The March of Time - 20th Century History

[Karelian]

"Come on then, Bethmann, we challenge you!"

In 1906 the events in Scandinavia finally forced the Prussian authorities to address the suffrage issue, and a committee was set to discuss changes in the Prussian election laws. Bethmann-Hollweg, a rising start in Prussian politics who had been appointed as the new State Secretary in 1907, noted for his abilities to work with Zentrum and Conservatives, was chosen to lead the effort.[1]

The Bethmann-Hollweg committee reform proposal, drafted in the middle of the worst political crisis in the history of German Empire, emerged from the cabinets after the Abdication Crisis as a cautious compromise. Broadening the franchise plural voting based on age meant that new property and educational qualifications would have to be introduced as a check. The reform draft introduced still open, but now direct elections, without an intervening tier of electors: winner would be determined on the basis of the proportional method of representation. The draft also redrew and enlarged the size of electoral districts. The three classes of voters were to be retained, but higher civil service (Beamte) and pensioned army officers were to be moved to the top class that had previously included only landowners and financial and industrial magnates.

This modified three-tier system proposal reduced the power of about 13 000 wealthiest electors, while doubling the numbers of the first class, adding a 25% increase in the second class, and saw the third class reduced by about 7%. Bethmann-Hollweg himself referred to his proposal as a law that was designed "to help the Conservatives to regain touch with the mood of the people."

Like all political compromises, it infuriated everyone who stood to lose the most. Left-liberals and Social Democrats wanted a true general direct suffrage in Prussia. Zentrum had competing factions supporting either the federal model or a plural suffrage system that would favour the more well-off people. The Conservatives, as stated earlier, stalwartly defended the status quo, for obvious reasons: In 1908 they obtained 34% of of the seats, 143 in total, with 14% of the vote.

Following the Swedish example, the SPD ultimately opted to organize demonstrations to make their case heard. Every Sunday in February and May 1910 workers demonstrated in the streets of all the big cities of Germany. Miners and construction workers staged prolonged strikes. The Party Congress at Jena in 1911 formally sanctioned relatively easy conditions for electoral bargains with non-Socialists considering the suffrage question, namely to save face and party unity since at Bavaria the Left and SPD had already fought the Landtag elections in alliance.

In 1903 the SPD obtained 18,8% of the vote, but no seats. In 1908 the party gained 23,9% of the vote, entered the House for the first time, but received 7 seats (out of 443), whereas Conservatives secured 212 seats with 16%. In the face of the growing public unrest caused by the Eulenburg Scandal, the Prussian politicians fearing the next elections were more eager to compromise than would have otherwise been the case.

Ultimately the Black-Blue Bloc found a face-saving way forward. Their counter-proposal maintained indirect elections to the Prussian lower house, but also introduced voter secrecy. After a lot of hair-splitting and haggling about income thresholds that would be used to assign voters to different electoral classes forced the Prussian government to step in to resolve these disagreements, the two houses of parliament reached an agreement over the introduction of secret elections.[2]

On March 1910 the lower house deputies of the Prussian parliament accepted the Bethmann proposal in its altered (or "mutilated" as the Socialist press called it) form. German liberal newspapers referred to Sweden as a cautionary tale for the folly of government intransigence in the face of public protest, and urged the government and the crown to show this type of wisdom in the future as well, and enact reforms now when there was still time and room for a compromise. Curiously enough the same Nordic example was used by the Conservative press, where a completely opposite conclusion was reached: that right now it would be extremely dangerous to show weakness. As one contemporary conservative publication commented: "Despite our serious reservations, the recently accepted counter-proposal is less dangerous than the original draft that would have introduced direct elections and a highly dubious proportional representation."

1. Instead of being the new Chancellor after von Moltke, B-H remains a State Secretary for the time being.
2. in OTL such a compromise was really reached for the secret ballot, but the government was unwilling to get involved to the minor disagreements that ultimately killed the whole draft proposal.

 

[Karelian]

“When a dilettante held the cords of policy in his hands, Weltpolitik was impossible. For the Hohenzollern dynasty knows nothing but the sergeant-in-arms form of power - command, obedience, standing in attention, boasting. The King of England has ambition and power; the Kaiser had vanity and was content with the appearance of power. And this was a fault of the system, not the person. Do not overestimate the importance of the quality of the person. It is the institutions...and your own lack of resolution that are guilty. This is the result of Bismarckerei and the political immaturity that it promoted."

Maximilian Carl Emil Weber had watched the parliamentary debates on the Eulenburg Affair closely and was extremely agitated by the sudden news of abdication. He had consciously avoided all active political involvement for nearly a decade after 1900. Now he felt that the issue of the monarch’s place in a parliamentary monarchy simply had to be addressed. He began a careful study of the possibilities of introducing a parliamentary system to Germany. Would it be possible to do so in a manner that would avoid upsetting the constitutional idea of a federation of princely states balanced by the unifying power of the Reichstag?

For the first time in ten years he attended a public meeting of the National Liberal party on 30th of November 1908. There Jellinek argued for making the chancellor responsible to the Reichstag and the Bundesrat. When Gothein argued against parliamentarism and partisan interest politics, Weber suprised everyone. He held a passionate improvised speech in opposition of Gothein. His main argument was that both Britain and Belgium had parliamentary systems of government, and their colonial possessions dwarfed the German overseas empire. With mere figurehead monarchs, their policies showed far more consistency and firmness than what was perceptible in Germany. Their monarchs had performed services for their countries by practicing Realpolitik that had trumped Wilhelmian “prestige.” “A statesman, holding it all together, is lacking. None exists, and no one can replace it. We need governmental leadership by a politician. Conservative bureaucrats have governed, not ruled. Bismarck has cultivated a generation of politicians who lack the will or capacity for independent political action!"

Max Weber reacted to the news of abdication with smug satisfaction: “The proud, self-confident Kaiser Wilhelm II bowed his head and conceded what the people wanted...From now on honour of the nation is of prime importance - the welfare of the Fatherland." Weber was a firm supporter of a powerful Weltpolitik, seeing no alternatives to an energetic imperialist policy aimed at the expansion of German sphere of interest and territory. Exercise of military and economic power would have to form the basis of German foreign policy. He wrote an article to the Historische Zeitschrift, analyzing authoritarian and parliamentary monarchy and arguing that the monarch was quite capable of exercising significant political influence in a parliamentary system, while his position among the people was much more secure than it could ever be in a semi-constitutional system with bureaucratic control.

With his moods improving after years of melancholic retreat from daily politics, Weber became more active in the National Liberal politics. He helped Georg Jellinek, who was working on a law draft to amplify article 17 of the Reich constitution, bringing forward his views regarding the constitutional stipulation of the chancellor’s responsibility. Weber had a clear vision.

Only by ending personal government and the uncontrolled bureaucracy would Germany move towards parliamentarism, and only thus could the leading politicians be able to oppose dynastic impulsiveness and excesses effectively. Germany needed political reform to be able to play a role in the “universal struggle of great powers for spheres of influence around the world.” Reform was a necessary step in order to take on the great international policy tasks that were the historical responsibility of Germany. The German nation had to achieve a certain measure of political freedom to become a Herrenvolk, a nation worthy of the historical right to participate in the struggle for the division of the earth.

To Weber, this was an unconditional basis for a successful Weltpolitik. He lamented the fact that ever since the fall of Bismarck, Germany had pursued mere prestige politics, resorting to aggressive statements but always avoiding actual dangers and confrontations. Weber wanted a “stronger armament coupled with a sober and ruthlessly decisive foreign policy.” Other powers had become accustomed to the way Germany always gave in when the going got rough, in spite of her portentous moves in the world stage. Therefore the current constitutional position of the German monarch were incompatible with the world interests of the nation and the means necessary to protect these interests: war and diplomacy.

Here too the German bureaucratic government struggled in comparison with Western democracies in all areas. “They have been more successful overseas than our impeccable moral bureaucracy. In the light of Realpolitik - the ultimate criterion - I ask: which system of organization...is most effective today?”

But since "true", Western-model parliamentarism was a pipe dream, Weber thought of possible short-term remedies. The Bundesrat Committee for Foreign Affairs should be reactivated and expanded by including the respective secretaries of state and elder statesmen, reconstituted as a Reich crown council. A new criminal code against the publication of royal speeches and programs combined with a re-activated Reich crown council would finally put an end to any new instance of royal speeches, telegrams, and other statements causing embarrassments to the national prestige of Germany.

The Chancellor was to be dismissed if 240 Reichstag members or 24 Bundesrat members withdrew their confidence to him. Both the Reichstag and the Bundesrat would have to gain the right of parliamentary assembly even without a special royal order. A federalist resolution to constitutional reform was possible within the framework of the existing Reich structure only if the Reichstag members were permitted to enter the Bundesrat. Only the presence of the leaders of the Reichstag parties in the Bundesrat could turn the upper house into a force that could reconcile the interests of the Reich with the interests of the individual states - and to form a counterweight to Prussian hegemony.

Bismarck himself had stressed the federal character, seeking to restrict the powers of the Reichstag. Since the Bundesrat held the real power, Weber sought to turn it into a representative body of the states instead of a multi-dynastic court. This was the only way to free the other members from the vassalization of the three-class Landtag of Prussia. As it was the Chancellor was another stooge of the Prussian hegemony, by dint of his position at the head of the Prussian government and his control of the Prussian votes in the Bundesrat.

While he had both national and international renown as an academic, in 1909 the main effect of his political re-awakening was rather limited. His ideas and viewpoints were a curious mixture of Pan-German chauvinism and Western-minded liberal reformism, and failed to attract major support from either camp. They were still a sign of the times: fear of losing the international competition and despair about the perceived weaknesses of the German political model were becoming increasingly common by 1910.

All views and quotes of Weber are from OTL. He really did reactivate politically after 1908.

 

[Karelian]

The fatal visit: General von Hülsen-Häseler, (sixth from left, at the front row) as a part of the imperial
entourage at the 1905 Kaisermanöver together with Lord Lonsdale (second from left).

When Wilhelm II surprised his generals by announcing his abdication, the Army was already fully committed to the bitter battles of two drawn-out holding actions. They were defending their internal position within the Empire in the so-called MStGO conflict of military justice code reform, and had done so since the 1870s. The other - deemed even more important among the old guard - was an organizational resistance against the expansion of the army. Both were mortal threat to old Junkers elites, for they would have diluted the prestige of the military by infiltrating her ranks with bourgeois middle-class officers, who could not be trusted to be as conservative as their minor noble colleagues.

The chief of the Military Cabinet of Wilhelm II was a key figure in this struggle. Because he had a seremonial role as adjutant, he was present at audiences with holders of others who had Immediatstellen-level access to the Emperor. Holders of this office used this right extensively, seeking to guard the Kaiser from any influences that they deemed hostile to the best interests of the Army.

Dietrich von Hülsen-Häseler had been appointed to his post on 5th of May 1901. His predecessor, General von Hahnke, had known that the Chief of the Military Cabinet was the highest position he would ever have in the German society. He had therefore allowed Wilhelm II a lot of leeway in military matters without giving him much guidance, out of fear that the erratic Emperor would remove him from office. Hülsen-Häseler did not have this flaw, for he was not financially dependent to his position because he had married money.

He was smart, wiley, and apt to coarse Berlin humour that pleased Wilhelm II and was scandalous to nearly everyone else, and he always spoke his mind. He was tall (198cm), frank in his views, agreed with Wilhelm on most issues, had excellent contacts to Austria-Hungary, and most importantly he had staunch conservative credentials. That is, he viewed his role as a protector of the privileges of the Army, shielding it from unnecessary expansion or and political meddling. His reactionary political views had made him a firm part of the Eulenburg clique. Eulenburg had actually used his influence to get Hülsen-Häseler away from his post as the Military Plenipotentiary at the Viennese Embassy.[1]

When the Eulenburg scandal started a media spectacle surrounding the army, Hülsen-Häseler had received a fatal task from the Kaiser. Wilhelm II told him to "uproot all perverts" from the ranks of the officer corps. The following series of trials, dishonorable discharges and a string of suicides had all placed a great strain to his health. In early November 1908 he collapsed to the staple floor after arriving from a ride as a victim of a fatal heart attack, leaving the Military Cabinet paralyzed at the worst possible moment.[2]

The officer corps was anxious to see who would be picked as the Chief. For the greatest power of the Military Cabinet lay in the control of promotions and appointments. Each year, every officer of the Prussian army from the lowest second lieutenant to the corps commanders was formally evaluated. These fitness reports (Qualifikationsberichte) were sent to the Military Cabinet, and each one of them was reviewed. Every corps commander, fortress governor, high-level staff appointment had been ultimately decided by the Kaiser, but due the sheer amount of bureaucracy and lack of interest Wilhelm II had most often just rubber-stamped the recommendations of the Military Cabinet by default. Because of this, the Military Cabinet had sought to guide the structure of German officer corps to suit their vision. And now every faction within the officer corps stood ready to make their case for the future of the German army.

