The nub of the problem lay in the fact that Wilhelm insisted on handling such affairs as an internal military matter, a Kommandosache (command issue) that concerned only himself as warlord and his military subordinates. This was an extremely formalistic and myopic view, since it was plain that liberal opinion in the nation as a whole was appalled by the army’s handling of events in the province and saw the Zabern issue as a test case for the primacy of law and civil authority. In view of Wilhelm’s intransigence, Bethmann (despite strong private reservations) felt obliged to defend the actions taken in Alsace-Lorraine before the Reichstag. The Reichstag responded with a vote of no confidence in the chancellor that passed with a huge majority (293:54). Behind the scenes, Bethmann was able to persuade Wilhelm to investigate the original incidents and to launch disciplinary action against the chief military offenders, but he could not capitalize on the support these measures would have earned him in the Reichstag, because Wilhelm’s invocation of the imperial ‘power of command’ required that they be handled confidentially, as an internal military matter.69
The Zabern affair revealed the formidable obstacles to peaceful integration in the formerly French territories and cast the limits of the Reichstag’s power into sharp relief. It damaged the prestige of the Bethmann chancellorship (indeed it may help to explain the swift depletion of support for him after 1914). According to at least one source, it also stirred a popular resentment against the Kaiser that went ‘even deeper than in the November days [of 1908]’.70 At the same time, it strengthened the bonds between Kaiser and chancellor. The difference between Bülow’s handling of the Daily Telegraph crisis and Bethmann’s handling of the Zabern affair, which was widely compared with the earlier scandal in the press, was not lost on Wilhelm. He repaid the chancellor with steadfast loyalty through the difficult early years of the war. The Mühlhausen and Zabern incidents also highlighted the peculiar position of the military within the German political system. The army, with its imperial command structure, was an extra-parliamentary, institutional legacy of absolutism within an otherwise constitutional Rechtsstaat. It was the foremost carrier of Hohenzollern and Prussian particularist tradition within the new Reich and, as such, a piece of the compromise struck in 1871. It would thus be mistaken to lay sole responsibility for the conflicts that arose in the troubled province of Alsace-Lorraine at the door of Wilhelm II. The root of the problem lay, as Valentini put it, in ‘the failings of our politico-legal structure’.71
Wilhelm proved unable to tighten this loose screw in the German constitution. A wiser and more confident monarch might have mediated constructively between the two parties, thereby securing the ‘cooperation of military and civilian authorities in full mutual respect’ that Bethmann called for.72 Instead, Wilhelm aligned himself demonstratively with the military, while yielding behind the scenes to the demands of the politicians. That he did so is a mark of how seriously his power in the sphere of civil authority had declined since 1890. It is as if he no longer felt responsible for government policy, or even the defence of the civil order – that could be left to Bethmann! – and was resolved to stand by ‘his’ army, the only institution in which his authority remained unquestioned. At no point, however, did this imply that Wilhelm had returned to thinking in terms of a coup d’état. His son, Crown Prince Wilhelm, who had fallen in with the ultra-conservative opposition, was certainly thinking along these lines in the last year before the war, and he bombarded the emperor with letters urging him to ‘make short work of the accursed rabble’ and ‘take firm control both within and without, even if this means treading on some feet’.73 But Wilhelm was unimpressed: ‘Coups d’état,’ he told the crown prince in November 1913, ‘may belong to the art of government in southern- and central-American republics; in Germany they have never, thank God, been customary and must never become so, neither from above nor from below. Those who dare to advise such a course are dangerous people, more dangerous for the monarchy and its security than the wildest Social Democrat.’74
Conclusions
In the 1890s the emperor had emerged as a significant factor in high politics, launching ambitious (if often doomed) legislative schemes, intriguing with individual ministers, and gradually hollowing out the authority of the chancellor. An atomized, irresolute government faced a stormy and unpredictable Reichstag and there was loose talk of a coup d’état that would reverse the franchise reforms of 1871 and restore monarchical authority. The advent of Bülow coincided with a relative stabilization of the political system. Relations between the chancellor and the parties of the Reichstag became more routine as the involvement of the parties in the drafting and amendment of legislation deepened. Not without a sense of relief, Wilhelm took the back seat, surrendering much of the political initiative in domestic matters to Bülow. The Kaiser did occasionally back a specific government measure, such as the tertiary education reforms of the early 1900s, or the Prussian Mining Law of 1905, but he played a supporting role; there was no repetition of the earlier débâcles over anti-socialist measures and canal-building proposals, in which the Kaiser himself had attempted single-handedly (and unsuccessfully) to steamroller new legislation through the Reichstag.
