WELTREICH: Part 2 — Victoria III AAR (1870–1920)

43 min readApr 24, 2024

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Part 2 of my Victoria III campaign AAR is here.

Part 1: https://medium.com/@edisonzhou2007/weltreich-a-victoria-iii-germany-campaign-aar-7fcbd2b0d80f

Part 3: https://medium.com/@edisonzhou2007/weltreich-part-3-victoria-iii-aar-1920-1925-a77a0f722e07

Last chapter we see the formation of Greater Germany. This time we will see how Germany translates its latent power into hard power.

The New Course, 1870–1879

Students of History find it fashionable today to study the German ‘Sonderweg’, its supposedly unique path to democracy that renders it distinct from all other nations.

There is some evidence to sustain this. Germany’s shift to a more liberal governance after Bismarck was asked to resign after the 1870 election was quite radical. Its success was in no way because of the weakness of the ruling classes but came top-down. The Kaiser Heinrich was called the ‘Kaiser Liberator’, because the moment the nation was under his fiat, reforms were executed with vigour.

“…and so I have ascended the throne of my forefathers and of the German Kaiser! God help me fulfil my duties conscientiously and for the weal of my Fatherland, in both the narrower and the wider sense.” Germany’s progressive elements hoped that Heinrich’s succession would usher the country into a new era governed along liberal lines. Their hopes proved to have much basis.

He himself detested war, and though German colonialism would grow under his reign, Germany actively avoided war.

Germany, for all its exciting, momentary unity, was a nation of contradictions in 1870.

The total population numbered 51.5 million, 85% of them in the lower strata, 13.3% bourgeois, and about a million affluent citizens. And nearly half of the population (47%) were labourers. From the grassroots, and through the stellar opportunities of expansion, capitalists had an outsized influence on ordinary life. 40% of Germany was North German, the other 32% Southern, and the next largest minorities being Czech and Polish. Religion-wise, the Protestants became disgruntled that they were now outnumbered.

Figure 11.0, religion in 1870 Germany

Standards of living were also disparate by the North-South divide:

Figure 11.1, standards of living in Germany

Seen also with analyses of National GDP for each state. Berlin and Brandenburg were unique among European nations for not contributing much to the national economy.

Figure 11.2, regions by proportion of GDP.

Saxony was the national powerhouse.

Sammlungspolitik was the defining notion of the new policy, which sought to properly integrate all regions of the new state through inclusivity and the forging of a German civic identity — the national myths, the works of Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, the Nibelungenlied, and all manner of other great works became the Sturm und Drang impetuses of the new national Renaissance of culture. Economically, Heinrich and his new (industrialist) Chancellor, the young Michael Brockhaus, sought to even out the nation by investing into poorer provinces and raising the standard of living.

The budget deficit was to be balanced by cutting military size and wages considerably. Germany went in a year from a standing army of about 360,000 men to 290,000.

Brockhaus introduced a series of economic regulations to standardise factories that same year, which put a great strain on new industries which were not so advanced with novel technologies. In the long run, this was thought to increase interoperability of the economy and better incorporate new regions.

Over the course of 1870–1872, comparatively extreme reforms were carried out: voting was extended to all who owned a certain value of wealth, and extra votes were afforded to those with more owned, a dedicated police force was introduced alongside the Preußische Geheimpolizei, private health insurance, but these and other concessions were made contingent on a controversial move to introduce proportional voting, something which only passed through the famous ‘My Vision of Germany’ speech delivered by the Kaiser in October 1871, an appeal to the people to sacrifice for the nation’s treasury.

Most historians revere the great changes made in the ‘New Course’. Others point out the continuity in the secret police, the lack of labour rights, the legality of child labour, and the non-existent rights of women. On balance, however, it was not a case of government vs people; there lacked general support for such further upset.

There is evidence to show that the Kaiser and his Chancellor were more concerned about their principles than about practical effect. It made sense to them that the new Germany should have total separation of the church from affairs of the state. They thought this would appeal to Catholics and Jews who had traditionally been persecuted. What happened instead was that this annoyed two natural enemies, the Protestants who lost influence in the north, and the Catholics who lost the same in the south.

The last major development of the era came about with the officialisation of the Zweikaiserbund, the League of Two Emperors, enabled by the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and thereby Germany’s willingness to accept Russian influence in the Balkans.

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Europe was struck by several geopolitical earthquakes in early 1872, all from internal events. Germany’s GDP (104 million pounds) overtook Britain’s (100 million) for the first time.

The first actual event, though, was a massive popular uprising of disgruntled peasants and workers that practically subsumed the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte had Germany’s support if for nothing else because of the latter’s economic interests in Mesopotamia and Anatolia, but Heinrich forbade any kind of military involvement. The Sultan (Adulmecid Osmanoglu) successfully broke off British support to the revolutionaries through the cession of a territory in Aleppo.

Then, in France, practically all its provinces save for Ile-de-France and its military border districts rose in revolt against the ambitious President Chauvet’s attempts to completely atheise the nation. The conservative, military, and religious forces proclaimed their backing to Alphonse de Cambaceres’s claim to a Second French Empire. He was a bigot and an ethno-nationalist. Suddenly, Germany’s sworn enemy, the Republic, may not actually be an enemy at all. Former compatriots of the war against Germany like Henri de Croy and Pascal Coquerel found themselves clashing in the Battle of Paris. In the end, the Germans did not touch the French situation with a ten foot pole.

The Catholic Pope would eventually crown Alphonse at a ceremony in Paris, to which Germany was not invited, and in which he adopted the title ‘King’ rather than ‘Emperor’, perhaps to avoid overt parallels to Napoleon. If that was a factor, he certainly failed to prove it, perhaps only a month into the reign the Catholic French kingdom was claiming the Rhineland and Alsace-Lorraine — la Revanche.

Heinrich and his Chancellor had grown complacent towards relations with their northern neighbours — the Scandinavian nations. They were thus caught off guard by the sudden spring of nationalism, which was having a field day across the continent (note that Romania had just formed). Oscar Bernadotte was abruptly crowned the Scandinavian Emperor, in a total political union of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, including Iceland and Greenland. The German embassy and ambassadors had not kept a pulse on events at all. Suddenly in Schleswig-Holstein, there was a powerful Danish (or rather Scandinavian) secession movement. In September, Danish rebels took hold of Kiel and the rest of the province, killing some German police but expecting that the Kaiser would let them join Scandinavia. In the event, the Germans did let them gather for about two months, while negotiations were held with desperate pleas, but eventually crushed the rebels quite utterly. The Scandinavian Empire had received a dressing down. Their defensive pact was afterwards renewed.

