The Turn of the Twentieth Century.
It is a common, yet dimwitted mistake to think that the world before the Eurasian War was divided between two armed camps, the members of each awaiting the signal for an all-out melee; it is erroneous to say that the two alliance systems of the day had put each other in deadlock, unable to back away from their alliances and stated obligations. To the very end, diplomacy remained volatile, even chaotic; to the very end, the Great Powers in each alliance system viewed their alliances not as obligations, but as mechanisms of serving their own interests. All alliances, no matter how often they were explained by dynastic ties or ideological affinities, were chiefly ones of convenience. As such, they were changed as was convenient for the interested powers.
The fact that the alliance system remained flexible to the end is easily demonstrated by the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the two main European alliances were not the ones that would end up fighting the Eurasian War. France and Russia were tied together by their Dual Alliance of 1894, while Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany constituted the Triple Alliance and the United Kingdom remained in “splendid isolation” or “arrogant neutrality”, depending on who was talking about it. By 1915, the alliances as the world knew them would not survive, indeed would be dramatically changed, by a myriad of wars and lesser crises, and by treaties both official and secret.
In 1900, the world geopolitical situation was nothing if not in flux. Several up-and-coming powers had begun to spread their influence, both violently and “peacefully”, forming new empires, while even the older dominant powers expanded their holdings dramatically. The German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow had, in a memorable speech before the Reichstag, claimed a “place in the sun” for Germany, and German colonies soon sprouted in Africa and Asia. America’s “Manifest Destiny” became a similar slogan, symbolizing expansion across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and then, after a war with Spain in 1898, across that ocean to the Philippines. Japan, too, had come onto the scene following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, and now effectively controlled a foothold on the Asiatic mainland in Korea. But the older powers – the British, French, and Russians – had expanded too; never before had they ruled empires as large as the ones they then controlled. So far, the Germans and the others had their “place in the sun” without pushing the older powers out of their own: the Great Powers carved up fresh new territories in China and Africa to incorporate into their empires, both officially and unofficially. Could that state of affairs continue? Most politicians were increasingly pessimistic.
It must be said that, though some prophesized an apocalyptic war once the Great Powers “ran out of room to expand”, as it were, the men who controlled those Powers remained unwilling to solve their disputes by force of arms – at least, the disputes with other European powers. (Unlettered savages in Asia and Africa were, of course, fair game.) Between the various alliance groups, there were still strong ties. In 1897, the Russians and Austrians had put the Balkans “on ice”, promising to consult each other on disputes and crises and, remarkably, the solution had worked, to the bemusement of those convinced there could be naught but eternal war between Teuton and Slav.[1] Germany, too, had joined with their supposedly implacable French and Russian enemies to “restrain” the Japanese from demanding too much from China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War.
The story of the early twentieth century is one in which the willingness of European statesmen to keep the peace eroded, slowly but surely. If the battle lines were not drawn in 1900, by 1914 they surely were; it is therefore also a tale of the widening and solidification of the alliance blocs that dominated the Eurasian continent. Frequently, the tale is told as teleology, with the ultimate outcome of the Eurasian War already written before the British even ended their splendid isolation; some trace it to the “militarism” of Japanese/German/French/Russian culture, or to specific statesmen, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Edward Grey, or Tsar Nikolai II, whose characters made their actions supposedly inevitable. But in reality, none could have foreseen the way things played out; at several key moments, things might have gone the other way, and chance – or human agency – proved the deciding factor.[2]
Since the early 1890s, it had been clear that the British would have to end their splendid isolation one way or another; indeed, some Continental statesmen remarked, the whole thing had been illusory anyway. The UK was thus the greatest of the prizes up for grabs by the alliance blocs. With the ascent of Arthur Balfour to the head of the ruling Conservative Party in 1902, the British finally made their first tentative steps towards a foreign connection[3], ever-conscious of the need to save on the costs of defending their vast empire by having proxies do it for them: they allied with the Japanese, seeing the Japanese as the greatest threat to British possessions in the Far East and thus electing to co-opt them. This sent mixed signals: on the one hand, it boded well for a French alliance, because it was France who most threatened British colonies around the world. On the other hand, it boded ill for a French alliance, because Japan and Russia – France’s closest ally – were already at loggerheads over China.
Russia’s Asiatic orientation had been a constant element in foreign policy since the 1880s, if not earlier. While broadsheets in St. Petersburg trumpeted about Russia’s essential “Asiatic nature” and about the “Mongol tutelage” that set Russia apart from Europe and fixed her future in the East[4], Russian statesmen expanded Russia’s holdings in Central Asia and Trans-Amur, tying all of it together with the great Trans-Siberian Railway project. Russia had a clear sphere of influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang – a relic of the Boxer Rebellion, when the Russians had occupied Manchuria to restore order (and never left) – and Russian intervention in 1895 had won her the prized naval base of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula, from which Russian naval power was projected into the eastern seas. But Port Arthur had had to be wrested from the Japanese at the end of the Sino-Japanese War with French and German help; Japan’s expansionism in Korea posed a threat to Russia’s Manchurian sphere, and Japanese fleets considered those very eastern seas that the Russians cruised to be Japan’s backyard.
A clash between the two might not have been inevitable, but it was surely very likely. By 1903, it was clear that the Russians would not be leaving Manchuria any time soon, so the Japanese and Russians attempted to formalize their spheres of influence by mutual agreement. Most of their problems were actually not as serious as they appeared at first blush. The Japanese could even paper over the issue of Port Arthur, at least for a while. But as the year dragged on, one particular sticking point emerged: northern Korea. Russia refused to accept any Japanese influence north of the thirty-ninth parallel; the Japanese thought this was absurd. Eventually (on 6 February 1904), the negotiations broke down completely, and the Japanese severed diplomatic relations; two days later, they sent a declaration of war.
