A Concise History of Germany by Mary Fulbrook

Author:Mary Fulbrook [Fulbrook, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Europe, Germany, History, Social History
ISBN: 9781108418379
Google: NRJ9DwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1108418376
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2019-01-03T03:00:00+00:00

Plate 28. The latest in ladies’ bicycling fashion, as illustrated in the popular middle-class magazine, Die Gartenlaube.

FOREIGN POLICY AND THE F IRST WORLD WAR

Undoubtedly the fact most influencing interpretations of Wilhelmine Germany is that it culminated in, and collapsed as a result of, the First World War. Debates over the causes of this war are as old as the war itself. The Versailles Treaty of 1919 laid primary responsibility on Germany in the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause. While the following decades witnessed a wide-ranging search for the origins of the war in pre-war diplomatic relations among the great powers, a rather different approach was already being expressed in 1928 in an essay by Eckart Kehr on the ‘primacy of domestic politics’ in the determination of foreign policy. This sort of approach was resurrected, in rather different ways, in the 1960s, first as a result of the reopening of the concept of Germany’s war guilt in a controversial book by Fritz Fischer, and subsequently in the reinterpretations of domestic politics in Imperial Germany undertaken by scholars such as Hans-Ulrich Wehler and Volker Berghahn. Most historians would now probably agree with the verdict of James Joll, that no one factor is alone sufficient in explanation: an adequate approach must take account of both long-term and short-range factors, and encompass domestic social and political tensions, cultural orientations and preconceptions, in addition to international circumstances, shifting alliances and clashes of foreign policy interest among the great powers.

A number of elements are important when considering the general context. First, there is the shift in German foreign policy after Bismarck. There were debates among proponents of different views, ranging from notions of a strong middle European position of domination to more ambitious aspirations to world power status. In the 1890s and 1900s, the latter view gained ground. Imperialism entailed not only political but also economic considerations: a rapidly industrialising power needed markets for manufactured goods, and sources of cheap raw materials, and in this connection also needed to be able to compete with Britain. There were also cultural considerations, as in the view propounded by Weber, in his Freiburg inaugural lecture of 1895, that German culture had to be protected by a powerful nation state on the world stage. Imperialism became a cultural given, particularly in connection with the navy construction programme.

Secondly, there was the formation of alliances. The ‘Triple Alliance’ between Germany, Austria and Italy had already been developing in Bismarck’s time (with Germany signing an alliance with Austria in 1879 and being joined by Italy in 1882). The ‘Triple Entente’ between France, Russia and Britain developed more slowly. Between 1891 and 1894 France and Russia developed an understanding; from 1904, Britain began to align with this (agreements with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907) after settlement of differences with France in Egypt, Morocco and the Far East, and with the increasingly apparent weakness of Tsarist Russia after defeat by Japan in 1904–5 and the revolution of 1905. These alliances were not clearly fixed, and each country tended to act in its own interests over particular issues.

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