Sir Edward Grey had become foreign secretary in 1905. His appointment was not in the Lansdowne-Salisbury tradition of great wealth and aesthetic or intellectual sophistication. Indeed he had been sent down from Oxford for idleness, spoke no German and little French, and during his first nine years as foreign minister did not once go abroad. Grey vastly preferred the company of the wildfowl on his country estate to that of diplomats and, possibly, to human interaction generally. His shyness, deep sense of honor, and lay evangelical background suggest comparison with Woodrow Wilson, and like Wilson, Grey also took an instant and deeply affectionate liking to Colonel House. Indeed Grey's biographer, G. M. Trevelyan, concluded that Grey's relations with House were his greatest personal contribution to the policy that won the war and founded the League of Nations.31
Grey's policy until the outbreak of war was founded on four principles: (1) to maintain the entente developed with Britain's two ancient enemies—by Lansdowne in 1904 with France, and by Grey himself in 1907 with Russia; (2) to ensure that neither of these friendly relationships, however, slipped into an alliance that would close the door to an amicable relationship with Germany; (3) to protect the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom; and (4) to resurrect the Concert of Europe in order to guarantee European security against aggression in Europe. He pursued these objectives with courage and dexterity, but, as will be recalled from Book I, the pursuit of peace was doomed to fail. Germany, a protofascist nation-state, confronted France and Britain, two parliamentary state-nations, in a struggle to determine the grounds of legitimacy of the European state itself. There could be no Concert of Europe—the state-nation alliance of great powers—because Germany, a great power whose participation was crucial to any scheme of crisis management, was determined to destroy that Concert. Germany was too dynamic to intimidate, too ambitious to cooperate with. Inevitably, what began as an entente with France and Russia became an alliance once Germany determined on war through Belgium, whose territorial integrity was a British vital interest of long standing. German indifference to the creation of such an alliance against her is a measure of her determination to destroy the prevailing system; indeed, had Germany not attacked France through Belgium (in order to outflank French fortifications), it is unlikely that England would have intervened.
All this, however, was still to come when House contacted Grey's personal secretary in November 1913 to propose that House come to Europe on a mission of reconciliation. He hoped to achieve lower levels of armaments among the great powers in order to avert a potentially cataclysmic crisis. After wintering in Austin, House asked for Wilson's blessing for this mission and, receiving it, set out for Germany on May 16, 1914; he would be gone for two months.
On his arrival in Berlin, House was shocked and alarmed. “The situation is extraordinary,” he wrote Wilson. “It is militarism run stark mad. Unless [we take the initiative] there is some day to be an awful cataclysm. No one in Europe can do it.” After lengthy interviews with a hostile von Tirpitz, the architect of German naval growth, and a somewhat more sympathetic von Moltke—the nephew of the figure discussed in Book I— House was entertained by the kaiser. For over half an hour they spoke alone, with the Kaiser presenting a classic ethno-national, fascist argument: the Russians, as Slavs, and the French, as Latins, would never be suitable allies for the English. Only an English, American, and German alliance, based on their common Anglo-Saxon racial heritage, would withstand the challenges of the new century. German political strength, the kaiser said, lay in being always prepared for war at a second's notice.32
House correctly saw that Germany lived in an excited state of fear, something the other European powers, including Austria, neglected to appreciate. From Berlin, House went to Paris, where politics was paralyzed by a cabinet crisis and the shooting of an influential newspaper editor by the mistress of a disgraced minister. After a few fruitless days, House, who fully appreciated the impact of local politics on the ability of a government to focus its attention on international issues, simply retired to London. There he lunched with Grey and told him of his discussions with the kaiser. House proposed that Grey meet with the kaiser during a regatta at Kiel, but Grey demurred on the ground that the French and Russians would be alarmed. When House suggested that Germany be permitted to aid in the development of Persia, Grey replied that it might be a good move in order to play Germany against Russia. It is clear that, at this point at any rate, Grey and House are speaking on the basis of two completely different state “paradigms,” Grey for the imperial state-nation and the balance of power on the one hand and House for the newly emerging nation-state and a scheme of collective security on the other. House later proposed a development bank funded by the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany to invest in underdeveloped areas of the globe, similar to the World Bank of our day. Grey expressed enthusiastic (if mercantile) interest, but explained that quick action would not be possible. The Irish question dominated the cabinet, Grey explained, and it would not turn its attention elsewhere for the time being. Indeed, when news came of the assassination of the Austrian archduke, no anxiety was expressed in London. Only on July 3 did Grey respond to House, telling him to let the kaiser know of the peaceable sentiments of the British in order to pursue negotiations along the lines suggested by House. On the 7th House wrote the kaiser, but by the time the note was delivered, Wilhelm II was at sea, from where he was recalled by the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Wilhelm later remarked that “the visit of Colonel House to Berlin and London in the spring of 1914 almost prevented World War I.”33 The most that can be made of this statement, however, is that House might have thrown off the timing34 of the German general staff (as indeed the assassination did) had House been able to persuade the European powers that the new world of industrial warfare they were about to enter would mock their unrealistic ambitions. This was something, however, that even four years of horrific suffering could not do.