Several hours before that, though, the Imperial Japanese Navy had launched a surprise torpedo-boat attack on the Russian flotilla at Port Arthur. The attack was poorly managed and the Japanese scored few hits (the few that they did score were lucky, though), but the attack provided cover for the Japanese to land troops in Korea, from where they took over the peninsula and stormed towards the Yalu. Russia’s Manchurian forces had not concentrated in time; the Eastern Detachment that was to bar the way out of Korea was outnumbered by the Japanese attackers, and after a costly assault (proving, many decided, the power of fortifications and modern firepower) the Russians were driven back. Much has been made of the ostensibly patronizing way that Westerners had viewed the Imperial Japanese Army before the opening battles of the Manchurian War; this was not true of many of Europe’s top military officers, but of the press, which viewed the Yalu battles with something akin to shock.
The Japanese commander, Marshal Ōyama Iwao, had stormed the Chinese defenses on the Liaodong Peninsula in 1894; his plan in 1904 was to do the same, matching military policy to diplomatic policy, for Port Arthur was Japan’s primary goal. The problem was that, unlike the Chinese, Russia was massing a large army to the north. If Port Arthur were to be stormed, thus clearing the sea-lanes of possible Russian interference, then the Japanese army would need to be split, with most of the troops acting as a rear guard for the besiegers at Port Arthur. This was an incredibly dangerous task – splitting the army invited defeat in detail – making it a priority to capture Port Arthur before the Russians could ship enough troops down the Trans-Siberian Railway to launch their own offensive.
Despite the riskiness of the plan, the Japanese did have several things going for them. For one, the Russian Asiatic fleet was immobilized in Port Arthur, with several of its most powerful warships disabled by mines and its well-respected commander, Admiral Stepan Makarov, killed in action. For another, the Russian commander, Aleksei Kuropatkin, who had been Minister of War before the war’s outbreak, was loathe to try conclusions against the Japanese until he had more troops in hand, thus giving the Japanese extra breathing space in which to conquer Port Arthur. And the besieging Third Army, commanded by Nogi Maresuke, caught several breaks of its own. The Russian commander of the Port Arthur garrison, Anatoly Stessel[5], incompetently managed the defense of the port; though the Japanese bled for every inch, they managed to seize the commanding 203 Meter Hill overlooking the harbor, and from there shelled the Russian Asiatic fleet into oblivion. Stessel surrendered the day after the New Year, 1905, yielding the invaluable naval base as well as copious stores of food, water, and ammunition that had inconceivably never been doled out to the starving defenders.
Nogi’s troops moved as quickly as they could to return to the rest of the Japanese army, which had been doing an admirable job of shielding the besiegers from the Russians, and which had even launched attacks of its own. The last Russian offensive of 1904, which had ended at the bloody and inconclusive Battle of Shaho, had seemingly set an end to operations for months to come, and so Ōyama believed he and his men had breathing space, time in which to wait for Nogi, whereupon the Japanese would be able to renew their offensive and crush the Russians once and for all. Once Port Arthur fell, it seemed as though that was that: the Japanese were home free. But Kuropatkin was rightly worried about the Japanese concentration, and he still had some time left; despite the poor weather, he ordered his troops to prepare for a general offensive against the Japanese left wing before Nogi’s troops could link up with the rest of the army, and had a detachment of cavalry launch a deep raid on the Japanese rear areas in preparation for the attack. On 18 and 19 January the troops went forward; although the cautious Kuropatkin had initially limited Oskar Grippenberg, the commander of his Second Manchurian Army, to a one-corps offensive near Sandepu, the excitable and somewhat inexperienced Grippenberg was surprised by the limited resistance his troops met and, without orders, threw in the rest of his troops. The Japanese had failed to prepare fortifications, believing that the winter weather would suffice to protect them from the Russians, and so they fell back in disarray. Kuropatkin, seeing the result of Grippenberg’s attack, followed it up by reinforcing Grippenberg’s troops and ordering holding attacks against the Japanese center, hoping to envelop part of the Japanese army. The weather prevented effective coordination, and the Russians’ inadequate maps did the rest, keeping Kuropatkin from bagging most of the Japanese army, but the Japanese casualty count was astronomical and Ōyama was forced to pull his troops back as his army disintegrated. The Russians then reoriented their army and engaged Nogi’s outnumbered troops, moving north from Port Arthur; these too were defeated, and forced to pull back into the very fortifications they had just captured.[6]
The Battle of Sandepu vindicated Kuropatkin’s defensive-offensive strategy and saw the decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was forced to fall back over the Yalu and retreat into Port Arthur. While the Japanese retained naval supremacy – especially after the Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated off Tsushima by the Japanese under Tōgō Heihachirō after an odyssey around half the world[7] – their land forces were collapsing, unrest in Korea was growing, and the Japanese economy was in the toilet. To be sure, the Russians had problems of their own, and, despite the victory at Sandepu, riots had broken out in several of their cities in Europe. But the Russians had clearly won this round, and so when the good offices of the American President Theodore Roosevelt were offered to solve the dispute, both parties gratefully accepted.
What became the Treaty of Portsmouth was still months of tense negotiations in the making. The Russians, fired by the victory of Sandepu, demanded to annex Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, southern Sakhalin, and the Kurils, along with a sizable indemnity from the Japanese; ultimately, though, pressure from the British and Americans convinced them to moderate their goals. Manchuria – namely, the Three Provinces[8], not including Zhili for obvious reasons – was formally annexed by the Russians, with a small squeak of protest from the imperial government in Beijing. The Japanese lost all claims to suzerainty over Korea, which entered a period of independence it had never before known, no longer having tributary obligations to either China or Japan. The British, on the side, attempted to hammer out their differences with the Russians by agreeing to divide western China, as well: Tibet to be a British sphere, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia to be Russian. Since, as far as the Russians were concerned, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia were in the Russians’ sphere anyway, they demanded instead to have further rights in northern Afghanistan and Iran – rights the British were unprepared to concede, thus adding to the already-long list of Anglo-Russian grievances. Eventually, the Russians were permitted to formally annex Outer Mongolia as well in exchange for the British sphere over Tibet, something that prompted howls of anger from Beijing that everybody promptly ignored.