1. The letter Eulenburg sent in OTL to Wilhelm II from Vienna called von Hülsen-Häseler a distinguished and remarkably clever man, but also referred to his “outrageous scurrility” and called him “a show-cactus, with glittering, somewhat prickly foliage. The shrub does not do so well abroad.” In OTL Hülsen-Häseler found out about the letter and took slight, turning against von Eulenburg. TTL he remains unaware. As a result he is even more distressed about his role as a leader of an internal purge than in OTL.
2. He had a hidden heart condition, as the tragicomic nature of his OTL death shows.

 

[Karelian]

Politics were dirty business and beneath the value of a Prussian nobleman. Having a lively discussion about military strategy among peers was a whole another matter, though.
Especially when something as vulgar as money was involved.

The German War Minister was the War Minister of Prussia, a Prussian general oath-bound to the King of Prussia. The Bavarian, Saxon and Württembergian War ministers were legally of the same rank, and had their own mini-budgets. Wilhelm II, eager to show that he was a Supreme Warlord worth of the moniker had made their job nearly impossible. Ever since the Landesverteidigunsgkomission, the Home Defence Commission, had been abolished in 1897, no one had coordinated financial, diplomatic, military and naval policies of the Kaiserreich. Composed of admirals and generals and entrusted with the coordination of joint defence policies, the commission had enabled the soldiers and civilians of Prussia to debate and discuss matters of strategy.

Wilhelm II had not only disbanded the entire commission, but had later on placed various army factions in and out of favour seemingly on a whim, hampering the long-term development of the German Army. Surrounded by military men who had told him that the army had no need to expand in size, he had been easily lured to the call of navalism. Navalism had always been the greatest love of his life - he was an admiral of the fleet of the Royal Navy, an admiral in the Imperial Russian, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian navies, and an honorary admiral of the Royal Greek Navy, and sought out every possible occasion to dress up in each admiral outfit in turn.

During the reign of Wilhelm II the German War Ministers had been operating without any real information about the strategic planning of the General Staff, despite the fact that the War Minister was the one responsible for the armament policy. And since it was his duty to deal with the Reichstag to receive funding, long-term development of German military had been hard. Organizationally the War Ministry had thus traditionally focused on the preservation aristocratic character of the officer corps, joining forces with Chiefs of the Military Cabinet in the opposition of army expansion.

This conservative stance combined with the formidable reputation and vainglorious pride of the German General Staff had created a situation where leaders of a land power located to the middle of Europe and surrounded by powerful current or former rivals had started to dream of a powerful fleet.

Gustav von Senden-Bibran, former Chief of the Naval Cabinet, had therefore had an easy job. Eulenburg had attempted, but failed, to torpedo his career and remove him from the entourage. His failure here stemmed from the obsessive interest Wilhelm II had on all things naval, and the way Senden-Bibran had been willing to provide Wilhelm II an outlet to his navalism had cemented his position. He had also secured his legacy by lifting admiral Tirpitz to his current position.

But one easily agitated Kaiser alone would not have been able to create the German navalism. At the same time when Wilhelm II started his reign, the perceived vulnerability of German overseas and maritime interests had become a powerful rallying cry for fleet expansion. According to German nationalists, Britain viewed interests Germans considered legitimate with indifference or casual disregard. Tirpitz carefully cultivated the public image of German navalism, and with the PR funding from Krupp and major shipyard companies he and his supporters organized the Navy League, one of the first truly "all-German" lobby organizations in the Kaiserreich. Offering the growing patriotic middle class a chance to serve in a more meritocratic military force was a powerful rallying cry, and so far the Reichstag had yielded funding for one Naval Law after another.

The German generals had been happy to ignore the navy for years, but when the strategic situation in Europe was changing and the arms-race between the Triple Alliance and the Franco-Russian Dual Alliance gained pace, they begun to watch the steadily growing naval budgets with unease. A common Army criticism to the naval expansion was rather simple: “What does the navy propose to do if the army is defeated, be it in the west or in the east?” By 1905, that question had become not only fair, but also acute. Britain had just changed the calculations of the naval arms race completely with the HMS Dreadnought. Tirpitz had conducted a masterful propaganda campaign at home, but had little to show for strategy. Admirals who competed for the attention of Wilhelm II pointed out that as it was, all available naval resources were being invested to the build-up, while officer salaries and crew training were being squeezed thin.

British politicians were alarmed by this development. The previous naval arms race between Britain and her potential continental foes had failed to deter them. After increasing her fleet to 22 first-class battleships by building ten new ships between March 1889 and 1893, Britain had witnessed the French and Russian respond with their own buildup to a total of 25 battleships, even though the geographic constraints of Russia helped to even the odds. The Franco-Russian alliance that was formalized in 1892 further restricted the British diplomatic freedom of moment, and signaled a serious challenge to the splendid isolation policy in a time when the size of the British Empire had roughly doubled in a span of 40 years. During that time Russia had been humiliated in the Crimean War, while Germany and Italy had unified and completely altered the balance of power in the Continent.

The Norwegian Independence War of 1905 made painfully obvious how weak the German naval capacity still was, and how little it mattered internationally. Sea Lord Fisher had ordered the Royal Navy to show the flag along the entire German coastline both at the North and Baltic Sea alike, and the joint naval demonstrations along the North Sea coast of Sweden reminded many planners that the French had also been able to bring significant naval presence to the North Sea. Tirpitz has responded to this criticism by stating that this was still the risk phase of his plan, but already in late 1905 Admiral Friedrich von Baudissin had warned Tirpitz that the British could also opt out from their expected course of action, that is, steaming into the Blight to offer a decisive battle at the outbreak of the war. Von Baudissin and Admiral von Fischel recognized that Britain held the control of the entrances of the North Sea, and this basic fact of geography allowed them the option to either attack or defend when facing a challenge to their control of the vital German shipping lines to the rest of the world.

For Tirpitz, this was unfortunate development, since the creeping costs of the naval programme caught up with Germany in 1905. The dissident admirals were calling for a grand naval council to hammer out a reformed German naval vision. Tirpitz had done his best to silence potential criticism well in advance by keeping the Admiralty Staff powerless out of fear that it might become as independent and powerful as the General Staff. In 1903 Tirpitz had vetoed the proposed officer exchange program, where half of the Naval Academy graduates would serve with the Admiralstab. By fall of 1907 serious doubts were already being raised in public about the soundness of Tirpitz’s battleship strategy, and by late summer 1908 Eulenburg felt strongly that concessions in the speed of future naval construction needed to be negotiated in return for a political settlement with Britain to extract Germany from her increasingly isolated international position.

Tirpitz replied that Germany would be in a good position for a prolonged dreadnought race with Britain, provided that Eulenburg could carry through the planned financial reforms. But Eulenburg was increasingly critical of the strategy Tirpitz was pursuing. He especially loathed the way the Navy League publicly pressed for an increase in the pace of construction. The leader of the League, August Keim, and a large segment of German nationalists denounced Tirpitz’s draft bill for 1908 as wholly inadequate. Keim directly defied the Chancellor and the Kaiser, publicly stating that they could expect a wave of protest that would damage the Kaiser’s image were Keim forced to step aside. Furious about the way commoners sought to challenge the vision of the Kaiser Himself, Eulenburg had dragged his feet with the naval expansion, with pretext that he needed more time to secure the votes for the Naval Law of 1908. For him, the naval arms race was becoming an annoying distraction from his real foreign policy goals, and Eulenburg had been pondering his options on how to deal with Tirpitz before the scandal ruined his career.

Tirpitz was no fool. He knew what Eulenburg was up to, and when Wilhelm II surprised everyone in Germany with the news of his abdication, Tirpitz was already making plans for the future. He would do everything in his power to save his naval expansion programs from civilian meddling.

 

[Karelian]

The man responsible for just the kind of civilian meddling Tirpitz feared was an old acquaintance of his, and no stranger to the scheming power politics of Prussia. In fact the acting Vice Chancellor who was now legally tasked to clean the mess Wilhelm II had left behind had plenty of experience of washing other people's dirty laundry.
Secretary of the State for the Interior since 1897, Count Posandowsky-Wehner had risen to prominence as a strongman who would force rigorous anti-socialist legislation through the Reichstag. But when the bill that would have allowed the government to imprison anyone who participated in strikes “harmful to public security” was twice voted down by clear numbers, he had been forced to reconsider. Here Posandowsky had experienced a rare, but all the more profound change of view. He had grudgingly accepted that repression policies of the 1890s had failed, pure and simple, and the Prussian bureaucracy would have to be able to deal with the Social Democratic challenge by other means from now on. He chose an old Bismarckian tactic, extension of social security.

Eulenburg did not move against him for years. He had circumscribed the traditional role of Posadowsky as the spokesman of the government in the Reichstag in 1900, and sought afterwards to keep Posadowsky away from the limelight as much as possible in order to avoid insulting his Conservative opponents. The truth was that Posadowsky had been as indispensable to him as the count had been to his predecessor, Hohenlohe. Eulenburg had greatly relied upon Posadowsky’s extensive knowledge of domestic affairs, for he was not the kind of man to strain himself by struggling with questions that were alien to him. Posadowsky had utilized his leverage well, and Eulenburg had sought to avoid coming into conflict with his views.

He had thus enjoyed considerable independence in the realm of social policy, his true interest, and had been content on letting Eulenburg act as the figurehead of the government. Posadowsky had stayed in Berlin at work on official business while Eulenburg was abroad or accompanied Wilhelm II on his frequent journeys. He had been a dutiful workhorse bureaucrat, whose accomplishments Eulenburg had always presented as his own, while they both had known that Posadowsky would have to take the fall in the first case of failure. Luckily for Posadowsky, his poor relations with Wilhelm II had protected him - Wilhelm II had sent him to England every year "to broaden his horizons" because he had considered Posadowsky ‘too agrarian’, and had always been cool and distant towards the count. Thus Eulenburg had had little to fear from his Vice-Chancellor, since he could always simply state to him that the Kaiser had given him a free hand in a particular affair in a case he wanted to override possible objectives from his loyal mandarin.[1]

This arrangement had been a basis of an unfair, but effective working relationship. Posandowsky had managed to push through a series of social reforms through the Reichstag because of his close ties to Zentrum. Reduction of child labour, reduction of maximum work hours in shops and offices, establishment of industrial courts of arbitration and a system of factory inspections for town with more population than 20 000 people, improved social insurances for old age, accidents, invalids and sickness, funding for worker housing - the list of his accomplishments achieved by the votes of Zentrum and left-liberals was impressive enough to little by little gain him tacit approval and ultimately even limited Reichstag support from the SPD aisle.

An able parliamentary speaker and an efficient administrator, Posandowsky stated matter-of-factly that no one else among the Prussian elites had done more or as much to reconcile the workers to the regime of Wilhem II by improving their lot than he had. While his small-scale, slow-acting social policies failed to wean the voters from SPD, they gave him support among the Zentrum and SPD, the rising political forces in the German society. They also earned him a lasting enmity from the Conservatives. His reactionary fellow peers knew him as the “Red Count”, blamed his policies as smacking of state socialism, and had wanted him gone for a long while.

Ultimately the Moor had done his duty. After Friedrich Wilhelm von Loebell became Chief of the Reich Chancellery in September 1904, Eulenburg started to consult him as his key political adviser, and rapidly lifted him to a deputy plenipotentiary to the Bundesrat, finally promoting him to Under State Secretary. The two men became close, and soon everything Eulenburg did passed through the office of von Loebell. Together with State Secretary of the Foreign Office, von Richthofen, Eulenburg ran a tight ship and kept Posandowsky and the other State Secretaries more and more in the dark.

Posadowsky was ultimately removed in June 1907, after the count had stated that he wanted to pass the 1907 budget with the help of Zentrum. He and Eulenburg had never liked one another, and the way Posadowsky steadfastly promoted cooperation with Zentrum was by now totally unacceptable to Eulenburg, who hated Catholics and needed the Conservative votes. His new political bloc at the Reichstag was more important. But Eulenburg never sought to completely destroy anyone. He convinced Wilhelm II to appoint Posadowsky to be the Vice-President of the Prussian Ministry of State - a position Posandowsky had long coveted for himself - and tasked him and Bethmann-Hollweg, the new Secretary of State, to work out several reform programs.[2]

This sidelining was actually a blessing in disguise. When Eulenburg soon hastily retreated from the forefront of Prussian politics in a desperate attempt to avoid the coming political disaster, the new Chancellor von Moltke had deemed it wise to elevate Posadowsky as his Vice-Chancellor, being that the hapless general had even less experience from day-to-day politics than Eulenburg. Soon confused Posandowsky found himself right in the middle of the worst political scandal in the history of German Empire, shocked to find out that it was his legal duty to guide the German Empire and the new Kaiser forward as the new acting Chancellor.

