The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (47 page)

Yet if the imperialists were undoubtedly right
in the long term—
“will the Empire which is celebrating one centenary of Trafalgar survive for the next?” the influential journalist Garvin asked gloomily in 1905
¹¹⁴
—they nearly all tended to exaggerate the contemporary perils. The iron and steel trades and the machine-tool industry had been overtaken in various markets, but were certainly not wiped out. The textile industry was enjoying an export boom in the years prior to 1914, which only in retrospect would be seen as an Indian summer. The British shipbuilding industry—vital for both the Royal Navy and the flourishing merchant marine—was still in a class of its own, launching over 60 percent of the world’s merchant tonnage and 33 percent of its warships in these decades, which offered some consolation to those who feared that Britain had become too dependent upon imported foodstuffs and raw materials in wartime. It
was
true that if Britain became involved in a lengthy, mass-industrialized conflict between the Great Powers, it would find that much of its armaments industry (e.g., shells, artillery, aircraft, ball bearings, optical equipment, magnetos, dyestuffs) was inadequate, reflecting the traditional assumption that the British army was to be deployed and equipped for small colonial wars and not gigantic continental struggles. But for the greater part of this period, those were exactly the sort of conflicts in which the army was involved. And if the exhausting, lengthy “modern” warfare of trenches and machine guns which at least some pundits were already forecasting in 1898 did come to pass, then the British would not be alone in wanting the correct matériel.

That Britain also possessed economic
strengths
in this period ought to be a warning, therefore, against too gloomy and sweeping a portrayal of the country’s problems. In retrospect one can assert, “From 1870 to 1970 the history of Britain was one of steady and almost unbroken decline, economically, militarily and politically, relative to other nations, from the peak of prosperity and power which her industrial
revolution had achieved for her in the middle of the nineteenth century”;
¹¹⁵
but there is also a danger of exaggerating and anticipating the pace of that decline and of ignoring the country’s very considerable assets, even in the nonindustrial sphere. It was, in the first place, immensely wealthy, both at home and abroad, though the British Treasury felt itself under heavy pressure in the two decades before 1914 as the newer technology more than doubled the price of an individual battleship. Moreover, the increases in the size of the electorate were leading to considerable “social” spending for the first time. Yet if the increases in payments for “guns and butter” looked alarming in absolute terms, this was because the night-watchman state had been taking so little of an individual’s income in taxes, and spending so little of the national income for government purposes. Even in 1913, total central
and
local government expenditure equaled only 12.3 percent of GNP. Thus, although Britain was one of the heaviest spenders on defense prior to 1914, it needed to allocate a smaller share of its national income to that purpose than any other Great Power in Europe;
¹¹⁶
and if archimperialists tended to disparage Britain’s
financial
strength as opposed to
industrial
power, it did have the quite fantastic sum of around $19.5
billion
invested overseas by then, equaling some 43 percent of the world’s foreign investments,
¹¹⁷
which were an undoubted source of national wealth. There was no question that it could pay for even a large-scale, expensive war if the need arose; what was more doubtful was whether it could preserve its liberal political culture—of free trade, low government expenditures, lack of conscription, reliance chiefly upon the navy—if it was forced to devote more and more of its national resources to armaments and to modern, industrialized war.
¹¹⁸
But that it had a deep enough purse was indisputable.

Certain other factors also enhanced Britain’s position among the Great Powers. Although it was increasingly difficult to think of defending the
landward
borders of the empire in an age when strategic railways and mass armies were undermining the geopolitical security of India and other possessions,
¹¹⁹
the insularity of the British Isles remained as great an advantage as ever—freeing its population from the fears of a sudden invasion by neighboring armies, allowing the emphasis upon sea power rather than land power, and giving its statesmen a much greater freedom of action over issues of war and peace than those enjoyed by the continental states. In addition, although the possession of an extensive and hard-to-defend colonial empire implied immense strategical problems, it also brought with it considerable strategical advantages. The great array of imperial garrisons, coaling stations, and fleet bases, readily reinforceable by sea, placed it in an extremely strong position against European powers in any conflict fought outside the continent. Just as Britain could send aid to its overseas possessions, so they (especially the self-governing dominions and
India) could assist the imperial power with troops, ships, raw materials, and money—and this was an age when politicians in Whitehall were carefully cultivating their kinsmen overseas in the cause of a more organized “imperial defense.”
¹²⁰
Finally, it might cynically be argued that because British power and influence had been extended so much in earlier times, Britain now possessed lots of buffer zones, lots of less-than-vital areas of interest, and therefore lots of room for
compromise
, especially in its spheres of so-called “informal empire.”