It has been suggested that even when Wilhelm was not intervening personally in politics, he was nevertheless shaping outcomes by virtue of the fact, firstly, that his prejudices came in themselves to constitute informal ‘barriers’ beyond which no minister dared to go, and secondly, that ministers tended to curry favour by anticipating the emperor’s wishes and working towards them. John Röhl has used the term ‘kingship mechanism’ (borrowed from Norbert Elias’s study of the court of Louis XIV) to describe these indirect forms of imperial authority.75 But developments within the executive under the Bülow and Bethmann chancellorships suggest that this analogy may overstate the case. To be sure, Bülow was a ‘courtier’, in the sense that he depended – albeit to a fluctuating extent – on the personal confidence of the monarch, and was prepared to devote time and energy to retaining it. But the parliamentary strategies launched by Bülow and his fellow ministers in the years 1900–1906 went largely against the grain of Wilhelm’s known political preferences.
Wilhelm remained, as we have seen, in control of key appointments, and was capable of deploying that power on occasion to thwart the designs of the chancellor. But he could also be faced down, and in any case he remained incapable of using this important constitutional instrument in a way that would enable him to impose his own imprint upon the doings of the executive, let alone the great political decisions of the day. Favouritist appointments, when they occurred, did not translate, generally speaking, into effective power for the monarch. The Kaiser’s role in key personnel decisions declined further during the Bethmann chancellorship. The king of Prussia’s right to summon his ministers in Crown Council and thereby gain leverage on the decision-making process (as had occurred during the struggle with Bismarck) likewise remained unexploited; there were only four meetings of the Crown Council during the nine years of Bülow’s chancellorship.
Finally, a cursory glance at the period 1900–1914 reveals the extent to which the political initiative had slipped from the executive as a whole. It was the confrontational attitude of the Centre Party and the constitutional issues thrown up by the colonial crisis of 1904–7 that obliged Bülow to construct a new ‘national’ coalition of parliamentary forces, not Wilhelm’s encouragements and sniping from the sidelines. It is going too far to suppose that Bülow aimed at a comprehensive ‘parliamentarization’ of the system, or to suggest that the preconditions existed for such a radical departure in 1909.76 Nevertheless, ‘bloc politics’ inaugurated a novel form of collusion between the chancellor and the parliament that tended further to marginalize the emperor’s role in domestic affairs. Bethmann did not pursue the provocative course inaugurated by Bülow in the last desperate months of his chancellorship, but the prevailing political mood left the government increasingly unable to set the political agenda. The domestic role of
the emperor was thus gradually reduced to interventions in those areas – most notably the interface between civilian and military authority – in which his supreme office was the only link holding the system together.
5. Wilhelm II and Foreign Policy (1888–1911)
‘The sole master of German policy’
How important was the role Wilhelm II played in the formulation of German foreign policy? His own assertions would lead us to believe that his influence was absolutely decisive. ‘The Foreign Office? Why, I am the Foreign Office!’, he once exclaimed.1 As he put it in a letter to the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII): ‘I am the sole master of German policy and my country must follow me wherever I go.’2 There can be no doubt as to Wilhelm’s burning ambition to play the key role in this uniquely prestigious area of high politics. Bismarck had nurtured and exploited this ambition in the mid-1880s when, to the indignation of the crown prince, he offered Wilhelm a prominent role in the conduct of diplomacy with Russia and accelerated the young man’s induction into the Foreign Office. As we have seen, Wilhelm sprang to the bait, pressing his advantage with an audacious and ill-judged attempt to establish his own private hotline to the tsar. It was in the sphere of foreign affairs that Wilhelm acquired a first tantalizing taste of influence and recognition beyond the circles of the court.