1. In OTL Bülow placed Posandowsky to this situation, and Eulenburg has a similar need for an expert of Prussian domestic politics.
2. In OTL Bülow roasted Posadowsky-Wehner out of office accompanied by a press smear campaign, which was most likely a dress rehearsal for the Eulenburg-Molte scandal.
In TTL Posadowsky is kept around and merely sidelined, since Eulenburg characteristically always went out of his way to avoid burning bridges with anyone who could potentially be useful later on at all costs.

 

[Karelian]

During this period of eager study in 1907, I received from Admiral von Tirpitz, the Head of the Admiralty, some particularly deep and stimulating impressions. In him I found a really surpassing personality, a man who saw the effects of the whole as they appeared in the distant political perspective and who served with all the comprehensive capabilities of his ample creative vigour. In one fundamental question did I differ from the Lord High Admiral. He held so firm to the conviction that the struggle with Britain for the freedom of the seas must sooner or later be fought out...

Considering our economic and political position, it seemed to me that its form, presupposing us as the sole opposing rival of Britain at sea, did not permit the realization of an ideal principle underlying this theory, to which I did not shut my eyes. Healthy, rigorous and real balance of power at sea required a counterpoise to the Royal Navy formed in combination with another Great Power whose navy in conjunction with our own would yield an adequate force...
Excerpt from the memoirs of Kaiser Wilhelm III.

The leaders of 1908 all agreed that the world they lived in was a competitive place. Struggle for colonies, spheres of influence and markets were things that kept them awake at night. The rise of two powerful industrial competitors to Britain - US and Germany - and the expansive British colonial and naval policy of the previous 40 years bore a degree of responsibility for creating this more menacing international climate.

The new technology that had promised such endless progress and prosperity had failed to deliver. The same steamships, railroads and telegraphs had once been heralded and celebrated as inventions that would bring about a more peaceful and secure world were now creating new tension and flashpoints all over the globe.

Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz was no stranger to this merciless reality. For him, the promotion of German economic influence and its worldwide expansion was the guiding principle of everything he did. For him it was all too obvious that in a modern world, true economic power and sea-power were naturally the same thing. The more the German overseas trade grew, the better it was for the German battlefleet that would have to safeguard the expanding German merchant marine.

This made Tirpitz accept the prospect of economic transformation of Germany from an agricultural society to an industrial one as something of a natural law. This view seated him in the camp of the modernizing industrialists who were increasingly at odds with the reactionary agrarian conservatives. He knew that the landowners and agrarians had deep-rooted objections to what they called “the terrible fleet”, which they rightly regarded as an agent of further industrialization. But while the old Junker families had their estates and a lot of prestige, von Tirpitz had Krupp and the other steel barons, bankers and shipyard magnates. As long as Wilhelm II had reigned, the Admiral had managed to control the German naval policy.

This political position on the right side of modernity had suited Tirpitz just fine. He had always thought that the arch-conservative Eulenburg was weak, unable to stem the threat from the left and unwilling and reluctant to pursue a consistent foreign policy that would be determined and imperialistic enough. Convinced that Germany was on the wrong track, Tirpitz seriously contemplated his position in November 1908. He was becoming desperate, frustrated and angry. Lately Wilhelm II had made his life a perfect hell with his constant meddling.

Worse still, the now-disgraced Kaiser and Chancellor had both failed to deliver the desperately needed cooperation between government, army and navy. And the constitution contained no future safeguards against men like Wilhelm II. This state of affairs would have to be remedied. For Germany to prevail, the young Crown Prince would have to rule with the support of Chiefs of the Admiral Staff and the General Staff. Already when the Eulenburg scandal had been starting to seriously threaten the crown, Tirpitz had privately urged Gustav von Niedner, the personal physician of Wilhelm II, to declare him unable to govern.[1]

Tirpitz felt that the time to act was now. He had managed to make a lasting and positive first impression to the young monarch by talking business instead of focusing on court etiquette. The old Empress also liked him, as well as several other German royals. The Grand Duke of Baden openly supported him. Prince Johann Albrecht of Mecklenburg helped his navalist cause as the honorary leader of the Colonial Society, ADV, the Navy League and several smaller nationalist organizations that also held the Admiral in high regard. Prince Regent Luitpold of Bavaria wanted his support over the question of military justice reform. [2]

There was but just one flaw. Tirpitz hated speech making and public oratory. He preferred the small technocratic expert circles of the Naval Office and the Reichstag budgetary committee where he could focus on his sole ambition, naval matters. He knew that by most standards he was an uncharismatic, untalented public speaker. Lacking options, he thus had to rely on the Navy League - for now.

Tirpitz was ambivalent about the role of lobby groups and regretted the excesses of the most noisy German navalists of the League. At the same time he lacked other means to change German domestic politics. Privately he was attending meetings with his financial backers and doing his best to gather funding to support his political efforts, but publicly he felt uneasy about the idea of breaking a social taboo and getting directly involved to politics himself. For now, it was easier to wait for the coronation of the new Kaiser and muster his troops.

1-2: Both OTL - Tirpitz had friends in high places, and he became politically active and increasingly critical towards Wilhelm II during WW1. Here he is more reluctant, but still sees the status quo as a recipe for a disaster just like in OTL. In OTL he kept quiet until 1914 since the naval expansion seemed less threatened than in TTL.

 

[Karelian]

As the dust began to settle around the Abdication Crisis, Posadowsky-Wehner was once again busily at work. As the new acting Chancellor he was performing his constitutional duties, and urgently sought an acceptable option for the post of acting Vice-Chancellor. Since the Conservative Junkers hated his guts and the National Liberals were too small to provide the necessary votes in the Reichstag, he had few other options than to turn towards the Zentrum.

This option made good political sense. After all, the more or less open anti-Catholic agitation of Chancellor Eulenburg in the election 1907 had not been lost to the many Catholic voters, and the internal relations between Prussia and the southern German states were now extremely strained as a result. This state of affairs had to be addressed, since the Catholics formed an influential group that had only grown in influence lately. Zentrum had gained 85 percent more votes in 1907 than it had done in 1874 (1,45 million to 2,18 million), enjoying an upward trend that exceeded both the growth in population (37%) and the number of potential voters (47%) of the same period. The end of the Kulturkampf era of Bismarck meant that Zentrum was now seeking to retain its current status instead of expanding its ranks further. It was also no longer the only option for German Catholics ( - in 1912 only 54,6% of all Catholics voted for Zentrum). The old clerical party was now increasingly seen as a middle class movement, a fact reflected in the new cooperation with the Prussian Conservatives, the former arch-enemies of South German Catholic culture.[1]

Zentrum was an odd party. It had never built up an actual party organization, opting to use the Church and clerics as the local networks of voter organization. The Catholic community did have their own mass movement, the Volksverein für das katholische Deutschland. Established in 1890 the Volsverein had grown to one of the largest voluntary organizations of Wilhelmine Germany, with over 700 000 members by 1908. Offering social, social reformist and democratic left-wing Catholicism an institutional home, the Volksverein was accompanied by the growing Christian Catholic unions. Together with these groups and the 90 and 110 seats that the Zentrum party consistently secured in the Reichstag, the Catholics were a group that any aspiring imperial government could ill ignore.

The man whom Posadowsky approached with an offer of Vice-Chancellorship was a former professor of philosophy from the university of Bonn, with a previous record of honorable and faithful service as a member of the Bavarian Government. A devoted monarchist by birth and conviction, Georg Friedrich Karl Freiherr von Hertling seemed like a curious choice for a vice-chancellorship at a time when public dissent for the House of Hohenzollern and the person of the previous Kaiser seemed to be increasing by the day.

Hertling was sixty-five when he became the party chairman of Zentrum in 1908 after his second tenure as a Reichstag representative. His decision of pleading patience and conciliation towards the government had just recently trumped the confrontational and uncompromising stance supported the populist left wing of the party, led by Mathias Erzberger and Hermann Roeren. Hertling was a veteran of the Kulturkampf, and feared that brash polemics of Erzberger would put an end to a decade of efforts aimed at allaying passions and overcoming the confessional division by emphasizing national unity. It was this desire to normalize the position of the Catholics in German politics after recent return from political exile that led to the desire to find the Zentrum a reliable Protestant political partner from the Reichstag.

Here too the Wilhelmine-era feature of German politics, relying on extra-parliamentary forces to govern the country, was clearly visible. For Stegerwald and other Catholic labour union leaders the Black-and-Blue Block had been a bad alternative to the solution they lobbied: a deal with the Christian Socials. Such a move would have brought the smaller Protestant grouping into obliged loyalty towards its mentors at Zentrum, pushing the party towards more urban-oriented social policy and unifying the Christian unions and their political influence behind the two allied parties. Stegerwald correctly predicted the drawbacks of the chosen course of action: As the Conservatives and Zentrum had joined forces, the Christian trade unions had suffered, and their rate of growth dropped. After this decision had marked the end of the Eulenburg Block, Hertling had been in bad terms with Erzberger, his radical colleague and main competitor inside the party.

After he had been personally tasked to take up the post of the Vice-Chancellor by Prince Regent Luitpold, he promptly resigned from his position in the party, so as to be able to act as a representative of the will of the sovereign in a constitutional monarchy and not as the agent of a parliamentary majority.[2]

He declared that he was fully cognizant of the strength and justice of the demand for an increased share of participation by the people in the government, and he pledged himself to use his best efforts to see that this demand would be met. But for an aged conservative like him, the idea of a change of the system meant quite different things than to the average voter.

While he was acceptable to the young Kaiser, the limits of his political views considering the general mood in German politics quickly became apparent. When the Herrenhaus Junkers and industry barons seemed dead-set to hold their old privileges and ancient rights in the face of the suffrage reform bill, Hertling stated in a speech that the new law should be seen "as a necessary step to avoid the future necessity of making still more far-reaching concessions." The speech made the Junkers-linked press call him “the gravedigger of the Prussian monarchy” while the Liberal and Socialist newspapers assaulted him as a “man who sought to block honest democratic reforms of Prussia’s iniquitous franchise system.”[3]

Personally Hertling truly believed that imposing franchise reform on the states would be an unwarrantable violation of their rights, just like the introduction of a parliamentary government. In this he and Posandowsky were in complete agreement. Their reformism was ultimately firmly conservative in nature and limited in scope. And as both of them were early on firmly focused to the disastrous domestic situation, this left the stage open for politicians more interested in international politics to step ahead to promote their own agendas.

1: OTL figures
2: He did this in OTL during his post as the Ministerpräsident of Bavaria, and I see little reason he would chance course in a higher office.
3. OTL quotes from WW1 era.

 

[Karelian]

The Emperor often messed up our difficult foreign relations by his interference. In that respect I grant he was a football - but the football of his own character, with his sudden “inspirations”, those convictions that he had to instantly realize some “brilliant idea, before it loses all its grit in that confounded Foreign Office melting-pot.” Naturally the fact that the unfortunate Foreign Office had to toil for months at mending his broken crockery was something that never occurred to him. His tendency to handle personally and sou modo our foreign relationship and the manifest wish to be his own Foreign Minister made him stubborn in his attempts to shoulder a burden for which he sadly was in no way equal. The fact that he called his diplomats at the Foreign Office a bunch of swine more often than once did little to help things...

I, like Caprivi and Hohenlohe before me, never promulgated an edict on any political matter without Holstein’s putting in his oar or in some cases drawing up the documents with his own hand. But all these edicts involving foreign matters were then modified by the Emperor’s interference. His direct telegraphs in cipher and his private letters to the other sovereigns, brusque marginalia and commands on the reports from the Ambassadors and Ministers...the list was endless, and the Foreign Office was constantly ill at ease. Neither me, Holstein or Richthofen could pursue independent action, for the Imperial interventions always loomed above our work, ready to strike in at random and remodel and frustrate our efforts before it received official countenance.

Excerpt from the memoirs of Chancellor Eulenburg.

When Chancellor Eulenburg took office in the beginning of the century, he placed great confidence and trust in Richthofen, the new Foreign Minister of German Empire. He had chosen von Richthofen among the potential senior diplomats because Baron Richthofen was a clever, capable, completely reliable and amiable personality. He also knew that von Richthofen was a man who could be trusted not conduct German foreign policy according to his own precepts.

