In January 1919, the plenipotentiaries (representatives sent with full powers to negotiate on behalf of their states) and delegates of over thirty Allied and Associated states assembled in Paris for a conference whose task was to restore European and world peace after the most ruinous and devastating war in the history of mankind to date. At its height, there were more than a thousand diplomats and statesmen in Paris together with many experts and advisers, far eclipsing any earlier peacemaking assembly in both its size and the extent of its responsibilities. The outbreak of a second major European war in 1939 suggests that they failed to create a lasting peace but, as Gerhard Schulz points out:
There is a serious lack of logic in all verdicts passed on the peace treaty which ignore the fact that the prewar policies could not prevent war and which fail to appreciate the essential continuity of the prewar period, the war, peacetime and the era of revision.
Although none of the leaders of 1914 had planned to start a war which would last for over four years and consume millions of men and vast amounts of treasure, the Paris conference was only necessary because, whether through miscalculation or design, a war between the great powers had taken place. The world of 1914 was one in which there were enough problems serious enough to convince at least some of the leaders of the major powers that a war, albeit a short and successful one, was necessary to the continued great power status and future prosperity of their states. It was thus not an ideal world, seductive though it must have appeared in retrospect to those who suffered its bloody demise.1
1.1 The Shifting Balance of Power
Europe underwent a painful and complex process of reconfiguring the balance of power. In 1898 the British prime minister, Lord Salisbury, said:
You may roughly divide the nations of all the world as the living and the dying … the weak states are becoming weaker and the strong states are becoming stronger … the living nations will gradually encroach on the territory of the dying and the seeds and causes of conflict among civilised nations will speedily appear.
This reflected the social Darwinism of the time, with its emphasis on expansion or decay, conceptualising international relations as a struggle. Its anticipation of an increase in the volume and complexity of problems facing the world at the turn of the century is also typical, even if Salisbury remained more optimistic about the prospects than many of his younger colleagues. Population changes, the rise and decline of political systems and the expansion or contraction of economies all suggested that there would be a reordering of the European and world league tables, and possibly maps, so that they coincided more accurately with the realities of power.2
This did not mean a major war was inevitable – almost a century had passed without a general war when the crisis of July 1914 exploded – but Europe in the new century was full of unpleasant ideas about ultimate tests and blood sacrifices. Contemporaries wrote in increasingly fatalistic tones about the prospect of war. They did so partly because of the intellectual climate of the period, and partly because, having little idea of what industrialised war would entail, they still saw war as an acceptable, if extreme, part of diplomatic strategy. They felt also that certain problems were reaching an acute stage simultaneously with industrial, economic, social and political changes on an unprecedented scale. Imperialism, nationalism, the decay of the Chinese and Ottoman Empires, and the question of who would inherit their possessions and influence, were coupled with the need to readjust the internal structures of states to take account of urbanisation and the arrival of mass electorates.
The development of Germany after its unification in 1871 suggested that it had no reason to fear. In the years between 1890 and 1913 its population increased from 49 to 66 million, the annual output of its coal mines grew from 89 to 277 million tons, while its steel production of 17.6 million tons in 1913 was greater than the combined totals of Britain, France and Russia. In 1870, Britain had produced twice as much steel and three and a half times as much coal as Germany, yet by 1913 the steel position had been reversed and it produced only slightly more coal (292 million tons). In chemical and electrical goods Germany led the world, and its young, vigorous and rapidly expanding population was well educated, providing intelligent recruits for its industries and powerful armies.3
Germany’s rise occurred in a world previously dominated, both industrially and in terms of imperial possessions and influence, by Britain, but the situation was more complex than a simple head to head challenge for supremacy. The world in 1900 was becoming both smaller and larger; smaller in terms of communications and speed of travel, larger in terms of the number of important powers and hence the complexity of international problems. If Germany was overtaking Britain in the production and consumption of energy, both were left far behind by the rapid development of the United States, although this was obscured by the fact it had not yet chosen to translate its industrial and economic potential into commensurate military and naval forces, preferring to confine its influence to the Americas. In the Far East, Japan announced its coming presence with victories over China in 1894–1895 and over Russia in 1904–1905.
