German Foreign Policy from Bismarck to Adenauer

Klaus Hilderbrand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135073909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 1989. Tackling the problem of Germany's role in the history of world politics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is one of the most interesting tasks of historiography. Furthermore, the relationship between Britain and Germany is of central significance in understanding this role.

The European Order
between German Unification
and the
First World War

1

Great Britain and the
foundation of the German Reich

I

In the history of the twentieth century, Anglo-German antagonism¹ has been a factor of crucial significance. Historians have consequently devoted a great deal of attention to the relationship between Great Britain and Prussia-Germany, and particularly to its origins and development in the course of the last century. During the Second World War, when he was editing a selection of the correspondence between the British ambassadors in Berlin and Foreign Secretary Granville during the years 1871–4 and–5, Paul Knaplund commented:² ‘How these great nations became rivals and finally enemies has challenged and will perhaps for all time challenge the curiosity of students of history.’ In analysing the relationship, historians are confronted by a fundamental problem: how far, if at all, was the kleindeutsch (Little German) national state ever compatible with the interests of its European neighbours and of Great Britain, then at the height of its power? A few years ago, in his survey of the short history of the German Reich which had to all intents and purposes been destroyed in 1945, the English historian James Joll gave the following answer:³

The present European community would, I believe, be impossible to maintain in its present form if Germany were ever to be reunited, since in that case we would be presented with a recurrence of the historical situation which we have already experienced before 1914 and between the wars, in which the natural economic, demographic and geographical strength of Germany would be such as to threaten the European balance, and thus make the only form in which Europe might possibly unite that of a Europe under German hegemony. On the other hand, we can also speculate whether the reunification is as inevitable on historical and political grounds as most Germans have to maintain that it is. After all, the Germany the reunification of which is demanded only existed as a unified state for 75 years. Must we necessarily accept this as a fixed historical pattern to which we are bound to return?

These comments oppose any reunification of the kleindeutsch national state which had been created on 18 January 1871, destroyed in the Second World War and subsequently divided. The argument was linked to a conviction that a divided Germany would probably contribute more to the maintenance of peace – ‘peace in pieces’⁴ – than a united German national state. This latter belief is very widely held and has proved extremely difficult to repudiate. At the root of these assessments of the German Question’ lie real doubts about the feasibility of, and justification for, the Bismarck state. They were stimulated by ideas of the kind put forward by the German historian Siegfried A. Kaehler under the direct impact of the ‘German catastrophe’ of 1945.⁵ Kaehler wondered then whether Germany’s responsibility for the loss of European power⁶ – and thus for the fate of the world – was in fact due primarily to the policies pursued by the German Reich; might it not ultimately have been Germany’s very geographical, demographic and economic existence which constituted its ‘guilt’?⁷ Kaehler himself raised this question with the very greatest caution and hedged it round with a whole series of qualifications. Nevertheless, it provoked a strong response from the English historian Geoffrey Barraclough.⁸ At the same time, Barraclough provided a clear – though controversial – answer to the various options on the ‘German Question’ which had been considered during the nineteenth century and have become a live issue again during the postwar period. Barraclough remained unconvinced by the alternatives to the kleindeutsch solution achieved by Bismarck – namely, the possibility of German unity or unification in the form of Grossdeutschland (Germany and Austria), in kleindeutsch liberal form, or in central European federal form. He did not believe that any of these solutions would have been more tolerable for Europe. In Barraclough’s judgement all of these possibilities, whether tending towards conservatism or liberalism, to a unitary or more federal state, would still have led to a concentration of power in central Europe which was bound to endanger peace. Accordingly, he expressed some astonishment that the Reich created in 1871, which he regarded as out of harmony with the ‘spiritual map of Europe’,⁹ had not been dismembered after the First World War ended. The logic of his theories demanded that the victorious powers should have eliminated the alleged destroyer of European peace without hesitation. With hindsight, it does seem surprising that contemporaries were so ready to accept the continued existence of the Reich after the end of the First World War. Why did the victors of 1918 allow the kleindeutsch national state to survive? Was its survival not comparable to the unexpected ‘miracle of the House of Brandenburg’¹⁰ which had saved the Prussia of Frederick the Great in the eighteenth century? In truth, the threat of ‘déstruction totale had always hovered over the Prussian-German state; in 1918 it was averted by the cataclysm of the October Revolution in Russia and the massive uncertainties that provoked. Barraclough’s belief that the Reich was fundamentally incompatible with peace in Europe became common currency after the experiences of 1933–45, with the division of Germany as the consequence. After the First World War, however, the Anglo-Saxon powers in particular did not believe that the very existence of Germany had been responsible for the disastrous course of events in Europe. They held that its constitution and culture had also played a prominent role and that these might now be altered with favourable consequences for the future.¹¹ Naturally, the allies were also influenced by other important international and social motives (the factor of Soviet Russia and the perceived communist threat). Nevertheless, the course of events indicates that British statesmen at least, in the years 1918–20, thought that the German Reich was well worth preserving. During and after the Second World War, in contrast, they had come to believe that the continued existence of a unified German Reich was highly dangerous to peace and security. Nevertheless, these developments are an indication that the kleindeutsch national state had once been acceptable to and compatible with Europe, at least temporarily. It is against this background that the years when the German Reich was founded must be investigated. Did British statesmen at that time, in the 1860s and 1870s, regard Bismarck’s Reich as compatible with their own requirements and with the existing international order in Europe? What significance did they attribute to Prussia, and then to Prussia-Germany, during the years 1860–80 – that is, before Great Britain came to regard Bismarck’s colonizing activities in Africa during the 1880s as a threat to its world and its imperial interests, before Bismarck’s successors in Wilhelmine Germany made a direct challenge to Great Britain by expanding the German navy, and before the two world wars did so much to convince Britain that the existence of the German nation-state was incompatible with European peace?