Eulenburg was always most courteous to Baron von Richthofen: “Not only will I always allow you to speak freely, but I expressly ask you always to tell me your view without reserve. Rest assured that I not only never misunderstand sincerity [Aufrichtigkeit], but I place this above all other qualities”, he told to von Richthofen when he took office. Richthofen gradually became one of the closest advisers of Eulenburg, since the Chancellor left the brunt of the routine paperwork to Richthofen. Richthofen dealt with his lot without qualms. His traditional Prussian bureaucratic mindset made him so “colourless and uninspiring” that he was barely tolerable for Wilhelm II, who had to be persuaded hard by Eulenburg to accept von Richthofen to the office in 1900.

For his part, von Richthofen had to accept that his new role had great responsibilities, but little practical power. Eulenburg, an old fox in the German diplomatic circles, had made it clear from the outset that von Richthofen would have to play a second fiddle to the Chancellor, who was also now automatically the Foreign Minister of Prussia. Richthofen soon found out that he was in fact not only one, but two steps down in the pecking order of Wilhelmine court: He had to confirm his every move from Eulenburg, who in turn had to abide by the whims of the erratic Kaiser.

And then there was Holstein. Since Holstein and Richthofen were not on speaking terms, Eulenburg had to placate the old Geheimrat to accept the new Foreign Secretary by offering Holstein the post of State Secretary: both of them new that the recluse Holstein would never accept the position, but the offer appeared to his vanity.

After the former Director of the Foreign Office Trade Department and a protégé of Holstein, Otto von Mühlberg, was assigned as the new Under State Secretary, Holstein was pleased and a sort of peace returned to Wilhelmstrasse. But the cost was ineffectiveness of the entire Auswärtiges Amt, as the Political Division turned into a stage of petty jealousies, disputes and endless intrigue, with Holstein himself playing a central role.

He and the other ambitious diplomats never accepted the control of Chancellor Eulenburg with his subtle, suave personality, sweet-talking manners and scintillating mind. In his correspondence with the other top diplomats of German Foreign Office, Holstein resented both the Kaiser and his Chancellor, but he and the other diplomats could do little to change the way the German foreign policy was led. After all, the All-Highest held the power to do unto them the same he had done to Bismarck, and Wilhelm II expected “his diplomats” to align their views to his own in every detail.

And so things muddled along until the Abdication Crisis. Eulenburg did what he could to affect the little things, but the major lines of German politics set by Wilhelm II remained firmly in place: the naval arms race with Britain, adventurism in China, Ottoman Empire, Africa, the Pacific region and Central America. The increased unease felt towards the growing strength of the Franco-Russian alliance and the vague desire to conduct Weltpolitik - whatever that meant - led to constant stream of incidents where only the diplomatic skill of Eulenburg and the cooperation between him, Richthofen and Holstein had managed to avert and limit the worst disasters. Together with Count Posadowsky-Wehner, von Richthofen remained a close confidant of Chancellor Eulenburg through his term[1], as the Dissolution War in Scandinavia and the turmoil in the Balkans focused German foreign policy back to Europe after 1905.

The stress of the job was considerable, but von Richthofen was still around to see Holstein go. That was a short-lived joy, for the expanding scandal and the fact that the German yellow press unfairly linked him to the Liebenberg Circle proved to be too much for his failing health. A day after hearing the news of the abdication of Wilhelm II, Baron von Richthofen fainted to his desk, clasping his chest in pain. [2]


1. in OTL Bülow used von Richthofen in a similar way, and Eulenburg also prefers to keep the nominal leader of German diplomacy close at hand.
2. Unlike Bülow, von Eulenburg does not burden von Richthofen with as much extra work and complete disregard of scheduled appointment times. In addition von Richthofen sees a different doctor than in OTL after assuming office, and upon his instructions he picks up a habit of longer daily walks, cuts back on beer and tobacco and goes to regular vacation trips to Marienbad. Thus he does not unexpectedly die to a cardiac arrest in January 1906 as described here, but lingers on for two extra years.

 

[Karelian]

The coronation ceremony of Wilhelm III felt more like a funeral, and was a stark contrast to the sunny wedding of the royal couple just three years earlier.

When he returned from his political exile to extinguish the flames of the Abdication Crisis and to serve the young man who had been dazed to realize that he really was the new Emperor of Germany and King of Prussia, Chancellor Posadowsky-Wehner held true to the political maxim that one should never let a good crisis to go to waste. He knew that speed was essential, and utilized the fact that the Conservatives were in complete disarray because of the abdication. Securing a new majority in the Reichstag with one stroke by getting the conservative wing of Zentrum on board with von Hertling as his new Vice-Chancellor, he made himself indispensable for both to the young Kaiser and to the Conservative Junkers, who were afraid that the radical wing of Zentrum might join forces with the dreaded SPD if left unchecked. This step to mend fences with the slighted South Germans was quickly followed with the new revised libel law (Lex Eulenburg).

As the Eulenburg Scandal faded away from the headlines and the new Kaiser went to a charm tour accross Germany, the Conservatives regained their footing. They organized a bitter opposition to the suffrage law revision and especially the tax reforms plans, which required Posadowsky to use every last favour and backroom horse-trading deal to wiggle out the minimum working majority to pass it. By then the worst of the storm had passed, and while the criticism from socialist and liberal press still kept coming in, it was already muted by the new legislation and no longer attracted large crowds to public demonstrations.

By then the Chancellor and the new Kaiser had also found some common ground. Spirited in from the middle of his studies and without any real experience from the affairs of state (much to his own dismay, the Crown Prince had been allowed to get the first brief tours at bureaus of the Lord Lieutenant at Potsdam, the Home Office, Admiralty and the Exchequer only in October 1907), the young Emperor had been initially besieged by angry older German monarchs who had taken advantage of his confusion and the sense of urgency to promote their own causes. Getting Wilhelm III to personally attend to the sessions of the Bundesrat regularly was enough to get them back in line, whereas the re-establishment of Landesverteidigunsgkomission had a lot to do with von Tirpitz, who wanted to have another seat on the table near the young Kaiser.[1]

Some other changes emanated from the person of the new Kaiser himself.
Oberhof- und Hausmarschall Count August Eulenburg had dodged many bullets in his life, and even during the crisis that rocked the court and empire the core he never became a target of public criticism, proving that he had not been called “the most intelligent man in Berlin” by von Bismarck himself for nothing.

He had experience and tact, and despite his conservative views he was flexible enough to pick his battles carefully. For decades he had focused solely on promoting the agrarian Conservative Junker policies discreetly and subtly from the background. He had abstained from using his influential position to shut Wilhelm II off from outside influences or to topple personal enemies, opting to remain neutral in petty politics and court intrigue.

Now his disgraced cousin had made his family name an anathema, but he could take solace from the fact that he had (in vain) tried to warn the former Kaiser about the looming threat well in advance, but failing that, he had reluctantly embraced the candidature of Philip von Eulenburg. August had used his own influence to promote the careers of two men, and them alone: he and his brother Botho. For everyone else he had always formulated a backup plane. At the same time he had accepted the idea that his cousin would become the new Chancellor instead of his brother, he had stored documents proving his far-sighted warnings to the Emperor. He leaked them to the conservative press to limit the damage caused to the House of Eulenburg at the height of the crisis, turning his part in the story to a role of a wise but, tragically ignored loyal advisor.[2]

After he had met the future Kaiser and gone to great lengths to stop all plans of a Prussian electoral reform, he had found Wilhelm III unaffected by his reasoning. From this he drew his own conclusions. While he had avoided the fate of his cousin, his central role in the court made him part of the world of his father - a place the new Emperor found dusty and dull. His departure from the court was more or less a willing self-exile of a loyal servant of Wilhelm II.

Letting him go was also a convenient way for the young Wilhelm to re-arrange the court a bit more. The three "Hallelujah-Aunts", Gräfin von Brockdorff, Gräfin von Keller and von Gersdorff were all devoted servants of the Kaiser's mother, Augusta Viktoria, and permanent fixtures in court. His father had found them tiresome and annoying, but had been powerless to get rid of them because the Empress had insisted to keep them around. They had enforced their narrow conservatism to the royal entourage during the whole childhood of Wilhelm, and the young Kaiser hated their guts. Thus only his mother was shocked when the new Emperor almost immediately expressed his loyal wish that his beloved mother would have to take some familiar faces along with her and make sure that her husband, Wilhelm II, would feel at home in his new residence, Achilleion, at Corfu.

After all, the young emperor reasoned, they both knew how much their poor father liked familiarity and repetition. Deep down both of them knew how Achilleion had been like. Every trip had been the same. Same guests, same activities. To relieve the shock and stress caused by the recent events as much as possible, Corfu simply required the constant presence of Auguste Victoria, Princess Viktoria-Luise, Prince August Wilhelm, the two most trusted adjutants and Wilhelm’s doctor.[3] It was for the best of Germany and dear Papa, after all.


1. The Daily Telegraph affair saw the other German monarchs to express hopes for such an arrangement, while von Tirpitz wanted closer cooperation between the various branches of the German military and government in OTL.
2. As per OTL.
3. This was the core of the OTL list of people who accompanied Wilhelm II to Achilleion. He loved endless repetition, while the other guests stuck to the island with him found the Groundhog Day life in the palace "tedious and horrible."

 

[Karelian]

I knew King Edward from my earliest youth and had ample opportunity to talk with him on past and present affairs almost up to his death. This Serene, world-experienced man was, as long as I can remember, extremely friendly to me, and as I have said before, he took a most active interest in my development. My great-uncle always seemed to feel a sort of responsibility for my welfare. Often we sat talking for hours in the most unconstrained fashion while he lay back in a great easy chair and smoked an enormous cigar. At such times, he narrated many interesting things, often out of his own life...

He was a brilliant upholder of his country’s interest, and a one who, I am convinced, would rather have secured these interests in cooperation with Germany than in opposition to her, but who, finding the former way barred, turned with all his energies to the one thing possible and needful, namely, the assurance of that security per se...

Undoubtedly a remarkable personality endowed with vast experience, great wisdom and practicality, Edward VII repeatedly expressed his anxiety lest the economic competition of Germany would some day lead to collision with Britain. Remembering that England’s forces had always been employed against that Continental Power which at any given moment happened to be the strongest, it seemed inevitable that sooner or later the German Empire would become involved in a war unless the opposition would be removed...

Personally, I considered it desirable to strive for an understanding with England on economic, economic-political and colonial questions. I did not entertain any illusions as to the difficulty of such an undertaking. I was quite aware that any such effort presupposed a thorough discussion both on the naval programme and of economic matters. The object appeared to me well worth the sacrifice, for the relaxation of the political tension would have secured peace and provided us with advantages amply compensating for the concessions indicated. When I pointed this out to Chancellor Eulenburg, he replied to me, smiling sadly, that just like Bismarck he was quite willing to love the English, but they refused to be loved...[1]

Many an hour’s talk on this fascinating subject my great-uncle, King Edward, had lovingly instructed me concerning Britain’s political structure, in which I recognized many a feature of value to our younger development. That the ideas which had governed the first two decades of my father’s reign had been leading further and further from the lines along which the monarchy of Germany ought to develop, if that monarchy were to remain the firmly-established and organic consummation of the State’s structure. It was as though he clearly and consciously meant to call my attention to this danger point, in order to warn me and to win me to a different path at the threshold of my political career...[2]

In the early months, during the collective regency of all the federal princes, I was deeply moved by their oath-sworn loyalty to our House, when they offered me their advice and guidance in the interest of the Reich and in the name of their peoples, under clearly stated conditions. Prince Ludwig of Bavaria was their spokesman in the name of his father and of the grand dukes of Saxony and Württemberg. It was with him that we discussed the matter for the second time...

I made the incautious remark that in my opinion and with the view to a certainty of peace, it would be far and away the wisest thing for Germany and England, the two greatest Teutonic nations - the strongest land Power and the strongest sea Power - to co-operate; they could then, moreover (if it must be so), divide the world between them. “Yes, true, but England does not wish to divide with anybody -- not even with Germany.” I still recall the surprise and confusion I felt in that moment. The world of youth with its simple and clear solutions met the complex and harsh reality...[3]

Everyone told me again and again: Understanding was impossible, England would not have it, or if a basis were found, we should lose the whole affair... For me, a glance across the black-white-and-red frontier lines showed that all around us political feats quite different from our had been performed; but they had been performed by men who understood their profession and the signs of the times. The British Empire grew to great heights when it was guided by a dozen strong, clear-headed men who, misled by no sentiment, worked along the lines of a firmly-established tradition to accomplish the programme mapped out for England and England’s weal...

I persistently advocated, in view of the menacing situation, an augmentation of our military resources. Our own preparations were limited to the minimum of what was essential. In the face of all this and in sure and certain anticipation of this final settlement, it became the bounden duty of the German Empire to arm itself as thoroughly as possible and to demand a similar fighting-power from Austria, which country, under the influence of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the men selected by him, had become politically very active. The Archduke was putting out feelers and developing ideas which should enable him to see what he might except of me. This dangerously ambitious Archduke, who was prepared to act as anything but modest part and who was as clever as he was ruthless...

