Charmley Splendid Isolation?

Britain, the Balance of Power and the Origins of the First World War
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30925-2
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 536 Seiten

Splendid Isolation? is at once a portrait of British politics and diplomacy at the height of British power and a revisionist account of the First World War. John Charmley argues a powerful and challenging case, forcing a fresh look at a period long held to be part of the glorious British past.

John Charmley is a British diplomatic historian and a professor of modern history at the University of East Anglia, where he is head of the school of history. He is the author of eight books, five of which are being reissued in Faber Finds. He is perhaps most famous for his revisionist interpretation of British foreign policy in the mid-twentieth century, dealing with subjects like Appeasement and the Second World War with a degree of iconoclasm.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Charmley, John

Leseproben

Introduction

As we approach the end of the twentieth century, the place of the Great War in determining its shape looms as large as ever. The British have a special relationship with the two World Wars. They ended up on the winning side twice, yet the rewards for so doing have hardly seemed commensurate with the sacrifices involved. One result of this has been to take as an article of faith the utter necessity of becoming involved in the wars; this way the lack of anything to show for the sacrifices can be ignored in the warm glow of self-satisfaction which usually follows British evocations of the wars.

One strand in the ‘inevitability’ argument is the belief that Britain had a role to play in maintaining the balance of power in Europe and that this ‘traditional’ policy was being fulfilled in 1914 and 1939. Neville Chamberlain is assaulted for not following this tradition. Yet where was this ‘tradition’ between 1815 and 1914, or between 1714 and 1793 for that matter?

This book dissents from the view that there was such a traditional foreign policy, and therefore from the opinion that the British involvement in the war of 1914 was inevitable; it dissents, by implication, from the view that British participation was desirable. Just before this book begins in 1874, the Germans had defeated the French. The skies had not fallen in and civilisation had not ended; nor would it have done in 1914 had the Germans once more defeated the French.

So why did the British Government in 1914 feel that it ought to go to war? Statesmen are the prisoners of their assumptions, which, in turn, derive from their experiences and their reading of events. This book attempts to delineate the experiences and events which shaped the consciousness of British policy-makers in 1914.

For that generation, as for the previous one, the formative event had been the creation of Bismarck’s German empire, so the book begins with the Disraelian attempt to regain for Britain the prestige which he felt had been lost under Gladstone and the Liberals. Disraeli, the first, last and only Earl of Beaconsfield, has generally been credited with reviving the fortunes of Queen Victoria and of the Conservative Party, making the one an Empress and the other the party of Empire; even the revisionist view that there was more style than substance to all this has been trumped by a more modern perspective which can admire a politician who denied that ‘politics and government were a primarily ratiocinative activity’. Disraeli’s mastery of ‘image’, and his sense of ‘the direction in which the nation and the party ought to be travelling’, are sufficient to win admiration in an era of ‘spin doctors’. To have ‘more or less single-handedly hewed out the central image of his party’s platform for a century by creating the image of the Conservatives as the national party’1 can now be recognised as having been of more significance than pushing through a legislative programme, the details of which have long ceased to be of interest. He was an imperialist who added little to the Empire; an advocate of aristocratic rule who ushered in democracy and made it Tory. It was not what Disraeli did, but what he said, and even more importantly the way he said it, which mattered; substance fades, image remains and, in time, is everything.

Historians who wrote in an era when achievement was measured in terms of legislative impact tended to dismiss Disraeli’s odd ideas on foreign policy as part of his ‘fondness for the bizarre and the fantastic’,2 and as lacking any ‘compensating flair for diagnosing the trends of the time, or discerning the future trend of events’.3 The Whig statesman, Lord Clarendon, summed up the popular view when he called Disraeli a ‘political acrobat’.4 But in an era of rapid change, a talent for acrobatics can be useful. Disraeli recognised that the unification of Germany was ‘a greater political event’ than the French Revolution, and that ‘not a single principle in the management of our foreign affairs, accepted by all statesmen for guidance up to six months ago, any longer exists’; the balance of power had been ‘entirely destroyed’, much to England’s disadvantage.5 George Canning had declared as long ago as 1826 that the ‘balance of power’ was ‘a standard perpetually varying, as civilization advances and as new nations spring up’;6 upon his return to office in 1874, Disraeli would attempt to readjust it in Britain’s favour. His methods and actions would create a crisis within the Conservative Party, controversy in the country, and set the tone expected from British governments for the next fifty years.

