The Three Emperors Page 21
One thing that seemed to appeal to almost everyone in the German Foreign Ministry, however, was the notion of plain speaking, of cutting through the flowery nonsense of international diplomatic language, of pursuing an explicitly self-interested aggressive foreign policy, and being entirely honest about it—unlike the British, who dressed their acquisitiveness up in myths about the white man’s burden. It seemed in the blunt, realpolitik tradition of Bismarck, for whom, after four years, the German Foreign Office was starting to feel a little nostalgia. Salisbury told the incoming British ambassador to Berlin in 1895 that “The rudeness of78 German communications [had] much increased since Bismarck’s time,” and attributed it “to the wish for smaller men to keep up the traditions of the Great Chancellor.” Perhaps it was also a subconscious attempt to mimic the admired military values of the German army, aggressively pursuing one’s goals with no distraction or mitigation. In fact the policy was clumsy and muddle-headed and more to do with relieving feelings and striking poses than getting results. The British were far from the only ones to observe this. A British diplomat in Vienna reported in November 1894 that the Austrians were complaining that German foreign policy was ruled by “the sudden impulse.”79 There was “an absolute want of a guiding hand in Berlin in Foreign Affairs,” and “thorough confusion in the Ministry.”
This lack of focus, even chaos, was becoming characteristic of German politics. Even those embedded in the system could see it. Holstein privately complained that sometimes he seemed to be working in an “operetta-style government.”
The problem was that when he had drawn up the German constitution in 1871, Bismarck had left great holes and contradictions, deliberately failing to define the precise powers of and relationships between the offices and institutions at the top of government. This allowed him to exercise unprecedented control over every part of it. For example, the precise balance of power between the emperor, chancellor and council of princes had never been defined; and there were effectively two central governments—the German, with its unbiddable representative assembly, the Reichstag, and the Prussian, dominated by a conservative Junker clique, with its own assembly, the Landtag, whose franchise was weighted dramatically towards the Junkers themselves. What was missing was a systematized, overarching, professional body or process at the top to coordinate policy and decision-making, such as existed in Britain. Bismarck had done this job himself, and Wilhelm was simply not competent to fill his shoes. “In view of the80 absence of an overwhelming personality under whom the department heads … might be absolutely subordinated, the most contradictory opinions are now urged at high and all-highest level,” one German diplomat observed a year after Bismarck had gone. Probably no one could have done the job—each year government business increased and became more complicated—but Wilhelm, with his insistence that he was in charge, his erraticness, his susceptibility to flattery and dislike of criticism, made it worse. With Bismarck’s departure, a “Hobbesian war81 of all agents within government against all other agents” was taking hold.
The problem was not just confined to the government, it was also an issue in the army. Virtually Wilhelm’s first act as kaiser had been to address his army. “The army and I82 were born for one another,” he announced in his first proclamation, “and will stick together forever, be it, by God’s will, through peace or war.” He constantly expressed his passion and admiration for the armed forces, and had identified himself closely with them, spending a good part of every week in Potsdam inspecting his regiments, redesigning their uniforms, taking part in war games—which he was invariably allowed to win. By the terms of the German constitution he was the army’s supreme warlord, and it reported exclusively to him—not to the nation or the government. It was a power Wilhelm hugged to himself. When he was angry, he would mutter about using the army to launch a coup d’état to get rid of the Reichstag. When he was feeling martial, he would describe how he would lead it into battle. Behind their hands, the chiefs of staff expressed their exasperation and laughed at his postures. No one in the officer corps was under any illusions that Wilhelm could “lead three83 soldiers over a gutter,” as his disgruntled former mentor General Waldersee liked to say. And just as with the government, he was incapable of providing a consistent focus and overview of military planning and policy, and wouldn’t allow anyone else to do it either, deflecting any attempts—Caprivi, himself a general, made several—to bring the army under government control and scrutiny. No one outside the army, not even the chancellor, had the authority to be informed of the chiefs of staff’s plans and intentions. Rather than sapping its effectiveness—as it had the government—the effect was to make the German military more independent and more assertive. It also encouraged an inward-looking, solipsistic culture not sufficiently mediated by contact with civilian Germany, along with a set of assumptions not outlandishly different