The feverish and unconcealed warlike preparations of the Russo-Frankish Entente were clearly directed against us and showed that they meant to be ready and then await the right watchword for a rupture. France exhausted her manpower and her finances in order to maintain a disproportionately large army. Russia, in return for French money, placed hundreds of thousands of peasants in somber earth-hued uniforms. Italy turned greedy eyes on Turkish Tripoli and built fortress after fortress along the frontiers of her deeply-hated Austrian ally. England watched this activity and launched ship after ship.

We had missed the opportunity of coming to a complete understanding with the well-intentioned Combes Cabinet in the early summer of 1905. In the meantime, the bitterness towards England caused by the Fashoda affront had begun to dissipate. The conditio sine qua non for any major agreement would be a sacrifice of at least a part of the Reichsland, a thing which we could not even discuss in times of peace. So, assuming it to be impossible to alter the antagonism with the French or to bridge the rift started during the Boer War with England, the only possible and profitable ally left for us in Europe was Russia...I received the impression that the Tsar was as friendly to Germany as ever, but that he was less able to put his friendliness into action. He was completely enmeshed by the Pan-Slav and Anti-German party of the Grand Duke Nicholai Nicholaievitch and powerless to oppose that prince, who quite openly displayed his hatred for Germany...

But how to loosen the Franco-Russian alliance to draw Russia into cooperation with ourselves? There seemed to be a prospect of succeeding, if we supported Russian wishes in regard to the Dardanelles and the Persian Gulf. Free passage was anything but an unapproachable idea to the Ottoman politicians, and opposition to such a solution was not found from Austria-Hungary either...

I was dismayed to discover that no energetic action or a well-defined Government programme existed to bring about to link our policy with Russia, or to bring about an understanding with England or France.[4] This short-term hand-to-mouth policy from the days of old that wished to offend nobody had nothing in common with the Bismarck tradition of clever and wide-spun conceptions...

1. replaced Bülow with Eulenburg, otherwise OTL quote.
2. Written in 1919, this is almost certainly a calculated remark rather than genuine feeling.
But aside of this the amount of praise he heaps upon the man who was in OTL viewed as the main architect of "encirlement of Germany" and whom his father hated like poison until the day he died is rather remarkable.
3. In OTL the Crown Prince states that Edward Grey made this remark to him during his visit to London. Part with regency is naturally added-up, but the remark and reply are from OTL memoirs.
4. France is added to the mix, rest of the quote is OTL.

 

[Karelian]

The Nordic Secession War of 1905 affected German domestic politics more than her foreign relations. The Björkö debacle, where Wilhelm II sought to utilize the conflict for his own grand foreign policy schemes instead of seeking to defuse the situation, was in many ways the watershed of erratic royal diplomacy of the Wilhelmine era.

Once a truce was called at the insistence of the joint demand of the Concert of Europe and Britain, Germany and Russia had started occupying ports in Norway, international tensions were running high. The weakness of Hochseeflotte in comparison to the Royal Navy was also now made obvious to all. Although Richthofen and Eulenburg were ultimately rather successful in pouring oil to the waves in the final negotiations for the North Sea Convention, the crisis left the German military elites concerned with the overall military situation of the Empire, as a major war in the continent now seemed more likely than ever.

The first session of the re-instituted Landesverteidigunsgkomission dealt with the current status and future of Germany from the perspective of military strategy. The young Kaiser was accompanied by Chancellor Posadowsky and War Minister Josias von Heeringen.

The military top brass present included Chief of Staff Hans Hartwig von Beseler, Chief of the Military Cabinet Colmar von der Goltz, Chief of the Naval Cabinet Georg Alexander von Müller, Head of the Reichsmarineamt Admiral von Tirpitz, and Chief of Staff of the Naval High Command, August von Heeringen - brother of the War Minister.

The first meeting was intended to act as a general briefing of the Emperor, and a presentation of the current status and strategic plans of the Army and Navy. This was also a useful pretext for the Chancellor to be present. Posadowsky was naturally curious: As it was, he had next to no idea what the German armed forces actually planned to do in a case of war!

The Army opened the meeting. As the bemused young Kaiser, his Chancellor and the top Navy brass listened, von Beseler started his representation by stating that the Großer Generalstab had two main war plans, one for each member of the most likely foe, the Franco-Russian Entente. The plan focusing against France had to deal with the narrow geography of the Franco-German border. As France had fortified her eastern border with Germany extensively, it was obvious that a purely frontal assault would lead to a laborious and costly struggle, trench warfare of indeterminate length, and yet to an uncertain conclusion. Hence the plans of venerable old von Moltke had called for a strong right wing conducting a deep sweep through Luxemburg and Belgium - a course of action von Beseler had found militarily sound approach in his own operational study as the Oberquartiermeister III, from January 1900.[1]

The enveloping wing would have to be as strong as possible from the very beginning. Since Meuse fortresses of Liège and Namur limited the operational deployment area to 80 to 90 kilometers, there was only room for maneuver for 10-11 corps. After testing variations of the plan in the staff ride of 1904[2], Beseler was unsatisfied with the results. The right wing advanced towards Trier and Aachen, and the left advanced between Metz and Strasbourg. The key battles were fought in the center, and the task of the right wing was to swing south - not west- to support the center and left by entering the battle on the frontiers from the French rear.

The conclusions of the war game were grim: The French fixed the left wing down by pushing forward from their own fortress line, while the right wing lacked strength to avoid getting stuck down to inconclusive frontal battles, since it was eight army corps short of requisite forces! Worse yet, these hypothetical missing troops would hardly have room to maneuver and supply themselves effectively even if they were available.

Von Beseler continued with the grim remark that it would be next to impossible to assemble majority of the German army to the Belgian-Luxembourg border in secrecy. The French high command could at once rearrange their posture to secure their northern flank. This was supported by a fresh study from his old III Department: it concluded that military intelligence and French military publications both pointed out that French had enough reserves to recover from “a Belgian hook” early enough to avoid a quick defeat.[3]

The operational draft of von Moltke had rested on several assumptions. Russian mobilization would have to be slow enough to give the German armies enough time to decisively defeat the French armies in a single short campaign. The German armies would have to be strong enough to do so in a single lightning-fast campaign. Now, von Beseler grimly pointed out, the plan was becoming more and more unfeasible by the day. The Russian railroad infrastructure had been expanding with an alarming rate, and most importantly the divisions needed for the Western offensive plan did not even exist to begin with.

Moreover, as Posadowsky felt compelled to point out, the plan was expressly hostile to Great Britain: it threatened a vital British interest and carried the risk of finally driving Britain from her aloof isolation into a definitive alliance with France. Both von Beseler and von der Goltz countered by stating that it was clearly obvious that in any war with France, Germany would almost certainly have to fight Britain as well, and thus any considerations for Belgian neutrality were moot to begin with. Posadowsky was not convinced, and pointed out that Britain had sat out the last time because von Bismarck and his diplomatic success. Here von der Goltz referred to his earlier work: Wars of the kings were over, as the fresh example from Scandinavia so aptly showed. There would no longer be short and victorious wars, period. Ultimately the general consensus of all generals present in the meeting was that a war with France could no longer be brought to a swift conclusion in a single campaign, no matter how desirable that was.

All such an all-out offensive could offer was a chance to seize areas vital for the French war effort, and offer Germany a better negotiation position. Now, assuming they still had to go to war, an offensive to enemy terrain was a classic approach straight from von Clausewitz. But if they invaded and the British Empire declared war as a result, and a quick victory was out of the question, what then? Everyone turned towards von Tirpitz and rest of the German naval delegation.

1. He did this work in OTL as well as a part of the preparations of his expected promotion.
2. Similar of the OTL war game of 1908 - von Beseler was fond of testing existing plans with war games beforehand.
3. OTL report from 1911, advanced by three years after the disappointing result of the 1904 wargame.

 

[Karelian]

The meeting turned from cordial discussion into a heated debate. Tirpitz had to admit that right now he could not promise decisive success in a decisive battle against the Royal Navy. In a case of war the German foreign trade would be blockaded, August von Heeringen stated, and there was little the Navy could do to change this considering the overall geography. The British had the luxury to either choose a distant blockade or go for an aggressive close blockade, whereas the German Navy lacked strength to challenge either posture.[1]

Von Beseler did not miss the chance for a sardonic remark. Since now was obviously a bad time, when exactly would the Navy be ready then? Just like Field Marshall von Waldersee had said already in 1898, the navy kept cultivating the notion that future wars would be decided at sea. But what exactly did the navy propose to do if the army suffered a defeat, be it in the West or in the East?

Here the two factions of German military found little room for compromise: Beseler wanted more divisions and revision of available funding, while Tirpitz would not give up with his idea that the Hochseeflotte would ultimately become an important deterrent against the threat of a British blockade - but when pressed on the exact timetable, the irritated old sea lion was unable to provide anything concrete.

Posadowsky was appalled.
Two days later the Chancellor invited von Beseler, von der Goltz, War Minister von Heeringen and the State Secretary of Finance Adolf Wehrmuth to meet him in private. Chancellor Posadowsky stated outright that the current war plans were a road to ruin and totally out of touch with the basic facts of Realpolitik.

The old agrarian made von Beseler an offer he could ill refuse: Firstly, he wanted an ally to wean the young Kaiser away from Tirpitz and the navalists, and promised more funding for the army in return. Secondly, since it was clear that Tirpitz could never deliver what he kept promising, antagonizing the British by invading Belgium would turn a war against France into a struggle against the very kind of nightmare coalition Bismarck had warned about.

There had to be an alternative course of action, and Posadowsky said that the Emperor wanted to see a concrete plan for it as soon as possible. Von der Goltz, an old warhorse and anglophobe Pan-German as he was, supported this notion - knowing fully well that the young Kaiser had no idea that this meeting was taking place. The old general was not against naval expansion per se, on the contrary, but he had for long advocated for expanded funding for the Army.[2]

War Minister von Heeringen was a loyal mandarin and supported the Clausewitzian idea of the primacy of the civilian government, while State Secretary of Finance Wehrmuth just wanted to get the rampart spending spree in check, merely remarking: “As the strength of the army is for us a matter of life and death, so is the fleet for England.”[3]

And thus the civilians and soldiers formed a temporary marriage of convenience. The preliminary drafts from von Beseler were ready after a month of work. It had two variants, for French aggression and Russian aggression each, with either one of the hostile powers initially in an undetermined political position. Both plans showed that they were devised by a military engineer and the former Inspector of Fortresses: they called for strong fortress lines at the western and eastern border of Germany, and von Beseler openly stated that it would require a lot of new standing army formations and funding to turn the drafts into a viable strategic options.

Posadowsky realized that this was finally it: Germany was facing a strategic choice she had postponed for far too long.
For the previous decade Tirpitz had bypassed the tangled mess of conflicting Reichstag interests by using extra-parliamentary lobby groups of his own to influence the parties from the outside. Zentrum deputies had helped him to pass the first two Navy Laws, but already before his downfall Chancellor Eulenburg had found it harder and harder to sustain the alliance of moderate agrarians and industrialists who had so far allowed Wilhelm II and Tirpitz to continue the grandiose naval plans.

His predecessors had merely kept kicking the can down the road. Posadowsky no longer had neither the necessary tax funds or Reichstag votes for such luxury. Germany could no longer afford to maintain a strong standing army, invest in the unprofitable colonies, and constantly expand the naval budget, especially since the populist wing of Zentrum led by Matthias Erzberger was now openly critical to the naval policy of Tirpitz. Something had to change, since there simply wasn’t enough funding to keep all grandiose plans of Wilhelm II up and running anymore.

Posadowsky presented this state of affairs to Wilhelm III in a most courteous manner. He was friendly, but firm, and had a simple message: Further naval laws were no longer a realistic possibility. He requested from the new All-Highest that in order to save what might still be saved from the noble legacy of His Majesty Wilhelm II, the Foreign Office should be given a chance to at least try to negotiate some sort of a face-saving naval détente with Britain.

For his part, Wilhelm III never found it odd that the Chief of Staff, Chief of the Military Cabinet, Finance Minister, Foreign Minister and Chancellor all advocated roughly similar courses of action when he asked for their opinion during the following days. Had he not always loved the Army more than the Navy after all, and wanted to try to find at least some common ground with Britain, if possible?

Tirpitz, for his part, was not so easily fooled. He knew that the son was unlike his father, and realized that the way the Navy received almost half of the total defense expenditures of Germany was not a state of affairs that could be justified easily with the new monarch.

Even though he never admitted it frankly and openly, his blueprint for Weltpolitik had failed the moment HMS Dreadnought had been launched. Existing locks and docks in the major German naval bases required extensive rework to handle the increases in displacement, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Kanal had to be both widened and deepened: in total the changes in technology increased the costs of up-to-date battleships by 96% and battlecruisers by 107%!