Much of the public rhetoric of British imperialism does not suggest that concessions and withdrawals were the order of the day. But the careful assessment of British strategic priorities—which the system of interdepartmental consultation and Cabinet decision-making allowed
¹²¹
—went on, year after year, examining each problem in the
context
of the country’s global commitments, and fixing upon a policy of compromise or firmness. Thus, since an Anglo-American war would be economically disastrous, politically unpopular, and strategically very difficult, it seemed preferable to make concessions over the Venezuela dispute, the isthmian canal, the Alaska boundary, and so on. By contrast, while Britain would be willing to bargain with France in the 1890s over colonial disputes in West Africa, southeast Asia, and the Pacific, it would fight to preserve its hold on the Nile Valley. A decade later, it would make attempts to defuse the Anglo-German antagonism (by proposing agreements over naval ratios, the Portuguese colonies, and the Baghdad Railway); but it was much more suspicious of offering promises concerning neutrality if a continental war should arise. While Foreign Secretary Grey’s efforts toward Berlin prior to 1914 were about as successful as Salisbury’s earlier bids to reach Asian accords with St. Petersburg, they both revealed a common assumption that diplomacy could solve most problems that arose in world affairs. To suggest, on the one hand, that Britain’s global position around 1900 was as weakened as it was to be in the late 1930s, and to argue, on the other, that there had been “a tremendous expansion of British power” prior to 1914, upsetting the world’s balances,
¹²²
are equally one-sided portraits of what was a much more complex position.

In the several decades before the First World War, then, Great Britain had found itself overtaken industrially by both the United States and Germany, and subjected to intense competition in commercial, colonial, and maritime spheres. Nonetheless, its combination of financial resources, productive capacity, imperial possessions, and naval strength meant that it was still probably the “number-one” world power, even if its lead was much less marked than in 1850. But this position as number one was also the essential British problem. Britain was now a
mature
state, with a built-in interest in preserving existing arrangements or, at least, in ensuring that things altered slowly and peacefully. It would fight for certain obvious aims—the defense of
India, the maintenance of naval superiority especially in home waters, probably also the preservation of the European balance of power—but each issue had to be set in its larger context and measured against Britain’s other interests. It was for this reason that Salisbury opposed a fixed military commitment
with
Germany in 1889 and 1898–1901, and that Grey strove to avoid a fixed military commitment
against
Germany in 1906–1914. While this made Britain’s future policy frustratingly ambiguous and uncertain to decision-makers in Paris and Berlin, it reflected Palmerston’s still widely held claim that the country had permanent interests but not permanent allies. If the circumstances which allowed such freedom of action were diminishing as the nineteenth century ended, nevertheless the traditional juggling act between Britain’s various interests—imperial versus continental,
¹²³
strategic versus financial
¹²⁴
—continued in the same old fashion.

The empire of the czars was also, by most people’s reckonings, an automatic member of the select club of “world powers” in the coming twentieth century. Its sheer size, stretching from Finland to Vladivostok, ensured that—as did its gigantic and fast-growing population, which was nearly three times that of Germany and nearly four times that of Britain. For four centuries it had been expanding, westward, southward, eastward, and despite setbacks it showed no signs of wanting to stop. Its standing army had been the largest in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, and it was still much bigger than anybody else’s in the approach to the First World War, with 1.3 million frontline troops and, it was claimed, up to 5 million reserves. Russia’s military expenditures, too, were extremely high and with the “extraordinary” capital grants on top of the fast-rising “normal” expenditures may well have equaled Germany’s total. Railway construction was proceeding at enormous speed prior to 1914—threatening within a short time to undermine the German plan (i.e., the so-called Schlieffen Plan) to strike westward first—and money was also being poured into a new Russian fleet after the war with Japan. Even the Prussian General Staff claimed to be alarmed at this expansion of Russian might, with the younger Moltke asserting that by 1916 and 1917 Prussia’s “enemies’ military power would then be so great that he did not know how he could deal with it.”
¹²⁵
Some of the French observers, by contrast, looked forward with great glee to the day when the Russian “steamroller” would roll westward and flatten Berlin. And a certain number of Britons, especially those connected with the St. Petersburg embassy, were urging their political chiefs that “Russia is rapidly becoming so powerful that we must retain her friendship at almost any cost.”
¹²⁶
From Galicia to Persia to Peking, there was a widespread concern at the growth of Russian might.