The immediate aftermath of the war was an even more open rift between the British and the Russians. Russia’s Baltic Fleet had already nearly caused a shooting war with the British in the Dogger Bank incident while sailing east. Balfour’s Conservatives were then faced with an outcry in Parliament over the failure to support the Japanese alliance, over the cavalier sale of northern China for Tibet – a Tibet that could not even honor the agreements to which the Dalai Lama had been forced to acquiesce in 1904 during Britain’s Younghusband Expedition, and over which the British still had to argue with China itself. It was over these issues, along with Joseph Chamberlain’s legacy of “empire free trade” (a polite euphemism for tariff reform, Imperial Preference, and all the rest), that the Conservative government collapsed in the winter of 1905-6, yielding a Liberal government that was more willing to tie itself to the French in the name of peace and retrenchment.
For the French, too, were estranged from the Russians. The tsar’s forces had been brutal in quelling the riots that had broken out during the war, which brought the complete lack of ideological similarity between the two starkly into the open. France, for its part, was widely disliked in Russian councils for failing to step up at Portsmouth and support its ally, even when Russia and the hated British were at the brink of a shooting war. Furthermore, the French had, during the height of the Manchurian War[9], come to a colonial agreement with the British, the so-called entente cordiale; while a long way from an alliance, the “understanding” that it promoted helped bring the British closer in line with the French, at least on matters outside Europe. The new Liberal Foreign Minister, Edward Grey, also helped align the British more closely with the French, as his affinity for them was well-known.
Into the fray strode the always-controversial German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Wilhelm’s taste for personal diplomacy, his bombastic, flamboyant nature, and his constant attention to PR (or at least, PR in Germany; he was not given to doing things that played well in other countries[10]) are all quite well known. He was perhaps the first ‘media monarch’ in both the good sense – of constant attention to his appearance – and the bad – as he was frequently embroiled in scandals, like the Eulenburg affair. He was difficult for his advisors to control, but in turn only intermittently tried to control or at least coordinate them. He had learned of the increasing Franco-Russian estrangement and saw it as an opportunity; without informing Bülow (still the chancellor), he secretly met with the tsar during a yachting trip to Finland. Wilhelm and Nikolai had always had a fairly strong rapport, which made the treaty of friendship and mutual defense that they signed almost unsurprising in the wake of the tsar’s fury with his French “allies”. What was actually surprising is that the tsar’s cabinet, upon learning of this Treaty of Björkö, did not even try to convince the tsar to disavow it. Even those who had most loudly supported the French alliance – such as the new Foreign Minister, Aleksandr Izvolsky[11] – were disheartened by France’s lack of support. Insofar as there was a cabinet consensus, the tsar’s ministers wished to pursue the profitable course of abandoning European disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary in favor of expansion in Asia. The Franco-Russian Dual Alliance was not abrogated yet, but as soon as the Björkö treaty was made public, the world knew it was a dead letter, and would not be renewed.
The Kaiser’s visit to Finland had been another in a string of major media events for him that year. The first had been dramatic enough. A crisis had been brewing over Morocco – one of the last independent states in Africa – for some time. The French considered the place to be their backyard, and had been involved in Moroccan politics since the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s; over the years immediately leading up to the crisis of 1905-6, the French had carefully made agreements with the British, Spanish, and Italians to clear the way to the assumption of a French protectorate. Indeed, that had been one of the purposes of the Anglo-French entente cordiale. Morocco’s imminent financial collapse was to be the final stepping stone, just as Egypt’s bankruptcy had permitted the British to gain a lodgment there in 1882.
But at the same time, Morocco was an object of German interest, as well. It dated back further than the influx of German investments, which at any rate were not that substantial (since German capital was never as available overseas as was French capital). In 1880, the French had agreed with the Germans not to extend their exclusive control over Morocco, and were preparing to violate that agreement unilaterally – or, rather, violate it multilaterally, with the support of Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom.[12] Partly, then, to safeguard German interests and remind the French of their own treaty obligations – for if the French were allowed to simply violate the agreement at will, German prestige was sure to suffer – and partly to score a PR victory of his own, Wilhelm made a landing at Tangiers to the adoration[13] of the local crowd in March 1905.
The French were first shocked, then livid; war was threatened, on both sides, with the French bleating about the Germans attempting to gain a back door into France via the Mediterranean (ludicrous) and the Germans complaining of French designs on other territories agreed to be neutral in China and even the Americas (preposterous). Germany had good diplomatic cards, but ultimately no ability to project power into the area, whereas the French had done their homework and secured the agreement of every other power in the Western Mediterranean. While the Kaiser negotiated his treaty in Finland with the tsar, the French Foreign Minister Delcassé confirmed his own agreements. In the 1906 conference at Algeciras that resulted when Bülow called for American mediation, the Germans, Russians, and Austrians were outnumbered by the Americans, Spanish, Italians, French, and British, and so the Franco-Spanish joint spheres of influence went ahead – although the Germans did manage to get the French to give up part of their equatorial African colonies to add to German Kamerun in exchange.
For the example of Morocco was worrisome to the Russians as well, outside of being an example of the French conspiring with perfidious Albion. Few enough countries were independent from European (or American, or Japanese) control by 1906; many of those that were, were in areas deemed vital to Russian interests. What if the British and French decided to pull the same stunt they had done in Morocco elsewhere – say, in Iran, or the Ottoman Empire? If there had been a hope of rescuing the Russo-French alliance – and some in the Russian government thought there was – it was dead after the Algeciras conference. France’s short-term gains had resulted in a very grievous long-term loss: that of Russia as a partner in alliance.