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Though crucially neglected, it is worth noting down here early the rapid developments that were occurring in terms of German investment in Africa. The government itself had limited involvement, but after Heinrich effectively gave the Afrika Korps (of Dieter Jahn) stationed in Lagos a free hand, a large number of settlers, spurred on by the newly-formed Colonial Society and Pan-German League, began drawing grandiose plans to expand. Jahn was responsible for a spontaneous and savage war — the Zulu War — that eventually seized Zululand and Basuto, setting up a tripartite conflict between the Orange and Transvaal republics, Cape Colony, and Germany in Zululand.

‘Resource scouters’ began campaigning for colonial conquests in India (quite impossible given the dominance of the Raj), the Sinai (German surveyors had reported the idea of creating a canal from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea), and South East Asia.

The Kaiser had little interest in colonial affairs, for to him “the place of the nation of Germany is in the heart of continental Europe, and it is out of there from which must flow our influence”. Paradoxically, this led him not to curb the increasingly bold actions of colonial military Caesars but to leave them be. What he did do was pass an order to have the Niger Delta run by a new German Niger Company, annexing Benin too, i.e. civilian rather than military governance.

A Great Power intervention in China after its attempts to fight Russia also gifted Germany possession of Qingdao in 1873.

A small fleet and a large number of convoy ships set out from Zulu with perhaps 25,000 men under Jahn’s command, the ‘Lion of Africa’, with the goal of conquering of Brunei for Germany. This was an act of military insubordination, a fait accompli, which the central government only heard about in October of 1872 when the Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies protested strongly and indicated that local military forces would oppose this excursion.

It just so happened that at the time the Chancellor Brockhaus, became embroiled in a male brothel scandal, and was forced to resign. The Afrika Korps took its chance and heavy-handedly pushed its way through the Dutch East India Company’s light blockade of the straits to the Java Sea; the Dutch were unwilling to take violent action until they had heard back from the government in Amsterdam.

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In June of 1874, President Paul van der Merve of Transvaal Republic (‘South African Republic’) launched an invasion of German Zululand and overwhelmed the tiny German garrison there. He had the tacit backing of the Orange Free State and had communicated to the British, who had stated that they would not intervene either way. The invasion succeeded and threw out the Germans, but the mistake was to assume that their government would be the ones conducting negotiations. There was practically no negotiation — Jahn had proven himself to be a reckless and singular force in colonialism, and an expedition of 10,000 veteran men set out on the 4th of August.

The Germans trekked over the mountains of the Drakensberg and took Pretoria, after which, staring down Oranje’s reinforcements, Jahn unilaterally proclaimed the annexation of the Transvaal. After this, Jahn gave a speech in which he celebrated his career and “crowning victory”, and then retired at 70. The Kaiser honoured him in one brief address, not mentioning that at it was he who had at last communicated to the imperious general that his wild campaigns would have to end. The former government retreated to the western savannahs.

That these acts of aggression did not result in Germany being punched back by other Great Powers is not a true claim; for one, the Americans published daily columns lambasting the Germans, and for another the Chancellor had to devote massive energies to mitigating the infamy of the Berlin government.

The harms of German colonialism, like any other European power’s, cannot be wholly ignored. In the 1870s, these can be most readily observed in Western Guinea, where a flailing German colonial administration can come to govern over 80,000 Melanesians. They mismanaged crops and redirected too many taxes to the effort of incorporating more land. The result was first the 1872 ‘Great Hunger’ that saw a 8% population decline in a single year, followed by a massive earthquake in 1874 that the German government, with its curious policy not fully recognising the people or the territories of Papua as under its domain, did not pay to alleviate, and to cap it all off two more famines occurred in the same decade.

Apologists can claim that the government of Germany was not responsible for the spontaneous attempts of its subjects to colonise. This fails on two counts; a) it could have properly put an end to these practices and b) Germany would later indeed claim these lands as its own.

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Race in the Pacific

The Kaiser, with his ever-greedy eye on profits, took an increasing interest in German colonial expansion and the captive markets they provided. Before long, Germany and France were at a race to claim the islands of the South Pacific.

The Germans first took Kanak, which prompted the French to seize nearby Vanuatu and gain a major upperhand by setting up outposts across Tonga and its outlying islands. Germany went where it could, to Micronesia and Bougainville, and before long both were sizing up the potential to extend all the way to Hawaii, which was undergoing a rebellion against its king.

France paid off the debts for the rebel islands (i.e. all of those non-central, summing up to 219,000 Haiwiians), while Germany bankrolled the King-to-be-overthrown, whose kingdom now only stretched to the shorelines of Honolulu. The presidential government of the islands had a force of about 4,000 men armed with guns, but no ships to transport them, while the monarch’s problem was precisely the opposite.

(Ultimately, Germany lost this race when the king was deposed by his own bodyguards.)

Nor was the interest in the Sinai productive. France was the first to act on the Suez Canal idea through its friendly relations with the Egyptians.

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The Economic Miracle

The author Frank Brian’s famous novel The American Dream published in 1880 described a counterfactual world in which America came to utterly dominate the two American continents through economic hegemony.

This was in part his prediction for the future but more so a reaction to a real miracle that was happening live across the Atlantic, in Germany.

The German GDP by 1880 had risen to 134 million pounds, trailing only behind Britain (152M) and the perennial first, China (197M).

The growth is more accurately characterised as a wholesale improvement in the quality of the economy; at a roughly 68% literacy rate, Germany was not the highest, but was well above nations like Britain and France. Meanwhile, in the industrial sectors, Brockhaus’s policy of standardisation and successive chancellors’ focus on converting German manufacturing from a privately owned to publicly traded enterprise together had positive effects on productivity.

Figure 11.4, literacy rates in Europe

Germany was also among the most receptive nations as a whole to novel technologies: from mechanisation to the rotary valve engine to fertilisers to the steam donkey and to dynamite. Reichskanzler Edwin von Oldenburg’s interests, as an industrialist, were to adapt and innovate. The free market was the driving force, the primary vehicle of national development, and it freed the government to paying off its principal. All those millions had been cleared by September 1879 to the point where taxation for all income levels was reduced and the government could finally build up its gold reserves.

New Imperialism, 1880–1890

The 1880s would see the Great Powers embark upon a lightning-fast and more audacious than ever before race to colonise and carve up the world entire.

Save for the unstable ‘Dark Corner of Europe’, the Balkans, European borders were fixed for the foreseeable future. It was in the minor powers and in the undeveloped continents — Africa and Asia — that the potential for growth lay. Inasmuch as the other major states shifted to protectionism and renounced laissez-faire, Germany could no longer afford to recline back without a horse in the colonial race.

By the decade 1870s’ end, Russia had grown significantly more wary of the German Empire’s strength, and inaction by Chancellor von Oldenburg allowed the League of Two Emperors to lapse. Therefore, surrounded by one hostile power in the west and a potential one in the east, Germany lacked any Great Power allies.

