European Militarism Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 214-217:

‘The situation [in Europe] is extraordinary,’ Colonel Edward House reported to American President Woodrow Wilson after a trip to Europe in May 1914. ‘It is militarism run stark mad.’ House’s views may have been shaped in part by a personal experience: he was a ‘political colonel’ of the American type. He had been appointed to that rank in the Texas militia in return for political services there. But when Colonel House visited Berlin, the Germans took him to be a military man and always sat him with the generals at dinner. His views on the prevalence of militarism may have owed something to this unfortunate misunderstanding. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that, viewed from across the Atlantic, pre-war Europe presented a curious spectacle. Senior statesmen, emperors and kings attended public occasions wearing military uniform; elaborate military reviews were an integral part of the public ceremonial of power; immense illuminated naval displays drew huge crowds and filled the pages of the illustrated journals; conscript armies grew in size until they became male microcosms of the nation; the cult of military display entered the public and the private life of even the smallest communities. In what ways did this ‘militarism’ shape the decisions that led Europe to war in 1914? Did the roots of the July Crisis lie, as some historians have argued, in an abdication of responsibility by civilian politicians and a usurpation of political power by the generals?

There was without doubt a struggle between the soldiers and the civilians within the pre-war executives: it was a struggle for money. Defence expenditure accounted for a substantial share of government spending. Military commanders keen to improve equipment, training and infrastructure had to contend (as they do today) with civilian politicians for access to government resources. Conversely, ministers of finance and their political allies fought to impose restraint in the name of fiscal rigour or domestic consolidation. Who prevailed in these contests depended on the structure of the institutional environment and the prevailing domestic and international political constellation.

Until 1908, the chaotic structure of the Russian military command made it difficult for the generals to lobby government effectively. But the balance began to shift from 1908, when reforms to the military administration created a more concentrated executive structure, establishing the minister of war as the pre-eminent defence official with the exclusive right to report to the Tsar on military matters. From 1909, a rivalry of epic bitterness evolved between the new war minister Vladimir Sukhomlinov (who was still in post in July 1914) and the strong-willed conservative finance minister, Vladimir Kokovtsov. Backed by the powerful premier Pyotr Stolypin, Kokovtsov, a champion of fiscal responsibility and domestic economic development, routinely blocked or curtailed Sukhomlinov’s draft budgets. Professional friction swiftly deepened into lively personal hatred.118 Sukhomlinov thought Kokovtsov ‘narrow, verbose and self-seeking’; Kokovtsov accused the minister of war (with more justice) of incompetence, irresponsibility and corruption.

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We can discern analogous tensions in every European executive. In Britain, the Liberals campaigned (and won an absolute majority) in 1906 on the promise to cut back the vast military expenditure of the Boer War years under the slogan ‘Peace, Retrenchment and Reform’. Budgetary constraints were a significant factor in the decision to seek an understanding with France and Russia. One consequence was that, while British naval budgets continued to soar (British naval spending was three times the German figure in 1904 and still more than double in 1913), army expenditure remained static throughout the pre-war years, forcing War Minister Haldane to focus on efficiency savings and reorganization rather than expansion. In Austria-Hungary, the tumultuous domestic politics of dualism virtually paralysed the monarchy’s military development after the turn of the century, as autonomist groups within the Hungarian parliament fought to starve the monarchy’s joint army of Hungarian tax revenues and recruits. In this environment, proposals for increased military allocations were worn down in endless legislative feuding, and the Habsburg military languished in a condition, as the Austrian staff chief put it, of ‘persistent stagnation’. This was one reason why, as late as 1912, Austria-Hungary spent only 2.6 per cent of its net national product on defence – a smaller proportion than any other European power and certainly far below what its economy could afford (the figures for Russia, France and Germany in that year were 4.5, 4.0 and 3.8 per cent respectively).

Poland's Zaduszki celebrations

This week's Culture.pl newsletter previews All Souls' Day in Poland in an article by Gabriel Stille from October 2025, when the Far Outliers were visiting historic Sandomierz, where we attended a large open-air mass in a large hilltop cemetery above the city that was filled with flowers and candle lamps. Here are some excerpts from the article.

One of the most important family holidays in Poland, Zaduszki sees people all over the country gather to visit the graves of their loved ones. Throughout Poland, cemeteries glow with lights. Travelling home is a must to celebrate Zaduszki. What once began as a set of traditions to please the spirits of the departed is now an occasion to gather the family and remember those no longer with us.