One of the book’s underlying themes is the relationship of British politicians to the notion of ‘the balance of power’, so it might be as well to define what contemporaries meant when they spoke of it. When the House of Commons had debated the declaration of the Crimean War against Russia on 27 March 1854, Lord John Russell, the Leader of the Commons, referred to it as the ‘maxim which, since the time of William III, has governed and actuated the councils of this country’, namely that of denying ‘preponderance’ to any one Power by throwing Britain’s weight ‘into the scale’; he declared that war was necessary in order to maintain the ‘balance of power’.7 That a scion of the great Whig dynasty of Russell should have favoured a ‘maxim’ which had enabled his own kind to enrich themselves was only natural. It was equally natural that from the other end of the Liberal coalition the concept should have been questioned. The Radical Liberal, John Bright, asked what it meant to say that the war was necessary in order to maintain the balance of power, and professed himself unable to see what British interests would be served by the sacrifice of blood and treasure which would be entailed.8 Like his friend Richard Cobden, Bright believed that diplomacy was a ‘gigantic system of outrelief for the aristocracy’, and saw no reason why a rational and liberal polity should engage in warfare. Lord Palmerston, the Home Secretary and darling of the patriotic press, declined to ‘explain the meaning of the expression “the balance of power”’, to an obviously ignorant middle-class manufacturer from northern parts who would, he suggested, ‘give his vote against going to war for the liberties and independence of the country, rather than bear his share in the expenditure which it would entail’. He declared, de haut en bas, that the term was ‘one that has been familiar to the minds of all mankind from the earliest ages in all parts of the globe’; it meant ‘that a number of weaker States may unite to prevent a stronger one from acquiring a position which should be dangerous to them, and which should overthrow their independence, their liberty, and their freedom of action’.9

Palmerston got his war in 1854, but a decade later Bright had his revenge. Despite declarations that Denmark would not stand alone if she defied Bismarck’s Prussia in 1864 in the Schleswig-Holstein affair, that was precisely what occurred. Bright allowed himself to gloat over the downfall of the balance of power, describing it as a ‘foul idol’ which had loaded the country with debts, taxes and the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives; there was, he rejoiced, ‘one superstition less which has its hold upon the minds of English statesmen and English people’.10 Certainly during the next decade, whilst the map of Europe changed dramatically, Britain stayed on the sidelines. Lord Stanley, Foreign Secretary in 1866, declared of the war which decided the struggle for mastery in Germany that ‘there never was a great European war in which the direct national interests of England were less concerned’.11

In a sense then Disraeli’s foreign policy after 1874 amounted to a reassertion of the importance of the balance of power and of the need for Britain to actively readjust it in her favour. But his reaction was not shared by many even in his own Party. Lord Stanley, who succeeded as the fifteenth Earl of Derby in 1869, remained unmoved by Disraeli’s fears. To those who argued that Britain should increase her spending on armaments, he replied: ‘France and Germany have their hands full now, and will be exhausted when peace is made; the US have cut down their navy to the lowest point and disbanded their army…. Where is the enemy?’ He could understand Radicals and Liberals wanting to help the new republican France and advocating intervention in the Franco-Prussian war, ‘but for Conservatives and generally for those who have anything to lose, it seems suicidal’.12 This was a line very different from that of his leader, but it was not the product of Stanley’s personal oddities; rather it was a manifestation of a type of thinking with a long and distinguished lineage in the Conservative Party.

Gladstone (who, unlike Disraeli, had been a member of it) described ‘the old Tory party’ as following ‘essentially a Peace policy’ in foreign affairs.13 The longest-serving (if least successful) Conservative leader, the fourteenth Earl of Derby (father of Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary) reminded their Lordships in 1866 that it was not true that a Conservative Government was necessarily a warlike one, since the Conservative Party ‘consists, in a great measure, of men who have the greatest interest and the largest stake in the country; they are the men upon...