Russia having recently abolished serfdom and undergoing a ‘Great Spurt’ under Tsar Alexander III and his talented finance minister, Witte, often tied with or even surpassed Germany in rankings of the European nations.

Figure 12.0, spheres of influence in 1880.

The Russian Empire was an elephantine force. Its sphere of influence spread from Japan and Alaska to Persia to Scandinavia and Greenland. There was quiet diplomatic competition in the Balkans too. Germany backed the Ottomans against the Russians who sought control of the Dardanelles and Constantinople, though Serbia and Romania were firmly Russian. Anyone could have told that Germany was well-established in Central Europe and that its power base was in a firm alliance there that spanned Sicily to Kiel, and Mosul to the east.

In response to the Russian withdrawal from the agreements, Germany concluded alliances with Hungary, Galicia-Lodomeria, Croatia, Transylvania, and Ottoman Turkey within the year. This was not a pragmatic move and was motivated primarily by ideas of prestige and national honour; it sapped away from diplomatic energies that could have been spent elsewhere — indeed, there were tentative attempts to create a rapprochement with France.

Five Point Agreement

Only a month after the arrangements were confirmed, Britain came to blows with the Ottomans. The British colonial authorities in their share of Syria had been encroaching on Ottoman land for some time, metres at a time, and the Sublime Porte’s note of protest to London backfired when it doubled down in support of Aleppo. A panicked telegram was sent to Berlin on 16 November when the British communicated that they would now seek control of Lebanon and of Basra (with Kuwait).

The charismatic Dieter Hestermann was vested with the powers of secret diplomacy to meet with a British delegate in Latakia. The two men held enormous sway over foreign affairs, for both governments had already agreed to stand by their mediation. In the event, Hestermann, a great admirer of the British Raj, pushed for British concessions to Germany in Egypt and — most stunningly — India.

The agreement that they came to by the end of a week’s discussion, all while Turkish and English troops had been skirmishing, came to be known as the Five Point Agreement. The governments of their respective nations were not thoroughly pleased, but accepted the terms reluctantly.

Britain could demand those territories and Cyprus from the Ottomans without German complaint
Germany could no longer establish new colonial exclaves on the African continent, save for in the Horn of Africa
The Orange Free State would remain as a neutral buffer state
Germany could acquire the port of Gwadar off Baluchistan.
Germany would be obliged to support Britain in the colonial race against France

In April of 1880, Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire, and won crushingly.

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The 1882 Reichstag elections delivered an outright majority of 53% of the votes for the National Liberal Party, riding on the wave of the economic boom. Kaiser Heinrich agreed to re-appoint von Oldenburg as Chancellor if the German Progress Party was kept on.

From thereafter began a New Economic Policy which was really a return to the heavy-handed state investment and stimulus of the early years of Germany. The state reserves were drained in about a year in what may as well have been called the ‘Catch up and overtake the UK campaign’.

The gap was closing! By the end of 1884 the German GDP continued to climb at 175M pounds, the British sat at 184M.

Majerteen and Harar (Ethiopia) were attacked a year later. From the top levels of government, Germany did not colonise because it wanted for prestige; it did so because it needed the workers and the resources and the tradeposts, in a trade battle where Britain was already winning and France was badly outstripping Germany.

Meanwhile, the French were at last humbled in the 1884 Oyo Crisis, when French military exercises into Oyo territory were chastised before the world after the local Prince appealed to Russia, Britain, and Germany.

A rather random and brazen crisis erupted in 1885 when Russia’s Tsar Alexander III, heckled and spat upon by Dutch citizens during his visit to Amsterdam, grew so angry that he sent a list of demands for apology to Holland, among those terms being the effective reduction of the Netherlands to an economic satellite of Russia. If nothing else, this incident demonstrated the stupidities that can arise from total autocracy. Germany backed Italy and Spain in opposing Russia. This one decision of Germany’s irreversibly damaged the two’s foreign relations.

Scramble for Africa

In 1884, Germany had hosted a Berlin Conference, whose General Act declared the principles by which the European powers would colonise Africa.

It stated that all would do so with respect to the other and without fighting. The processes of staking out land and marking out boundaries had been in practice for an entire decade already, and what effect this had looking towards 1890 can be described as catalysing. An entire continent, one that truly dwarfed Europe in size, had been divided up among the European nations in not a long period, and even before most of newly drawn borders actually possessed citizens of the state which claimed sovereignty or any military presence. That is to say, the Scramble for Africa worked as it did because of unstated but mutually understood rules.

Figure 13.0, colonial empires as of 1890

Until now, France had been a serious threat in international politics. It had represented the atavistic aggressiveness of the modern Enlightenment. But domestic turmoil and the German-British cooperation against them in the colonial domain eventually put an end to that.

Tibet War 1887–88

A keen eye would notice the German possession of Sindh and Baluchistan, two wealthy

states not yet conquered by the Raj. It is true that the British would never have allowed the Germans to enter India, the ‘Jewel in the Crown’, save for one cataclysmic event in 1887: the beginning of the Sino-British War, sometimes called the Tibet War.

The Great Game of Central Asian competition between Russia and Britain had spanned Persia to Afghanistan to India and China, and there is no question that as of 1887 the UK was on the losing side. The Shah of Persia and the Emir of Afghanistan were both tied to the Tsar. Therefore, when Queen Victoria greenlit the brazen move to invade Tibet, not only China was inclined to disapprove but Russia too.

Governor-General Bolingbroke sent out the British Indian Army in an expedition for Lhasa. There, they found a Dalai Lama who was already defended by Qing soldiers. Before long, Russia was moving troops through China towards the Burma front and the Raj was scrambling for troops from the Princely States and their own domain. Not long after were declarations of war exchanged — Russia in this war too. All defenders of the British Empire considered (colonial troops too), the UK fielded around 100,000 effectives across Burma-Bengal and Vietnam. Hong Kong was sacked and Russian troops advanced viciously. Chinese troops suffered at minimum a casualty rate twice as large due to their ineffectual and brute-force tactics.

At home, the British government under PM Fowler (a former naval admiral) then called up 100,000 conscripts anew while landing an amphibious force that successfully seized Saint Petersburg. Suddenly, all of Russia’s wrath had been provoked.

The German position in this was Kaiser Heinrich’s (not his jingoistic ministers’). Germany did not want war. Germany would not benefit from war. Thus, Germany would rather receive concessions for its neutrality. From this it followed that Britain granted Germans permission to seize Hyderabad. And Russia would reduce its economic domination of Scandinavia (which was soon replaced by a German hegemony).

In the end, it was the decapitation of Russia from the head that ended the war. Britain was granted the Lhasa (eastern) half of Tibet.