The word zaduszki comes from dzień zaduszny, which could be translated as day of prayer for the souls. The eve of the holiday, November 1st, falls on what is also known as All Saints' Day in Catholic communities. In the church calendar, that day is followed by All Souls' Day, the official day to commemorate the departed faithful.

Polish Zaduszki celebrations begin with tending to family graves and surrounding graveyards on the first day, and then extends into the the next. November 1st is a bank holiday in Poland and remained free of work even during Communist times, while the following day is not. The Zaduszki custom of honouring the dead thus corresponds with All Souls' Day celebrations in many parts of the world, but has a more profound meaning, and is much more observed in Poland than in most places in the West.

In the Polish calendar, Zaduszki is, along with Easter and Christmas, a requisite opportunity to meet with one's extended family. In today's society, that means travels can be long as as roads fill and traffic is usually exceptionally heavy. It is a sad and well known fact that that road accidents peak during this holiday.

Many of the folk traditions surrounding Zaduszki have ancient pagan roots. According to old beliefs, during this time the spirits of forefathers come to inhabit our world once more. Not disturbing or angering the forefathers was considered very important. For example, if water or waste had to be thrown on the ground, a word of warning had to be uttered to alert the invisible spirits. In general, not undertaking any work and going to bed early was preferable during this time so as to not interfere with the doings of the spirits. Instead, food and other items were prepared for the forefathers, and feasts were held among the living as well. The dead were said to attend a special mass during the night, where no living persons should allow themselves to be found.

Another tradition involved the baking of bread to be brought to the graveyards and distributed to the poor or the clergy, or to be left at the graves. This tradition served the purpose to please the spirits or to bring good fortune. In keeping with church practices of the times, this could also be a way to atone for the sins of the forefathers and thus relieve the suffering of their spirits in Purgatory.

The honouring of the dead during this holiday holds similar importance all over Central and Eastern Europe, and many of the Polish folk customs can be traced back to common old Slavic traditions. At certain times, those Slavic roots have been a strong source of national identity among the Polish people. During Romanticism and the period of the formation of national states in Europe, Adam Mickiewicz drew upon the legends of Dziady, a festival common to Slavic and Baltic peoples and early ancestor of Zaduszki, for his epic drama Forefathers' Eve.

Visiting Poland's Cemeteries

In anticipation of All Saints' Day, last week's Culture.pl newsletter includes an article about Unusual Polish Cemeteries by Anna Cymer. Here are some excerpts.

We normally visit cemeteries to bury our nearest and dearest, but many notable graveyards in Poland also possess exceptional atmosphere, history and architecture.

Powązkowski Cemetery, Warsaw

The oldest cemetery in the capital opened in 1790, covering an area of two hectares, which has since grown to 44. Two years later, Dominik Merlini (court architect to King August III and Stanisław August Poniatowski, and creator of both the Palace on the Water in Warsaw’s Łazienki Park and the Królikarnia Palace) designed the Church of St Charles Borromeo, built on one side of the cemetery. Its decorated white towers still overlook the area today.

Around a million people lie buried in Powązkowski Cemetery. Its most famous section is the Avenue of the Heroes, the final resting place of many distinguished Polish historical, cultural and scientific figures. There are centuries-old tombs, for example those of Hugo Kołłątaj and soldiers from the time of the Kościuszko Uprising, as well as numerous graves of more recently deceased artistic celebrities, including Julia Hartwig and Wojciech Młynarski.

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Old Cemetery, Łódź 

Built in 1855, this mixed-denomination cemetery perfectly reflects the formerly multiple cultures of Łódź. To this day, it contains Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox graveyards. Buried here are famous 19th-century Łódź industrialists, people who aided the city’s development, social activists, lawyers, doctors and cultural figures.

More than 200 of the cemetery’s headstones are listed monuments, and many of them are fine examples of sculpture and small-scale architecture. The cemetery’s grandest monument is the Karol Scheibler mausoleum, erected in 1888 in the form of an immense, neo-Gothic chapel designed by Edward Lilpop and Józef Dziekoński.

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Old Jewish Cemetery, Wrocław

Jewish cemeteries in Poland were forgotten and neglected for many decades. Fortunately, in recent years, some of them have been tidied up and are now not only final resting places of the dead, but also precious monuments. One of the most beautiful is the Old Jewish Cemetery in Wrocław, which dates back to the latter half of the 19th century. Since affluent Jewish people (including some living outside Poland’s current borders) chose to be buried in this cemetery, many impressive monumental, decorative mausoleums and gravestones were erected. One can even find small-scale examples of Moorish and Egyptian architecture. The Old Jewish Cemetery, now a subsidiary of the City Museum of Wrocław, covers 4.6 hectares and contains around 12,000 headstones.

