Balfour The Kaiser and His Times

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30377-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 558 Seiten

What were the consequences for Germany, and the world, that William II was Kaiser at the onset of the 'Great War'? In The Kaiser and His Times (first published in 1964), Michael Balfour analyzes the social, constitutional, and economic forces at work in imperial Germany, and sets the complex and disputed character of the Kaiser, who occupied such a central position in the three decades before 1918, in the context of his family background and the history of Germany. '[Balfour] has borne in mind the Kaiser's own request to the head of his military Secretariat - 'Not dry reports only, please, but now and then a funny story.' The circumstances that allowed to Kaiser to live as if 'The greater part of his life... was illusion' would make comic reading if the results had not been so tragic...' Kirkus Review

Michael Balfour (1908-1995) was a writer, historian and public servant. Educated at Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford, he held various senior civil servant posts before becoming Professor of European History at the University of East Anglia. He wrote nine books on modern history, three of which are being reissued in Faber Finds, The Kaiser and His Times, Propaganda in War, 1939-1945 and Britain and Joseph Chamberlain.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Balfour, Michael

Leseproben

The Background to Anglo-German Relations: Trade and Colonies*

THE DISTORTIONS OF German internal politics caused by the country’s previous history were all the more unfortunate because the social fabric had to be adjusted not simply to one revolution but to two, the Industrial as well as the French. By 1870 Germany was just beginning to feel the full effects of that peculiarly intense phase which each country experiences at the outset of its industrialization and which an American writer has called ‘take-off’.1 To appreciate what was happening, it is necessary to go back nearly a century.

Soon after the War of American Independence ended, the rate of increase in British production began noticeably to outstrip the rate of increase in population. This deceptively simple statement contains the key to the history of the world during the last two hundred years. What happened in Britain had never happened before, but once it occurred it was ‘irreversible, like the loss of innocence’.2 The fact that this development occurred in Britain was due to the convergence of numerous interacting chains of historical causation, some of which have been already mentioned.

(a) An essential accompaniment to increase in the rate of output is an increase in the rate at which machinery is installed and so (since machinery has to be paid for) in the rate of investment. But this in turn requires that:

(i) capital should have been accumulated by people who have more money than they require for their immediate needs and so can afford to save

(ii) the machinery of banking should have been developed to a stage at which the capital accumulated by some can be put at the disposal of others in a position to devote it to productive use

(iii) some should be prepared to take risks in lending their capital on the strength of a reasonable expectation of private profits, while others should be prepared to take the lead in introducing innovations.

The development of all these factors in Britain owed much to a century or more of stable government with a legal system that was reliable and undiscriminating, so that people could feel confidence in the future.

(b) Thanks largely to Britain’s favourable position on the world trading routes opened by the navigators of the sixteenth century; thanks also to the enterprise with which those routes were exploited, Britain had developed the habit of overseas trade, with the greater variety in material resources which it made possible and the credit and commercial institutions which it demanded. The British grew accustomed to devising new solutions to unprecedented situations. The spirit of innovation and the spirit of risk-bearing became more widely diffused than in any previous century.

(c) The capture of the government by the middle classes and small squirearchy in the seventeenth century led to the removal of official impediments to trade, risk-bearing and innovation. A commercial outlook permeated political policy just as the successful merchants permeated the aristocracy.

(d) The raw materials most needed in the early stages of industrialization—coal, iron, wool and cotton—were either at hand in Britain or could be imported easily.

(e) Scientific discovery developed to the stage at which it could be effectively applied to the productive processes. In particular, the invention of the steam cylinder revolutionized the situation regarding supplies of energy. Underlying this practical development, however, was a fundamental change of mental attitude. Whereas for centuries most men had conceived of the physical world as something outside their control, mysterious and therefore unpredictable, they now looked on it as subject to knowable laws and therefore capable of controlled manipulation. Here again much was due to the stimulus which internal peace and regular government gave to education and research. Two particularly important applications of this principle were:

(i) Communications, which vastly increased the size of potential markets. (Sir Robert Peel, travelling at top speed from Rome to London in 1834, took thirteen days on the journey, about as long as he would have needed sixteen centuries earlier; twenty years later, he could have done it in three.)