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While the war taxed its combatants, Germany stood as its greatest profiteer — in prestige more than anything.

1888 saw the completion of the Panoramapunkt (panorama point), the second skyscraper ever built, in Berlin, along with the holding of a World Fair styled ‘Zitadelle’.

There was also great liberal hope. In 1889, a bill passed that prepared the next election to be one with a full census suffrage, as opposed to wealth voting. The intellectuals, labourers, and many thousands of women joined together in a Suffragette Movement that entered full swing in 1889, though the accompanying legislation was unlikely to pass.

Figure 14.0, global movements for women’s suffrage represented.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, Germany, as conservative a nation as it was, became the first nation in the world to introduce women’s suffrage. This was an anomaly indeed, and can only be explained by the sheer force of the protestors — 1 million people marched in Berlin on Christmas 1889 — and Heinrich’s personal interest in the movement (that is to say, a personal infatuation with a certain suffragette…).

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In April of 1890, the Zeppelin, a spectacular airship, was shown off to the world and dedicated to the Kaiser.

In May, Heinrich I stepped into the Zeppelin through the mooring post on the Panoramapunkt, for a regular cruise flight, one of countless that the airship had already made.

He would never step foot off of it.

Whether by sabotage, static electricity, lightning, or engine failure, something caught flame, and the airship ignited. The Zeppelin exploded, and so did the German emperor along with it.

Weltpolitik, 1890–1910

Kaiser Friedrich IV’s Ascension

A solemn funeral ceremony in Berlin on 1 May ended, and was soon followed by the coronation of Kaiser Friedrich II, whose ceremony’s splendour juxtaposed with its atmosphere of gloom.

The new emperor’s manifesto to the nation was suitably mournful, yet it had an edge to it, a graveness of another sense — he proclaimed that Germany was the greatest nation in the world, that his father had shown to the world what it was capable of, and that he, so young and vigorous at 20, would ensure Germany was given its “place in the sun”.

Figure 15.0, coronation of Kaiser Friedrich IV

Friedrich IV was a ruthless industrialist but also sympathetic to the aristocratic heritage of Prussia; he was raised by tutors of an invariably military background. He was grandiose, bordering on grandiloquent. Wrathful bordering on mercurial; prone to tantrums. He aspired to the greatness of his namesake, Friedrich the Great. A passionate and shameless ethnonationalist, unlike his father, who saw Germany’s current borders as too small.

Kaiser Friedrich was but the typifying archetype of all that the younger generation of Germans stood for. They had not seen the hardships of the subdued past nor the lessons of the revered Bismarck. They had been born into the tidal wave of Germany’s industrial miracle, and thus had never known anything other than this perpetual growth. (It just so happened that in 1890 Germany’s GDP overtook Britain’s for the first time, 221M pounds over 217M.) To them, Germany was the greatest nation in the world, the most traditional but also the most liberal, the most industrial yet also the least radical, and the overlooked but also the star of international relations.

The outward expression of these sentiments could only be expansion. In Friedrich’s eyes, the Reichsmark deserved to be the world’s currency, and the British Empire over Africa and India should be overthrown and replaced by the new German one. French colonies needed to be broken up and its king humbled permanently if not removed. Russia’s proximity would need to be smashed up into new buffer states that could be Lebensraum. Germany needed to raise the world’s premier fleet for this purpose.

Call it delusions of grandeur — the Kaiser was fully willing to break off all the Great Power ties so carefully cultivated over decades in pursuit of a hegemony that would usher in, ultimately, the Pax Germanica — Earth under the jackboot.

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The Zeppelin Disaster also overshadowed the German elections as they were happening simultaneously.

Suddenly, nostalgic memories of Heinrich’s reign and the desire to defend the German monarchy came into focus, and despite the fact that the new census suffrage would have, by any prediction, brought the progressives into power, the largest polling party was in fact the German Conservative Party, which won 45% of the national electorate.

An old legend was appointed to be the next Chancellor: Otto von Bismarck, the 75-year-old Junker.

To an Ersatz historian, it would thus seem that Germany was taking a step back into the past. But far from it.

No German reforms would be reversed under Friedrich IV’s reign. The primary change would be in foreign policy, where Berlin became more bellicose, aggressive, and power-maximising than ever before. Weltpolitik, as termed by the Kaiser, had three aims: 1) Diplomatic — to make Germany a necessary component in resolving all disputes or crises, the Jupiter (if not the Sun) of Europe, 2) Economic — to become the world’s resource and currency master, and 3) Military — to have a navy that could properly defend trade routes in war and an army that could hold in a two-front war. The achievement of the first two aims hinged on the colonies, which would provide prestige and resources.

It is important to note that, in contrast to the era identified as the ‘Hyper-nationalistic’ one from 1910 onwards, Weltpolitik sought not to snuff out the other powers but to bring Germany to an international par with them.

In conceiving these aims, Friedrich’s blunder was to, eventually, necessarily render all other Great Powers an enemy of Germany. It was rigid and inflexible to think of Russia, France, Britain, and the USA all as enemies forming a conspiracy to break his nation. But this was how we saw it, despite all of Bismarck’s protestations, and so the Iron Chancellor’s appointment was made contingent on his ability to ‘break the encirclement’ — to find new allies and to disrupt any coalescence of these nations, while strictly forbidden from actually allying with them. This, ironically, later had the very effect of creating an anti-German alliance that Friedrich had so feared.

This was Weltpolitik in any case.

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Though Bismarck personally had little interest in the rights of the poor, he did see the number of voters for the Social Democrats concerning, and moved to enact regulatory bodies on labour.

Acting on his Kaiser’s orders, feelers were sent out to China and Spain, while the Ottoman and Italian alliances were reaffirmed.

The tone for Germany’s external outlook was set quite suddenly in 1891 when the Sinai, an area of interest for quite some time, was claimed in the interests of solidifying German control over the Suez Canal, whose construction had began four years earlier in 1887. And after some heavy threatening, Egypt backed down and was forced to cede the entire region. This massive feat of construction was completed in February 1891 and before long became the ‘artery through the heart of Africa’. Bismarck began to play on Egypt’s hostile relationship with Britain and its conciliatory mood to potentially befriend it.

When Britain got busy with a war against the Princely States in 1892, a substantial colonial force was dispatched to annex the Punjab. This was no easy ordeal — Punjab (not to mention Kashmir) had a population of 14 million. And it actively sabotaged Bismarck’s efforts to improve the German image abroad.

Though as many as 110,000 Punjabis were armed to defend the Maharaja, and Germany brought significantly fewer men, it became a testing ground for methods of trench warfare and heavy artillery bombardment. Helmuth von Motlke Jr proved his mettle in his offensive to the Kashmir mountains.