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Mennonite Cemetery, Sosnówka

In the late 16th century, the Mennonites – followers of a branch of Protestantism who had previously lived in the Netherlands – were forced to flee persecution in their country. Some settled in formerly tolerant Poland, particularly the Lower Vistula Valley. Sosnówka in the Grudziądz district has one of the few remaining Mennonite cemeteries in Poland. It probably came into use around 1690, and some remnants of 17th-century gravestones have survived. A sign by the cemetery gate lists its most noteworthy historical relics:

The original layout is clearly visible, as are numerous headstones of outstanding artistic value (the oldest dating from 1691, 1836, and 1861) and a relic of the main gate.

Muslim Cemetery, Kruszyniany

Over 600 years ago, a Muslim minority inhabited lands belonging to Poland. From the latter half of the 17th century onwards, the Tatar community had its own cemetery in Kruszyniany. Its oldest surviving gravestone dates from 1699. Interestingly, the site continues to be used for Muslim burials. In one section, next to an 18th-century wooden mosque, headstones over 300 years old stand alongside completely modern ones.

Lipowa Street Cemetery, Lublin

The history of the Lipowa Street Cemetery in Lublin dates back to 1794. From the outset, it always contained a range of nations and religions, and there are still Catholic, Evangelist and Orthodox gravestones today. From a historical point of view, the latter section of the cemetery is particularly valuable. Apart from more than 500 ancient headstones, there is also the Church of the Holy Maidens Bearing Fragrances, built in the early 20th century – a two-storey, five-domed brick chapel in the Russian-Byzantine style that, despite its fairly small size, boasts all the major elements of Orthodox architecture.

Lemko Cemetery, Świerzowa Ruska

Świerzowa Ruska in the Low Beskids was a Lemko village, probably founded in the late 16th century. In the early 20th century, the village numbered almost 500 residents and had its own school and Orthodox church – but the villagers were resettled in 1947, and the abandoned buildings fell into disrepair. The former village later became part of Magurski National Park and was inaccessible for many years, even to tourists. But in 2015, paths were created, along with an eight-stop educational trail that allows one to discover the history of the Lemkos who lived there and visit the local cemetery, which has been preserved to some extent. Today, 20 gravestones (some from the 19th century), wooden crosses and sculptures are all that remain of the people who inhabited this area for several hundred years.

We visited many cemeteries among other historical sites in Poland during our year there, and one of the unheralded sections of any cemetery in eastern Poland (and even a little country cemetery in Transnistria that we visited) was a section for Soviet soldiers who died fighting the Germans, helping to "liberate" them. Lots of war dead are buried in Polish cemeteries from World War I and World War II, including many Unknown Soldiers. All Saints' Day is the time of year when candles are lit and flowers are placed all over Polish grave markers.  The Jewish cemetery in Kielce, like many everywhere, was destroyed during World War II, and partially restored with the help of expatriate donors. Its gates remain locked and there is often a police car parked within sight of the entrance.

Britain's Foreign Secretary Before 1914

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 199-202:

Britain presents a rather different picture. Unlike Stolypin and Kokovtsov or their German colleagues Bülow and Bethmann Hollweg, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had no reason to fear unwanted interventions by the sovereign. George V was perfectly happy to be led by his foreign secretary in international matters. And Grey also enjoyed the unstinting support of his prime minister, Herbert Asquith. Nor did he have to contend, as his French colleagues did, with over-mighty functionaries in his own Foreign Office. Grey’s continuity in office alone assured him a more consistent influence over policy than most of his French colleagues ever enjoyed. While Edward Grey remained in control of the Foreign Office for the years between December 1905 and December 1916, the same period in France saw fifteen ministers of foreign affairs come and go. Moreover, Grey’s arrival at the Foreign Office consolidated the influence of a network of senior officials who broadly shared his view of British foreign policy. Grey was without doubt the most powerful foreign minister of pre-war Europe.

Like most of his nineteenth-century predecessors, Sir Edward Grey was born into the top tier of British society. He was the descendant of a distinguished line of Whig grandees – his great grand-uncle was the Earl Grey of the 1832 Reform Bill and eponym of the popular scented tea. Of all the politicians who walked the European political stage before 1914, Grey is one of the most baffling. His aloof and lofty style did not go down well with the rank and file of the Liberal Party. He had long been a Liberal MP, yet he believed that foreign policy was too important to be subjected to the agitations of parliamentary debate. He was a foreign secretary who knew little of the world outside Britain, had never shown much interest in travelling, spoke no foreign languages and felt ill at ease in the company of foreigners. He was a Liberal politician whose vision of policy was opposed by most Liberals and supported by most Conservatives. He became the most powerful member of the faction known as ‘the liberal imperialists’, yet he appears to have cared little for the British Empire – his views on foreign policy and national security were tightly focused on the European continent.

