africa) all did. And, again, the German fleet was vastly outclassed by the Royal Navy alone, not to mention the all very sizable French and Russian fleets.
What you're basically left with arguing for is instead some kind of perception gap between the French military and civilian authorities' understandings of their military power and the reality, saying that they all underestimated it. Strangely, this is not the kind of reading you will get from most popular-history discussions of the outbreak of the war, in which the French stupidly and hubristically launch their offensive into mountainous Alsace-Lorraine right into the jaws of the German army and get their asses handed to them. It's not the sort of image you get from prewar discussions among the Entente. In 1912 the French general staff prepared a memo at the request of Poincaré, who wanted to know about the chances of war with the Austro-German alliance over the Balkans: the staff's conclusion was that "under these conditions, the Triple Entente...
could achieve a victory permitting it to remake the map of Europe" - italics mine. (Strangely - or rather, not so strangely - this memo is never taken as evidence that France planned a war of conquest against Germany like the December 1912 German council meeting is described as a "war council". This is because the French did not commit the Holocaust.)
Gangor said:
Uh, no. Germany of the late 19th and early 20th century acted like a spoiled child not being paid enough attention to. Abandoning the restraint of Bismark, they precipitated the biggest arms race in history (at that time) and sought to bully it's neighbours into doing what it wanted. Frankly, from the point Bismark was removed war was inevitable.
Cheap shot: if Germany's government was acting in its best interests by "acting like a spoiled child", who are you to criticize it?
That "spoiled child" characterization always bugs me - it's as though the critic is playing the part of the United Kingdom, the harassed father, paternalistically buying young Germany a gift every once in a while but eventually getting fed up with tantrums. Entirely apart from being deliberately calculated to infuriate somebody else (which it was), it acts as though German policy was all that different from, say, British policy, French policy, Italian policy, or even American policy...yet nobody was forming encircling alliances to crush the United States.
Your message is extremely confused now. First you claimed that Germany's very existence as a united state made European war inevitable; now you've retreated to the old line that Bismarck held everything in check like a magician and that once he was gone, it all fell apart and Wilhelmine Germany set the continent on an inexorable path towards confrontation. The only thing that's missing is an open indictment of the Kaiser as a war criminal, and an inquiry into his formative years in which the whole thing is laid down to his crippled arm and the fact that his mother didn't love him, just to get the maudlin parts in there.
The problem is that, as we've discussed before in this thread (or, at least, I have), many of those things are not necessarily causative. For instance, the naval arms race with Britain was over by late 1912, Germany having given it up unilaterally. Churchill himself admitted in his
The World Crisis that naval matters were no longer a source of Anglo-German tension after that year - since he was, at that time, the British civilian naval chief, he should probably have a good idea about whether that was true, hmm? You refer to Germany's "confrontational diplomacy" in pushing around other states and causing everybody to hate them. I'll be the first to admit that the German foreign ministry's tactics were sometimes pretty terrible, but I fail to see how they made war inevitable. The Germans were acting like dicks, but they were dicks who didn't actually want to fight a war, and in acting like dicks they sometimes helped resolve sticky situations. Take the Bosnian Crisis of 1908-9, a rather complicated affair in which the Russians and Austrians seem to have backstabbed each other, partly because of revolution in Turkey sending a timetable out of control. Russia mobilized, but the German chancellor forced them to back down with a rather famous note about their intentions: "We await a precise answer - yes or no; we shall be obliged to consider an evasive, ambiguous, or unclear answer as a refusal." What was notable about the July Crisis was that the German foreign ministry
didn't take control and act tough with either its ally or its potential enemies. Instead, the German Kaiser went on a yachting holiday, the German chief of the general staff and war minister both took vacations, and the German foreign minister completely ignored the situation for weeks until long after it was much more difficult to stop the march towards war. One is tempted to imagine Bethmann Hollweg acting like a dick as his predecessor Bülow had, by laying out the Austrian position and explicitly demanding a response from Russia within days of the assassination, leading to no war and happy little duckies and bunnies.
Anyway, let's just ignore specifics like the nitty-gritty of Bismarck's actual policy and the policies of his successors (they might be a bit too high-brow for this thread) and concentrate on that key line: "Frankly, from the point Bismark [sic] was removed war was inevitable." What are you implying here, that only Bismarck ever kept the German state from fighting a Great Power war, only he
could have done so, and no matter who followed him or what policies his successors employed, war became inevitable purely because the pilot had been dropped? Ridiculous. I'm sure you don't actually think that way. Okay, then: is it that the policies Bismarck employed were different from the policies of his successors in certain ways, and it's the difference between them that Germany was set on an inexorable path towards million-man slaughter in 1890? Right, so how, specifically, were they different? What made war impossible to avoid for Germany after 1890? Do you think the German foreign ministers between 1890 and 1914 did a good job in avoiding war for a generation when it was apparently inevitable? If your answer involves general statements like "the Germans pushed other countries around and they didn't like it", please state how these actions when done by the Germans made war inevitable, but not when anybody else's foreign ministries did them. Furthermore, please state what about these policies made them irreversible, such that no change in direction was possible, if indeed the direction was towards war. Preemptive word of warning: answers involving the
Sonderweg will not be acceptable.