As of 1894, Britain had about 380 ships, and France not far behind with 333 (the numbers would drop massively as older ones were retired and not replaced). Germany’s goal was to overtake them at 400 in two decades. To this end, Grand Admiral von Tirpitz’s proposed Flottengesetze, Naval Laws, were approved, and much funding was put towards the construction of destroyers and developing new ship types.

Bismarck was dismissed by 1894 just as the Conservatives were thrown out of government. He was too old, according to Friedrich, and not active enough in furthering German influence. His replacement — von Tirpitz. Within a month Germany concluded trade agreements with the Great Qing and with Egypt, and a defensive pact two years later with Spain and Japan.

In 1894, discontent in France led to the seizure of Paris by revolutionaries. France was now split between two rival governments — the Commune in Paris, and that of Versailles. The German reaction to this crisis is most indicative of the Kaiser’s new cutthroat view of politics. While other monarchies denounced this change, we welcomed it, and was eager to see his enemy King Alphonse deposed — that was in private. In public, he gave words but did nothing.

The result was far more than any nation or any man could have imagined: all of France did revolt, and all the soldiers mutinied, and the King was executed in as barbaric a fashion as the victim of the first French Revolution. France and all its colonies had become the first Communist nation in the world. They justified the retention of colonies under the doctrine that members of their colonies would be treated better; and that this was a necessary evil for the long run revolution against capitalism.

Thereafter, France would be even more irresolute in terms of foreign policy, but it fell gradually down the ranks of the great powers, as its colonies fell apart from illegitimacy and finances at home meant the downsizing of their fleet, which was only about 200 ships strong by 1900.

Von Tirpitz that same year also made a play to ‘liberate’ the Dutch East Indies back to the native peoples. He was much disgruntled by King Alexander of Orange-Nassau’s personal union with Luxembourg, which Germany claimed. When the Kaiser himself threatened that war could be had over this, and no other European powers supported the Dutch (they were keen on the opening-up of the Indies), the Netherlands backed down — forced to surrender Luxembourg and their prized colony.

Then Germany showed its nasty colours by launching an invasion to claim Batavia.

Before long, Japan had also been snatched into the German sphere, conceded by the weak Tsar Nicholas II.

Spectre of Communism and French Civil War

The rise of a Communist government in France that without a delay began radically redistributing property and mass-executing the rich and bourgeoisie scared Europe to the core. A debate arose in the halls of the German leadership over what to do. Von Tirpitz was itching for a war, and although the immensely popular Communists could probably call up a million conscripts in a war, he was confident that powers like Russia, Spain, and Britain could join in the overthrow of the French Communists. Kaiser Friedrich was of the moderately opposing view. Since his ascension, the return to heavy state expenditure had created nothing short of an economic boom; Germany’s GDP now climbed past 344 M pounds a year, having left the United Kingdom in the dust at 278M (although not if we count the British Raj!). A military buildup to satisfactorily prepare for modern warfare was, according to Moltke’s estimates, five years away at least.

A Bismarck was reanimated from his deathbed — eminence grise, perhaps — to receive one last audience from the Kaiser. He was disgusted by what he saw as the upheaval of centuries of admirable French tradition and culture. Friedrich II was advised that if the French Communists were able to solidify their grip on France, Germany would have a permanent foe more dangerous than ever before, not only more nonchalant with its aggression but also able to spread domestic dissent to the Fatherland; moreover, perhaps these radical workers’ ideas could become normalised, while at present all of Europe had essentially been taken aback and looked with disdain towards Paris. On the other hand, if the Communists were overthrown by conservative forces, perhaps like the Jacobins were, then Germany would have lost its chance to isolate and cut France out of the competition. Therefore, there was one rational path of action: crush France overwhelmingly, and now.

The opinion of the Kaiser was swayed. Bismarck died a week later.

(Indeed, between 1898 and 1898 there were a total of 6 revolutions around the world, not including the French one — Quebec, Afghanistan, Liberia, whites in Tanganikya, and the Zambezi).

Figure 16.0, Europe in 1897

The German government had poured support into ‘counter-revolutionary’ groups in France, a policy which at last saw major success in September 1898 when the south of France rose up to throw off the Communists. A broadly capitalist provisional government under President Germain de Guerin was at the helm and possessed about 100,000 mutineers.

Germany did not confer recognition upon the Provisional Republic, but it had its casus belli.

The development of the crisis did not go favourably, however. The United States, for whatever reason, saw the French as compatriots of democracy and indicated their intent to defend Paris militarily. Then Italy’s Emperor Francesco, with the promise of gigantic land transfers all the way up to the River Rhone and naturally the German territories of Tyrol and Istria, broke off its alliance with Berlin and threw in with the devil. Meanwhile, neither Britain nor Russia now seemed keen on getting involved in this mess.

The Kaiser proclaimed a crusade for the spirit of Europe and ordered general mobilisation on 28 October 1898.

The French Civil War began in earnest on 8 January 1899, when hostilities commenced at home, and the Deutsches Heer began speeding into Lorraine and charging across the Isonzo.

Moltke’s dash to Paris was eventually bogged down by partisans and he had to withdraw. The southern front of France was completely overwhelmed and saw the highest German casualty rates. In contrast, the ageing Prince Friedrich Karl capably switched from the offensive to entrenched defence when he saw the Americans preparing to strike back. Italy performed very poorly in its attacks up the Tyrolean mountains.

One more year of futile attacks on German trenchlines passed, with the pro-French coalition taking casualties at a 6:1 rate, until at long last an unofficial truce took over. The Germans from Verdun to Epinal retained de facto control.

Other effects: France reneged on its promises to Italy, allowing the possibility of rapprochement with Germany, and lastly the Oyo state was surreptitiously annexed.

On the face of it, Germany had triumphed, but Friedrich II seethed at the failure to attain any of the aims upon which such a costly intervention had been staked, the breakdown of the relationship with Italy, and the ostensible fact that his nation had been stood up by the other powers.

Figure 16.1, World in 1900.

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In 1900, many German intellectuals published their papers on the new academic Zeitgeist which they termed the beginning of the Positive Epoch.

For about a decade now, the major universities (in Saxony, Baden, and Bavaria) had been overrun with the austere philosophical school of Positivism, which held itself above all statements that were normative and instead ruled that the only truth that could exist would necessarily be derived from empiricism and logic, not in the least part intuition or introspection. A movement begun by Comte but brought into focus in Germany’s academic institutions, it was before long entwined with nationalism; they sought to uncover the ‘true’ and ‘genuine’ state of the German past, poring over literature and journals, developing from there a civic nationalism that would perfect the nation’s great historical narrative.

The ‘Manifesto of 1900’ read:

“From the halls of academia to the chambers of government, let us cultivate a society in which reason reigns supreme, where the pursuit of knowledge is revered as the highest virtue, and where the German people march boldly into the future armed with the tools of empirical inquiry… We declare a revolution of reason against the tyranny of dogma and superstition. Let empirical evidence be our guiding star in the pursuit of understanding.”