from other armies, but more extreme. Within the German officer corps war would be increasingly regarded as inevitable and necessary, and plans would be made without any consideration for political or diplomatic realities. The threads of these tendencies had existed long before Wilhelm. The army was one of the most visible and impressive symbols of the new Germany and the central part it had played in its creation had spawned an uncritical cult of admiration for its manners and methods in all regions and classes that would have its own damaging effects. But Wilhelm’s public identification with it, his encouragement of its independence, his refusal to allow that this might be unwise, would exacerbate these tendencies. The end of 1894 marked the end of Wilhelm’s liberal phase, and of Germany’s explicit pursuit of Britain as an ally. Caprivi resigned for the last time in October 1894, exhausted. The government lurched back to the Right. Wilhelm ordered legislation for the suppression of the Social Democratic Party—just as Bismarck had done four years before—as well as demanding big increases in military spending and military service. Caprivi’s replacement, found by Eulenburg, was the seventy-five-year-old Prince Chlodwig Hohenlohe von Schillingfurst, a grand former diplomat and distant relative of Wilhelm’s with Russian estates and sympathies, chosen because Eulenburg reckoned he was old, tired and would do as he was told. The Reichstag, however, remained as unbiddable as ever. The centre and Left parties, with whom Wilhelm (and his advisers) refused to treat, voted against the government. The main parties of the Right, the Conservatives and National Liberals, whom Wilhelm had hoped to rally with his moves against the Left, demanded concessions for their own agendas, particularly the privileges and protectionism that kept the Junker class so influential. The government was now often forced to go further than it actually wanted—its ministers making aggressive speeches against whichever country the parties currently hated most, and keeping tariffs high on imported grain, which made food expensive for the poor, to keep them on-side. And all the time, support for the Socialist Party had been growing. In the 1893 Reichstag elections it had won 25 percent of the vote. The old divisions seemed more entrenched than ever, and Wilhelm’s government both unable and unwilling to try to resolve them.
At Wilhelm’s Cowes visit of 1895 it was all too evident that Anglo-German relations had passed their honeymoon phase. Edward grumbled that Wilhelm now sashayed around as if he was “the Boss of84 Cowes,” and when Wilhelm’s Meteor finally beat Britannia the following year, he sold his yacht. Wilhelm, meanwhile, was smarting because the English family had been unenthusiastic about his first regatta week at Kiel. Eventually George had reluctantly attended the madly lavish celebrations (a whole island was built in the middle of a lake outside Hamburg, for a week only, for Wilhelm’s gala dinner for 600), but bluntly announced that he couldn’t accept any honorary titles. Wilhelm had taken this as a slight85 and blamed it on Alexandra’s plotting.
At Cowes his entourage saw British insults everywhere. “Fat old Wales86 has again been inconceivably rude to HM,” one member wrote to Holstein. Wilhelm himself was far from a model of tact. At a drinks party on board the Hohenzollern, crammed with grand English guests,
he allegedly called Bertie “the Old Peacock.”87 He brought a thirty-strong brass band which performed, without invitation, at every possible opportunity, and two new flashy German gunships, which blocked the yacht’s course and fired a twenty-one-gun salute—giving the visit an official status it was not supposed to have. On the anniversary of the Prussian victory over the French in 1870 he gave a speech praising the supremacy of the German army. The British press were scaldingly critical. The hitherto pro-German Standard suggested the kaiser go home before he insulted anyone else, a comment Wilhelm still recalled five months later when he told the queen that the newspaper had been “very unkind”88 to him.
To make matters worse Lord Salisbury, lately re-elected prime minister, failed to take his own advice that the kaiser should be treated “like a 89jealous woman who insists on the undivided devotion of all her admirers.” He was two hours late for a meeting with him. The audience had been arranged to discuss the Eastern Question—the apparent imminent collapse of the Ottoman empire and how to stop it causing chaos in eastern Europe. Salisbury had a plan to partition its territories. Wilhelm—between furious little jokes about the prime minister’s91 tardiness—was dismissive. Salisbury was taciturn and impenetrable. The next day the kaiser decided he wanted to talk it over once more. Salisbury failed to show. He claimed afterwards with profuse apologies that he had had a simultaneous meeting with the queen, had not received the message, and had been caught in the rain. Wilhelm summoned him again. This time he didn’t turn up because he said he had to be in London early. No one entirely believed him, especially the kaiser.90 One of the less devoted members of Wilhelm’s entourage told Holstein that he thought the prime minister simply couldn’t bear to see the kaiser again.