Gangor said:
Rational wars happen because one side feels they have an advantage over the other, ie power is not balanced. WWI and everything around it (at least from the perspective of the Central Powers) was not in the least rational. Germany was easily the most powerful nation in mainland Europe, but didn't know what to do with their power. They wanted prestige and recognition but didn't receive enough to satisfy their hubris. Austria was looking outward for a way to solve internal problems.
Much of this is true. Austria was, in fact, acting as though its internal problems and its foreign policy were intertwined. Frankly, they were. Anything that Serbia, Italy, Romania, Russian Poles, or even Germany did impacted the constituent nationalities of the Habsburg state. This had been true, effectively, since 1867 and even before. It continued to matter in 1914 because Austria-Hungary failed to effectively reform the
Ausgleich in the intervening years. That it did so was hardly because of the grand sweep of history or something like that: it's more bound up in the issues of personal politics. Franz Josef didn't really want a change unless the Magyars pissed him off unduly, and successive generations of Magyar politicians were experts at not doing so and only giving a very little bit each time they were pushed by Vienna. Since national threats could not be neutralized by internal policy, Habsburg statesmen were left with neutralizing them through external policy. They genuinely believed that failing to respond to the Sarajevo murders would be tantamount to a dissolution of the Dual Monarchy. Since statesmen can hardly be expected to work for the destruction of their own state, they embarked on the course for war that they did. That doesn't really justify it or make their beliefs into reality; it's an explanation, not an
apologia.
The rest of what you said is extremely confused. First you blame the disruption of the balance of power for World War I (the jury's apparently still out in your mind as to whether that happened in 1871 or 1890). Then you state that rational wars have to do with balance of power calculations, and that World War I was not a rational war. So do you or don't you blame the war on a disruption in the balance of power? How do irrational wars occur if statesmen act in their country's best interests, as you stated earlier? Doesn't this just blow your earlier argument out of the water? Furthermore, you state that Germany was the most powerful single state in Europe, with which I can hardly disagree. Okay: what does that have to do with the irrationality of their calculations before the war? Surely if you wished to talk about how irrational the German statesmen were being, you'd talk about stuff that demonstrated that they were irrational, instead of saying that they were in charge of the most powerful single state in Europe. Instead we get tropes like "they didn't know what to do with their power", as though the millions of Germany and the statesmen that led that country can be reduced to a teenage Marvel comic-book character testing out her newfound ability to fly and her super strength, all the while leaving destruction in her wake.
Gangor said:
Austria was rotting from the inside. Like many authoritarian powers whose lights are dimming, they tried to divert the attention of their people by causing trouble abroad - in this case the balkans. This was the spark.
The keg however was more complex, and it is this which the threat is about. Germany, afraid of encirclement (Bismark's "le cauchemar des coalitions"), build up it's military to the point where the surrounding nations felt so threatened that they had to form strong alliances to counter the threat, thereby increasing German paranoia. Britain must have been worried by this, but were unsure initially who to back. In fact were it not for inept German diplomacy and naval policy they likely would have been on the other side - negotiations were going on as late as 1912.
Ah, finally we have some specifics! Hallelujah! Here we have the classic international tragedy of a security dilemma, where one state's acts to ensure its own security create the very peril it had been trying to avoid.
Unfortunately, as usual, this is an incomplete explanation at best. Germany's land forces grew very slowly compared with those of especially France and to a lesser extent Russia; the first time a major increase in the size of the German army was voted through the Reichstag during Wilhelm II's reign was in fact in 1913, and that was in
response to a change in the French conscription laws that would allow France to deploy even more men on the field, and of course Russia's famous "Great Program" of the same year that would massively expand the military by 1917. Austria-Hungary, Germany's ally, did not even increase its annual conscription classes each year to keep pace with population growth, with the result that Serbia actually had a larger standing army than did its immediate enemy in 1912, mitigated slightly in the following two years by massive casualties (est. possibly as high as 91,000) in the Balkan Wars. It was Bismarck who was the chief backer of army bills in the Reichstag, not his successors. These increases apparently didn't make war inevitable. And his successors only began to push for big army bills long after the Entente had both formed and solidified. Perhaps the negotiators of 1894 could travel through time.