It is difficult to determine to what extent this focus on reason and observation had on German science that was not already in motion, but Germany did certainly become the world’s leader in technological research. Its progress in the ‘new industries’ — synthetics, oil, fertilisers, electricity, chemicals, communications, electricity, and automobiles — was unmatched.

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The world’s second Communist revolution began in Australia. Britain and France were immediately at odds; Communism was an internationalist ideology.

If personal bitterness played any role in international relations, it was here. For its own irresoluteness in the French Civil War, Britain received no aid from Germany; the Teutons instead busied themselves with taking a treaty port in Rabat by invasion. The British triumphed eventually but there was no major domestic upset in France.

The 1902 German election saw the incumbents more popular than ever before. The Free-Minded People’s Party won 57% of all votes and joined with the petite bourgeoisie Free Conservative Party (27.5%) to form a preponderant super-majority government. The 71-year-old Prince Friedrich Karl (von Hohenzollern) was appointed as Chancellor, a last vestige of the Junkerdom, though this made ruling more frictious than it need have been. There is no wonder that as many as 21 million people turned out to celebrate: the standard of living and literacy (76%) were by far the best of the Great Powers, whilst GDP had left others in the dust, now at 425M.

The government moved to enact the right of assembly and modified the constitution to provide guaranteed liberties for citizens. There is a theme here: the energetic attempts to thoroughly reform the massive juxtapositions in the German constitution and its bias towards the conservative order. Much work was done to rectify that.

When however they attempted to remove all migration controls, the (racist and xenophobic) middle class was up in arms in the south and centre of the country, following the charismatic Philipp Neunzig as he went from city to city building up millions of supporters against the law. Chancellor Friedrich Karl’s proposal to arrest him was shot down because they could not provide liberties on the one hand and arrest dissidents on the other. Lawmakers raced to get the law passed. They reasoned that it would be harder to mobilise support against a decision already made — fait accompli. Compromises were made to delay imminent revolution — e.g. banning scrips as wages.

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Dreams of Hegemony, 1910–1920

The historiographical eras of Germany usually diverge at 1910; the separation from a policy of Weltpolitik is justified by an understanding that German foreign policy from that year onwards ceased to be controlled by the Kaiser but often outpaced him — it was no longer about making Germany a permanent staple of global relations (that had essentially been achieved) but about eliminating competition, present and future. Berlin would begin to treat its allies high-handedly, its desiderata would extend to a new ‘Germanic’ domain, and the endeavours of attaining the imperial patrimony now inherited were treated with insouciance, as the German latent and hard power were considered adamantine, the bedrock engine of their newly predacious outlook on the world.
The culprits, the Fatherland Party of 1910, had shown themselves in military uniform some years earlier: in 1906.

Anglo-German Naval Arms Race, 1906–1913

The Royal Navy, the world’s premier force on the seas, was frightened to learn in 1906 that Germany had laid down two dreadnoughts (the name being applied post-fact after the HMS Dreadnought), the first of their kind, the Deutschland and the Hannover, with their ‘all-big-gun’ armament scheme, with an unprecedented number of heavy-calibre guns, and steam turbine propulsion. The Kaiserliche Marine was also the first to majorly invest in submarines, which they saw as a way to cut off Britain from its colonies. Britain, with a fleet four times larger, suddenly became nervous.

At the same time, Germany in every single war against a power with a navy yet had suffered tremendously from loss of tonnage in shipping (‘Jeune Ecole’). Defence was arguably a more pressing matter. How to balance a strong main fleet with the many small flotillas needed to protect trade lanes? — the central problem of naval theory.

German gunboat diplomacy was put on display in December of 1906 when pretty much all of Japan save the Kanto region rose up overthrow the Emperor Komei Yamato, because the Japanese had followed a passive, complacent, and non-reformist agenda for far too long. He had refused to open up Japan to foreign powers or to modernise, until eventually it allied with Germany, but aside from that he had defended the embattled Tokugawa Shogunate against insurrectionists and partisans. Now, things had come to a head. Knowing or otherwise ignorant, the Emperor sought for German protection, and Tirpitz was all too happy to head an expedition to Kanto.

The German force was frightening. It was relatively small (25,000) so well-stocked and well-trained. With the new machine gun, they shredded down Japanese in their hundreds for each German man, using oppressive siege artillery and complex trenches to throw out any attack.

As an effect of the war, the Empire of Japan suffered an unequal treaty from Germany: it ceded the Ryukyu Islands, while Sakhalin was gifted to China, which, along with the return of Qingdao, paved the way for China’s integration into the German economic sphere.

Great Britain and Russia were infuriated. They terminated their trade agreements with Germany without delay.

The naval buildup continued, but Tirpitz, its chief architect, died in 1908. Many questioned: “What use is there to our building one ship if for each one we lay down, the British lay down two?”

Germany was feeling resource constriction. Oil was the main problem. It was for that reason that the British stranglehold over the Middle East, the Russian dominance over Romania, and French Tripolitania were all causes for consternation. Hence the Reich invaded Eastern Java in September of 1908 when oil was reported.

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When in 1910 the German Fatherland Party was formed of many members sitting in the present government, projected indeed to win a plurality of votes in the election of that year, this was proof to most that nationalism was rising to new heights, to a new fever pitch. Most historians point to this moment as a Stygian climacteric for the German Sonderweg. Following the popular momentum, the Kaiser appointed the demagogue Joachim Basserman as Reichskanzler, knowing and supportive of the fact that he was a reactionary, Social Darwinist, and German ethnonationalist. They allied with the corporate forces of Germany, not extemporaneously, in what can be described as a proto-Fascist state. They moved to increase the level of exploitation in German colonies.

In Hannover, August 29th 1910, the first heavier-than-air flight occurred — mankind took to the skies. Unnecessary rhetoric from Basserman about bombing Britain from the air prompted their Prime Minister Walker to repair relations with America; they began to cooperate on a new race whose character was not all too different from the naval one. There were other competitions too, like the Race to the South Pole, The calculus on the English side was that Germany’s heavy military investment was unsustainable. After all, it took ridiculous expenditure to raise a modern navy already half their size. But they underestimated the German economy’s equanimity. The Kaiser’s planners were the doyens of the world, navigating the usually Sisyphean task of procuring funding with unchecked fiat; the GDP was booming, now at 603M, and the methods of proportional taxation played no small role in providing the necessary capital — so long as business exploded, German taxation levels for the populace as a whole could remain relatively smaller than other states (17.5% average tax for lower classes, 15% for middle, 12% for upper), building up the standard of living, whilst the industry barons grew rich but not extravagantly so.