His staff had made calculations that kept Tirpitz awake at night. Naval estimates of 347 million for 1908 would have to rise to at least 434 million GM by 1910 to maintain the planned expansion rate (that would most likely not be enough to keep up with the Royal Navy), and the Reich Treasury would have to raise 1 000 million GM in new indirect taxation for Germany to continue the dreadnought race.

And no matter how Tirpitz tried to spin these numbers, he remarked to his staff in private that the cost of individual ships “had reached impossible heights for Reich finances and will continue to do so.”[4] To make matters even worse, the German shipyards were simply not up to the task of challenging their British counterparts. Competition schedules were constantly delayed, and the major shipyards were hard-pressed to keep up in the international competition for civilian vessels.

The humiliating experience of 1905 when the British naval forces descended to the Baltic and North Sea coast in an open display of prowess of the Royal Navy had driven the point home for most of the German elite. The old fear - “Der Fischer kommt” had turned to reality. It was one thing to read about the British naval power and look at statistics, and quite another to actually see their battleships at sea all along the coasts of Germany.

With the prospect of a new naval law being particularly nil considering the views of the new Chancellor, mood in the Reichstag and the country at large and the ambivalence of the young Emperor, Tirpitz surprised Wilhelm III when he was summoned to discuss "vital questions of naval strategy." He started by stating that he, too, supported a greatly expanded army bill. This did little to warm Wilhelm III to the still adamant view of the Admiral regarding the vital necessity of continued naval construction, but further improved his personal view of Tirpitz in the eyes of the young Emperor.

But it was not enough. Vultures had already began to descent. Chief of the Naval Cabinet, von Müller, now advocated the view that the delay of the 1908 naval funding had already given the Royal Navy too much of a head-start, and ruined German prospects of a prolonged naval arms race. Admiral Henning von Holtzendorff wrote a widely-discussed article to Die Flotte, the Navy League monthly, publicly hoping that the Navy would focus on readiness issues - for what good were new ships without trained crews? Tirpitz had made sure that he held all the reins during the time of Wilhelm II, and had used his elbows to make sure he remained the top dog in German naval strategy. Now he found himself surrounded by greedy competitors who showed scant mercy.

The Treasury was desperate to cut expenses, Posadowsky wanted to placate his Agrarian supporters by focusing on the Army, and hoped against hope that he could turn necessity into virtue by still seeking some kind of a deal with Britain. When met with an alliance of dissident admirals, vengeful generals and thrifty politicians surrounding the inexperienced and ambivalent young Emperor, Tirpitz offered his resignation.

But Wilhelm III would not have it. He greatly valued Tirpitz as an individual, as he explained to the downtrodden navalist, and added that he was certain that He and Germany would yet need the good services of Admiral in the future. He insisted that Tirpitz remained in office, as the Emperor wanted him to remain in the Landesverteidigunsgkomission.[5]
1. OTL assessment, which was historically kept a secret from the Army and politicians.
2. Colmar von der Goltz met the Crown Prince in Eastern Prussia during his tenure as commander of the I Corps both in TTL and OTL, and was posted to Berlin the same time when the Crown Prince started his studies there in 1907. His hardliner Pan-German views closely match those of the Crown Prince, who adores people who dare to say what they think. Hence he became the new Chief of the Military Cabinet after the death of Hülsen-Haeseler. The OTL replacement, Moritz von Lyncker was the officer in charge of the education of the Crown Prince, and his memoirs make it clear that he would have never assigned his former tutor to such a post.
3. OTL quote.
4. All figures are from OTL, and Tirpitz really said this to his staff.
5. Crown Prince Wilhelm greatly liked Tirpitz because of his middle-class background and professional mindset, even though he was never the navalist his father was.

 

[Karelian]

Born in London 1836, Joseph Chamberlain was a son of a shoemaker, just like his father and his father before him, whereas his mother’s side had history as brewers and wholesale merchants.

Taken away from his studies to learn the trade of his father at the age of sixteen, he had to abandon his hopes for university education. He earned his spurs as a partner of Nettlefold and Chamberlain, a screw-making firm that Joe helped to rise into one of the most successful industrial enterprises of Birmingham, dominating the market through mass production. From one of the largest employers there was but a short step to politics, and to the position of major. Improving the water supply, reforming education and other social reforms as well as clearing slums, he started a political reign that lasted for over thirty years.

Lacking family connections or inherited income to sustain his political career, he relied heavily on his “Birmingham caucus”. Acting as an uncrowned king of the city, he created a distinct style for himself. He dressed impeccably, had a large golden monocle on a black ribbon. He had a staff of twenty-five people attending his twenty-four greenhouses full of orchids and other flowers, so that he could always have a fresh boutonnière for every occasion.

A vehement Radical in his early career, he denounced plutocrats and aristocrats alike. But fiery oratory and orchids, monocles and taste for expensive port were not enough to make Salisbury and Balfour forget that Joe was still a middle-class manufacturer, a self-made man whose career owed everything to screws. Joe was a new tycoon, always in a hurry, ruthless and intense in the pursuit of his political goals. “Joe, though we all love him, does not absolutely and completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us. Why? I cannot tell, but so I think it is.”

This background always showed in his politics. Joe Chamberlain approached the government as he did business: redundant parts had to be discarded so that the enterprise could focus on more productive areas. In the case of British politics, this meant taking the political system away from its landed aristocratic origins and towards a mechanism that would recognize the interests of the middle-class and industry and alleviate popular grievances that bridged social divisions and avoided class issues: welfare, defence of the nation, the Empire and the union with Ireland. Uneducated, excessive, ill-informed and unbridled democracy had to be avoided, and the people had to be managed. This political instinct led him to break with Gladstone and head for the wilderness in the Home Rule issue, leading to the creation of the Liberal Unionists.

When Salisbury had offered him any job he liked in his first government, he had assumed that as a businessman Chamberlain would have wanted to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer. And while he allowed him to take up the Colonial Office instead, he initially believed that Chamberlain’s interest in the colonies would be “entirely theoretical.” He would soon regret his decision. Chamberlain had turned into a hawkish imperialist, who dragged Britain to a bitter war with the Boer republics in Southern Africa.

Afterwards, when Salisbury offered his resignation, worn-out and ill and harrowed by accusations of nepotism, Chamberlain made his move. Salisbury had advised the lame and tormented King Edward to send for A.J. Balfour as his successor. The leader of Conservatives in the Commons for eleven years and First Lord of the Treasury for eight years, he seemed like an obvious candidate. But Balfour wanted to consult Chamberlain first. Always looking for consensus and lacking firm conviction to the post, he wanted to find compromise solutions rather than push his own agenda stubbornly. Chamberlain was the man the masses knew, best-known figure in the new Government, the one who made the weather. When he confronted Chamberlain, full of worry about the future of China, pressed on with characteristic vigour. Balfour, always the philosopher, opted to give him a chance to implement his ideas as the new Prime Minister. Like Salisbury before him, he would later on regret his decision.

 

[Karelian]

“Joe’s mandate” was gained in the general elections of September 1900 by donning khaki and waving the Union Jack in a most blatant manner ("Every seat won by the Liberals is a seat won by the Boers!"), cashing in on war popularity.

While patriotic fervour dominated in the country, a growing minority opinion in the country opposed the war. A a 38-year-old Liberal radical MP called David Lloyd George made himself known by his anti-war attitude, blaming the gold mines of Rand as the primary reason of "this commercial war for profit and predatory capitalism." He and his family paid dearly by his political views. His son was hazed and bullied out of school. His wife had to suffer insults and sneers by strangers and friends alike in London. But he kept on. Finally, as the mood in the country was riled up and antiwar meetings often turned into mass brawls between "jingoists and pro-Boers", he made a fateful decision.

He accepted an invitation to come to speak to the Birmingham Town Hall. For him to take his opposition to the Boer War to Birmingham was to attack one of the architects of Britain’s colonial policy – Joseph Chamberlain – right on his own doorstep.

When the skilled Welsh orator was just getting warmed up with his characteristically trenchant pro-Boer, anti-war speech at Birmingham Town Hall, things quickly escalated out of control. Stained glass rained down from the upper stores of the neoclassical building, as stones and bottles begun to whirl in the air. A crowd numbering tens of thousands had surrounded the building, and now attacked the doors with a battering ram. Within minutes the demonstrators broke in, attacking everyone inside in frenzy, chanting pro-war slogans: "Traitor! Traitor! Bloody traitor! Pro-Boer! Kill 'im! Kill the bloody traitor!"

The crowd surged forward, and the small army of policemen guarding Lloyd George rallied to the corner of the hall and hacked away with their batons in a desperate last stand. The resourceful chief constable Charles Rafter kept his calm in the middle of this chaos. He ran to fetch the nearest officer who could hand over his coat and helmet. But just when Constable Rafter turned around to rush Lloyd George to the backdoor exit, a brick hurled from the outside landed down almost directly from above. Lloyd George fell like a wether struck by a butcher's hammer, and when Rafter and another Constable managed to dress him up and get him out of the scene, it was already obvious that he had suffered a severe head injury.[1] While he lived, Lloyd George was a stuttering ruin of a man, and his political career was effectively over.

It was a dark year for Britain. The Boer War continued, the Boxer troubleshad escalated into a new conflict in China. Previous January had already witnessed the tragic death of the daring young war journalist and the son of Lord Randolf Churchill, Winston, at the battle of Spion Kop[2]. The Birmingham Riot shocked the nation, but was only the latest article in a long list of bad news. Chamberlain himself was publicly outraged of "such provocation and mob rule", but privately the incident had only encouraged him to push for high office when Salisbury retired. Once there, he planned to win, and win big - both at abroad and at home. He had so much to do.

1. The riot really happened. In OTL the resourceful chief constable Charles Rafter hastily disguised Lloyd George as a policeman, and managed to escort him from the building using a back way at the last minute.
2. The bullet that in OTL "had come so close to his head that it severed the jaunty feather on his hat" flies a bit lower.

 

[Karelian]

Joe Chamberlain was open with his methods: he decided something first, and found reasons and methods afterwards. He was guided by default scepticism about established systems, foreign and domestic alike. This did not mean that he would not have employed his calculating intellect to adapt means to ends and manipulating practical details. He was good in spinning ideas he came across into arguments supporting any goal he was currently pursuing. What he lacked was the insight to think what the long-term policies of his short-term solutions might ultimately be. Whatever he did, he did with a passion. He was antagonistic and willful, and impressed von Eulenburg: “Quite the modern businessman: determined, hard-headed, unscrupulous, quick-on-the-draw but withal realistic." Lord Esher had a more critical view: "Chamberlain’s faults all come from his upbringing. Clever as he is, he has never learnt the self-restraint which everyone with his immense capacity learns at a great public school or a university.”

The ongoing Boer War had sucked up the revenues that might have enabled the government to actually finance the social welfare programs he had talked about in the beginning of his political career as the president of the Board of Trade in the second ministry of Gladstone: three acres and a cow for each agricultural labourer and compulsory purchase of land for artisans’s dwelling and compulsory free education. He had long believed that the survival of the existing economic order could only be achieved through sustained economic prosperity. And in a world of colonial expansion and imperial competition, prosperity could only be found from consolidating the imperial interests. More loosely held territories were to be placed under firm control, new areas in Africa were to be expanded into, and imperial resources were to be cultivated and managed by government-supported construction of railway networks, that would create demand for British coal, iron and rolling stock, as well as labour and materials.

The end result of such investments would certainly be creation of new markets that British trade would then sustain, providing funds for reforms back at home. At the start of his career he had publicly demanded that "the propertied classes" should take cognizance of their responsibilities and obligations to society. For the true economy lay in spending and investing in the homes, streets and schools of the working class. This would enhance the productivity of workers and build up prosperity while also “civilizing and beautifying towns and cities.”

“The Empire...is being attacked on all sides, in our isolation we must look to ourselves...We must draw closer our internal relations...If by adherence to old shibboleths, we are to lose opportunities of closer union...we shall deserve the disaster which will infallibly come upon us....The tremendous issue is whether the great Empire of ours is to stand together, one free nation, against all the world, or whether it is to fall apart...losing sight of the common weal, and losing also all the advantages which union alone can give...We know that we shall have to maintain against all comers that which we possess, and we know that, in spite of the jargon about isolation, we are competent to do so...We must not allow our Jingoes to drive us into quarrels with all the world at the same time, and we must not reject the idea of alliance with those powers whose interests most nearly approximate to our own.”

