The imperialist aspect of the war, and some of its causes, emerge in the make-up of rival coalitions. These were not created by chance since they came from a rivalry induced by nations' unequal development. Europe had been traditionally dominated by one or other nation - Spain in the sixteenth century, and subsequently England or France. After the wars of the Revolution and Napoleon a new historical cycle developed, dependent on the nations' industrial development. England was outstanding, her power in mid-Victorian times being equal to the rest combined. The situation differed from what has happened in the later twentieth century, since the technical lead of the United States has not declined, whereas in the nineteenth century the British lead over other industrial powers declined decade by decade. Industry was born, grew and prospered in other countries, which would in future no longer be dominated by England. France and Belgium were the next off the mark in the race to industrialize; they were followed by the United States, Russia, Japan and especially Germany.
Germany was a new nation; she had to adapt herself to a world made without her, where other states had their roles and positions clearly defined, with markets reserved, raw materials set aside and future projects worked out in detail. To withstand and defeat competitors, she had to concentrate her energies, even more than the United States. Between i88o and 1914, owing to her success in this and in technology, she made unprecedented economic strides - a matter of immense pride, since in some ways she could even challenge England, first of the industrial nations, within the English borders. Following British and French examples, Germany was in turn converted to overseas expansion, either for new markets or cheap sources of raw materials. But the world had already been conquered and partitioned; there was no 'place in the sun' for Germany, and her immense economic power remained highly concentrated on a relatively small national territory, her field of expansion narrowly circumscribed by her rivals' positions. The vast demands of a maturing economy could not be met, although the economy was itself fully competitive. Her zone of influence and markets could not be extended, nor did she have a financial base on the same scale as her economic power.
England felt threatened: the challenge touched her pride, the pride of outstanding success. Since 1895 Joseph Chamberlain had remarked on 'the black spots' on the horizon in China or South Africa, England came up against Germany. The greatest worry was the rise of German naval power after 1900, dictated by nationalists such as Tirpitz. The British intended to maintain their two-power standard, whatever the cost, and built super-ships, the Dreadnoughts, assuming that the Germans could not follow them, since the Kiel canal was too narrow. The Germans were not dismayed at this extravagant auctioneering, but widened the canal and built their own Dreadnoughts. Anglo-German rivalry became a public matter, orchestrated and fomented by press and cinema. Some statesmen in both countries sought accord: but the two countries were pushed by the logic of imperialism and the character of statesmen into hostility. For two decades before the war, Germany behaved with more impatience and aggression than England who, being the possessing power, was necessarily conservative, and compromising, if not outright pacifist - as she showed a few days before entering the war. This attitude only showed that she had too much to lose to want change. But if she were under serious attack and her future threatened she would reconsider the position. Her statesmen considered making concessions to expansionist Germany, but even if this meant territorial gains for Germany in Belgian or Portuguese colonies, the future of Great Britain was not guaranteed thereby. German power was an ever increasing threat.
Since the turn of the century British policy had been one of containment (Eindämmung). Once convinced that Germany was threatening her hegemony, Britain abandoned her policy of isolation, tightened her links with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907 and accepted an unprecedented burden of defence. Lloyd George wrote, a few weeks after war broke out:
We have been living in a sheltered valley for generations. We have been too comfortable and too indulgent . . . and the stem hand of fate has scourged us to an elevation where we can see the great everlasting things that matter for a nation - the great peaks we had forgotten, of Honour, Duty, Patriotism, and, clad in glittering white, the great pinnacle of Sacrifice pointing like a rugged finger to Heaven. (Queen's Hall speech, 19 September 1914)
This was what the vicissitudes of international affairs in the previous decade had taught. The Kaiser felt insulted: the same British who had offered a rapprochement in his grandmother's day were now, under Edward VII, rejecting his advances. A personal grievance was added and nationalism further promoted. Delbrück's words of 1899 were still true: 'We must become a world power... we cannot go back. We can do this with England or against her. With her means peace; against her, war.' German leaders were still misled by the pacific utterances of British statesmen and their taste for negotiation, and felt that only personal disaccord or whims stopped agreement. They were sure, in the July crisis itself, that England would not come in, that they could make some kind of agreement with the British; they reacted with surprise and rage to Great Britain's declaration of war when they invaded Belgium. This sense of spite came through in the immensely successful 'hymn of spurned love', the Hassgesang by Ernst Lissauer:
French and Russian they matter not,
A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot;
We love them not, we hate them not,
We hold the Vistula and the Vosges-gate,
We have but one and only hate,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone -
ENGLAND!...