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On ’12 March Day’ 1912, Japan’s rampant middle class set themselves loose against the ossified Tokugawa state by proclaiming a new Emperor and dynasty, Yasukata Kujo’s, which quickly ballooned in a nationwide, populistic uprising. Once more, the Emperor, at the cost of his own sovereignty, had to appeal for German aid. The formidable Asiatische Armee was deployed to the outskirts of Kanto.

Unlike other colonial wars, this actually involved large, conventional battles where tens of thousands were killed. German wartime casualties were only around a tenth of the Japanese, but propaganda about a war of total domination should not be believed, as General Neuerberg did suffer about 1100 German casualties at Kansai (November) in a headlong drive for Osaka.

1912 was a hectic year on the world stage.

Castelnau’s colonial administration of Abyssinia (French northern sector) had become an echo chamber for anti-Communist sentiment, and they attempted to declare themselves an independent colony, which prompted an invasion attempt by the Communards — hard-pressed to sail around Africa after being denied access to the Suez Canal. They certainly could not force a naval battle there. Germany had that year laid down the sister ships Baden and Bayern as a novel class of super-dreadnoughts, which placed all the main armament on the centreline (hence with some turrets superfiring over others), increasing displacement by 25% and weight of broadside doubling; the former became the new naval flagship.

That the People’s Army (Armee Populaire) suffered such humiliating setbacks on the shores of Eritrea against General Firmin Rabot’s colonial militia emboldened the white classes of German Abyssinia to rise up too, albeit unsuccessfully.

Wary regardless, when the Spanish Philippines were upset by a Communist-Socialist rebellion two months later, Spain responded with military strength and German naval backing. Only a year earlier, French Laos and Cambodia had risen up for their freedom from the ‘liberators’, and de facto blocked through the Straits of Malacca, Paris had been powerless to stop them.

Franco-German relations, which technically did not even exist, were nothing short of a ticking time bomb. On the eastern side of the Rhine, what looked like a pattern of communist agitation everywhere made a confrontation with its alleged source unavoidable. To the west, Germany was the reactionary, atavistic barbarian who shunned progress and would make world revolution impossible. Exactly how a Second German-Communard War would break out was up in the air. That it would was no question.

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1913 made 1912 look like child’s play.

Haijiabad Crisis, May 1916

The young King Henry (13) was not, of course, dictating foreign policy. The disproportionate controlling factor in Westminster was the armed forces. Their influence had grown much more pronounced during the competition against Germany, and to them the Sun was setting on the British Empire, something which could never be allowed to happen, even if it meant futile and bloody attempts to maintain it.

Russia, which had failed to industrialise and so had a GDP only barely above Spain’s, was a much more appealing target than Germany — and weakening it would still increase the relative power balance against the Germans. To this end, in one of the most blatant acts of insubordination of Armed Forces’ history, the British garrisons in Bandar Abbas and Basra began to sortie into Persian territory, fighting when blocked, and when the Shah protested loudly about this, Prime Minister (and ex-Admiral) David Beatty unveiled his determination that they should be granted control of the province of Kerman. Russia may have been quiet in recent years, but it was not going to let this stand, and stepped in with Tehran.

Now, Britain was truly drawn in, because backing down would mean humiliation from the British. The new Ottoman Sultan, who, too, was itching for a war, committed the Caliphate to Persia’s defence. It was a chance to reclaim some lost provinces.

(By July, widespread fighting had broke out in a major Persian War.)

Bassermann did not waste a second before exploiting this crisis. He marched his imposing stature into the Royal Palace and told the Kaiser it was time for war against France. Kaiser Friedrich II agreed.

Lorraine Crisis, May 1913

A flurry of nighttime activity at midnight on the 18th May in Nancy was heard and witnessed. Two mornings later, German newspapers published numerous exposes on freshly captured agitators and revolutionaries and accused France of violating German sovereignty and sedition within foreign borders. As fundamentally un-diplomatic and anti-European, therefore, the French people needed to be liberated.

This war was clearly pre-meditated in Berlin. But it is important not to become lost in the myth of German war guilt, because precisely a month earlier France’s Chairman Ambroise Bouillet had been contemplating the possibilities of a revanchist war against Germany. Those shelved plans of his were brought out of the archives just a week before once news of the situation in Persia spread, and an injection of funding for French nationalists in Lorraine was calculated to create popular turmoil that could justify French intervention, and, by extension, a wider war to claim the Rhineland — the reason why it was now scheduled was the same as with Bassermann: because Britain and Russia were preoccupied.

By the end of May, Germany was moving troops into Italy and Belgium and Egypt. In France, weapons kept in the central storage of local communes (Délégation Générale pour l’Armement) were being handed out as members of the people’s militia were called to arms. The Germans were careful not to push too hard in their demands. Claiming large swathes of colonial territory would force the hand of the other Great Powers into (inconceivably) defending France, and “This is not the time for a war of the world” (Bassermann). They were already feeling very threatened about this move, Communist or not.

In the event, Germany did not call upon its allies or ask for access through their borders. It neither felt it necessary nor advantageous to put strain to relations that existed on paper.

Compared to the last war, when some semblance of military order had existed, by now ideology had fully pervaded the People’s Army, and all its experienced officers and command staff had been purged for loyalists. Their mobilisation was terribly disorganised and was hardly even on the front line by the time the German declaration of war was delivered on 25 August, 1913.

There can be no parallel between this war and the previous experience. There was no frontline. The French troops had blobbed up in Burgundy with little direction. In the colonial battle, France hold, but only until the Army of Asia was redeployed from India. And on the seas, Admiral Eduard Graff won a battle in the English Channel after which the naval war devolved into the Grosse Armada of Maximilian von Spee chasing the enemy where he could catch wind of them. The rest of the ships soon turned to convoy raiding.

In the Champagne theatre, the French militia were being overrun. Even Moltke was surprised at the extent to which their military strength had been overestimated. He was even moved to pity at seeing well-built fortifications being taken without even a defender to man them.

There were still major battles, especially as November and December arrived, the most decisive of which was the Battle of Meaux (very close to Paris), which sucked in 200,000 men.

Figure 17.0, Germans repulsed from Paris.

The transfer of the German 6th Army to another battle in Burgundy, an act of hubris, likely contributed to General Krohn’s defeat and humiliation at the hands of Rodolphe Lagagner.

In terms of strategic aims, toppling the Commune had long been accomplished. The defenders of France now were effectively warlords, the men who commanded the armies but answered to no civilian authority. This led to such blatant inefficiencies such as 300,000 men being called up to garrison the northern shoreline of France, because the commanders there would rather hoard their own power than subordinate their men to a bigger warlord. This also meant that the ‘Warlord of Paris’, Lagagner, was able to give a gun to anyone he deemed fit and draft them up for service.