(ii) Medicine, where clearer ideas about the causes of disease led to quick progress in its prevention, and so to a rapid increase in population.

(f) This is the final factor calling for mention and one of the most important; the sudden swelling in the numbers of human beings constituted both a problem, owing to the resulting pressure on resources, and at the same time an opportunity, thanks to the increase in the available labour force and in the size of the potential market.

Mechanical production in quantity became not merely technically possible but also, in view of the economies of scale which it involved, financially attractive. But the full effect of this would not have been felt if there had not been at the same time an absolute increase in the number of consumers and an extension of the area over which effective distribution became possible. Finally, the machines for the productive process could only be installed because the spare financial resources existed and could be made available.

The industrial changes brought in their train a transformation of society, of which the main signs have been a steady growth in standards of living and leisure and a widespread diffusion of literacy, partly in answer to the demand of the workers for what they regarded as the key to advancement and partly to meet industry’s need for trained operatives and technicians. The application of machinery to the media of intellectual communication fostered this diffusion. But behind this lay the deeper shift in outlook involved in the transition from a static and largely customary society to one in which change, popularly regarded as ‘progress’, is accepted as the normal order of life. This brought in its train an expansion of men’s conception of what is possible, fostered by an awareness of alternative societies either in time or space, and so a questioning of all accepted values. This in turn found expression in a transformation of ideas about the aims to be achieved by common action in communal life, in other words, politics. But thanks to the improvement in communications, these widening interests and awareness of possibilities were matched by growth in the possibilities of control from a single centre, and therefore of what could be achieved by communal action. There were more things which men wanted to do, and as facilities increased, so did the amount which one man could accomplish; life began to be lived at a greater intensity. Above all, advance consisted in a steady extension of the fields in which problems were brought to the level of consciousness where they could be analysed—the essential first step towards their solution.

These changes of outlook produced what can be conveniently, if repulsively, labelled ‘the modern mind’. The outstanding internal and international problem of the last hundred years has been to adjust the social framework to accommodate that mind. Not surprisingly, the process has been hampered by misconceptions. One of the most pregnant and one which was particularly prevalent in Germany concerned the relationship between liberal democracy, with responsible Parliamentary government, and industrialization. In those western European States which pioneered the process of industrial innovation, the political adjustment to that process took the form of liberal democracy and it was therefore assumed that this, instead of being the form appropriate to a particular area and time, was an inevitable accompaniment. An industrial country would always have a liberal parliamentary constitution. The opposite was also accepted; the social consequences of industrialization could be escaped if the introduction of liberal democracy could be prevented. A narrow and closed élite could then enjoy the benefits of industrialization without losing its social privileges. But this was the reverse of the truth. For longer experience has shown that there are other political forms equally compatible with ‘the modern mind’, but that one thing which is not compatible is the unimpaired retention of privileges by an élite whose position rests on birth and tradition. Had they been astute, the German élite might have done well to bow to the inevitable, sacrifice a number of their privileges in the hope of salvaging the rest, and set out to devise a new political order in which they could retain the maximum influence. Their preoccupation with resisting liberal democracy ruled out such a policy and doomed them to ultimate defeat.

But there were other and more sinister consequences of industrialization. The purposes to which machinery was applied were not solely those of peace. Its application to war transformed the speed and scale on which hostilities were conducted, the efficiency with which the enemy could be slaughtered and the percentage of the population whose whole-hearted co-operation in the war effort became important. It was Moltke who familiarized the concept of ‘strategic railways’ and turned mobilization into a matter of timetables. The increasing use of novel raw materials and the accidental way in which these were distributed throughout the world made the economies of the various nations...