The pattern was taken up by parallel conflicts of the same type, for instance Franco-German rivalry with its ancestral roots. Since 1900 the French economy had undergone rapid growth once more, although compared to Germany or America it displayed too many signs of exhaustion. As their demographic curve declined, the French trembled at the mounting shadow of their hereditary enemy. No longer did Germany, in the old way, encourage French expansion overseas to make up for loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Franco-German rivalry reached into all corners of the globe (Morocco, the Congo and China) and appeared at all levels (colonial, commercial, financial). Over the previous few years further points of contention had come with German penetration of French businesses: now Germany was present even within French borders. France did, of course, still have a great part to play early in the century in financial and economic matters. 'France is a Bank', was Nicholas II's phrase. The French investor speculated in loans, particularly state loans; savings were buried abroad, particularly in Russia where interest was high. Banks and government collaborated and French capital acquired a powerful, even predominant, role. It seldom had to combat the British, who preferred private loans, and then mainly in America, the Dominions or China. It did, increasingly, come into conflict with the Germans, backed, like the French, by their government, in Russia, Romania and Serbia~ Germany lacked financial power but she was omnipresent, and the French noted increasing resistance between 1910 and 1914. It was appreciated that French capital permitted the client states to make orders in Germany: French money was going, to some extent, to strengthen its rival's industry - the Serbian case being obvious.
Russia was another 'hereditary enemy' of Germany, and she too felt menaced, both by traditional Drang nach Osten and by expanding German exports. Men felt more strongly about invasions of foreign goods than about capital penetration and the Russians did not quite appreciate the danger of the British, Belgian or French financial colonization of their country: on the contrary, they saw in the ubiquity of German goods a threat to their future. In the mid-nineteenth century England had exported to Russia twice as much as Germany; by 1913 she exported three times less than Germany; Germany's share of Russian imports, a mere i6 per cent in 1846, reached 32 per cent in 1896 and 42 per cent for the period 1909-14. A Russian journalist, Kulicher, adopted the ideas of Williams's Made in Germany and described in these terms the invasion of Russia by German goods:
Toys, dolls, picture-books read by your children come from Germany; so does the paper on which the most patriotic news-paper is printed. Go home and look about: everywhere, things 'made in Germany', from the piano in your living-room to the cooking-pot in the kitchen. Go downstairs, and you'll see on the pump that waters the flowers in the garden the words 'made in Germany', and you'll see them again on the periodicals stuffed in the wastepaper basket. If you put them in the fire, you'll see the poker was welded in Germany; throw it down, and knock off some ornament from the shelf: on the bits and pieces, you can piece together the words 'made in Germany'.
The journalist felt, writing in 1917, 'This is a good opening for British commerce if England can learn from past mistakes.'
Both past and present lent coherence and system to the alliances: England against Germany, now associated, owing to Delcasse's 'diplomatic triumphs', with France and Russia. It was true of other states as well. Turkey and Austria, both threatened with disruption, necessarily sought German protection. Austria had to contend with south Slavs supported by Russia; Turkey had always had to contend with Russia--Tsar and Pan-Slavs alike aimed at the Straits. England had been protectress in the past, but now she was linked with Russia so that the doubly threatened 'sick man' had to seek German protection. Germany eagerly took over the British role and colonized Turkey in the name of 'protection' - building the Baghdad railway, instructing the Turkish army, but not, like the British in Cyprus, demanding bases: the Germans asked for neither garrison rights nor the right to fly their flag. After the Balkan wars of 1912-13 the weakened Turks began to regard German protection as more and more threatening to their independence; and Jagow did indeed tell the Austrians he regarded partition of Turkey as inevitable. Maps of Asia Minor were drawn up showing in various colours the Arbeitszonen--a term preferred to 'spheres of influence'--of Italy, Austria and the rest. But Russia did not want to find Germany a neighbour here and attempted a rapprochement, via French diplomacy and finance, with Turkey. Austria and Germany appreciated that they would have to combat this vigorously: 'Punishment of Serbia would at once restore the prestige of Germany and Austria in Constantinople', said the Grand Vizier to the Austrian ambassador. In fact, the very day after the Austrian ultimatum was sent, following Sarajevo, Turkey formally requested adhesion to the Triple Alliance.