Soon after Joseph Chamberlain became the Colonial Secretary, he had a sudden idea that a combination of the British Empire, Germany and US should form “a new triple alliance between the Teutonic race and the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race.” Chamberlain faced a storm of criticism from abroad when he applied grandiose terms like “alliance” and “union” to the relations he’d like to see between Germany and the United States before any actual negotiations were even held. As Edward Grey remarked in 1899: “Joe’s speech about the German alliance (unless it was expressly dictated by the German Emperor, which I can’t believe) was disastrous. I never read anything which struck me as being more of a mess. He really must be kept out of foreign politics or he will make everything impossible, even friendship with America.”

In the informal Cabinet committee dealing with the growing Boxer troubles he left a memorandum, where Chamberlain once again found Germany a useful proxy for promoting British interests. As Britain and Germany shared the same interests in China and elsewhere, an Anglo-German compact would “guarantee our safety, by ensuring that Germany should throw herself across the path of Russia.” The principal problem for Joe Chamberlain in dealing with foreigners was that they for some unexplainable reason tended to consider international problems in light of their own interests and past experiences, as he was about to soon find out.

 

[Karelian]

Chamberlain did not bother to study the times when Lord Salisbury and Lord Gladstone had previously discussed and reviewed their relations with Berlin. Closer relationship with Germany was desirable “but can we get it”, that was the question increasingly doubtful Salisbury had pondered during his last days in office. The last time there had been official talks, Holstein had pressed for concessions outside Europe, to which Salisbury had replied that Berlin “wanted too much for their friendship." And since Lord Salisbury thought that no British government could bind Parliament or its successors, and lasting formal alliances were something that “went well beyond what a democratic state could honestly promise”, how could one count on long-term commitments of Britain?

The grey eminence of German diplomacy, von Holstein, had viewed things differently. “Hardly any general treaty with England is conceivable for Germany that would not involve us in almost certain danger of war. And Germany could only exact compensation comparable to the immense risks she was running if Britain had a more accurate, that is, modest opinion of her performance.” And as long this discrepancy in the assessment of the respective strength of both Powers remained in place, agreements remained hard to reach, and cooperation was bound to be difficult and sporadic at best.

The early discussions with Germans in 1901 frustrated Chamberlain. After he had said openly in public that in his view that Britain needed Germany before even entering official negotiations, Chancellor Eulenburg soon had to inform him that at the moment Germany (read, Wilhelm II and Holstein) felt that Germany could do perfectly well without England. Chamberlain had thought that China was important enough to Germany for British help there to be worth the risk of antagonizing Russia in Europe, but had paid no heed to the fact that Britain would be unable to offer effective assistance in a short war.



Kaiser Wilhelm II was quick to point this out to his Military Cabinet:
“The good Chamberlain must not forget that in East Prussia I have three Russian armies and nine cavalry divisions standing opposite to one Prussian army corps, with no Chinese Wall to keep them apart and no British battleships to help in holding them off."

The round of talks culminated when Chamberlain declared during a speech defending the Boer War in Edinburgh that if the British had in fact occasionally "acted forcefully against the enemy", there were many precedents in the military annals of various continental powers, including the conduct of German troops in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Since the anti-British mood ran high in the Continent, such comparisons to war that had been elevated to mythical status in German nationalist, such commentary was political dynamite, and the German yellow press was soon up in arms. Despite great resentment in Berlin, Chancellor Eulenburg followed the advice of Holstein and other Foreign Office dignitaries and allowed the furor to die down. But as the negotiations had so far led to little else than a media row over the Chamberlain Boer War speech, Chancellor Eulenburg could do little to curtail the wider anti-British sentiment of the German nationalist press. Chamberlain, vain as he was, took insult from the German press smear campaigns, and cooled to the idea of a treaty with Germany. He had hardly realized how large the differences in the point of views of London and Berlin had been.[1]

“It is impossible to fight the battle of Germany in this Country at the present - she is more unpopular than France!”

The two royal families were on bad terms, the growing German economy was worrying British leaders and voters alike, and the naval arms race was a popular rallying cry for mutual hostility in both countries. As the interests for further cooperation with Germany dwindled, Foreign Secretary Lansdowne preferred to keep in touch and in cordial terms with the German government, choosing to ignore the fact that a year later the Kaiser had commented his work in the Anglo-Japanese treaty to the British Ambassador Lascelles by stating that “The noodles seem to have had a lucid interval.”

Chamberlain cooled to his early eagerness to do business with Germany. He still thought that in the future it would be sufficient to arrange piecemeal settlements with Germany on colonial differences - but this approach was rebuked by Ambassador Metternich, who followed the line set by Holstein - Germany would accept either an actuall alliance or nothing at all. Wilhelm II echoed this view, and told the British ambassador that the country whose alliance was being sought might demand a high price for it.

To this Chamberlain replied that the Frenchmen had a proverb about le bonheur qui passe. Skipping the topic of a general alliance as unattainable, Chamberlain gained an agreement in the Cabinet that the best way to proceed would be the repetition of the Samoan dialogue, and settling each issue separately.

Wilhelm II, however, told the British military attaché that “Chamberlain should be taken to South Africa, marched across the continent and then shot. A firing party is what he wants.”
He promptly wrote to his uncle, letting King Edward VII know how profound his irritation was. “A conglomeration of bluff, overbearing and secret insult. It was a most unlucky thing to do, and if he does not stop these elucubrations...one fine day he will wake up to see his country in the greatest of muddles ever yet seen...The press is awful on both sides, but here it has nothing to say, for I am the sole arbiter and master of German foreign policy, and the government and country must follow me even if I have to face the music. May your government never forget this and never place me in the jeopardy to have to choose a course which could be a misfortune to both them and us.”Despite this He was naturally full of goodwill towards England, in spite of all the obstructions and idiocies that London had continuously put in his path. Weltpolitik was the destiny of Germany, but it ought to be carried out with England’s cooperation. He was not quantite négligeable, for He alone was the architect of German diplomacy.

1: In OTL Bülow used the gaffe to gain Reichstag votes for the First Naval Law, and Chamberlain never forgot the way the German Chancellor insulted him in a Reichstag speech. Here von Eulenburg is more cordial, but the press smear campaign still deeply insults Chamberlain.

 

[Karelian]

After succeeding Salisbury in autumn 1900, Lord Lansdowne held the post during the eventful first five years of the century. An old Etonian who had also studied at Balliol, Lansdowne had risen to a position of eminence despite his early age, becoming the governor-general of Canada at 38 and a Viceroy of India at 43. Because his extensive holdings in Ireland oriented him to the Conservative Party, Salisbury had put his administrative experience to good use. “I shouldn’t call him clever, he was better than competent”, as Arthur Balfour described his limited, but flexible approach. He had undoubted industry, shrewdness and capacity for understanding complex international situations. Willing to compromise, accept advice and suffer temporary setbacks and defeats without losing his balance, he was an excellent negotiator. His lack of brilliance was in fact often an advantage when he sought motus vivendi with the other Great Powers of the day.

Extensive prior experience of international and colonial problems had led him to believe that foreign policy should be consistent, “lifted out of party politics and placed on a different plane.” Naturally a small élite of landed aristocracy was best qualified to safeguard this secretive world of diplomacy and national defence. Chamberlain reserved the posts of foreign and defence opposition speakers to a small inner circle of former ministers: out of 12, nine were peers or sons of peers, and eight were old Etonians.

Widely criticized for his administration of the War Office as the Secretary of War at the start of the Boer War, Lansdowne and his colleagues watched the postwar world with the firm conviction that traditional British isolationism was no longer feasible. To meet threats from some Great Powers they would have to seek agreements with others, to balance them against one another.

The end to the exploration of possibilities with Berlin in 1902 for the time being was not tragic to Chamberlain and Lansdowne, who were aware of the relative security of Britain. Both men understood the difficult geopolitical position Germany faced. Unlike Chamberlain, Lansdowne never saw the need to turn his back entirely to the possibility of an agreement. To make concessions where possible and signal strength as required by essential interests of Britain - for him, the old maxim remained tried and true.

He leaned heavily on the Permanent Under-Secretary Sanderson, one of the few old hands who could recall the mid-Victorian period and the one who had accompanied Lord Salisbury during most of his career. He alone remembered the obscure background and details of such vital international treaties as the Mediterranean agreements, and kept the original texts in his office.

In May 1901 Sanderson formulated the draft of the proposed Anglo-German defensive alliance for Chamberlain. He included a short note summarizing the difficulties of a project which he did not favour. On the German side Baron Eckardstein and the ailing German ambassador Count Hatzfeldt were fighting a diplomatic duel that further complicated matters. But Sanderson was not without sympathy: “Germany is a young power, striving for recognition as a world influence. It was inevitable that she should emulate the British and have colonial aspirations. It was unfortunate that everywhere Germany wished to expand, she will find the British lion in her path.” He remarked that despite this a policy of one-sided concession was foolish and impossible. Britain had so far been more tolerant towards German colonial aspirations, because they had been considered less threatening than those of France or Russia.

But the Germans had mistook the British attitude as a sign of weakness rather than of strength. Regardless of their folly, the German sensitivities should still be respected, and her expansion not checked where it did not clash with major British interests. As a man of an era when there were still large areas in which to manoeuvre, Sanderson still recalled the times when colonial disputes still determined the relations of the Great Powers.

Having observed the cyclical movement of the state system for more than four decades, he appeared far more unsettled by the perceived weakness of the Central Powers, particularly Germany, than by their supposed bid for world dominance and aggression. For Lansdowne and Sanders, the ebb and flow of the Anglo-German relations and even the erratic Kaiser were not particularly remarkable. Holstein and Eulenburg were neither to be taken too seriously, nor was a war between the two countries deemed inevitable. Repeatedly they sought to imagine themselves in the position of their colleagues in Berlin. Balfour commented that Germany repeatedly seemed to ignore good opportunities to realize the hegemonial plans that Berlin was accused of harbouring.

For his side, Lansdowne saw the world where heavily armed Great Powers formed and reformed combinations with and against each other with the utmost rapidity. He sought to avoid the conflict that might arise for Britain as a result. What others called muddling through with ad hoc diplomacy was a conscious policy that gave Britain room to maneuver, provided flexibility, and sought to stabilize the state's system by keeping it in flux. For if separation of Empire and the continent were abandoned, especially in dealings with Russia, colonial tensions would automatically be reflected back to Europe, where they risked intensifying into existential crises. British diplomacy had be conducted with a clear vision and subtle tact to avoid such calamities.

Lansdowne was willing to pay a good price for better relations with other countries, as he found the isolation of Britain alarming, and was anxious to reduce imperial commitments in the far corners of the globe. Convinced that Britain was suffering from imperial overreach, he sought to reduce British exposure to risk, at the very least seeking to lower the intensity and scope of such conflicts as might inevitably occur. He sought continental friends, not foes. To this end, he downplayed both perceived and actual dangers.

 

[Karelian]

Fears of Russian advance in Central Asia and Far East during the Boxer War kept Lansdowne busy. For military and economic reasons, Britain wanted to limit Russian involvement in China, the big prize for all the imperial powers and an area where they all had repeatedly sought to slow or block one another. Additionally, the traditional British naval superiority was under threat as France and Russia expanded their naval presence in the region. Russia was thus both a global and imperial problem because of the Great Game, the old Asiatic antagonism with Britain. Britain considered three policies to deal with the problems of China, but met only limited success in the goal protecting British interests. Attempts to negotiate an understanding with Russia had failed in 1898, followed by two frustrated attempts to strike a bargain with Germany in 1898 under Salisbury and again in 1901 with Joe Chamberlain.

Afterwards Lansdowne tried again to seek a deal with Russia, but both attempts in 1901 and 1902 were fruitless. Following plans of Joe Chamberlain to check the Russians by luring Germany into the Far East met meager results, even though Landsdowne managed to get something out of the Yangtze protocol, and made sure to keep the line to Berlin open. Failing to strike a bargain with Russia or Germany, Lansdowne then led Britain to an Anglo-Japanese alliance, removing the threat of a Russo-Japanese bargain at the expense of Britain, allowing the Royal Navy to move ships away from the China Station. Lansdowne urged his hearers at the House debate not to be prejudiced in considering the Japanese alliance by any musty formulas of old-fashioned superstitions as the desirability of pursuing a policy of isolation: “The question was whether Britain should allow Japan to be wiped out by France and Russia in certain given circumstances: if the answer is “no”, may we not as well tell her so beforehand and get what we can out of the bargain?”

Restraint was also a major British motivation for the treaty. A Japan feeling more secure would be less likely to start local conflicts that might force Britain into a war with Russia, or worse yet, with Russia and France. “British officials had been largely influenced in their decision to enter into this important contract by the conviction that it contains no provisions which can be regarded as an indication of aggressive or self-seeking tendencies in the regions to which it applies. It has been concluded purely as a measure of precaution.” After the treaty had been signed, British officials welcomed the Russo-Japanese understanding on Manchuria, seeing restraint of Japan as the primary mechanism for avoiding being drawn into a Russo-Japanese conflict.