Historians have been too ready to allow their assessment of the British-Prussian and British-German relationship during the 1860s and 1870s to be distorted by their awareness of the disastrous course of Anglo-German relations in the following decades. As a result, they have tended to stress the special – and hostile – nature of Great Britain’s attitude to Bismarck’s Prussia and the young German national state.¹² In truth, at first sight the events of the 1860s appear to support such a judgement. In those years, Bismarck’s Prussia was engaged in altering the map of central Europe by force and using war to revise the status quo in continental Europe. By contrast, Britain’s main interest in foreign policy lay in maintaining the status quo so that the country could concentrate on domestic affairs relatively undisturbed and attend to the urgent need for reform. Thus, Great Britain favoured stability in foreign affairs so that it could safely give priority to internal change and reform; on the other hand, Bismarck was striving for revision in foreign affairs, at the same time managing to avoid the fulfilment of liberal demands for reform at home. Since the domestic and foreign policy interests of the two states diverged so widely, was future conflict between them not inevitable in Europe? Was the clanger of conflict not bound to increase during the 1870s as Germany replaced France as a potential hegemonic power on the continent and began to confront Great Britain? There were also significant differences in the internal structure of the two states, between the liberal and parliamentary system of Britain and the conservative, monarchical government in Prussia. Were relations between the two not bound to be damaged by British suspicion and disapproval of the Prussian constitution? In this way, it can be argued that the outlines of future conflict were apparent even as the Reich was being established, long before Bismarck’s shift towards conservatism at the end of the 1870s and long before the Reich took its momentous decisions on colonial and naval policy. According to these arguments, the hostility between the two states was rooted in internal political and ideological differences, which ultimately forced them into opposition in foreign affairs. Thus, for example, Raymond Sontag commented in his major study Germany and England. Background of Conflict 1848–1894:¹³ ‘Friendship was impossible between liberal England and Bismarckian Germany. To Gladstone, the Germans were foes of freedom; to Bismarck, Gladstone was a hypocritical demagogue.’ If these arguments hold water, then British non-intervention policy in the 1860s and early 1870s was weak and inadequate in permitting the German Reich to be founded at all. Surely Britain should have intervened resolutely to prevent the creation of the new German national state in central Europe?¹⁴ After the experiences of two world wars, and of the Anglo-German conflicts which had contributed to their outbreak, it is easy to believe that the creation of the German national state had always been incompatible with British interests for economic, demographic, geographical, political and ideological reasons. But was that how the situation appeared to British statesmen at the time the Reich was founded, in the 1860s and 1870s?

There is no room in this chapter for a full analysis of the history of British-German relations during these years. Instead, some of the fundamental features and problems of British world politics will be examined from a domestic and foreign policy perspective; Great Britain’s attitude towards Prussia, and later to the German Reich, will be investigated against this background.

II

There is an obvious n...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• The European Order between German Unification and the First World War
• 1 Great Britain and the foundation of the German Reich
• 2 Lord Clarendon, Bismarck and the problem of European disarmament, 1870. Possibilities and limitations in British-Prussian relations on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War
• 3 Between alliance and antagonism. The problem of bilateral normality in British-German relations in the nineteenth century (1870–1914)
• 4 The crisis of July 1914 The European security dilemma. Observations on the outbreak of the First World War
• The Revolution in the International Order in the Twentieth Century
• 5 Hitler's policy towards France until 1936
• 6 War in peace and peace in war. On the problem of legitimacy in the history of the international order, 1931–41
• 7 The German Resistance and its proposals for the political future of Eastern Europe
• The Federal Republic and its Policies towards East and West
• 8 The provisional state and ‘eternal France'. Franco-German relations, 1963–9
• 9 Adenauer and Soviet Russia, 1963–7. The foreign policy ideas of the retired Federal Chancellor
• 10 The German Eigenweg On the problem of normality in the modem history of Germany and Europe
• Index