Wilhelm’s ambition to be the master of his country’s foreign policy remained unabated after his accession to the throne. He took a personal interest in the appointment of ambassadors and occasionally backed personal favourites against the advice of the chancellor and the Foreign Office.3 He regarded the military plenipotentiaries attached to foreign courts as his private envoys and valued them as indispensable tools in the conduct of a personal dynastic diplomacy.4 Wilhelm also saw the meetings and correspondence with fellow dynasts that were part of the regular traffic between monarchies as a unique diplomatic resource to be exploited in his country’s interest.5 Lastly, there was Wilhelm’s role as supreme commander of the armed forces in the German empire with personal responsibility for the peacetime standing of the army and the imperial navy. Policy initiatives concerning the size and character of these forces were, strictly speaking, issues of defence or security rather than foreign policy proper, but they had an immediate impact on the international situation and thus constituted another of the many ways in which the Kaiser could limit or extend the options available to the Foreign Office.
Wilhelm therefore lacked neither the means nor the ambition to influence the policy-making process. Can it be said, then, that he imparted a specific impetus to German policy? Did he succeed in placing himself at the helm of the ship of state, as he had aspired to do since before his accession to the throne? Our answer to this question must be equivocal. Wilhelm travelled indefatigably during the early years of his reign: to St Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen, Vienna and Rome in 1888, for example, and to England, Monza, Athens and Constantinople in the following year. These missions were not entirely without significance – the journey to Constantinople, in particular, may have helped to establish a basis for the later deepening of relations between Turkey and the German empire6 – but they were not informed by a new or distinctive agenda. Their chief function was to permit Wilhelm to show himself off in his new dignity and to feed his appetite for long-distance travel by railway and steamship.7
Nothing better illustrates how marginal the Kaiser was to the real centres of policy-making than the decision not to renew Germany’s Reinsurance Treaty with Russia in March 1890. Signed by Bismarck with Russia in 1887, the Reinsurance Treaty stipulated that Germany and Russia would come to each other’s aid in the event that Russia were attacked by Austria–Hungary or Germany by France. The chief advantage of the treaty was that it isolated France, whose hostility to Germany was implacable, and thereby prevented – or made more unlikely – a war on two fronts. Its chief drawback was that it involved Germany in commitments that conflicted with the terms of her alliance with Austria–Hungary. By the middle of February 1890 the Russian Foreign Office and Bismarck had tentatively agreed that the treaty should be renewed, possibly in a modified form.8 Within weeks of Bismarck’s departure from office, however, the treaty was allowed to lapse. This policy reversal has rightly been seen as one of the most important milestones of the pre-war era. It paved the way for the alliance and military convention between France and Russia which exerted such pressure on German diplomacy over the subsequent decades. And more generally, as Rainer Lahme has observed, it signalled the transition from a ‘multipolar, mobile equilibrium of the traditional pentarchy’ to a ‘stiff and inflexible bipolar equilibrium [between the central and the peripheral European powers] conceived in largely military and strategic terms’.9
In view of the far-reaching significance of non-renewal, it is all the more striking that Wilhelm was not involved in the policy’s genesis. Pressure for non-renewal came rather from a faction within the Foreign Office which had secretly opposed the Bismarckian line for some years and emerged as dominant after his fall. Led by Holstein, this faction had little difficulty in winning over the new chancellor, Leo von Caprivi, and the new secretary of state for foreign affairs, Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein, both of whom lacked confidence and experience in the area of foreign affairs. On 21 March, two days after Wilhelm had assured the Russian ambassador Count Paul Shuvalov in good faith that he had every intention of renewing the treaty, the anti-Bismarckians met secretly to coordinate their opposition. By 27 March they had won over the long-serving German ambassador to St Petersburg, Hans Lothar von Schweinitz, an influential expert on German-Russian relations, who in turn persuaded Caprivi that non-renewal was the preferable course on the grounds that Germany’s current treaty obligations to Austria and Russia were contradictory and thus dishonourable and unsustainable in the longer term. When Caprivi explained the situation to Wilhelm, the latter replied: ‘If Schweinitz is also against it, then it cannot be done. I am extremely sorry, but I desire more than anything to pursue an honourable policy.’10