Signing the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty and recognizing the exclusive rights of Washington to build a cross-oceanic canal to Panama. meant de facto acknowledgement of US supremacy in the Caribbean and Western Atlantic, solving yet another potential flashpoint with a Major Power. As he went down with his check list of international problems to be avoided and other Great Powers to be dealt with, Lansdowne started to focus to France, a major source of potential disputes that diverted available British resources to areas of secondary importance. He had good qualities for a diplomat determined to improve the Anglo-French relations after the Boer War, for Lansdowne had very close French connections. He was a descendant of great Talleyrand from his mother's side, spoke fluent French and had visited his French cousins in the continent often in his youth. As he prepared to start negotiations with the French representatives, he was about to discover that main players of British foreign policy were far from united in their vision of the preferred outcome - and that the same applied to the French side as well.

 

[Karelian]

After Fachoda, the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé was infuriated about the fact that France lacked strength to evict the British from the Nile valley. He had to swallow his pride and accept the Anglo-Egyptian condominium in Sudan as well, and in return he secured British acceptance to the French imperial expansion to North-Western Africa. Fachoda was as great a humiliation to the French as any in the history of the Third Republic, and the fact that it took place in the middle of the Dreyfus Affair just fanned the flames of xenophobia in general. For Delcassé himself, it was a personal insult.

In the following years he did pretty much the same thing as Lansdowne did in the northern shores of the Channel - he revisited long-standing disputes and problems of French foreign policy, and sought to deal and solve them in the light of the nervous and unstable political climate of the new century. For continental security, he strengthened the cornerstone of French escape from the Bismarckian isolation, the alliance with Russia.

Now officially aimed "to cover the maintenance of the balance of power in Europe" instead of merely balancing the Triple Alliance, the supplementary military agreements of 1900 included joint anti-British measures. French funding was channeled to speed up the construction of a railway to Tashkent from Orenburg. In a case of war between France and Britain, Russia would be able to move troops to the borders of the Indian frontier. In a case of war between Russia and Britain, France would in return prepare to mass 100 000 men to the Channel coast.

For colonial matters, Delcassé privately hoped for a rapprochement with Britain, but had to take the public opinion into account. The French nationalist circles remained unfriendly towards perfidious Albion. To the French public and Delcassé himself, Great Britain and Germany alike were inveterate enemies of France. As the older of the Gambon brothers summarized the public views:

“The nationalist, militarist and anti-Semitic tendency springs from Parisian lower-middle class of radical origins, but above all, of rebellious tradition, whose lack of political experience leads it to manifest against all and every government. It is traditionally xenophobic and anti-Semite because of its hatred against capital. It has been reinforced during the Dreyfus affair by its absorption of the remains of the old loyalist and Catholic parties."

Nationalist sentiment was indeed markedly strong among the clerks and students of Paris and other large towns, but the peasants and workers by and large ignored these issues. The sporadic mood of the French press, and the keenly felt vicious tone it often used when dealing with public figures such as King Edward VII maintained the mutual distrust and hostility between Paris and London, since press wars sold well.

In general the public resentment to the Boer War had ran so high in 1899 that even an understanding with Germany had seemed like nothing out of the question in spring, and Delcassé had been encouraged to seek an accord with Berlin.

After his overtures had been turned down by non-negotiable demands to accept the status quo of the French eastern border as a pretext for any further discussions, Delcassé felt that the British might be less demanding, and that he would gain little by upholding the 1894-98-era benign line towards Germany. In a speech to the Senate in April 1900, few days after the Belgian anarchist boy Sipido had wounded the future King Edward VII, Delcassé opposed the hardliner nationalists who openly cheered the assassination attempt, and instead called France and Britain to respect the dignity and rights of one another, for "France was a great European Power, that has become a colonial Power."

It was indeed true that the continued French hostility to the British occupation of Egypt and Sudan from the 1880s onwards had forced the British government to look for allies in the Eastern Mediterranean, and limited the abilities of British governors to carry out financial reforms in the country.

It had for long remained the foremost goal of French leaders to evict the British from the Nile, and Delcassé knew that it would take a lot to get them abandon this idea he considered hopelessly unrealistic. During the following years Morocco and Egypt were being mentioned increasingly often in the press on both countries - just like China, where the French military expedition to Yunnan had complicated the international settlement of the Boxer War.

The senior embassy councellor Léon Geoffray argued that Westminster politicians and the City of London, the "English governing elite", were true successors to the "nation of shopkeepers" so despised by Napoleon.

Geoffray was certain that all these men cared about was making money and conducting their businesses without interruptions. Colonial confrontations with France were therefore not acceptable for them after the South African War. Thus an agreement about imperial business would serve their interests as a strategic instrument.

This line of thought was not entirely alien to the British leaders. Men like Thomas Barclay and their business partners from chambers of commerce in Paris were all for good relations between the two powers, for trade had been the only aspect of the Anglo-French relations that had not suffered from the Boer War.

French financiers were cashing in to the war loans of Britain to profit from the high interest rates, while cross-Channel trade was also booming. The balance of trade favoured France, for Britain imported from France more than three times more than she exported. As the idea of a tariff reform started to gain ground in British politics, the French business sought to protect their trading interests. But they had little influence to the foreign policy or even the public opinion.

Delcassé was determined to promote the interests of France, as he saw them. When an international issue in the Middle East offered him a new chance to do business with Britain, he was willing to sit to the table and play along - especially because Germany was also involved.

 

[Karelian]

Lansdowne, a former Viceroy of India (1888-1894), made an official statement in the House of Lords debate on Great Britain and the Persian Gulf in 1903. “Our policy should be directed in the first place to promote and protect British trade in those waters...HM’s Government should regard the establishment of a naval base, or a fortified port, in the Gulf by any other Power as a very grave menace to British interests, and we should certainly resist it with all the means at our disposal." According to this policy, the German proposals for a protectorate over Kuwait and French initiatives to acquire a coaling station had been both foiled in the recent past.

As it was, the British-Indian interests in the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Basra had expanded steadily after the British shipping interests had acquired the rights of navigation on the Euhprates and Tigris after 1846. By now they controlled more than two-thirds of imports and half of exports of Basra. Eager to gain access to the the Ottoman markets, the German financiers had negotiated long and hard to gain concessions for one of the most ambitious projects of Sultan Abdülhamid II - a railway from Konya to Baghdad.

As soon as the news of the German railway concession were published, The French press had raised worries that the weavers in Lyon would be cut off from their suppliers of Syrian silk, and that the Calais-Marseilles-Suez route to India would be sidelined.

The recent German overtures of protection of Catholic Christian missionaries in the Holy Land was also a centuries-old French prerogative, and the recent announcements of Wilhelm II seemed to threaten it. As a final insult the German plan to open schools along the route openly challenged French cultural activities in the Ottoman realms. All this did not stop the French entrepreneurs in Anatolia from investing, and representatives of Deutsche Bank and the French-majority Banque Impériale Ottomane were eager to seek an accord.

Delcassé, for his part, faced a tough decision. He wanted a deal with Britain, but would have preferred to proceed with his own Moroccan endeavours first. But he was in a minority: most of the French politicians, diplomats and journalists thought Syria a worthy endeavour, and the Middle Eastern approach was strongly lobbied by the Gambon brothers and emerging lobby groups focused around powerful figures like Pichon, Pointcaré, Alexandre Ribot, and Louis Barthou. Furthermore, Delcassé held a deep personal-level attachment to the principle of an equal participation.

Knowing that he could not stop local French financiers from getting involved even if he had preferred to do so, Delcassé took the bull by the horns, and sought an agreement with Berlin at a governmental level. [1] Constans, the French ambassador at Constantinople, prepared a draft memorandum that suggested a deal that would divide the region to respective spheres of interest in order to avoid competition for the emerging Ottoman markets. Armenia, northern Anatolia and Syria would go to the French zone, the coastal region between Alexandretta (Iskenderun) and Beirut would form a neutral zone, and the Germans could focus to Mesopotamia.[2]

Meanwhile Delcassé made sure that the British got wind of these proposals. He was a man of secrets, who utilized the services of Étienne Bazeries and other skilled cryptographers of his personal cabinet noir, a secret espionage and cryptography unit. At the time the French code-breakers at the Quai d'Orsay and the Ministry of the Interior possessed at least partial knowledge of the diplomatic codes and ciphers used by Britain, Germany, Italy, Ottoman Empire, and other countries. Believing that everyone else could be at least as efficient in cryptography, Delcassé was most unwilling to conduct important business through diplomatic dispatches, preferring direct negotiations instead.[3] Having followed the British and German diplomatic traffic in secret for a while now, he had laid down a pre-arranged bait.[4]

And as it was in early February 1903, Clinton Davis of the Morgan Group and Sir Ernest Cassel, two British businessmen were pleased to realize that they had won the support of Foreign Secretary for their endeavour in Mesopotamia - a share in the German railway project. As for the Foreign Office Lansdowne thought “that it would be great misfortune if the railway were to be constructed without British participation.” Lansdowne saw the internationalization of the line as a way to reduce anti-German feelings in Britain: he would have preferred the area to remain without railroads, but felt that they would be built in any case - and because of that it would make sense for Britain to participate.

When French entrepreneurs met the German representatives on 18th of February, they were aware that Quai d'Orsay supported a proposal that would take into account the British request for equal participation. In March, 1902, Lansdowne informally discussed the project with the French and German ambassadors. He explained to Metternich that the British government did not regard the Bagdad Railroad with unfriendly eyes, but but that British participation would necessarily be conditional on British capital and British industry's sharing equally with the other participants.

Both sides had no real options in this regard: as the railway could not be financed without an increase in the custom dues because of the customary Ottoman kilometric financial guarantee, Britain had a practical veto on construction of the line, for the customs could not be altered without a joint agreement of the Powers. In 1903 the modification for the 1881 Murraham degree was agreed upon, and Ottoman state guarantees were released to back finances for the railway construction.

In April 1903 PM Chamberlain, Lord Lansdowne met the Gwinner from Deutsche Bank together with Revelstoke, the representative of City capitalists. The British government guaranteed support for the railway construction. In Paris, Rouvier and Delcassé debated the matter in a Cabinet session. For all his devotion to the Russian alliance, Delcassé was unwilling to see French interests in the Ottoman Empire subordinated to those of Russia. He had asked for equality at the beginning of Franco-German negotiations, insisted upon it before the Chamber, and refused to see it violated in the ministerial debate of 1903.[5]

Meanwhile in Britain it had become obvious that Ottoman duties were to be raised to cover the costs of the kilometre guarantees of the railway. Gibson Bowles, MP of Kings Lynn, found a useful angle from which to defend his personal investments to the competing Aydin Railway. Why was the government promoting a policy by which the Germans were increasing their trade in Anatolia at the expense of the British? “Hanging on to the skirts of German financiers” would not serve British interests, and it would drive two British-owned railways at the Bosphorus and Smyrna out of business!

Chamberlain asked whether Bowles wanted to cede the Germans and the French a joint control of this shortest route to India? Britain had to get involved to protect her interests in the Persian Gulf, especially in the lands of the sheiks of Kuwait. The railway project was going ahead regardless of what HM's Government did, and left to their own devices, the French would steal the march and strike a bargain with Berlin. The railway would open fresh markets rich in mineral resources for exploitation, but was Bowles willing to cede these profits to Berlin and Paris as well rather than promote the interests of British industry and commerce? On the contrary! Chamberlain stated that the government would negotiate a great deal for Britain, securing equitable access and shipping rates.[6].

For many British journalists, this was the last straw.

1. In OTL he had no reasons to do so, having already secured the British cooperation by other means.
2. OTL proposal from the second round of the railway negotiations.
3. Delcassé turned down several proposals where he would not be able to directly negotiate - to his contemporaries, this change from the established diplomatic tradition was peculiar, and was often mistaken as pompousness. He showed willingness to ignore Russian complaints when it suited French interests, ie. during the OTL Lorando-Tubini affair.
4. Delcassé has two goals with this project: he wants to get the British involved to limit the German control of the project, and the Germans involved to make French assistance invaluable to Britain and Russia - a classic Yojimbo-gambit.
5. A core idea of his foreign policy was the focus to French international prestige - Delcassé wanted France to be a Great Power that could dictate terms instead of accepting them, refusing all deals where France would serve as a subservient partner.
6. In OTL the slighted Chamberlain led the press war against the plan, despite the fact that the 1903 proposal was exactly the type of imperial project he promoted in general - a chance to get British investments and commerce promoted through new infrastructure projects. Here PM Chamberlain thinks this is a great idea - his idea, in fact - and wholly dedicates himself to promoting it.