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There was a curious dissonance between Grey’s persona – private and public – and his modus operandi in politics. As a young man, he had shown little sign of intellectual curiosity, political ambition or drive. He idled away his years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he spent most of his time becoming Varsity champion in real tennis, before graduating with a third in Jurisprudence, a subject he had chosen because it was reputed to be easy. His first (unpaid) political post was fixed up through Whig family connections. As an adult, Grey always cultivated the image of a man for whom politics was a wearisome duty, rather than a vocation. When parliament was dissolved in 1895 following a Liberal defeat in a key vote, Grey, who was then serving as an MP and parliamentary under-secretary of state for foreign affairs, professed to feel no regrets. ‘I shall never be in office again and the days of my stay in the House of Commons are probably numbered. We [he and his wife Dorothy] are both very relieved.’ Grey was a passionate naturalist, birdwatcher and fisherman. By the turn of the century, he was already well known as the author of a justly celebrated essay on fly-fishing. Even as foreign secretary, he was apt to leave his desk at the earliest opportunity for country jaunts and disliked being recalled to London any sooner than was absolutely necessary. Some of those who worked with Grey, such as the diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice, felt that the country excursions were getting out of hand and that the foreign secretary would be well advised to ‘spare some time from his ducks to learn French’. Colleagues found it difficult to discern political motivation in Grey; he struck them as ‘devoid of personal ambition, aloof and unapproachable’. And yet Grey did develop a deep appetite for power and a readiness to deploy conspiratorial methods in order to obtain and hold on to it. His accession to the post of foreign secretary was the fruit of careful planning with his trusted friends and fellow liberal imperialists, Herbert Asquith and R. B. Haldane. In the ‘Relugas Compact’, a plot hatched at Grey’s fishing lodge in the Scottish hamlet of that name, the three men agreed to push aside the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and establish themselves in key cabinet posts. Secretiveness and a preference for discreet, behind-the-scenes dealing remained a hallmark of his style as foreign secretary. The posture of gentlemanly diffidence belied an intuitive feel for the methods and tactics of adversarial politics.

Grey quickly secured unchallenged control over the policy-making process, ensuring that British policy focused primarily on the ‘German threat’. It would be going too far, of course, to view this reorientation of British policy as a function solely of Edward Grey’s power. Grey was not the puppet-master; the men of the new policy – Bertie, Hardinge, Nicolson, Mallet, Tyrrell and so on – were not manipulated or controlled by him, but worked alongside him as the members of a loose coalition driven by shared sentiments. Indeed, Grey was quite dependent on some of these collaborators – many of his decisions and memoranda, for example, were modelled closely on reports from Hardinge. The ascendancy of the Grey group was eased by recent structural reforms to the Foreign Office whose object had not been to reinforce the authority of the foreign secretary, but rather to parcel influence out more widely across a range of senior officials. Nevertheless, the energy and vigilance with which Grey maintained his ascendancy are impressive. It helped, of course, that he enjoyed the firm support of his former co-conspirator Herbert Asquith, prime minister from 1908 until 1916. The backing of a large part of the Conservative bloc in the House of Commons was another important asset – and Grey proved adept at maintaining his cross-party appeal.

But Grey’s plenitude of power and consistency of vision did not entirely protect British policy-making from the agitations characteristic of the European executives. The anti-German position adopted by the Grey group did not enjoy wide support outside the Foreign Office. It was not even backed by the majority of the British cabinet. The Liberal government, and the Liberal movement more generally, were polarized by the tension between liberal imperialist and radical elements. Many of the leading radicals, and they included some of the most venerable figures in the party, deplored the foreign secretary’s policy of alignment with Russia. They accused Grey and his associates of adopting a pose towards Germany that was unnecessarily provocative. They doubted whether the advantages of appeasing Russia outweighed the potential benefits of friendship with the German Empire. They worried whether the creation of a Triple Entente might not pressure Germany into adopting an ever more aggressive stance and they pressed for détente with Berlin. A further problem was the complexion of British public opinion, especially within the cultural and political elite, which, despite intermittent Anglo-German ‘press wars’, was drifting into a more pro-German mood during the last few years before the outbreak of war. Antagonism to Germany coexisted across the British elites with multi-layered cultural ties and a deep admiration of the country’s cultural, economic and scientific achievements.

