Before the War

by Viscount R. B. Haldane Haldane

We now have before us the considered opinions of Herr von Bethmann Hollweg, the late Imperial Chancellor, and of Admiral von Tirpitz, the Minister who did much to develop the naval power of Germany, about the origin and significance of the war. Both have written books on the subject.[4] It is to be desired that in the case of each of these authors his book should be studied in English-speaking countries as well as on the Continent. For it is important that the Anglo-Saxon world should understand the divergences in policy which the two books disclose, not less than the points of agreement. That world has suffered in the past from failure to understand Germany, while the German world has displayed a total inability to interpret aright the Anglo-Saxon disposition. When I speak of two worlds I mean the governing classes of these worlds. The nations themselves, taken as aggregates of individual citizens, by a probable majority in each case, desired the continuance of peace and of the prosperity of which it is the condition. So, of course, did the rulers, those in Germany as much as those in London. But the German rulers had a theory of how to secure peace which was the outcome of the abstract mind that was their inheritance. It was the theory that was wrong, a theory of which Anglo-Saxondom knew little, and which it would have rejected decisively had it realized its tendency. This theory is described in Admiral Tirpitz's book, with an account of the efforts made to indoctrinate with it the people of Germany.

The two volumes are profoundly interesting. For in that of Admiral Tirpitz we have the doctrine set forth that in the end led to the war. In that written by the late Imperial Chancellor we have quite another principle laid down as the one which he was endeavoring to apply in his direction of German policy. But in this endeavor he failed. The school of Tirpitz in the main prevailed, and this was the more easy, inasmuch as it was simply continuing the policy which had been advocated by a noisy section of Germans, nearly without a break, since the days of Frederick the Great. It was a policy which had in reality outlived the days in which it was practicable. The world had become too crowded and too small to permit of any one Power asserting its right to jostle its way where it pleased without regard to its neighbors. An affair of police on a colossal scale had begun to look as if it would ensue, and ensue it ultimately did. No doubt had we all been cleverer we might have been able to explain to Germany whither she was heading. But we did not understand her, least of all our chauvinists, nor did she understand us. In the main what she really wanted was to develop herself by the application of her talent for commerce and industry. To her success in attaining this end we had no objection, provided her procedure was decent and in order. But she chose a means to her end which was becoming progressively more and more inadmissible. Tirpitz describes the illegitimate means. Bethmann Hollweg describes the legitimate end. Tirpitz thinks Bethmann Hollweg was a weakling because he would not back up the means. Bethmann Hollweg, firm in his faith that the end was legitimate and thinking of this alone, dwells on it with little reference to what his colleague was about. His accusation against the Entente Powers is that, at the instigation of Russia primarily, and in a less degree of France, they set themselves to ring round and crush Germany. It was really, he believes, a war of aggression, and England was ultimately responsible for it. Without her co-operation it was impossible, and altho she did not enter into any formal military alliance for the purpose, she began in the time of Edward VII. a policy of close friendship which enabled Russia and France in the end to reckon on her as morally bound to help. It was easy for these Powers to represent as a defensive war what was really a war of aggression. Such was truly its nature, and England decided to join in it, actually because she was jealous of Germany's growing success in the world, and was desirous of setting a check to it.