In the short term, what resulted from the crisis was a solidification of the developing alliances. Following up on the Björkö treaty, the Russians, Germans, and Austrians revived the Three Emperors’ League in a summit at Kreuzburg in the summer of 1906. While, formally, the league charter involved no commitments on the side of any party (it was, essentially, a glorified nonaggression pact), the side meetings and protocols defined unified league policy with regard to the rest of the world. Austria-Hungary and Russia revised their 1897 agreement, changing their Balkan policies from “agree to disagree” to mutual support – tentative, especially as the Russians were leery of abandoning Serbia, but still quite real. And the Germans and the Russians had long discussions about China…
At the same time – or close to it – the British and French made their own agreements. Secretly, Grey met with Delcassé in the fall of 1906 and confirmed that the British would join the war on France’s side if France and Germany ever went to war, and both men provisionally divided up Germany’s African colonies. Grey also promised to add diplomatic weight towards convincing the Italians to abandon the Triple Alliance. Though Grey’s actions were never sanctioned by Parliament, and indeed in 1906 would have been rejected by the Liberal backbenchers, he had Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman’s support, and after Campbell-Bannerman died suddenly in 1907[14] , the new PM, H. H. Asquith[15], confirmed his predecessor’s decision. In a separate – and non-secret – meeting, the French acceded to the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, forming a formidable triplice in the Far East.
Even by late 1906, with the cores of the alliances firmly in place, war was still far from inevitable. Instead of a volatile affair where no alliances lasted longer than a few years and war scares popped up every few months, where every power was out for itself, the optimists believed that the new alliances made it possible for Germany and Britain to regulate the conduct of their allies, to prevent things from going too far. And for ten years, they were right. Only when it became clear to one of the two sides that peaceful solutions screwed them over, regardless of whether policy was aggressive or conciliatory, did that side opt for open war.
If the story of 1904-6 was of the end of the old diplomacy in Europe, the story of 1906-15 is that of the end of European diplomats’ belief in peace, and their failure to maintain it. For peace is not a default state of affairs any more than war is: just as a conscious effort must be made to keep a country in the fight, so must one be made to keep a country out of one.
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[1] = Yeesh. I vastly prefer footnotes to endnotes, but they're one and the same on forums. Anyway, I included that as a conscious shout-out to the apparently prevalent notion that Austria and Russia are natural enemies and can only ever have contradictory Balkan policies.
[2] = Can you tell that I'm also using this TL as a platform for discussing my ideas about diplomatic history? Sorry about the inclusion of some of this stuff; I wrote it for a different audience.
[3] = Yes, the first; the abortive Anglo-German alliance feelers of the early 1890s don't count, because they never would have led anywhere. Britain's terms were ridiculously unrealistic.
[4] = Something they seem to have trouble remembering these days. Clearly, arguments about whether Russia is "European" or "Asiatic" are pointless. It's whatever they feel like emphasizing at the time.
[5] = Most of the time, I have seen this name as "Stoessel", but apparently that's not congruent with the transliteration scheme I have worked up here and besides it doesn't look as cool. Disclaimer: my transliterations are bound to be inconsistent anyway.
[6] = This is the PoD, by the way.
[7] = Parallelism will be, to a degree, rampant in this TL, but I think it's mostly okay since the altered events occur from 1905 to 1931. Besides, part of the original point of the TL was to make points about historical events in OTL anyway.
[8] = Plus a section of Inner Mongolia to make the borders pretty.
[9] = A much cooler name than "Russo-Japanese War".
[10] = Tidbit: for a long time, Wilhelm was insanely popular in the Middle East. But since they are brown people, that never gets mentioned.
[11] = I wasn't sure what to do with Izvolsky here, since he was a Francophile but absolutely was cool with negotiating with Germans and Austrians, so long as they weren't Jewish Germans or Austrians. Without a Bosnian Crisis to make him more embittered, I figure he'll be serviceable.
[12] = I swear this isn't a Kaiserreich wank; I myself am not a huge fan of it, and am well aware of the serious flaws in its milieu and its military, and of course Wilhelm himself, who was a colossal tool. But the reasons for intervening in Morocco were pretty legit, and if you mention them, you seem like an unabashed German partisan. That said, I have to issue a disclaimer: I am going to make fun of the Entente powers a lot.
[13] = Some reports say the Moroccans loved him; some said that they didn't give a shit. I went with what sounded better.
[14] = Gratuitous butterflies? Yeah. Short-term effect with the greatest importance is that the Boers don't get their Union of South Africa (yet). It'll come up later.
[15] = Gotta say that I've never seen anybody call him anything but "H. H." To be fair, "Herbert Henry" is pretty uninspiring too.
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Let's see how this works. This is a TL I wrote on another forum over the last two months, and I figured it'd be good to get some feedback from here, too. It will go up to the end of 1931 in preparation for a forum game I plan to GM with this setting. The original idea for this TL, by the way, is not mine, but that of another forum member there (here is his AH.com account), who wrote a treatment several years ago that, while genuinely inspired, was also seriously flawed. With his approval and connivance, I rewrote it extensively enough that I think it can reasonably be described as "my" TL, but with immense amounts of inspiration from him.
The thread title is part of a Friedrich Meinecke quote from October 1918, in which he was complaining about the First World War and the German leaders who helped cause it.
Also, I guess this is in the wrong subforum. Shoot me now.
Comments and questions would be appreciated - nay, demanded!
