Partly an Englishman

Sunday, October 11th, 2015

World War I offers a sobering reminder of man’s capacity for folly:

When we say that war is “inconceivable,” is this a statement about what is possible in the world — or only about what our limited minds can conceive? In 1914, few could imagine slaughter on a scale that demanded a new category: world war. When war ended four years later, Europe lay in ruins: the kaiser gone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolved, the Russian tsar overthrown by the Bolsheviks, France bled for a generation, and England shorn of its youth and treasure. A millennium in which Europe had been the political center of the world came to a crashing halt.

[...]

Eight years before the outbreak of world war in Europe, Britain’s King Edward VII asked his prime minister why the British government was becoming so unfriendly to his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Germany, rather than keeping its eye on America, which he saw as the greater challenge. The prime minister instructed the Foreign Office’s chief Germany watcher, Eyre Crowe, to write a memo answering the king’s question. Crowe delivered his memorandum on New Year’s Day, 1907. The document is a gem in the annals of diplomacy.

The logic of Crowe’s analysis echoed Thucydides’s insight. And his central question, as paraphrased by Henry Kissinger in On China, was the following: Did increasing hostility between Britain and Germany stem more from German capabilities or German conduct? Crowe put it a bit differently: Did Germany’s pursuit of “political hegemony and maritime ascendancy” pose an existential threat to “the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England?”

Crowe’s answer was unambiguous: Capability was key. As Germany’s economy surpassed Britain’s, Germany would not only develop the strongest army on the continent. It would soon also “build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” In other words, Kissinger writes, “once Germany achieved naval supremacy … this in itself — regardless of German intentions — would be an objective threat to Britain, and incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”

Three years after reading that memo, Edward VII died. Attendees at his funeral included two “chief mourners” — Edward’s successor, George V, and Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm — along with Theodore Roosevelt representing the United States. At one point, Roosevelt (an avid student of naval power and leading champion of the buildup of the U.S. Navy) asked Wilhelm whether he would consider a moratorium in the German-British naval arms race. The kaiser replied that Germany was unalterably committed to having a powerful navy. But as he went on to explain, war between Germany and Britain was simply unthinkable, because “I was brought up in England, very largely; I feel myself partly an Englishman. Next to Germany I care more for England than for any other country.” And then with emphasis: “I ADORE ENGLAND!”

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be — none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

Comments

  1. Alrenous says:

    I still buy Moldbug’s assertion that Germany was deliberately provoked by leftist assholes. The question is whether they were British whigs, American whigs, or both. Crowe was either a liar or a useful idiot.

    Existential threat? The whigs wanted to be an existential threat to Germany, but they were only an existential threat to Wilhelm. Germany was never going to wipe out the English people.

  2. Cassander says:

    Leftists didn’t force the Kaiser to build a fleet, and the fleet was most definitely an existential threat to the UK — not to the population, but to its international position. The UK spent more than three centuries prior to WW1 balancing against whoever was the most powerful player on the continent. No further explanation is needed.

  3. While the British definitely didn’t help matters, I’ve got to agree with Cassander in the end. It was a strategic blunder of the first order for Germany to build up a blue-water dreadnought fleet explicitly designed to counter Britain’s. Not only did it push along the conversion of a long standing ally into an enemy (GB) but it also absorbed vast quantities of money, labor, and expertise that would have been better spent on Germany’s ground forces.

  4. Bruce says:

    If the German General Staff had really believed they were under siege by enemies in either world war, they’d have put fish ponds on every block, bunkers under every home, and giant mounds of food in mineshafts all over Germany. They were planning a quick victorious war of aggression- a big fleet, a big army, a bunch of dead Belgians and East Europeans and a couple dozen small countries to loot. Both wars.

  5. Candide III says:

    Bruce, before WWI, nobody expected total war, with memories of swift defeat of France by Germany in 1870 serving as operational example. When the war started, all sides believed it would be “over by Christmas”. Even in WWII, German experience in the battle of France was rather on the side of the blitzkrieg, and they were confidently expecting the same outcome in Russia as witnessed by their lack of winter preparations.

Leave a Reply