WWI · CHAPTER 1 ·
Alliance system before WWI
Chapter 1 of The Great War, 1871–1923: “Bismarck’s Europe and the Two Blocs”
After German unification in 1871, Bismarck sought to keep a vengeful France without allies, tying Austria-Hungary and Russia to Berlin and adding the Dual Alliance of 1879 and the Triple Alliance with Italy in 1882. The web held only while he kept repairing it, and by 1907 Europe had divided into two blocs.
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The map above is the world of Europe, August 1907 — Two blocs.
Part of IB History: The First World War →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The question that opens this atlas is why a quarrel in the Balkans, the peninsula of south-east Europe, could drag every great power into war in 1914. The great powers were the states strong enough to fight a major war alone, much like the permanent members of the UN Security Council today. The answer begins in 1871, when some two dozen German states were joined into one German Empire after defeating France. The new empire had the largest population west of Russia and the fastest-growing industry in Europe. It upset the balance of power, the principle that no state should grow strong enough to dominate the rest, much as competition law stops one company from swallowing a market. France, beaten and stripped of Alsace-Lorraine, wanted revenge, so from the first day German security depended on keeping France alone.
Germany’s chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, the head of the emperor’s government much like a prime minister, managed this with alliances, treaties in which states promise to fight for one another as NATO members do. The system rested on his own juggling, and it came apart after the young Kaiser, or emperor, Wilhelm II dismissed him in 1890. Wilhelm’s government let its secret treaty with Russia lapse, and Russia, isolated and short of money, allied with France by 1894. Wilhelm’s battle fleet then alarmed Britain, an island fed by imported food and defended by its navy. Britain signed ententes, French for “understandings”, with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907, much as neighbours settle their quarrels without promising to defend each other. On the map a blue ring now surrounds a charcoal centre, and Germany faced what its generals feared most, a war against France in the west and Russia in the east at once.
The full story
Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s chancellor, built his system on a calculation about numbers: in a Europe of five great powers, the states able to fight a major war alone, a state should always try to be one of three. France would never forgive the loss of Alsace and Lorraine, the border provinces Germany annexed in 1871, so Germany had to deny it any ally worth a war of revenge. He tied Austria-Hungary, the Habsburg empire ruled from Vienna, and Russia to Berlin in the Three Emperors’ League of 1873, a pact to consult and keep the peace. Its weakness lay in the Balkans, the peninsula of south-east Europe, where the two empires competed for the lands of the retreating Ottoman Empire, the Turkish state ruled from Constantinople. When Russia’s victory over the Ottomans in 1878 promised a huge client Bulgaria, the great powers cut it back at the Congress of Berlin, a conference that redrew the Balkan map, and Russia blamed Germany. Bismarck answered with the Dual Alliance of 1879, a secret promise to defend Austria-Hungary against Russia, which Italy joined in 1882 to form the Triple Alliance. The rivalry he meant to manage had become a German commitment.
The web held only while Bismarck kept repairing it, and in 1887 a crisis over Bulgaria broke the Three Emperors’ Alliance, the League revived in 1881, for good. Bismarck replaced it with the Reinsurance Treaty, a secret pledge that each would stay neutral if the other went to war, unless Germany attacked France or Russia attacked Austria-Hungary. After Bismarck’s dismissal in March 1890, advisers of the new Kaiser, or emperor, Wilhelm II judged it too devious and let it lapse. Russia, already borrowing in Paris, turned to France. A French squadron’s visit to Kronstadt in 1891 began the courtship, and a military convention ratified in 1894 bound each partner to attack Germany if Germany attacked the other. On the map France and the Russian Empire turn blue together, and within four years of his fall the alliance he had spent twenty years preventing existed.
Britain had kept out of continental alliances, a policy its politicians called “splendid isolation”, until German policy after 1897 pushed it toward Germany’s rivals. Wilhelm II pursued Weltpolitik, a “world policy” of colonies, prestige and sea power, much as a rising state today demands a seat at every top table. Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz’s Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900 committed Germany to a battle fleet in the North Sea, which Britain, an island fed by imported food, could only read as a threat. Britain therefore signed the Entente Cordiale, or “cordial understanding”, with France in 1904, a colonial settlement with no promise to fight that traded Egypt to Britain and Morocco to France. The Kaiser’s landing at Tangier in 1905, meant to break the entente, only tightened it when the powers sided with France at the Algeciras conference in 1906. Russia then divided Persia, today’s Iran, with Britain in 1907, completing the Triple Entente, and the power that felt most surrounded had done more than any other to surround itself.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Masterpiece or juggling act?