Krohn sought to redeem himself by commencing a new battle, this time on the outskirts of Paris itself, on 6 April 1914. This time he won, even though it was Moltke who fought the much more militarily important battle to his southern flank. Von Hindenburg soon won his own splendid victory on the Rhone.

What might have seemed perverse was that the Germans were still running massive profit margins in terms of revenue. They had not even increased taxation to pay for the war. They had simply paused state investments into industry, and let the military-industrial complex pay for itself. Erich Ludendorff’s intended army of some 125,000 professionals had not even been mobilised, to his chagrin — not to mention the reserve of conscripts still waiting.

The spirit of France, all trade cut off, was broken.

On 12 February, 1915, the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

Libya and Algeria immediately became independent states.
Egypt received Darfur.
Morocco annexed a small French strip of Inner Morocco.
German Africa was expanded to Damaturu and Waddai, ensuring then that French colonial possessions would be cut off, while the Spanish traded the Windward Coast for Togo.
Australia was handed Vanuatu and eastern New Guinea, without which England would have kicked up a fuss.
Tahiti was gifted to Britain.
France was allowed to keep the Moluccas but had to surrender the Tongan islands and Fiji to Germany.
France also had to cede Savoy to Italy.
France ceded Franche-Comte to Germany.
The French relinquished claim to their natural borders.

German troops stayed until some order was restored, enough to instate Philippe as King of the new Orleans dynasty. Although he detested the Germans, this did not help him escape public hatred as a German ‘puppet king’.

Though the French technically were to keep Abyssinia, the Wello had taken over most of their area, and self-proclaimed Communists (many of them now political refugees from the mainland) fought for Eritrea.

Anyone ever could see that this was an extremely punishing peace deal. Germany had refused mediation or oversight by any foreign powers. Their reputation was now worse than notorious. It is absurd that the Fascists in government had wanted even more land and were only moderated by the Kaiser’s influence.

Figure 17.1, The devastated French landscape

France was terribly weakened but given that it was decidedly not a satellite and rather was extremely hostile, with no further German control over domestic affairs, a rebirth of Revanchism was more likely than not. Vitriol was ubiquitous in 1915 from a war that had damaged a million French and German soldiers and no doubt many more civilians, those being French civilians.

Figure 17.2, Europe in 1915

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Elsewhere, Britain had won a very costly war to dominate Persia (Russia moved its capital to Moscow after being put under threat yet again), but it soon became the target of a Faustian pact of Muslims and Communists when the British Raj erupted into revolutionary turmoil under the leadership of the socialist Indian National Congress. They also threw the French out of Pondicherry.

Figure 17.3, World in 1915

It could only be a matter of time before a greater war was at hand. Too many chess pieces were at play, too many empires which thought they were at a fight-or-die stage of their history. Without a reliable continental ally, the United Kingdom had long since abandoned its historical policy of naval defensiveness and buck-passing of the actual army matters. Its standing army was of roughly equal size to Germany’s in 1915.

Quality was a different matter. The Deutsches Heer was hard at work incorporating the lessons of the German-Communard War. Tactics were overhauled for infantry, who were now expected to operate in independent squads. Veterans of the war were brought back as NCOs to teach reservists.

On the sea, Germany changed the game once again by laying down the world’s first purpose-built aircraft carrier in October of 1916, the first of the Tirpitz class.

The policy of the Royal Navy had traditionally been the upkeep of a ‘two-power standard’, where they would have to have more ships than the next two naval powers combined. This obviously being obsolete, the Admiralty had compromised on a superiority by 60% over the second power. In the end of 1917, Germany had 417 cutting-edge ships. To beat that by 60%, Britain needed 680 — what they had was merely 515.

The heroes of the previous war, most notably Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and von Moltke, were exerting the major part of influence on government, having well exceeded Bassermann in level of control. The German constitutional weakness was being exploited, this time to allow the military unprecedented sway over the organs of civil, democratic governance. Oberste Heeresleitung (OHL), the Supreme Army Command, had been allowed by the Kaiser to direct resources of the state in an effective mastery of the economy. This had not ended in 1915 with the cessation of hostilities. The Hindenburg Program was designed to build up war machine industries and dockyards and largely brushed aside civilian needs. One of these new war machines was proposed in 1918 under a prototype called the A7V: tanks. Their origin lay in the experience of trench warfare which the Germans had developed and knew that other countries must have emulated — how to breakthrough trench lines? Their first actual deployment test was at least a year away, however. Because the generals thought in overly harsh terms and imposed draconian quotas, there were many factories open but understaffed from the drought of skilled workers. The sustained German growth up to 725M pounds at the end of 1917 was because of the employment in the military-making bubble.

Germany had become a de facto dictatorship of the two warlords Hindenburg and Ludendorff.

With their endorsement, the Fascists won in 1918’s election with 45% of the votes, though there was concern at seeing the SDP take 30% of the remaining share.

War was still an unpopular prospect in all major nations, but otherwise the extension of the peace period was quite an anomaly. Almost everyone interpreted it as an interlude between war, and not war as an interlude between peace. The one country where there was widespread sentiment in favour of war was France, but it was torn from one political crisis to the next, at one point anti-socialist and then anti-monarchist the next.

The Quadruple Entente

For all their recent conflict, Great Britain, the United States, Russia, and France were able to correctly characterise the anocratic regime in Berlin as revisionist to the extent where the other Great Powers could reasonably have existential fear towards their intentions. A 1919 ‘Four Powers Summit’ in Lisbon produced an agreement that, although it was not a commitment to war against Germany, had done much of the work in solidifying the two axes of the inter-coalition conflict. Germany’s alliance network spanned Scandinavia, Italy, its half of the Balkans, Egypt, and Japan, and less certainly also the Ottomans, China, and Spain.

When the British seized Oran later in 1919, Germany could not risk a confrontation to stop it, even though it was close with Algeria.

If the French situation could not be more ridiculous, it became so in September of 1919. The Orleans were discarded by Emperor Victor of the house of Bonaparte! And when he effected his coup in Limoges with the socialists and workers on his side (one struggles to imagine), in Paris, a ‘counter-monarch’ was proclaimed in the form of Ferdinand Philippe of the house of Bourbon! And he had Catholic fundamentalists and fascists backing him. Both claimants had taken a roughly even split of the army and navy, the latter in the north and the former south and colonies. The Communards bared their teeth again through a coup in Bokoro, Niger.

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By 1919, the empires were on the brink, but none could imagine that war would come very soon… France had had its nose bloodied; German industrialists only wanted peace and what followed, ie the freedom to expand industry; Britain was dealing with colonial unrest; Russia needed time to modernise its military. But put a matchstick to gunpowder and, despite all your preferences, explosion will come.