It is a common, yet dimwitted mistake to think that the world before the Eurasian War was divided between two armed camps, the members of each awaiting the signal for an all-out melee; it is erroneous to say that the two alliance systems of the day had put each other in deadlock, unable to back away from their alliances and stated obligations. To the very end, diplomacy remained volatile, even chaotic; to the very end, the Great Powers in each alliance system viewed their alliances not as obligations, but as mechanisms of serving their own interests. All alliances, no matter how often they were explained by dynastic ties or ideological affinities, were chiefly ones of convenience. As such, they were changed as was convenient for the interested powers.
The fact that the alliance system remained flexible to the end is easily demonstrated by the fact that, at the turn of the twentieth century, the two main European alliances were not the ones that would end up fighting the Eurasian War. France and Russia were tied together by their Dual Alliance of 1894, while Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany constituted the Triple Alliance and the United Kingdom remained in “splendid isolation” or “arrogant neutrality”, depending on who was talking about it. By 1915, the alliances as the world knew them would not survive, indeed would be dramatically changed, by a myriad of wars and lesser crises, and by treaties both official and secret.
In 1900, the world geopolitical situation was nothing if not in flux. Several up-and-coming powers had begun to spread their influence, both violently and “peacefully”, forming new empires, while even the older dominant powers expanded their holdings dramatically. The German chancellor Bernhard von Bülow had, in a memorable speech before the Reichstag, claimed a “place in the sun” for Germany, and German colonies soon sprouted in Africa and Asia. America’s “Manifest Destiny” became a similar slogan, symbolizing expansion across the American continent to the Pacific Ocean and then, after a war with Spain in 1898, across that ocean to the Philippines. Japan, too, had come onto the scene following the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-5, and now effectively controlled a foothold on the Asiatic mainland in Korea. But the older powers – the British, French, and Russians – had expanded too; never before had they ruled empires as large as the ones they then controlled. So far, the Germans and the others had their “place in the sun” without pushing the older powers out of their own: the Great Powers carved up fresh new territories in China and Africa to incorporate into their empires, both officially and unofficially. Could that state of affairs continue? Most politicians were increasingly pessimistic.
It must be said that, though some prophesized an apocalyptic war once the Great Powers “ran out of room to expand”, as it were, the men who controlled those Powers remained unwilling to solve their disputes by force of arms – at least, the disputes with other European powers. (Unlettered savages in Asia and Africa were, of course, fair game.) Between the various alliance groups, there were still strong ties. In 1897, the Russians and Austrians had put the Balkans “on ice”, promising to consult each other on disputes and crises and, remarkably, the solution had worked, to the bemusement of those convinced there could be naught but eternal war between Teuton and Slav.[1] Germany, too, had joined with their supposedly implacable French and Russian enemies to “restrain” the Japanese from demanding too much from China at the end of the Sino-Japanese War.
The story of the early twentieth century is one in which the willingness of European statesmen to keep the peace eroded, slowly but surely. If the battle lines were not drawn in 1900, by 1914 they surely were; it is therefore also a tale of the widening and solidification of the alliance blocs that dominated the Eurasian continent. Frequently, the tale is told as teleology, with the ultimate outcome of the Eurasian War already written before the British even ended their splendid isolation; some trace it to the “militarism” of Japanese/German/French/Russian culture, or to specific statesmen, like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Edward Grey, or Tsar Nikolai II, whose characters made their actions supposedly inevitable. But in reality, none could have foreseen the way things played out; at several key moments, things might have gone the other way, and chance – or human agency – proved the deciding factor.[2]
Since the early 1890s, it had been clear that the British would have to end their splendid isolation one way or another; indeed, some Continental statesmen remarked, the whole thing had been illusory anyway. The UK was thus the greatest of the prizes up for grabs by the alliance blocs. With the ascent of Arthur Balfour to the head of the ruling Conservative Party in 1902, the British finally made their first tentative steps towards a foreign connection[3], ever-conscious of the need to save on the costs of defending their vast empire by having proxies do it for them: they allied with the Japanese, seeing the Japanese as the greatest threat to British possessions in the Far East and thus electing to co-opt them. This sent mixed signals: on the one hand, it boded well for a French alliance, because it was France who most threatened British colonies around the world. On the other hand, it boded ill for a French alliance, because Japan and Russia – France’s closest ally – were already at loggerheads over China.
Russia’s Asiatic orientation had been a constant element in foreign policy since the 1880s, if not earlier. While broadsheets in St. Petersburg trumpeted about Russia’s essential “Asiatic nature” and about the “Mongol tutelage” that set Russia apart from Europe and fixed her future in the East[4], Russian statesmen expanded Russia’s holdings in Central Asia and Trans-Amur, tying all of it together with the great Trans-Siberian Railway project. Russia had a clear sphere of influence in Manchuria, Mongolia, and Xinjiang – a relic of the Boxer Rebellion, when the Russians had occupied Manchuria to restore order (and never left) – and Russian intervention in 1895 had won her the prized naval base of Port Arthur on the Liaodong Peninsula, from which Russian naval power was projected into the eastern seas. But Port Arthur had had to be wrested from the Japanese at the end of the Sino-Japanese War with French and German help; Japan’s expansionism in Korea posed a threat to Russia’s Manchurian sphere, and Japanese fleets considered those very eastern seas that the Russians cruised to be Japan’s backyard.
A clash between the two might not have been inevitable, but it was surely very likely. By 1903, it was clear that the Russians would not be leaving Manchuria any time soon, so the Japanese and Russians attempted to formalize their spheres of influence by mutual agreement. Most of their problems were actually not as serious as they appeared at first blush. The Japanese could even paper over the issue of Port Arthur, at least for a while. But as the year dragged on, one particular sticking point emerged: northern Korea. Russia refused to accept any Japanese influence north of the thirty-ninth parallel; the Japanese thought this was absurd. Eventually (on 6 February 1904), the negotiations broke down completely, and the Japanese severed diplomatic relations; two days later, they sent a declaration of war.