House sailed for Boston on July 21. As he was packing on the 20th a message arrived from Grey to the effect that the Serbian situation was now a source of grave concern. Despite this, and the fact that Mrs. Wilson was dying, House did not go to Washington but continued to the Massachusetts North Shore and waited to see Wilson until the latter came to New Hampshire after his wife's funeral. House's mission had been a failure owing to a lack of appreciation on all sides, including his own, of the nature of the conflict about to erupt. This failure to grasp the epochal nature of the conflict upon which the great powers were about to embark would persist throughout the next five deadly years and into the peace conference that followed. We can learn from House's vision, however, something of the world which we now inhabit at the end of that epochal war, when the conditions for that vision have finally been satisfied, even if, as will be seen, House's vision can no longer sustain the system it brought into being.
In November 1914, two months after the Battle of the Marne had claimed half a million casualties and blunted Germany's drive for a quick victory, House attempted to use the American continents as a model for the resolution of the European conflict. He presented a plan to Wilson by which North and South American signatories were to (a) guarantee each other's territorial integrity and political independence under republican forms of governance; (b) commit to settling disputes peacefully through mediation; and (c) refrain from subversion or assistance to the enemies of any other signatory state. House was convinced that the outbreak of war in Europe had resulted “primarily from the lack of an organized system of international co-operation,” which was perhaps true in a way: the competing constitutional paradigms of fascism, communism, and parliamentarianism could not coexist in a truly cooperative international security organization, as was later seen in both the League of Nations and the United Nations Security Council.
“It was my idea,” House confided to his diary in December, “to formulate a plan, to be agreed upon by the republics of the two continents, which in itself would serve as a model for
the European nations when peace is at last brought about.”35 House moved quickly, getting agreement in principle from the Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean ambassadors to Washington. Already, however, he was making plans for an American mediation of the European war, and this forced him to turn over the Pan American negotiations to the State Department. This loss of momentum delayed the conference that was to produce the Pan American pact; without the pact in place, the United States lacked an international forum when Huerta's successor in Mexico was unable to prevent attacks on Texas by the Mexican partisan Pancho Villa. The U.S. intervention to capture Villa effectively killed the pact; no Latin American state could afford to be seen siding with the North Americans. In these circumstances the Chileans, who were least willing to join the U.S. initiative, pressed for further delays, and the American initiative came to nothing. The entire experience foreshadowed not only the substance of the American (as opposed to the European and espe-cially the British) idea of a League of Nations, but also the essentially premature hopes of House and Wilson, dealing as they were with a new international order of states that had not yet resolved the issue of what, precisely, constituted a “republican” form of government, an international order that would always fall back on, and fall out because of, national rivalries and ambitions. The Pan American Pact thus sounded an overture for many of the discordant themes of the Versailles Treaty, to which House and Wilson were to some degree tone-deaf.
When Grey learned that House was proposing an American mediation of the European war on the basis of a system of mutual security guarantees, he cabled through the British ambassador to Washington:
[W]hile no peace negotiation could be undertaken before Germany's evacuation and restoration of Belgium and the humbling of Prussian militarism, a negotiated peace might be possible if the U.S. were prepared to join the European Great Powers in a mutual security system and to join in repressing by force whoever broke the treaty.36
Grey had long been familiar with the idea of a World League of Peace, which had been put forward in various manifestos, editorials, and monographs since the late nineteenth century. In March 1914 he had written that “fear will haunt our gates until we have organized an international system of security and order.”37 Such a system would commit the great powers to refrain from aggression, reduce armaments, and submit disputes to peaceful arbitration; if any power refused to abide by the results of the arbitral panel and chose to resort to violence instead, “the others would join forces against” that power. The Hague Conventions would be strengthened by providing that those becoming parties would bind themselves to uphold the conventions by force.38
Grey had in mind an extension, in the twentieth century, of the Congress system initiated by Castlereagh in the early nineteenth century. This system was managed by the great powers, dealt almost exclusively with security issues, and did not differentiate—despite Metternich's earnest efforts to the contrary—among states according to their internal forms of governance. House, by contrast, sought a system that embraced specifically “republican” states on the basis of equality, in which the great powers played a cooperative rather than balancing role. He thought that the most powerful states would realize that their interests were best served by maintaining the system as a whole, even when, on particular issues, that system gave preference to smaller and weaker states that could have been easily overborne by any of the powers acting alone. Thus House's vision more nearly accorded with the constitutional order of the nation-state, which was replacing that of the imperial state-nation and whose legitimacy was based on each state's embodying the principle of service to the nation it was supposed, by the self-determination of its people, to reflect. Neither sort of league could in fact have halted the Long War in its midst: a great power like Germany or Britain (or Russia) saw no reason to acquiesce in the constraint of its sovereignty; and there was as yet no consensus on what precisely constituted the “self-determination” of a nation in choosing its State.