Managing the Kaiser
It was easy to move the Kaiser around in this way because his views on German policy were so open-ended. Wilhelm rarely formed hard-and-fast commitments. He could be roused to enthusiasm for any or all available policy options, including ones that had already been ruled out by the Foreign Office. In the summer of 1890, for example, he was closely involved in the drawing up (though not the initial conception) of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty with Britain, by which the Germans ceded East African Zanzibar in return for the little British possession of Heligoland just off the German North Sea coast. Wilhelm urged that the treaty be seen as part of a more comprehensive understanding with Britain and adopted a conspicuously friendly tone in his dealings with British diplomats.11
At around the same time, however, he began to show an interest in improving relations with Britain’s imperial arch-rival, France. At a meeting with the French ambassador Herbette in December 1890, he declared, in a striking prefiguration of the later ‘Daily Telegraph interview’ (see chapter 6 below) that he personally felt ‘no hatred towards the country that is widely known as the hereditary enemy of my empire’.12 ‘The Emperor takes every opportunity to show his good will towards France,’ Herbette reported in the following February.13 A series of conciliatory public gestures culminated in Wilhelm’s decision, without prior consultation with the Foreign Office, to support his mother’s wish to visit Paris in an unofficial capacity. The visit, which Wilhelm had hoped would inaugurate a thaw in relations, was not a success and had rather the opposite effect.14 When the chauvinist Ligue des Patriotes discovered that she had been accommodated at Versailles and had stayed in St Cloud, a town destroyed by the Germans in 1870, there was an uproar and she had to be removed under military escort to Calais and thence to England. The episode demonstrated the limited effectiveness of dynastic diplomacy in a context where the broader conditions for good relations were lacking. It was also a warning to ministers and officials that they should prepare
themselves for unexpected and possibly unwelcome diplomatic initiatives from the monarch.
There were further signs of independent initiative in the autumn of 1891, when Wilhelm became intent on consolidating his personal relationship with the tsar in order to reverse the damage done to German–Russian relations by non-renewal of the Reinsurance Treaty. Alexander III planned, in a clear demonstration of disregard for Berlin, to return from Denmark to the Crimea through German territory without making the usual visit to the capital. Wilhelm conceived the plan of rushing to welcome him at Danzig, the point where the tsar and his family were due to disembark for their overland journey by train. Holstein succeeded in mobilizing Eulenburg to prevent the Kaiser from doing so, on the grounds that the German public and foreign governments would ascribe such extravagant courtesy to the Kaiser’s fear of the Russians.15
In January 1893 Wilhelm decided, again without prior consultation with the Foreign Office, to meet with the tsarevich (the future Nicholas II), who was staying in Berlin at the time, for a discussion of foreign policy matters. In the course of their meeting Wilhelm reassured Nicholas of Germany’s peaceable intentions towards Russia, expressed his strong personal interest in a trade treaty between the two countries and presented the tsar with a document outlining his own thoughts on the ‘objectives of the Triple Alliance’. These conciliatory efforts yielded only a qualified sucess. They helped to improve Russo-German trade relations, but they could not arrest the growing alienation between the two states or the ominous deepening of military ties between Russia and France, strikingly symbolized by Tsar Alexander’s widely reported visit on board a French warship anchored off Copenhagen in October 1893.
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