Historians have judged Bismarck’s alliance system in two opposite ways, and the disagreement turns on whether a system deserves to be called a success if only its creator could run it. For A. J. P. Taylor and, later, Henry Kissinger, it was a masterpiece of restraint, in which the strongest state in Europe used its alliances to hold its partners back, refused to support Austria-Hungary in Balkan adventures, and kept the great powers at peace for two decades. Bismarck described the aim himself in his Bad Kissingen memorandum of 1877: a situation in which every power except France needed Germany and was kept from combining against it by its quarrels with the others. Critics such as Otto Pflanze and Jonathan Steinberg stress the strain instead. The treaties contradicted one another, as the Reinsurance Treaty and the Dual Alliance did, and their secrecy meant that no partner knew how much Germany had promised the others. Bismarck himself weakened the Russian link in November 1887 by barring Russian bonds from use as security at the German central bank, which sent Russia to borrow in Paris. A fair verdict holds both truths, since the system bought time while building dependencies it could not sustain.
Encirclement or self-encirclement?
German leaders after 1904 complained of Einkreisung, a deliberate encirclement of their country by jealous rivals, and the word still shapes how many people picture the road to war. Most historians now see the blocs as the sum of separate decisions, several of them German, each of which made sense on its own terms. George Kennan’s study of the Franco-Russian alliance shows how much it owed to Russia’s need for French capital and to Germany’s decision of 1890. Paul Kennedy traces Britain’s turn against Germany to the fleet laws, the Kaiser’s telegram of 1896 congratulating the Boers on defeating a British raid, and German pressure on France over Morocco. The ententes began as colonial bargains, and in 1904 neither London nor Paris intended an anti-German alliance. It was the Kaiser’s landing at Tangier that gave the Entente Cordiale a military meaning, when British and French staff officers began secret talks in 1906. Christopher Clark calls the result a bipolarization of Europe and treats it as a necessary condition of the war without being its cause, because the blocs remained loose enough that Britain, Italy and Romania all kept their options open into the summer of 1914.
The logic of the naval race
The Anglo-German naval race is the clearest example in these years of a security dilemma, in which one state’s attempt to make itself safer makes its rival feel less safe and provokes the very response it hoped to deter. Admiral Tirpitz’s “risk theory” held that Germany needed a fleet large enough that fighting it would cost the Royal Navy so dearly that Britain would fall behind other naval powers, and would therefore treat Germany with respect. Britain held to its two-power standard, in force since 1889, of matching the next two navies combined, and in 1906 answered with HMS Dreadnought, a battleship so superior that every older battleship became second-rate and the race restarted from almost level terms. Volker Berghahn argued that Tirpitz also meant the fleet to rally the German middle classes behind the monarchy, which made it politically impossible to bargain away. When Britain’s war minister, Lord Haldane, came to Berlin in 1912 to seek a naval agreement, Germany asked for a British promise of neutrality in return, and the talks failed. Britain then announced that it would lay down two new battleships for every extra German one, and by 1913 Germany had shifted its spending back to the army. The fleet bought Germany no security and cost it a possible friend.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
A new giant in the middle of Europe. Unification turned a loose group of German states into an empire with the largest population west of Russia and the fastest-growing industry on the continent. Its population rose from about 41 million in 1871 to about 65 million by 1910, while France’s stalled near 39 million, and by 1913 Germany produced more than twice as much steel as Britain. Every other power had to decide how to live beside such a neighbour, and that question, more than any single treaty, set the problem the alliance system tried to solve.
Alsace-Lorraine and the French grievance. The peace that completed German unity also guaranteed French hostility. The Treaty of Frankfurt took Alsace and most of Lorraine, with about 1.5 million people, and imposed an indemnity of five billion francs, much as a court today orders a losing party to pay damages. France paid the money within three years, but the lost provinces stayed a permanent wound in French politics, so Bismarck’s diplomacy spent twenty years containing a grievance that his own victory had created.
The Eastern Question. The slow retreat of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish-ruled state that had governed the Balkans for centuries, left a vacuum that Austria-Hungary and Russia both wanted to fill. Russia saw itself as the protector of the Orthodox Slavs and wanted free passage for its warships through the Straits, while Austria-Hungary feared that strong Slav states on its border would unsettle the Slavs inside its own empire. Diplomats called the problem of who would inherit the Ottoman lands the Eastern Question, and because both rivals were Germany’s partners, every Balkan crisis forced Berlin to choose between them.