In the end Germany, seeing herself without a colonial empire, exploited the fact to proclaim that she alone would respect the rights of peoples overseas to independence. She advocated the colonial peoples' right to freedom; and these words, through the medium of the Turkish Empire, reached the Moslems even of Russia, of the British Empire or North Africa. The effects of this propaganda campaign were first noted among the great nomadic tribes of Tripolitania, then an Italian possession; this success gave a world-wide dimension to the idea of national rights which, created by Europeans, was not intended for export. Germany won much sympathy in the Moslem world.
Italy followed this pattern. Her original alliance with Germany and Austria still conformed to the needs of a few businessmen or expansionists, to some extent controlled by German capital or disappointed at colonial failures; many Italians also felt the alliance was justified because of Anglo-French resistance in Tunisia or Ethiopia. But alliance with Austria, the hereditary enemy, was not popular: 'collusion' between Vatican, clericals and the Catholic, conservative Habsburg Monarchy offended many politicians; and the alliance did not in any case bring much. For the long-serving liberal prime minister, Giolitti, who had German connections, it had a strictly defensive, diplomatic character: it made Italy partner of the Great Powers and was itself a sign that Italy had been promoted into their ranks. Still, it could only be presumptuous for Italy to take on the joint forces of England and France, mistresses of the Mediterranean, who controlled the coal supplies of Italian industry. If they showed 'understanding' for the 'legitimate aspirations' of Italy in colonial matters, Italy could afford a rapprochement. The two western powers supported her when she made war on Turkey for possession of Tripolitania, and by 1914 she was tending towards the west: there was even a suggestion of constructing a railway, with British money and Serbo-Russian agreement, from the Adriatic to the Black Sea. The British and French could not do much to help Italy reach her objectives in the Adriatic or Tyrol, but they were better placed than other powers to satisfy Italian ambitions else-where - and these were now openly directed towards Asia Minor. Alfredo Oriani wrote, 'Turkey's exhaustion, Greece's futile revival, the Balkan states' slow and late awakening give Mediterranean Italy the essential role. We have never been more Italian than now. The myth of the fourth Rome was born.
These ambitions brought general negotiations. They caused a veritable diplomatic revolution; as the Kaiser said, 'Italy is dropping off like a rotten pear.' In July 1914 Vienna concealed her intentions from the new Italian leaders, an attitude felt by Salandra and Sonnino, in view of the Triplice's recent renewal, as an affront. They were even ready to intervene - in any event a wonderful answer to social and revolutionary agitation, which, over the past few months, had been lively enough (following 'Red Week'). This was an argument other countries could appreciate, though not in such a direct form. On the other hand, Giolitti and many deputies feared that war, with its inevitable sacrifices, would also create a demand for equal rights. The question of intervention was highly complex, since Italian statesmen, whatever their sympathies, announced that they would accept the highest bid. These annexationist ambitions show the essentially imperialistic character of intervention. But in August 1914 the peoples and their governments felt, rightly or wrongly, that they had gone to war to defend their rights, honour and security. Annexationist alms were not there at the time though they emerged later. In Italy it was different - public opinion had to be tempted before it would support intervention. The nationalists wanted to intervene, but not the other Italians, who through the press had to be diverted from other aspirations. Expansion might solve the problem of emigration; many socialists felt war would be the midwife of revolution.
In the Balkans it was almost a different war altogether. It had begun long before Sarajevo and went on after Versailles. In 1912-13, in the first Balkan war, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia had defeated Turkey; they shared out parts of Thrace and Macedonia. Bulgaria had borne the main burden and won the greatest victories. Both she and Serbia felt their share was insufficient, and planned war even before peace was signed with Turkey; Serbia received help from Greece and Romania, while Turkey once more attacked Bulgaria, who was thereby attacked on all sides at once. The peace of Bucharest in 1913 allowed defeated Bulgaria only the Strumitsa valley and the Thracian littoral of her former conquests, while her erstwhile allies increased their territory through land that Turkey had originally lost to Bulgaria in the previous year. This was a different world, a different war from the European one, although it took its pattern and means from Europe. The Great War did start in the Balkans, and it is legitimate to trace the causation from Sarajevo to Versailles; but the assassins of Franz Ferdinand and the men behind them had in view at most an Austro-Serb conflict, not European war: they could hardly imagine any connection. In a sense, there was no inevitability about the spread of war after Sarajevo, but by 1914 alliance systems had their own logic, the rivalries were fixed, and the antagonism of nations came from the depths of their past, from part of their collective consciousness. Contemporaries might believe war could be put off a year or two; it would come in the end. War had conquered men's minds before it even broke out.