H.R. Trevor-Roper correctly observes that complete sovereignty for small states is a fiction, that “they are not free to conduct independent politics on a world scale.” The concept of an international order based on a community of sovereign states whose borders are inviolable by unilateral military action no matter what the provocation owes much to the propaganda campaigns of World War I and more to the academic legalisms of Woodrow Wilson. In its pursuit, instead of Europeanizing the Balkans, politicians and intellectuals have in the long run Balkanized Europe and the world.65
It was this process of Balkanization that concerned Bethmann-Hollweg. Like Bülow, he sought to put Germany at the center of Europe’s diplomacy, to restore that freedom of movement whose loss had been so painfully plain at Algeciras. In his approach to the Near East crisis, he hoped in the short run to dampen a crisis and in the long run to restore the Concert of Europe under German direction.66
In pursuing a policy of flexibility Bethmann recognized as clearly as Bismarck that a Europe divided into rigid alliance systems was both a second-best solution to the problem of national security, and a solution whose implications were becoming extremely dangerous for the continent as a whole. Statesmen whose academic training normally included firm grounding in the classics were hardly likely to have forgotten the Pelo-ponnesian Wars, in which hostile leagues beggared each other at the expense of common civilization for over a century. And while German fire-eaters were fond of referring to Britain as the modern Carthage, to be eclipsed by the allegedly Roman virtues of the Second Reich, the Punic Wars also suggested a more somber analogy. These wars had, after all, so changed the internal structure of the Roman Republic that its victory had amounted to a defeat—a point stressed in the familiar works of Theodor Mommsen.
Alliances, in short, had their shortcomings as guarantees of order. At the same time the experience of the previous half-century, and of three hundred years of diplomacy, indicated that the great-power structure that had evolved since the Thirty Years’ War was too complex and too dynamic to function without some form of guidance. Laissez-faire was no more viable as a principle of international relations than of domestic economics. On the other hand, any single power that attempted to be more than primus inter pares exhausted itself, either directly in fighting the enemies it generated or eventually by dissipating its power and influence in attempts to control a continent. The focus of German diplomacy since 1871 had been rather a desire to be at Europe’s center, the principal force shaping and directing events. The German Empire’s statesmen sought this pivot point with more system, and more consequence, than the Kehr/Wehler internal-crisis school of scholarship allows.
This desire cannot be directly equated with a search for hegemony. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was committed in a similar fashion in 1918 to directing the negotiations for ending the war and establishing the peace.67 Maintaining a central position did, however, depend heavily on possession of armed forces strong enough to discourage any direct challenges to that position. It is appropriate in this context to recognize that 1914–18 marked the beginning of a significant inversion of vocabularies. Since those years, the use of force has been increasingly described in the verbiage of peace. War departments become departments of defense. Towns are destroyed in order to save them. Military occupation of a neighbor becomes a process of liberating that neighbor from oppression. In the era of Bülow and Bethmann, nationalism, Darwinism, and militarism combined to legitimate, sometimes to demand, a reverse process: the description of conciliatory behavior in belligerent terms. Private conversations and public correspondence alike tended towards rhetorical blood-thirstiness shocking to later sensibilities.68
In 1912 as in 1905, however, fear of war and its consequences continued to restrict the actual spectrum of acceptable initiatives. In the complicated game of snakes and ladders that was European international relations, to stand still was perceived as regression. Germany lacked the self-confidence to accept that risk. Yet her generals, statesmen, and diplomats continued to refrain from striking even when the immediate military advantage might lie with Germany.
Since 1908 the army had been steadily reasserting its position vis-à-vis the navy as the guarantor of the empire’s power, the ultimate source of national existence in a Europe frantically preparing for the war everyone expected. Its continued acceptance of the “short-war illusion,” the belief that future conflicts must be quick and decisive, has been frequently described by military historians as wishful thinking. To scholars emphasizing the primacy of domestic politics, it becomes a manifestation of the generals’ unwillingness to risk destabilizing their society even further by overstraining national unity. It seems more accurate to suggest that the German army’s growing concern with decisive victories and battles of annihilation in the years before 1914 manifested a corresponding reluctance to see war become an end in itself. Throughout the nineteenth century, Prussian-German military theorists had been concerned with retaming Bellona, with avoiding the unlimited wars of the Revolutionary-Napoleonic era, because they were ultimately indecisive. By the end of his tenure as chief of staff, Moltke the Elder was suggesting that the army’s primary function lay in deterring wars rather than fighting them. Such contemporary prophets of total war as Friedrich von Bernhardi and Colmar von der Goltz were regarded as dreamers or extremists by their more sober contemporaries, the men who actually received the important staff and command appointments.69
The major challenge to both the diplomatic and the military aspects of German policy came from Russia. The tsar’s empire was in a position simultaneously to threaten the existence of Austria-Hungary and the balance of Europe, either by direct initiative in the Balkans or indirectly by supporting the increasingly powerful Slavic states of the peninsula. Bethmann’s overtures to Britain, while they certainly had the positive aim of enhancing Germany’s position, incorporated a negative element as welclass="underline" the hope of restraining Russia, whether by British actions or through collective diplomacy. In the final analysis, however, Germany must ultimately depend on her own resources. Bethmann’s hopes for a reborn Concert of Europe were unlikely to bear fruit unless Germany should herself be capable of serving as its fulcrum. And in the context of the early Twentieth century, this meant developing and demonstrating the kind of military capacity that would make the risks of challenge too high to be undertaken except as a last, desperate resort.
Unfortunately for Bethmann’s vision, most of the desperation seemed to be felt by Germany’s soldiers. Schlieffen, in retirement the éminence grise of the general staff, had grown increasingly obsessed with the concept of a decisive battle in Belgium and northern France. His proposed modifications of the plan of 1905 developed corresponding tunnelvision, with schedules ever more rigid, with margins for error and friction reduced to the vanishing point. As chief of staff he had never felt able to ignore the Russian threat. As a theorist without responsibility, he was by 1913 advocating that the eastern theater be stripped of all save token garrison forces drawn primarily from the lowest categories of reservists. For support he turned no longer to the classical past, but to the campaigns of Frederick the Great. Frederick, he argued, could have crushed Austria in 1757 had he only possessed the moral courage to concentrate the Prussian army in Bohemia, instead of leaving detachments in Pomerania, East Prussia, and the Rhine provinces.70