Even so, Wilhelm’s entourage and ministers continued to worry about their master’s susceptibility to England. “I very much92 hope that his Majesty will soon return … because I very much fear the English influence,” one member wrote to Holstein.
* It was so famous that a species of South American monkey with luxuriant whiskers was named “Emperor Tamarin” after him, although confusingly its whiskers curl—impressively—downwards.
* Daughter of Victoria’s second youngest daughter, Helena, and Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. The marriage was a disaster: Aribert treated her appallingly and was almost certainly homosexual. They separated in 1900.
7
PERFIDIOUS MUSCOVY
1895–97
Everyone was excited by the accession of Nicholas II. Educated Russians longed for liberalization. The government’s attempts to prevent social change and its supine failure to manage the terrible famine of the early 1890s had hugely discredited it, and Alexander’s Russification policies had spawned the beginnings of angry separatist movements in the further reaches of the empire. Beyond Russia, however, expectations were even higher. Both Queen Victoria and the kaiser hoped that the young tsar would lean towards them, and were convinced that the key would be royal relationships. The British—inspired by Edward’s triumphant Russian visit—even thought they could see the seeds of a genuine liberalization. “The first acts1 of the new reign point to liberal measures,” the Prince of Wales’s equerry Arthur Ellis had reported to the queen, “—press censure of telegrams removed … to the dismay and astonishment of the ultra-Conservatives.” The tsar had told a deputation from much-persecuted Poland that “all his subjects were equal and alike in his own eyes.” “How not to2 admire him,” his second cousin Konstantin Romanov wrote in his diary, “such simplicity, such calm, the modesty in which there is so much majesty, and particularly that clear, deep expressive look, cannot fail but charm and enchant.” The truth was, Nicholas was such a blank canvas, so unknown, except for his much-admired personal charm and gentleness, that it was easy to project all kinds of wishful thinking onto him.
Within Russia, the illusion didn’t last long. In February 1895 a polite zemstvo delegation from the province of Tver petitioned the tsar that “the expression of the needs and thought not only of the administration but of the Russian people may reach to the height of the throne.” The British ambassador in St. Petersburg noted that their words had been “couched in the most3 loyal language and merely expressed the hope that the zemstvo might prove the means of direct communication between His Majesty and the People.” But the minister of the interior had told the tsar that it was an infringement of his prerogatives and an implied criticism of his father’s policies. Nicholas decided it represented a dangerous precedent, an attempt to take part in government. Replying to the zemstvo’s petition he dismissed it as “senseless dreams.” “I shall maintain the principle of autocracy just as firmly and unflinchingly as it was preserved by my unforgettable dead father,” he added. In government circles it was understood that the speech had been written by Alexander III’s most reactionary adviser, Pobedonostsev. “The speech had created a most unfavourable impression,”4 the British ambassador wrote; “the most distressing5 impression,” echoed a senior Russian diplomat. The fact was, all the way through the century, the arrival of a new tsar had always set off fantasies of liberalization and reform; they had always been disappointed.
Still, the tsar continued to express his fondness for his “English relations” and told the British ambassador how much he wanted “cordial relations with England,”6 and that since there was no longer any difference of opinion between the two countries, they should act “in perfect harmony” to solve the world’s problems. He wrote enthusiastically to Edward in the New Year of 1895 about the delegation from the Scots Greys Guards regiment who brought him his new uniform: “I find them such nice7 fellows … I cannot say how proud and pleased I was.” Not long afterwards Russia and Britain began negotiations to resolve the arguments over the boundaries of the Pamirs in the Himalayas. To demonstrate the new closeness, a portrait of the queen hung over the mantelpiece in the tsarina’s private sitting room. Alix and the queen corresponded regularly,* and the queen took to writing regularly to “Dearest Nicky,” signing herself “Grandmama,” enquiring after “poor dear Alicky’s” health and offering up tidbits of family gossip. When their first child, Olga, was born in November 1895, the imperial couple asked the queen to be godmother. The Daily Telegraph wrote that the birth “would be received8 with much friendly interest in this country, where all that concerns the present and future of Russia is the subject of intelligent and sympathetic appreciation.” It seemed natural that the warmth would lead to a new attitude in Anglo-Russian relations.