Who Ruled France's Third Republic?

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 190-193:

In France, there was a different but broadly analogous dynamic. To a much greater extent than in Russia, the foreign ministry, or the Quai d’Orsay as it was known on account of its location, enjoyed formidable power and autonomy. It was a socially cohesive and relatively stable organization with a high sense of its own calling. A dense network of family connections reinforced the ministry’s esprit de corps: the brothers Jules and Paul Cambon were the ambassadors to Berlin and London respectively, the ambassador to St Petersburg in 1914, Maurice Paléologue, was Jules and Paul’s brother-in-law, and there were other dynasties – the Herbettes, the de Margeries, and the de Courcels, to name just a few. The ministry of foreign affairs protected its independence through habits of secrecy. Sensitive information was only rarely released to cabinet ministers. It was not unusual for senior functionaries to withhold information from the most senior politicians, even from the president of the Republic himself. In January 1895, for example, during the tenure of Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux, President Casimir Périer resigned after only six months in office, protesting that the ministry of foreign affairs had failed to keep him informed even of the most important developments. Policy documents were treated as arcana. Raymond Poincaré was informed of the details of the Franco-Russian Alliance only when he became premier and foreign minister in 1912.

But the relative independence of the ministry did not necessarily confer power and autonomy upon the minister. French foreign ministers tended to be weak, weaker indeed than their own ministerial staff. One reason for this was the relatively rapid turnover of ministers, a consequence of the perennially high levels of political turbulence in pre-war France. Between 1 January 1913 and the outbreak of war, for example, there were no fewer than six different foreign ministers. Ministerial office was a more transitory and less important stage in the life cycle of French politicians than in Britain, Germany or Austria-Hungary. And in the absence of any code of cabinet solidarity, the energies and ambition of ministers tended to be consumed in the bitter factional strife that was part of the everyday life of government in the Third Republic.

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Of course, there were exceptions to this rule. If a minister stayed in power for long enough and possessed sufficient determination and industry, he could certainly imprint his personality upon the workings of the ministry. Théophile Delcassé is a good example. He remained in office for a staggering seven years (from June 1898 until June 1905) and established his mastery over the ministry not only through tireless work, but also by ignoring his permanent officials in Paris and cultivating a network of like-minded ambassadors and functionaries from across the organization. In France, as elsewhere in Europe, the waxing and waning of specific offices within the system produced adjustments in the distribution of power. Under a forceful minister like Delcassé, the power-share of the senior civil service functionaries known collectively as the Centrale tended to shrink, while the ambassadors, freed from the constraints imposed by the centre, flourished, just as Izvolsky and Hartwig did during the early years of Sazonov. Delcassé’s long spell in office saw the emergence of an inner cabinet of senior ambassadors around the Cambon brothers (London and Berlin) and Camille Barrère (Rome). The ambassadors met regularly in Paris to discuss policy and lobby key officials. They communicated with the minister through private letters, bypassing the functionaries of the Centrale.

The senior ambassadors developed an extraordinarily elevated sense of their own importance, especially if we measure it against the professional ethos of today’s ambassadors. Paul Cambon is a characteristic example: he remarked in a letter of 1901 that the whole of French diplomatic history amounted to little more than a long list of attempts by agents abroad to achieve something in the face of resistance from Paris. When he disagreed with his official instructions from the capital, he not infrequently burned them. During a tense conversation with Justin de Selves, minister of foreign affairs from June 1911 until January 1912, Cambon somewhat tactlessly informed de Selves that he considered himself the minister’s equal. This claim looks less bizarre if we bear in mind that between 1898, when he became ambassador to London, and the summer of 1914, Cambon saw nine ministers enter and leave office – two of them did so twice. Cambon did not regard himself as a subordinate employee of the government, but as a servant of France whose expertise entitled him to a major role in the policy-making process.

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Underpinning Cambon’s exalted sense of self was the belief – shared by many of the senior ambassadors – that one did not merely represent France, one personified it. Though he was ambassador in London from 1898 until 1920, Cambon spoke not a word of English. During his meetings with Edward Grey (who spoke no French), he insisted that every utterance be translated into French, including easily recognized words such as ‘yes’. He firmly believed – like many members of the French elite – that French was the only language capable of articulating rational thought and he objected to the foundation of French schools in Britain on the eccentric grounds that French people raised in Britain tended to end up mentally retarded. Cambon and Delcassé established a close working relationship whose fruit was the Entente Cordiale of 1904. It was Cambon, more than anyone else, who laid the groundwork for the Entente, working hard from 1901 to persuade his British interlocutors to settle over Morocco, while at the same time urging Delcassé to relinquish France’s putative claims on Egypt.