Russia had a larger population than the combined totals of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Britain, the next three most populous states of Europe, but it was spread over a vast area, nearly one sixth of the earth’s surface. Rapidly industrialising, Russia had frightened its nineteenth- century rivals by its sheer potential for future domination, though it was hampered by its size and the available communications technology. In 1914, however, the Tsarist system was threatened by a resurgent opposition, coming to terms with its defeat after the early successes of the 1905 revolution. Historians are divided as to the fate of the empire if war had not come in 1914, some arguing that the regime was incapable of reform and adaptation, others that there was nothing inevitable about a revolution which occurred only after three years of titanic struggle. There can be no doubt that a major factor affecting the attitude of German decision-makers in 1914 was their assessment of the future effects of Russian strategic railway plans and military reforms, which they judged would greatly enhance its capabilities.4
Great Britain enjoyed an amazing expansion of power and wealth in the nineteenth century, and its empire of 12 million square miles meant that Victoria in her last year ruled a quarter of the world’s population, but Britain faced the new century with less confidence. It thought of itself as a world and imperial power, but the Boer War revealed startling deficiencies in the health and education of its people, and in the strength of its armed forces. It also highlighted Britain’s diplomatic isolation and its South African discomfiture was relished by jealous rivals. In an age of rapid technological advance and an increasing vogue for aspiring powers to possess navies, it was becoming progressively harder for Britain to maintain its traditional naval superiority, although it continued to do so. Its industrial growth was slower than any of its main rivals, but its economy remained very powerful, supported by its ‘invisible’ earnings from shipping, banking, insurance, and the dividends from substantial overseas investments. A new generation of rulers believed that Salisbury’s style of diplomacy was outmoded and that a more active policy was required, although many were sufficiently muddled to believe that Britain could enter agreements with other powers and yet still retain its traditional ‘free hand’ in foreign policy.5
Other powers had more reason for concern about the future. Italy’s position was always in doubt; lacking both population and resources, it was either the greatest of the lesser powers, or the least of the great powers, a perpetual striver for promotion or struggler against relegation. Austria-Hungary was a great power, but its respectable population of 52 million and impressive industrial growth rate were undermined by its internal problems as other national groups aspired to the same privileges as the Germans and Magyars within the empire. Beset on all sides by potential enemies, it depended increasingly upon its major ally, Germany, to sustain its pretensions as a great power. France experienced a steady relative decline in its power since 1815, when it had the largest population in Europe apart from Russia. For reasons which have never entirely been explained, the French population of 28 million in 1800 had reached only 39 million by 1914, at a time when its rivals were doubling, sometimes tripling, theirs. Its industrial capacity was far behind that of Britain, less than half that of Germany, and was overtaken in the last years of peace by Russia. France found it increasingly difficult to sustain an army commensurate with its pretensions, needing to conscript over 80 per cent of its available young men to do so.6
The question which the European great powers faced was whether the existing system could accommodate the new Germany without destroying itself. This depended upon whether the role Germany saw for itself could be reconciled with the degree of power and influence the other states were prepared to concede, but the difficulties were exacerbated by their perception that Germany itself did not really know what it wanted. This left Germany always aggrieved, feeling under threat and that the other powers were working against it. Its attempts to remedy the situation, which tended to appear clumsy and bullying to its neighbours, seemed only to make matters worse. Its rapid development from an agricultural economy with a mainly rural population in 1870 to the industrial giant of 1900 was not only alarming to neighbouring powers, particularly France, but also imposed a heavy strain on the traditional ruling elite, the Junkers, the great Prussian landlords. Faced by an expansion of the army and the machinery of government which outstripped the number of Junkers available to fill their traditional roles, and with the challenge of an urban working class organised by the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the biggest socialist party in Europe, the structures established by Bismarck, precisely to ensure Junker domination, now seemed under severe threat. Some historians argue that their attempts to maintain their status and power in the face of industrialisation, urbanisation and the collapse of a deferential society is the key to understanding Germany’s erratic and aggressive foreign policy in the early twentieth century. Thus, both internally and externally, the transformation of Germany posed a challenge to the existing system.7
1.2 Nationalism, Imperialism and Alliances
Germany’s success acted as a powerful spur to nationalism across Europe, but especially in those eastern and central areas where the authority of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires was waning. Vienna watched the increasingly rapid decline of Turkish power with great misgivings, seeing the mantle of the ‘sick man’ about to be passed to the Habsburgs. Franz Josef resisted any attempt to satisfy the demands of the subject nationalities for autonomy within the empire, and those demands grew in intensity. It was ironic that the hopes of those who sought autonomy and a federal structure for the empire rested on the victim of Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand. Elsewhere governments encouraged patriotism and nationalism in schools and through semi-official or voluntary movements and thus ensured that international relations would be conducted under the gaze of an increasingly vociferous and intense populace, gaining their simplified version of events from the new mass circulation press.8
The expansion of Europe into Africa and Asia in the last quarter of the nineteenth century presaged that curious mixture of short-term optimism and long-term pessimism which was to be characteristic of the 1914 crisis. Driven by a powerful mixture of arrogance and doubt, many of the European powers began annexing formally territories and regions which they had either ignored or previously been content to dominate at a distance. As a contribution to a readjustment of the European balance, imperialism was a failure; Britain attained the lion’s share of over 4 million square miles and 66 million people, leaving the others to pick at the scraps and adding to Germany’s frustration. The contribution of imperialism to the outbreak of the war has been much debated. Did imperialism prevent an earlier confrontation in the 1890s, or merely postpone it, ensuring that when war did come, it would be on a much larger and wider scale? The paradox that the powers whose imperial interests were most likely to clash actually fought on the same side in 1914 may be set against the idea that, while many imperial confrontations had been, or were in the process of being, amicably resolved by 1914, the clashes which they had occasioned and the manner of their resolution formed part of a wider ‘crisis slide’ which led to war.9
This idea suggests that it was the accumulation and rapid sequence of problems which tipped the balance from peace to war in the early twentieth century. Each problem alone could be solved, but each solution reduced the options available for future solutions, while the perceptions of success or failure retained by the participants acted as an important element in their approach to later crises, narrowing their choices down to war or unlimited defeat. Some German decision-makers, for example, perceived the outcome of the 1911 Moroccan crisis as a humiliating failure and were not prepared to repeat it – ‘This time I shall not back down’, W...