Several hours before that, though, the Imperial Japanese Navy had launched a surprise torpedo-boat attack on the Russian flotilla at Port Arthur. The attack was poorly managed and the Japanese scored few hits (the few that they did score were lucky, though), but the attack provided cover for the Japanese to land troops in Korea, from where they took over the peninsula and stormed towards the Yalu. Russia’s Manchurian forces had not concentrated in time; the Eastern Detachment that was to bar the way out of Korea was outnumbered by the Japanese attackers, and after a costly assault (proving, many decided, the power of fortifications and modern firepower) the Russians were driven back. Much has been made of the ostensibly patronizing way that Westerners had viewed the Imperial Japanese Army before the opening battles of the Manchurian War; this was not true of many of Europe’s top military officers, but of the press, which viewed the Yalu battles with something akin to shock.
The Japanese commander, Marshal Ōyama Iwao, had stormed the Chinese defenses on the Liaodong Peninsula in 1894; his plan in 1904 was to do the same, matching military policy to diplomatic policy, for Port Arthur was Japan’s primary goal. The problem was that, unlike the Chinese, Russia was massing a large army to the north. If Port Arthur were to be stormed, thus clearing the sea-lanes of possible Russian interference, then the Japanese army would need to be split, with most of the troops acting as a rear guard for the besiegers at Port Arthur. This was an incredibly dangerous task – splitting the army invited defeat in detail – making it a priority to capture Port Arthur before the Russians could ship enough troops down the Trans-Siberian Railway to launch their own offensive.
Despite the riskiness of the plan, the Japanese did have several things going for them. For one, the Russian Asiatic fleet was immobilized in Port Arthur, with several of its most powerful warships disabled by mines and its well-respected commander, Admiral Stepan Makarov, killed in action. For another, the Russian commander, Aleksei Kuropatkin, who had been Minister of War before the war’s outbreak, was loathe to try conclusions against the Japanese until he had more troops in hand, thus giving the Japanese extra breathing space in which to conquer Port Arthur. And the besieging Third Army, commanded by Nogi Maresuke, caught several breaks of its own. The Russian commander of the Port Arthur garrison, Anatoly Stessel[5], incompetently managed the defense of the port; though the Japanese bled for every inch, they managed to seize the commanding 203 Meter Hill overlooking the harbor, and from there shelled the Russian Asiatic fleet into oblivion. Stessel surrendered the day after the New Year, 1905, yielding the invaluable naval base as well as copious stores of food, water, and ammunition that had inconceivably never been doled out to the starving defenders.
Nogi’s troops moved as quickly as they could to return to the rest of the Japanese army, which had been doing an admirable job of shielding the besiegers from the Russians, and which had even launched attacks of its own. The last Russian offensive of 1904, which had ended at the bloody and inconclusive Battle of Shaho, had seemingly set an end to operations for months to come, and so Ōyama believed he and his men had breathing space, time in which to wait for Nogi, whereupon the Japanese would be able to renew their offensive and crush the Russians once and for all. Once Port Arthur fell, it seemed as though that was that: the Japanese were home free. But Kuropatkin was rightly worried about the Japanese concentration, and he still had some time left; despite the poor weather, he ordered his troops to prepare for a general offensive against the Japanese left wing before Nogi’s troops could link up with the rest of the army, and had a detachment of cavalry launch a deep raid on the Japanese rear areas in preparation for the attack. On 18 and 19 January the troops went forward; although the cautious Kuropatkin had initially limited Oskar Grippenberg, the commander of his Second Manchurian Army, to a one-corps offensive near Sandepu, the excitable and somewhat inexperienced Grippenberg was surprised by the limited resistance his troops met and, without orders, threw in the rest of his troops. The Japanese had failed to prepare fortifications, believing that the winter weather would suffice to protect them from the Russians, and so they fell back in disarray. Kuropatkin, seeing the result of Grippenberg’s attack, followed it up by reinforcing Grippenberg’s troops and ordering holding attacks against the Japanese center, hoping to envelop part of the Japanese army. The weather prevented effective coordination, and the Russians’ inadequate maps did the rest, keeping Kuropatkin from bagging most of the Japanese army, but the Japanese casualty count was astronomical and Ōyama was forced to pull his troops back as his army disintegrated. The Russians then reoriented their army and engaged Nogi’s outnumbered troops, moving north from Port Arthur; these too were defeated, and forced to pull back into the very fortifications they had just captured.[6]
The Battle of Sandepu vindicated Kuropatkin’s defensive-offensive strategy and saw the decisive defeat of the Imperial Japanese Army, which was forced to fall back over the Yalu and retreat into Port Arthur. While the Japanese retained naval supremacy – especially after the Russian Baltic Fleet was annihilated off Tsushima by the Japanese under Tōgō Heihachirō after an odyssey around half the world[7] – their land forces were collapsing, unrest in Korea was growing, and the Japanese economy was in the toilet. To be sure, the Russians had problems of their own, and, despite the victory at Sandepu, riots had broken out in several of their cities in Europe. But the Russians had clearly won this round, and so when the good offices of the American President Theodore Roosevelt were offered to solve the dispute, both parties gratefully accepted.
What became the Treaty of Portsmouth was still months of tense negotiations in the making. The Russians, fired by the victory of Sandepu, demanded to annex Manchuria, Korea, Mongolia, southern Sakhalin, and the Kurils, along with a sizable indemnity from the Japanese; ultimately, though, pressure from the British and Americans convinced them to moderate their goals. Manchuria – namely, the Three Provinces[8], not including Zhili for obvious reasons – was formally annexed by the Russians, with a small squeak of protest from the imperial government in Beijing. The Japanese lost all claims to suzerainty over Korea, which entered a period of independence it had never before known, no longer having tributary obligations to either China or Japan. The British, on the side, attempted to hammer out their differences with the Russians by agreeing to divide western China, as well: Tibet to be a British sphere, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia to be Russian. Since, as far as the Russians were concerned, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia were in the Russians’ sphere anyway, they demanded instead to have further rights in northern Afghanistan and Iran – rights the British were unprepared to concede, thus adding to the already-long list of Anglo-Russian grievances. Eventually, the Russians were permitted to formally annex Outer Mongolia as well in exchange for the British sphere over Tibet, something that prompted howls of anger from Beijing that everybody promptly ignored.