Such is Herr von Bethmann Hollweg's explanation. He is, I have no doubt, sincerely convinced of its truth, and he explains the grounds of his conviction in detail and with much ability. But there is a fallacy in his reasoning which becomes transparent when one reads along with his book that of his colleague. If we put out of sight the deep feeling awakened here by the brutality of the invasion of Belgium, to which violation of Treaty obligations the former declares that Germany was compelled by military considerations that were unanswerable, and look at the history of Anglo-German relations before the war, the inference is irresistible that it was not the object of developing in a peaceful atmosphere German commerce and industry that England objected to. Such a development might have been formidable for us. It would have compelled great efforts on our part to improve the education of our people and our organization for peaceful enterprises. But it would have been legitimate. The objection of this country was directed against quite other things that were being done by Germany in order to attain her purpose. The essence of these was the attempt to get her way by creating armaments which should in effect place her neighbors at her mercy. We who live on islands, and are dependent for our food and our raw materials on our being able to protect their transport and with it ourselves from invasion, could not permit the sea-protection which had been recognized from generation to generation as a necessity for our preservation to be threatened by the creation of naval forces intended to make it precarious. As the navies of Europe were growing, not only those of France and Russia, but the navy of Italy also, we had to look, in the interests of our security, to friendly relations with these countries. We aimed at establishing such friendly relations, and our method was to get rid of all causes of friction, in Newfoundland, in Egypt, in the East, and in the Mediterranean. That was the policy which was implied in our Ententes. We were not willing to enter into military alliances and we did not do so. Our policy was purely a business policy, and everything else was consequential on this, including the growing sense of common interests and of the desire for the maintenance of peace. I do not think that Admiral Tirpitz wanted actual war. But he did want power to enforce submission to the expansion of Germany at her will. And this power was his means to the end which was what less Prussianized minds in Germany contemplated as attainable in less objectionable ways. Such a means he could not fashion in the form of strength in sea power which would have placed us at his mercy, without arousing our instinct for self-preservation.

All this the late Imperial Chancellor in substance ignores. The fact is that he can only defend his theory on the hypothesis that no such policy as that of his colleague was on foot, and that the truth was that France, Russia, and England had come to a decision to take the initiative in a policy embracing, for France revenge for the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, for Russia the acquisition of Constantinople with domination over the Balkans and the Bosporus, and for England the destruction of German commerce. If this hypothesis be not true, and the real explanation of the alarm of the Entente Powers was the policy exemplified by Tirpitz and the other exponents of German militarism, then the whole of the reasoning in Herr von Bethmann Hollweg's book falls to the ground.

It may be asked how it was possible that two members of the Imperial Government should have been pursuing in the same period two policies wholly inconsistent with each other. The answer is not difficult. The direction of affairs in Germany was admirably organized for some purposes and very badly for others. Her autocratic system lent itself to efficiency in the preparation of armaments. But it was not really a system under which her Emperor was left free to guide policy. There is no greater mistake made than that under which it is popularly supposed that the Emperor was absolute master. The development in recent years of the influence of the General and Admiral Staffs, which was a necessity from the point of view of modern organization for war but required keeping in careful check from other points of view, had produced forces which the Emperor was powerless to hold in. Even in Bismarck's time readers of his "Reflections and Recollections" will remember how he felt the embarrassment of his foreign policy caused by the growing and deflecting influences of Moltke, and even of his friend Roon. And there was no Bismarck to hold the Staffs in check for reasons of expediency in the years before 1914. The military mind when it is highly developed is dangerous. It sees only its own bit, but this it sees with great clearness, and in consequence becomes very powerful. There is only one way of holding it to its legitimate function, and that is by the supremacy of public opinion in a Parliament as its final exponent. Parliaments may be clumsy and at times ignorant. But they do express, it may be vaguely, but yet sufficiently, the sense of the people at large. Now, notwithstanding all that had been done to educate them up to it, I do not think that the people at large in Germany had ever endorsed the implications of the policy of German militarism. The Social Democrats certainly had not. They ought, I think, to be judged even now by what they said before the war, and not by what some, tho not all of them, said when it was pressed on them in 1914 that Germany had to fight for her life. Had she possessed a true Parliamentary system for a generation before the war there would probably have been no war. What has happened to her is a vindication of Democracy as the best political system despite certain drawbacks which attach to it.