Was Russia really on the point of becoming the gendarme of Europe once more, as these statements might suggest? Assessing that country’s effective strength has been a problem for western observers from the eighteenth century to the present, and it has always been made the harder by the paucity of reliable runs of comparative data, by the differences between what the Russians said to foreigners and said to themselves, and by the dangers of relying upon sweeping subjective statements in the place of objective fact. Surveys, however thorough, of “how Europe judged Russia before 1914” are
not
the same as an exact analysis of “the power of Russia” itself.
¹²⁷

From the plausible evidence which does exist, however, it seems that Russia in the decades prior to 1914 was simultaneously powerful
and
weak—depending, as ever, upon which end of the telescope one peered down. To begin with, it was now much stronger industrially than it had been at the time of the Crimean War.
¹²⁸
Between 1860 and 1913—a very lengthy period—Russian industrial output grew at the impressive annual average rate of 5 percent, and in the 1890s the rate was closer to 8 percent. Its steel production on the eve of the First World War had overtaken France’s and Austria-Hungary’s, and was well ahead of Italy’s and Japan’s. Its coal output was rising even faster, from 6 million tons in 1890 to 36 million tons in 1914. It was the world’s second-largest oil producer. While its long-established textile industry also increased—again, it had many more cotton spindles than France or Austria-Hungary—there was also a late development of chemical and electrical industries, not to mention armaments works. Enormous factories, frequently employing thousands of workers, sprang up around St. Petersburg, Moscow, and other major cities. The Russian railway network, already some 31,000 miles in 1900, was constantly augmented, so that by 1914 it was close to 46,000 miles. Foreign trade, stabilized by Russia’s going onto the gold standard in 1892, nearly tripled between 1890 and 1914, when Russia became the world’s sixth-largest trading nation. Foreign investment, attracted not only by Russian government and railway bonds but also by the potentialities of Russian business, brought enormous amounts of capital for the modernization of the economy. This great stream of funds joined the torrents of money which the state (flushed from increased customs receipts and taxes on vodka and other items of consumption) also poured into economic infrastructure. By 1914, as many histories have pointed out, Russia had become the fourth industrial power in the world. If these trends continued, might it not at last possess the industrial muscle concomitant with its extent of territory and population?

A look through the telescope from the other end, however, produces a quite different picture. Even if there were approximately three million workers in Russian factories by 1914, that represented the appallingly low level of 1.75 percent of the population; and while firms which
employed ten thousand workers in one textile factory looked impressive on paper, most experts now agree that those figures may be deceptive, since the spindles were used through the night by fresh “shifts” of men and women in this labor-rich but technology-poor society.
¹²⁹
What was perhaps even more significant was the extent to which Russian industrialization, despite some indigenous entrepreneurs, was carried out by foreigners—a successful international firm like Singer, for example, or the large numbers of British engineers—or had at the least been created by foreign investors. “By 1914,90 percent of mining, almost 100 percent of oil extraction, 40 percent of the metallurgical industry, 50 percent of the chemical industry and even 28 percent of the textile industry were foreign-owned.”
¹³⁰
This was not in itself an unusual thing—Italy’s position was somewhat similar—but it does show an extremely heavy reliance upon foreign entrepreneurship and capital, which might or might not (as in 1899 and 1905) keep up its interest, rather than upon indigenous resources for industrial growth. By the early twentieth century, Russia had incurred the largest foreign debt in the world and, to keep the funds flowing in, needed to offer above-average market rates to investors; yet the outward payments of interest were increasingly larger than the “visible” trade balances: in sum, a precarious situation.