The immediate aftermath of the war was an even more open rift between the British and the Russians. Russia’s Baltic Fleet had already nearly caused a shooting war with the British in the Dogger Bank incident while sailing east. Balfour’s Conservatives were then faced with an outcry in Parliament over the failure to support the Japanese alliance, over the cavalier sale of northern China for Tibet – a Tibet that could not even honor the agreements to which the Dalai Lama had been forced to acquiesce in 1904 during Britain’s Younghusband Expedition, and over which the British still had to argue with China itself. It was over these issues, along with Joseph Chamberlain’s legacy of “empire free trade” (a polite euphemism for tariff reform, Imperial Preference, and all the rest), that the Conservative government collapsed in the winter of 1905-6, yielding a Liberal government that was more willing to tie itself to the French in the name of peace and retrenchment.
For the French, too, were estranged from the Russians. The tsar’s forces had been brutal in quelling the riots that had broken out during the war, which brought the complete lack of ideological similarity between the two starkly into the open. France, for its part, was widely disliked in Russian councils for failing to step up at Portsmouth and support its ally, even when Russia and the hated British were at the brink of a shooting war. Furthermore, the French had, during the height of the Manchurian War[9], come to a colonial agreement with the British, the so-called entente cordiale; while a long way from an alliance, the “understanding” that it promoted helped bring the British closer in line with the French, at least on matters outside Europe. The new Liberal Foreign Minister, Edward Grey, also helped align the British more closely with the French, as his affinity for them was well-known.
Into the fray strode the always-controversial German Kaiser, Wilhelm II. Wilhelm’s taste for personal diplomacy, his bombastic, flamboyant nature, and his constant attention to PR (or at least, PR in Germany; he was not given to doing things that played well in other countries[10]) are all quite well known. He was perhaps the first ‘media monarch’ in both the good sense – of constant attention to his appearance – and the bad – as he was frequently embroiled in scandals, like the Eulenburg affair. He was difficult for his advisors to control, but in turn only intermittently tried to control or at least coordinate them. He had learned of the increasing Franco-Russian estrangement and saw it as an opportunity; without informing Bülow (still the chancellor), he secretly met with the tsar during a yachting trip to Finland. Wilhelm and Nikolai had always had a fairly strong rapport, which made the treaty of friendship and mutual defense that they signed almost unsurprising in the wake of the tsar’s fury with his French “allies”. What was actually surprising is that the tsar’s cabinet, upon learning of this Treaty of Björkö, did not even try to convince the tsar to disavow it. Even those who had most loudly supported the French alliance – such as the new Foreign Minister, Aleksandr Izvolsky[11] – were disheartened by France’s lack of support. Insofar as there was a cabinet consensus, the tsar’s ministers wished to pursue the profitable course of abandoning European disputes with Germany and Austria-Hungary in favor of expansion in Asia. The Franco-Russian Dual Alliance was not abrogated yet, but as soon as the Björkö treaty was made public, the world knew it was a dead letter, and would not be renewed.
The Kaiser’s visit to Finland had been another in a string of major media events for him that year. The first had been dramatic enough. A crisis had been brewing over Morocco – one of the last independent states in Africa – for some time. The French considered the place to be their backyard, and had been involved in Moroccan politics since the conquest of Algeria in the 1830s and 1840s; over the years immediately leading up to the crisis of 1905-6, the French had carefully made agreements with the British, Spanish, and Italians to clear the way to the assumption of a French protectorate. Indeed, that had been one of the purposes of the Anglo-French entente cordiale. Morocco’s imminent financial collapse was to be the final stepping stone, just as Egypt’s bankruptcy had permitted the British to gain a lodgment there in 1882.
But at the same time, Morocco was an object of German interest, as well. It dated back further than the influx of German investments, which at any rate were not that substantial (since German capital was never as available overseas as was French capital). In 1880, the French had agreed with the Germans not to extend their exclusive control over Morocco, and were preparing to violate that agreement unilaterally – or, rather, violate it multilaterally, with the support of Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom.[12] Partly, then, to safeguard German interests and remind the French of their own treaty obligations – for if the French were allowed to simply violate the agreement at will, German prestige was sure to suffer – and partly to score a PR victory of his own, Wilhelm made a landing at Tangiers to the adoration[13] of the local crowd in March 1905.
The French were first shocked, then livid; war was threatened, on both sides, with the French bleating about the Germans attempting to gain a back door into France via the Mediterranean (ludicrous) and the Germans complaining of French designs on other territories agreed to be neutral in China and even the Americas (preposterous). Germany had good diplomatic cards, but ultimately no ability to project power into the area, whereas the French had done their homework and secured the agreement of every other power in the Western Mediterranean. While the Kaiser negotiated his treaty in Finland with the tsar, the French Foreign Minister Delcassé confirmed his own agreements. In the 1906 conference at Algeciras that resulted when Bülow called for American mediation, the Germans, Russians, and Austrians were outnumbered by the Americans, Spanish, Italians, French, and British, and so the Franco-Spanish joint spheres of influence went ahead – although the Germans did manage to get the French to give up part of their equatorial African colonies to add to German Kamerun in exchange.