On January 30, 1915, Colonel House sailed for Europe on the Lusitania with an offer to mediate the conflict. Two days before, an American merchant ship carrying wheat to England had been torpedoed by a German submarine, the first such attack against American commercial shipping. On February 4, Germany declared the waters around the British Isles a war zone, threatening all shipping that approached Britain.
At this time, both Germany and Britain menaced American shipping. The British, having control of the seas, were able to stop American ships and board them unlawfully, directing them to British ports if they were thought to contain “contraband,” which included a wide range of nonlethal materials, including foodstuffs. Britain recognized that she could, over the long run, bring famine to Central Europe if she could blockade the ports to which the Germans had access. At the same time, Germany realized that her chief superiority lay in munitions. As a result, the Germans resorted to submarine attacks on all vessels bound for Britain that were thought to be transporting weapons and ammunition bound for the Allies. House's ostensible mission was to work out rules governing the compensation due to American merchants for British seizures. Actually he had been in negotiations for some months with the German and British ambassadors over American mediation of the war. The American proposal was to be based on the evacuation of Belgium by the Germans and a payment of reparations to that state; the French occupation of Lorraine, taken from France by Germany in 1870; and some guarantees against further aggression.
It is certainly open to question whether any of the European powers involved entered these talks in good faith. The Germans were anxious to separate Britain from France and Russia and doubtless hoped that effectively trilateral talks among the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany would cause disquiet and even friction within the Allied group. The British were equally anxious to string the Americans along, presenting themselves as the most reasonable of the belligerents, shaping proposals they knew the Germans could not afford to accept, hoping to entangle the Americans into nonneutral cooperation or, better, belligerency.
Grey seems to have been largely free of this: his proposals for a League of Peace served both as an instrument for forging an Anglo-American entente as well as a sincere lever to encourage U.S. mediation. Upon House's arrival in London, Grey again questioned the American about the possibility of U.S. participation in a “general guaranty for world wide peace.”
House was in London for a month and a half. He grew ever closer to Grey, writing in a memorandum in February, “If every belligerent nation had a Sir Edward Grey at the head of its affairs, there would be no war…”39 But Grey did not think that House should go on to Berlin. German armies were at that hour attempting a vast envelopment against the Russians. Until the outcome of this maneuver was known, the Germans would not think seriously about peace. At the same time the American ambassador in Berlin was urging House to put forward new peace proposals. A German indemnity was out of the question, he wrote, and the German undersecretary for foreign affairs soon wrote to say that acceptance of American terms would mean the overthrow of the kaiser and the government.40 Nevertheless, House pressed on, first to Paris then to Berlin.
In both capitals he found leaderships committed to wringing substantial territorial concessions from their enemies while insisting that peace guarantees were their ultimate objects. This was not necessarily as disingenuous as it may seem today. In both France and Germany domestic constitutional conflicts between Left and Right gave the state a constant sense of peril. It is altogether possible that sincere statesmen believed that success, the likelihood of which is usually overestimated by persons working to attain it, was the only alternative to a general settlement that no one—at least no one outside the United States—could envision. Indeed, these statesmen were entirely correct in this assessment, as the course of the Long War establishes. Only when the war aim of establishing a single legitimate form of the constitutional order was achieved—an aim that had to be a war aim because it could not be gained by nego
tiation as it implied the delegitimation of some of the negotiating states—could the crisis be finally resolved.
House returned on June 13 after the ruthless sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine on May 7. From this point on, he seems to have regarded American involvement in the war as inevitable, and his various peace moves all began to take on a double-edged character, on the one side asserting a more dominant role vis-à-vis prospective allies regarding peace terms, and on the other maneuvering the German government into a position of contempt before the American public. On May 9 House had sent Wilson a cable, which the president read to his cabinet:
It is now certain that a large number of American lives were lost [in the sinking]… America has come to a parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized… warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence a settlement for the lasting good of humanity.41
One cannot understand American policy in this period without appreciating that the deliberate determination to have a role in the design of the peace underlay every American decision. At this juncture, Wilson faced two alternatives: he could break relations with Germany on the ground that the submarine attack on an undefended ocean liner was a violation of international law and a crime against civilization itself; or he could demand an official disavowal and an assurance that such attacks would not be repeated. He chose the second course and on May 13 dispatched a diplomatic note to that effect. Wilson, as perhaps House of all most keenly appreciated, faced an uncomprehending public that would not support intervention, whatever view elite opinion might hold. Thus for the next two years House would search for peace proposals that, though they might conceivably end submarine warfare, probably had their greatest utility in uniting American opinion against the perpetrators of that warfare. While still in London, he had proposed a plan to the British cabinet by which the United Kingdom would lift its blockade if Germany abandoned submarine attacks; he suggested that it would be even better for Great Britain to propose such an initiative, putting Germany in the wrong in the eyes of the American public. The British demurred, and before the cabinet acted, the Germans replied with a refusal to consider the American proposal. House wrote that the Germans were absolutely convinced the United States would not enter the war under any circumstances and that this in his view would, ironically, ensure that an American intervention did ultimately happen. He now determined to return to America to work for that goal.
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Page 55