The great defect of the German Imperial system was that, unless the Emperor was strong enough to impose his will on his advisers, he was largely at their mercy. Had they been chosen by the people, the people and not the Emperor would have borne the responsibility, if the views of these advisers diverged from their own. But they were chosen by the Emperor, and chosen in varying moods as to policy. The result was that, excellent as were the departments at their special work in most cases, on general policy there was no guarantee for unity of mind. The Emperor lived amid a sea of conflicting opinions. The Chancellor might have one idea, the Foreign Secretary, a Prussian and not Imperial Minister, a different one, the Chief of the General Staff a third, the War Minister a fourth, and the Head of the Admiralty a fifth. Thus the Kaiser was constantly being pulled at from different sides, and whichever Minister had the most powerful combination at his back generally got the best of the argument. Were the Kaiser in an impulsive mood he might side now with one and again with another, and the result would necessarily be confusion. Moreover, he had constantly to fix one eye on public opinion in Germany, and another on public opinion abroad. It is therefore not surprising that Germany seemed to foreigners a strange and unintelligible country, and that sudden manifestations of policy were made which shocked us here, accustomed as we were to something quite different. Neither our pacifists nor our chauvinists really succeeded in diagnosing Germany. On the other hand, we ourselves were a standing puzzle to the Germans. They could not understand how Government could be conducted in the absence of abstract principles exactly laid down. And because our democratic system was one of choosing our rulers and trusting them with a large discretion within limits, the Germans always suspected that this system, with which they were unfamiliar, covered a device for concealing hidden policies. I wrote in some detail about this in an address delivered at Oxford in the autumn of 1911, and afterward published in a little volume called "Universities and National Life."

The war has not altered the views to which I had then come.

But it was not really so on either side, and it is deplorable that the two nations knew so little of each other. For I believe that the German system, wholly unadapted as it was to the modern spirit, was bound to become modified before long, and had we shown more skill and more zeal in explaining ourselves, we should probably have accelerated the process of German acceptance of the true tendencies of the age. But our statesmen took little trouble to get first-hand knowledge of the genesis of what appeared to them to be the German double dose of original sin, and, on the other hand, our chauvinists were studied in Germany out of all proportion to their small number and influence. Thus the Berlin politicians got the wrong notions to which their tradition predisposed them. I believe that Herr von Bethmann Hollweg was himself really more enlightened, but he could not control the admirals and generals, or the economists or historians or professors whom the admirals and generals were always trying to enlist on the side of the doctrine of Weltmacht oder Niedergang. Under these circumstances all that seemed possible was to try to influence German opinion, and at the same time to insure against the real risk of failure to accomplish this before it was too late.

In order to make this view of German conditions intelligible, it will be convenient in the first place to give some account of Herr von Bethmann Hollweg's opinions as expressed in his book, and afterward to contrast them with the views of his powerful colleague, Admiral von Tirpitz.

The ex-Imperial Chancellor commences his "Betrachtungen zum Weltkriege" by going back to the day when he assumed office. When Prince Bülow handed over the reins to him in July, 1909, the Prince gave him his views on what, in the attitude of England, had been causing the former much concern. We are not told what he actually said, but we can guess it, for Bethmann Hollweg goes on to indicate the origin of the cause of anxiety. It was King Edward's "encirclement" policy. It might well be that the late King had no desire for war. But the result of the policy for which he and the Ministers behind him stood was, so he believes, that, in all differences of opinion as to external policy, Germany found England, France, and Russia solidly against her, and was conscious of a continuous attempt to lead Italy away from the Triple Alliance. "People may call this 'Einkreisung,' or policy of the balance of power, or whatever they like. The object and the achievement resulted in the founding of a group of nations of great power, whose purpose was to hinder Germany at least by diplomatic means in the free development of her growing strength." Sir Edward Grey, when taking over the conduct of foreign policy in 1905, had declared that he would continue the policy of the late Government. He hoped for improved relations with Russia, and even for more satisfactory relations with Germany, provided always that in the latter case these did not interfere with the friendship between England and France. This, says Bethmann Hollweg, had been the theme of English policy since the end of the days of "splendid isolation," and it remained so until the war broke out. He says nothing of the rapid advances which were proceeding from stage to stage in the organization of German battle-fleets to be added to her formidable army, or of the risk these advances made for England if she were to find herself without any friends outside.