You're left with the navy, which did indeed see massive increases during the Wilhelmine period up to 1912, and somewhat moderated ones after that. It's true that this contributed to the general arms race, although causation is problematic. For instance, the British themselves began passing major naval increase bills before the German navy was even relevant, earlier in the 1890s, to keep pace with the French and Russians. Part of the justification for the earliest naval bills was security from the British. Referring to the arms race as some damnfool Wilhelmine experiment, connected to
Weltpolitik and Fischerian
Primat der Innenpolitik, only gets part of the story. For every British piece of "invasion literature" (which started coming out before the Germans even had a navy worth a damn, and which were generally jingoistic and in some cases rather offensive - of course, since the British didn't commit the Holocaust, they surely can't be seen as provocative, can they?
) there was a German naval scare that the British would "Copenhagen" their nascent fleet. Sure, part of this is the give-and-take inherent in any arms race, practically a realist standby. Much of it isn't.
The Anglo-German alliance negotiations come up again: ah, but of course! Every tragedy has to have its hubris, its fatal flaw. So Germany must reject the efforts of her eventual enemy to befriend her, thus forcing that friend to reluctantly enter the lists against her and eventually prove to be her downfall. And this all is quite inevitable, no one can stop it. This
might be true for professional sports figures, but I have to laugh when this particular instance of it comes up.
Unfortunately, the portrayal of the British alliance as close-but-yet-so-far kind of clashes with the inevitability argument. If it was that close, even after Wilhelm dropped the pilot, why was war inevitable? Say the Germans and British do manage to come to an agreement, perhaps on the basis of Rosebery's proposals in 1894. According to you, war would still be inevitable. Why?
Gangor said:
Germany to Austria July 6 1914: "Austria must judge what is to be done to clear up her relations with Serbia; but whatever Austria's decision, she could count with certainty upon it, that Germany will stand behind her as an ally." Without this reassurance, Austria would never have provoked Russia by invading Serbia.
Finally, the blank check. Of course. Wouldn't be complete without it! I've said before in this thread, I've said before in other threads, and I will say it again: Austria-Hungary decided to go to war with Serbia before the blank check was even asked for: that, indeed, was its precondition. Agency, in this case, lies with the Habsburg council that Berchtold and Franz Josef convened in the aftermath of the assassinations, not with the Kaiser or Bethmann Hollweg. This does not excuse the German leadership of any
moral culpability for the Habsburgs' decision to go to war, if moral culpability is what you're looking for. The Chancellor didn't really know what the Habsburgs were even going to do with the blank check, and couldn't be assed to find out. He essentially took no responsibility for managing his ally. This is hardly the result of inevitability, unless you consider the death of his wife a few months earlier to have been an inevitable event, timed perfectly by the Fates to drive the Chancellor into despondency right before a Europe-wide crisis that eventually turned into war. If you do, well, I suppose that's your opinion.
Considering Dachs never attributed an argument to anyone, merely stated his, I don't see how this could possibly be misconstrued as a strawman. Oh wait it's the internet, where Straw Man means "Something I don't like."
Anyhoo, I'd adress your arguments, but seeing someone pick a fight with Dachs, especially with such tropetastic arguments, is my favorite bloodsport.
Right, Gangor, since I hate quote war back-and-forth, I'm going to sum up everything over here. Characteristically, even my tl;dr is two long paragraphs.
Basically, you seem very confused about what your opinion on this matter seems to be. You argue that the First World War was the result of an imbalance of power, but then state that rational wars have to do with the balance of power's disruption and that the First World War was not a rational war. You argue that war was inevitable (and seem to not be clear on when precisely it became inevitable) and then bring attention to things like the Anglo-German alliance negotiations that eventually broke down. In general, you also seem to make problematic references to national character - Wilhelmine Germany as bombastic, hubristic, and foolish, for instance - which are essentially driven by stereotypes. It also appears as though you have read some stuff about the war, but most of that appears to be older works. All of this talk about inevitability, all of this focus on German culpability and hubris and so forth seems basically like the discredited
Sonderweg, but combined somewhat with Lloyd George's old explanation of a "slide into war" that none of the contemporary statesmen could stop.
The standard remedial for many of these issues is the first volume of Hew Strachan's
The First World War. In addition to remedying some problems you seem to have with the actual facts, Strachan's discussion of the outbreak of war puts a great deal of emphasis on the agency of individuals, albeit
informed by context; no one was acting in isolation of trends and the broader sweep of history, but no one was commanded by them, either. He candidly admits that this is an explanation that would be unpopular with the scholarship of a few decades ago, as it is unfashionably
personal,
political, and
diplomatic as opposed to based on economic logic or social phenomena. As it happens, personal, political, and diplomatic causation is the only sort of causation you can demonstrate in this case.