In the spirit of hopeful cooperation, the British government began to invite the Russians to work with it. It asked them to apply pressure to the Ottoman government, which had colluded in a series of massacres of Armenians, a Christian ethnic group within the Turkish empire campaigning for self-determination, in 1894 and ’95. The Russians declined. In early 1895 it asked the Russians to back a call for an armistice in the Far East, where the Chinese, having provoked a war with Japan, had been thoroughly beaten and were begging the Great Powers for help. The Russians were evasive; in fact, it was impossible to get an answer at all. The requests were not outlandish: Russia had long claimed to be the defender of Christians within the Ottoman empire. As for the Far East, it was in no Western power’s interest to let Japan establish a foothold in China, the last great unplucked colonial plum, which also happened to be on Russia’s doorstep. The British were disappointed. Then the two countries argued in April 1895, when the Russians—suddenly realizing the Japanese were planning to annex the northern Chinese province of Manchuria on which they had their own designs—demanded that the British back their campaign to evict them. This time the British refused. They saw no reason to alienate the new de facto rising power in the Far East, and they felt British interests weren’t directly threatened. Lord Rosebery took care, however, to say no with “great delicacy,” not wanting to “shut the door with a bang.” The Russians were unimpressed. The ambassador in London, Baron Georges de Staal, a comfortable fixture on the capital’s society scene
who played cards with the Prince of Wales, complained crossly that Rosebery was just fuelling the Russian anti-British party which would “now exclaim, ‘Just what we always told you, that England would leave us in the lurch whenever a pinch came.’”9 The Russian press denounced Britain and its refusal to help evict the Japanese—characteristic double-dealing, they said.
Queen Victoria wrote to Nicholas assuring him “how deeply I & my10 Government deplored not to be able to join in the Representations of Russia and the 2 other Powers to Japan but the feeling was so strong in this Country that it was impossible.” She couldn’t resist, however, complaining about papers and I need not say have caused an angry feeling. But the worst of all is, that they say he is your friend and possesses your confidence, and what I am so anxious for, is that it should be known that you know nothing of these articles and disapprove of them and I am sure you will not mind my writing to you so openly.
Some most violent and offensive articles against England in the Russian Newspapers signed by … the Gentleman (whose name I can’t recall at this moment [the Russian expansionist Prince Alexander Utkhomsky]) but who helped you in writing the account of your journey to India. These [articles] have been translated in to the English
“I must say11 that I cannot prevent people from putting their opinions openly in the newspapers,” Nicholas wrote back. Actually the Russian press was the most state-controlled and strictly censored in the world. “How often have I not been worried to read in English gazettes rather unjust statements in connexion with my country! Even books are being constantly sent to me from London, misinterpreting our actions in Asia, our interior politics, etc. I am sure,” he finished rather sharply, “there is as little hostility intended in these writings, as there is in the above mentioned ones.” It was true that sections of the British press regularly attacked the Russian regime. In October 1895 The Times ran Leo Tolstoy’s account of the brutal persecution of the pacifist Dukhobor sect, members of which had been beaten and starved for refusing to do military service. Like many people in autocratic states Nicholas was convinced that despite British insistence to the contrary, the British government controlled the press and that the queen’s complaints were disingenuous. Russian press hostility towards Britain continued unabated. In November, the same month the queen became godmother to the tsar’s daughter, the outgoing British ambassador, Sir Francis Lascelles, told the tsar in his final audience how “discouraging” the British found this, adding delicately that such articles “would not be written were it not that they were agreeable to the majority of the people”—by which he meant those who controlled the press, i.e., the government. All the emperor would say was “the press had very little importance in Russia.”12