For the example of Morocco was worrisome to the Russians as well, outside of being an example of the French conspiring with perfidious Albion. Few enough countries were independent from European (or American, or Japanese) control by 1906; many of those that were, were in areas deemed vital to Russian interests. What if the British and French decided to pull the same stunt they had done in Morocco elsewhere – say, in Iran, or the Ottoman Empire? If there had been a hope of rescuing the Russo-French alliance – and some in the Russian government thought there was – it was dead after the Algeciras conference. France’s short-term gains had resulted in a very grievous long-term loss: that of Russia as a partner in alliance.
In the short term, what resulted from the crisis was a solidification of the developing alliances. Following up on the Björkö treaty, the Russians, Germans, and Austrians revived the Three Emperors’ League in a summit at Kreuzburg in the summer of 1906. While, formally, the league charter involved no commitments on the side of any party (it was, essentially, a glorified nonaggression pact), the side meetings and protocols defined unified league policy with regard to the rest of the world. Austria-Hungary and Russia revised their 1897 agreement, changing their Balkan policies from “agree to disagree” to mutual support – tentative, especially as the Russians were leery of abandoning Serbia, but still quite real. And the Germans and the Russians had long discussions about China…
At the same time – or close to it – the British and French made their own agreements. Secretly, Grey met with Delcassé in the fall of 1906 and confirmed that the British would join the war on France’s side if France and Germany ever went to war, and both men provisionally divided up Germany’s African colonies. Grey also promised to add diplomatic weight towards convincing the Italians to abandon the Triple Alliance. Though Grey’s actions were never sanctioned by Parliament, and indeed in 1906 would have been rejected by the Liberal backbenchers, he had Prime Minister Campbell-Bannerman’s support, and after Campbell-Bannerman died suddenly in 1907[14] , the new PM, H. H. Asquith[15], confirmed his predecessor’s decision. In a separate – and non-secret – meeting, the French acceded to the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance, forming a formidable triplice in the Far East.
Even by late 1906, with the cores of the alliances firmly in place, war was still far from inevitable. Instead of a volatile affair where no alliances lasted longer than a few years and war scares popped up every few months, where every power was out for itself, the optimists believed that the new alliances made it possible for Germany and Britain to regulate the conduct of their allies, to prevent things from going too far. And for ten years, they were right. Only when it became clear to one of the two sides that peaceful solutions screwed them over, regardless of whether policy was aggressive or conciliatory, did that side opt for open war.
If the story of 1904-6 was of the end of the old diplomacy in Europe, the story of 1906-15 is that of the end of European diplomats’ belief in peace, and their failure to maintain it. For peace is not a default state of affairs any more than war is: just as a conscious effort must be made to keep a country in the fight, so must one be made to keep a country out of one.
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[1] = Yeesh. I vastly prefer footnotes to endnotes, but they're one and the same on forums. Anyway, I included that as a conscious shout-out to the apparently prevalent notion that Austria and Russia are natural enemies and can only ever have contradictory Balkan policies.
[2] = Can you tell that I'm also using this TL as a platform for discussing my ideas about diplomatic history? Sorry about the inclusion of some of this stuff; I wrote it for a different audience.
[3] = Yes, the first; the abortive Anglo-German alliance feelers of the early 1890s don't count, because they never would have led anywhere. Britain's terms were ridiculously unrealistic.
[4] = Something they seem to have trouble remembering these days. Clearly, arguments about whether Russia is "European" or "Asiatic" are pointless. It's whatever they feel like emphasizing at the time.
[5] = Most of the time, I have seen this name as "Stoessel", but apparently that's not congruent with the transliteration scheme I have worked up here and besides it doesn't look as cool. Disclaimer: my transliterations are bound to be inconsistent anyway.
[6] = This is the PoD, by the way.
[7] = Parallelism will be, to a degree, rampant in this TL, but I think it's mostly okay since the altered events occur from 1905 to 1931. Besides, part of the original point of the TL was to make points about historical events in OTL anyway.
[8] = Plus a section of Inner Mongolia to make the borders pretty.
[9] = A much cooler name than "Russo-Japanese War".
[10] = Tidbit: for a long time, Wilhelm was insanely popular in the Middle East. But since they are brown people, that never gets mentioned.
[11] = I wasn't sure what to do with Izvolsky here, since he was a Francophile but absolutely was cool with negotiating with Germans and Austrians, so long as they weren't Jewish Germans or Austrians. Without a Bosnian Crisis to make him more embittered, I figure he'll be serviceable.
[12] = I swear this isn't a Kaiserreich wank; I myself am not a huge fan of it, and am well aware of the serious flaws in its milieu and its military, and of course Wilhelm himself, who was a colossal tool. But the reasons for intervening in Morocco were pretty legit, and if you mention them, you seem like an unabashed German partisan. That said, I have to issue a disclaimer: I am going to make fun of the Entente powers a lot.
[13] = Some reports say the Moroccans loved him; some said that they didn't give a shit. I went with what sounded better.
[14] = Gratuitous butterflies? Yeah. Short-term effect with the greatest importance is that the Boers don't get their Union of South Africa (yet). It'll come up later.
[15] = Gotta say that I've never seen anybody call him anything but "H. H." To be fair, "Herbert Henry" is pretty uninspiring too.
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Let's see how this works. This is a TL I wrote on another forum over the last two months, and I figured it'd be good to get some feedback from here, too. It will go up to the end of 1931 in preparation for a forum game I plan to GM with this setting. The original idea for this TL, by the way, is not mine, but that of another forum member there (here is his AH.com account), who wrote a treatment several years ago that, while genuinely inspired, was also seriously flawed. With his approval and connivance, I rewrote it extensively enough that I think it can reasonably be described as "my" TL, but with immense amounts of inspiration from him.
The thread title is part of a Friedrich Meinecke quote from October 1918, in which he was complaining about the First World War and the German leaders who helped cause it.
Also, I guess this is in the wrong subforum. Shoot me now.
Comments and questions would be appreciated - nay, demanded!
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