The Kaiser’s new course. The new Kaiser’s determination to rule in person ended Bismarck’s system within two years. Wilhelm II, emperor from 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, forced Bismarck to resign in March 1890. His new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and the foreign office adviser Friedrich von Holstein wanted a simpler, more transparent policy, and they judged the Reinsurance Treaty incompatible with the alliance with Austria-Hungary. Their search for clarity cut the hidden link that had kept Russia from looking to Paris, so German policy became easier to read at exactly the moment it became more dangerous.
THE TURNING POINT
Kronstadt, July 1891. The hinge of this chapter is the moment Russia turned to France, and the French squadron’s visit to Kronstadt in July 1891 made that turn visible to the world. Only thirteen months after Germany let the Reinsurance Treaty lapse, Tsar Alexander III, the most autocratic ruler in Europe, stood bareheaded while a naval band played the Marseillaise, a revolutionary anthem banned in his own empire. A military agreement followed within a year. The scene mattered because it showed strategy overriding ideology: once Germany had let Russia go, an absolute monarchy and a republic discovered that a shared enemy mattered more than everything that divided them.
What it changed
A war plan built on two fronts. Once France and Russia were allied, German planners assumed that any war would be fought in the west and the east at once. Alfred von Schlieffen’s answer, set out by 1905 and put into action in August 1914 (Chapter 4), was to defeat France first with a sweep through Belgium and then turn east before Russia’s slow mobilisation was complete. A violation of Belgian neutrality was therefore built into German strategy years before the crisis that would trigger it.
Britain bound by conversations. The secret Anglo-French staff talks that began in 1906, and the naval arrangements that followed, created an expectation the British cabinet could not easily disown, even though the ententes contained no promise to fight. In August 1914 (Chapter 3) Britain went to war over Belgium, yet its army’s plans to fight beside the French made intervention far easier to imagine. Informal commitments can bind as tightly as treaties once soldiers have planned around them.
A naval race that Germany lost. The fleet that Tirpitz built to win British respect made Britain treat Germany as its most likely enemy, and by 1912 the Royal Navy had concentrated its battleships in the North Sea. When war came (Chapter 8), the German High Seas Fleet was too small to win and too valuable to risk, and it spent most of the war in harbour while a British blockade strangled German trade. The race left Germany with an expensive fleet and no way to use it.
Every crisis becomes a test of loyalty. Because each bloc now feared that a diplomatic defeat would break its alliance apart, every colonial or Balkan quarrel after 1905 became a test of whether partners would stand together. Germany tried to split the Entente at Tangier and failed, and both sides concluded that they must back their partners more firmly next time. That conclusion, traced in Chapter 2, turned three crises in six years into rehearsals for war.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did Bismarck’s alliance system keep the peace, or did it build the trap that closed in 1914?
The case for the system is that it worked while Bismarck ran it, since no war between great powers broke out between 1871 and 1890 and Germany used its alliances to restrain its partners as much as to protect itself. The case against it is that this peace rested on secret and contradictory promises, such as the Reinsurance Treaty and the Dual Alliance, that only Bismarck could balance, and that the Dual Alliance of 1879 tied Germany permanently to Austria-Hungary’s Balkan fears. Historians who emphasise structure, such as Christopher Clark, note that the bloc system of 1914 grew from the abandonment of Bismarck’s methods after 1890, when his successors let Russia go and then alarmed Britain. Others, following Fritz Fischer, stress the continuity of German ambition from the 1890s to 1914. A balanced judgement is that the system postponed the consequences of German unification without resolving them. The lesson travels well beyond 1914, because a security order that depends on one person’s skill is fragile, whereas one built into institutions can outlast its inventor.
An interesting fact
HMS Dreadnought, the ship that gave its name to a whole arms race, never fought another battleship. It was in dock for a refit when the British and German fleets met at Jutland in 1916, and its only success in combat came in March 1915, when it rammed and sank the German submarine U-29 in the North Sea. That made it the only battleship confirmed to have sunk a submarine, and U-29’s commander, Otto Weddigen, was already famous for sinking three British cruisers in a single morning in September 1914. The weapon that defined the pre-war race was obsolete within a decade and was sold for scrap in 1921.
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