Europe's Monarchs in Early 1900s

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 170-175:

Early twentieth-century Europe was a continent of monarchies. Of the six most important powers, five were monarchies of one kind or another; only one (France) was a republic. The relatively new nation-states of the Balkan peninsula – Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Romania and Albania – were all monarchies. The Europe of fast cruisers, radio-telegraph, and electric cigar-lighters still carried at its heart this ancient, glittering institution yoking large and complex states to the vagaries of human biology. The European executives were still centred on the thrones and the men or women who sat on them. Ministers in Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia were imperial appointees. The three emperors had unlimited access to state papers. They also exercised formal authority over their respective armed forces. Dynastic institutions and networks structured the communications between states. Ambassadors presented their credentials to the sovereign in person and direct communications and meetings between monarchs continued to take place throughout the pre-war years; indeed they acquired a heightened importance, creating a parallel plane of interaction whose relationship to official diplomacy was sometimes difficult to ascertain.

Monarchs were symbolic as well as political actors, and in this role they could capture and focus collective emotions and associations. When Parisian onlookers gawped at Edward VII sprawled in a chair outside his hotel smoking a cigar, they felt they were looking at England in the form of a very fat, fashionable and confident man. His triumphant ascent in Parisian public opinion in 1903 helped smooth the path to the Entente signed with France in the following year. Even the mild-mannered despot Nicholas II was greeted like a conquering hero by the French when he visited Paris in 1896, despite his autocratic political philosophy and negligible charisma, because he was seen as the personification of the Franco-Russian Alliance. And who embodied the most unsettling aspects of German foreign policy – its vacillations, lack of focus and frustrated ambition – better than the febrile, tactless, panic-prone, overbearing Kaiser Wilhelm, the man who dared to advise Edvard Grieg on how to conduct Peer Gynt? Whether or not the Kaiser actually made German policy, he certainly symbolized it for Germany’s opponents.

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At the core of the monarchical club that reigned over pre-war Europe was the trio of imperial cousins: Tsar Nicholas II, Kaiser Wilhelm II and George V. By the turn of the twentieth century, the genealogical web of Europe’s reigning families had thickened almost to the point of fusion. Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V were both grandsons of Queen Victoria. Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, was Victoria’s granddaughter. The mothers of George V and Nicholas II were sisters from the house of Denmark. Kaiser Wilhelm and Tsar Nicholas II were both great-great grandsons of Tsar Paul I. The Kaiser’s great-aunt, Charlotte of Prussia, was the Tsar’s grandmother. Viewed from this perspective, the outbreak of war in 1914 looks rather like the culmination of a family feud. Assessing how much influence these monarchs wielded over or within their respective executives is difficult. Britain, Germany and Russia represented three very different kinds of monarchy. Russia’s was, in theory at least, an autocracy in which the parliamentary and constitutional restraints on the monarch’s authority were weak. Edward VII and George V were constitutional and parliamentary monarchs with no direct access to the levers of power. Kaiser Wilhelm II was something in between – in Germany, a constitutional and parliamentary system was grafted on to elements of the old Prussian military monarchy that had survived the process of national unification. But the formal structures of governance were not necessarily the most significant determinants of monarchical influence. Other important variables included the determination, competence and intellectual grasp of the monarch himself, the ability of ministers to block unwelcome initiatives and the extent of agreement between monarchs and their governments.

One of the most striking features of the influence wielded by the sovereigns on the formulation of foreign policy is its variation over time. Edward VII, who presided over the diplomatic realignments of 1904–7, had strong views on foreign policy and prided himself on being well informed. His attitudes were those of an imperialist ‘jingo’; he was infuriated by Liberal opposition to the [Second] Afghan War of 1878–9, for example, and told the colonial administrator Sir Henry Bartle Frere: ‘If I had my way I should not be content until we had taken the whole of Afghanistan and kept it.’ He was overjoyed at the news of the raid against the Transvaal Republic in 1895, supportive of Cecil Rhodes’s involvement in it, and infuriated by the Kaiser’s Kruger telegram. Throughout his adult life he maintained a determined hostility to Germany. The roots of this antipathy appear to have lain partly in his opposition to his mother, Queen Victoria, whom he regarded as excessively friendly to Prussia, and partly in his fear and loathing of Baron Stockmar, the unsmiling Germanic pedagogue appointed by Victoria and Albert to hold the young Edward to a regime of unstinting study. The Prussian-Danish War of 1864 was a formative episode in his early political life – Edward’s sympathies in that conflict rested firmly with the Danish relatives of his new bride. After his accession to the throne, Edward was an important sponsor of the anti-German group of policy-makers around Sir Francis Bertie.

The king’s influence reached its height in 1903, when an official visit to Paris – ‘the most important royal visit in modern history’, as it has been called – paved the road towards the Entente between the two imperial rivals. Relations between the two western empires were still soured at this time by French outrage over the Boer War. The visit, which had been organized on Edward’s own initiative, was a public relations triumph and did much to clear the air. After the Entente had been signed, Edward continued to work towards an agreement with Russia, even though, like many of his countrymen, he detested the tsarist political system and remained suspicious of the designs that Russia had on Persia, Afghanistan and northern India. In 1906, when he heard that the Russian foreign minister Izvolsky was in Paris, he rushed south from Scotland in the hope that a meeting could be set up. Izvolsky responded in kind and made the journey to London, where the two men met for talks that – according to Charles Hardinge – ‘helped materially to smooth the path of the negotiations then in progress for an agreement with Russia’. In both these instances, the king was not deploying executive powers as such, but acting as a kind of supernumerary ambassador. He could do this because his priorities accorded closely with those of the liberal imperialist faction at Whitehall, whose dominance in foreign policy he had himself helped to reinforce.

George V was a very different case. Until his accession in 1910, he took little interest in foreign affairs and had acquired only the sketchiest sense of Britain’s relations with other powers. The Austrian ambassador Count Mensdorff was delighted with the new king, who seemed, by contrast with his father, to be innocent of strong biases for or against any foreign state. If Mensdorff hoped the changing of the guard would produce an attenuation of the anti-German theme in British policy, he was soon to be disappointed. In foreign policy, the new monarch’s seeming neutrality merely meant that policy remained firmly in the hands of the liberal imperialists around Grey. George never acquired a political network to rival his father’s, refrained from backstairs intrigue and avoided expounding policy without the explicit permission of his ministers. He was in more or less constant communication with Edward Grey and granted the foreign secretary frequent audiences whenever he was in London. He was scrupulous about seeking Grey’s approval for the content of political conversations with foreign representatives – especially his German relatives. George’s accession to the throne thus resulted in a sharp decline in the crown’s influence on the general orientation of foreign policy, even though the two monarchs wielded identical constitutional powers.

Even within the highly authoritarian setting of the Russian autocracy, the influence of the Tsar over foreign policy was subject to narrow constraints and waxed and waned over time. Like George V, the new Tsar was a blank sheet of paper when he came to the throne in 1894.

Europe's Shifting Alliances, 1887-1907

From The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark (Harper, 2013), pp. 122-123, 157-159:

If you compare a diagram of the alliances among the European great powers in 1887 with a similar map for the year 1907, you see the outlines of a transformation. The first diagram reveals a multi-polar system, in which a plurality of forces and interests balance each other in precarious equilibrium. Britain and France were rivals in Africa and South Asia; Britain confronted Russia in Persia and Central Asia. France was determined to reverse the verdict of the German victory of 1870. Conflicting interests in the Balkans gave rise to tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Italy and Austria were rivals in the Adriatic and quarrelled intermittently over the status of Italophone communities within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while there were tensions between Italy and France over the latter’s policy in northern Africa. All these pressures were held in check by the patchwork of the 1887 system. The Triple Alliance between Germany, Austria and Italy (20 May 1882) prevented the tensions between Rome and Vienna from breaking into open conflict. The defensive Reinsurance Treaty between Germany and Russia (18 June 1887) contained articles deterring either power from seeking its fortunes in war with another continental state and insulated the Russo-German relationship against the fallout from Austro-Russian tensions.* The Russo-German link also ensured that France would be unable to build an anti-German coalition with Russia. And Britain was loosely tied into the continental system through the Mediterranean Agreement of 1887 with Italy and Austria – an exchange of notes rather than a treaty – whose purpose was to thwart French challenges in the Mediterranean and Russian ones in the Balkans or the Turkish Straits.

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Move forward twenty years to a diagram of the European alliances in 1907, and the picture has changed utterly. You see a bipolar Europe organized around two alliance systems. The Triple Alliance is still in place (though Italy’s loyalty to it is increasingly questionable). France and Russia are conjoined in the Franco-Russian Alliance (drafted in 1892 and ratified in 1894), which stipulates that if any member of the Triple Alliance should mobilize, the two signatories will ‘at the first news of this event and without any previous agreement being necessary’ mobilize immediately the whole of their forces and deploy them ‘with such speed that Germany shall be forced to fight simultaneously on the East and on the West’. Britain is linked to the Franco-Russian Alliance through the Entente Cordiale with France (1904) and the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. It will be some years before these loose alignments tauten into the coalitions that will fight the First World War  in Europe, but the profiles of two armed camps are already clearly visible.

The polarization of Europe’s geopolitical system was a crucial precondition for the war that broke out in 1914. It is almost impossible to see how a crisis in Austro-Serbian relations, however grave, could have dragged the Europe of 1887 into a continental war. The bifurcation into two alliance blocs did not cause the war; indeed it did as much to mute as to escalate conflict in the pre-war years. Yet without the two blocs, the war could not have broken out in the way that it did. The bipolar system structured the environment in which the crucial decisions were made. To understand how that polarization came about, it is necessary to answer four interlinked questions. Why did Russia and France form an alliance against Germany in the 1890s? Why did Britain opt to throw in its lot with that alliance? What role did Germany play in bringing about its own encirclement by a hostile coalition? And to what extent can the structural transformation of the alliance system account for the events that brought war to Europe and the world in 1914?

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The Convention of 1907 was not driven by hostility towards, or fear of, Germany. It was rather the other way around: since Russia posed the greater threat to Britain across a greater range of vulnerable points, it was Russia that must be appeased and Germany that must be opposed. This had been the dominant British thinking on a rapprochement with Russia since before the turn of the century and it remained valid after the Convention was signed. In March 1909, Sir Charles Hardinge put the matter succinctly. ‘We have no pending questions with Germany except that of naval construction,’ he told Sir Arthur Nicolson, who would soon succeed him, ‘while our whole future in Asia is bound up with maintaining the best and most friendly relations with Russia. We cannot afford to sacrifice in any way our entente with Russia, even for the sake of a reduced naval programme.’ The same point can be made for the Russian decision-makers who agreed the Convention: this was not, for them, a policy directed against Germany, but rather a retrenching move designed to secure breathing space for domestic consolidation or (depending on whom you asked) greater freedom of external action. Of particular interest was the link between a deal over Persia and the prospect of British support for improved Russian access to the Turkish Straits. For Izvolsky and his ambassador in London, Count Benckendorff, the Straits question was ‘the core of the Convention’ and the key to securing favourable revision of Russian access rights at a ‘suitable time’ in the near future.

In other words: while the new international system that emerged from 1907 chiefly disadvantaged Germany, we should not assume that this outcome faithfully reflected the designs that brought it about. Only in the case of France can one speak of a policy that consistently assigned a high priority to containing Germany. It makes more sense to think of this array of agreements as the European consequence of world-historical transitions – the Sino-Japanese War and the emergence of Japan as a regional power, the fiscal burdens imposed by African conflicts and the Great Game in Central Asia, the retreat of Ottoman power in Africa and south-western Europe, and the rise of the China Question, meaning not just the great-power competition there but also the high levels of Chinese domestic turbulence that resulted. Germany’s ‘restlessness’ and its parvenu importuning were part of the picture, but they were perceived within a field of vision that encompassed broader concerns. The once widely held view that Germany caused its own isolation through its egregious international behaviour is not borne out by a broader analysis of the processes by which the realignments of this era were brought about.

In fact the causal relationship between antagonism to Germany and the new alliance system ran to some extent in the other direction: it was not that antagonism to Germany caused its isolation, but rather that the new system itself channelled and intensified hostility towards the German Empire. In Russia’s case, for example, the victory of Japan in the East and the provisional settlement of the imperial quarrel with Britain in Central Asia inevitably refocused foreign policy on the sole remaining theatre in which it could still pursue an imperial vision – the Balkans, an area where conflict with Austria-Hungary and, by extension, Germany was going to be difficult to avoid. The old factional divide within the Russian foreign policy community between ‘Asianists’ and ‘Europeanists’ was resolved in the latter’s favour. Under Izvolsky and Sazonov, Europeanists, who tended to distrust Germany and to favour good relations with Britain and France, always occupied a majority of the key positions. The Anglo-French Entente likewise neutralized the anti-British sentiment that before 1904 had intermittently diluted the Germanophobia of French statesmen.