The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (51 page)

Other activists preferred to concentrate on disarmament or at least limiting arms. Then as now it could be argued that the existence of weapons and a military and the almost inevitable concomitant of an
arms race made war more likely. Arms manufacturers themselves were a frequent target of peace advocates who saw them as deliberately stirring up tension, even conflicts, in order to peddle their wares. So when the young tsar unexpectedly issued a public invitation in 1898 to the world’s powers to meet to discuss the ‘grave problem’ as a result of the unprecedented increase in armaments and to work together solve it, peace activists such as Suttner were delighted. Indeed, the invitation, with its references to ‘terrible engines of destruction’ and the horrors a future war would bring, could have been written by one of them. The tsar seems to have been motivated partly by idealism and also by the practical consideration that Russia was having trouble in keeping up with the spending of other European powers.
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A second Russian note suggested topics that might be discussed including a freeze on increases in each country’s military, limits on some of the new and more deadly weapons that were appearing, and regulations on the conduct of war.
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The governments of the other European powers were lukewarm or, in the case of Germany, hostile to the idea but they had to deal with the enthusiastic response from the public. Petitions and letters urging the delegates to work for peace poured in from around the world. In Germany a campaign to endorse a declaration of support for disarmament got over a million signatures. The document, which was sent to The Hague, also gave a taste of the way in which nationalism was going to undermine the attempts at disarmament before 1914. ‘We do not want Germany to disarm’, it said, ‘as long as the world around us bristles with bayonets. We do not want to diminish our position in the world or refrain from any advantage which we can get from a peaceful contest of nations.’
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‘I’ll go along with the conference comedy,’ said the Kaiser, ‘but I’ll keep my dagger at my side during the waltz.’
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For once his uncle in Britain agreed with him. ‘It is the greatest nonsense and rubbish I ever heard of,’ said Edward.
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Germany went to the conference intending to wreck it if it could do so without taking all the blame. Its delegation was headed by Georg zu Münster, the German ambassador to Paris, who strongly disliked the whole idea of the conference, and included Karl von Stengel, a professor from Munich, who published a pamphlet shortly before the proceedings started in which he condemned disarmament, arbitration and the whole peace movement.
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The directions that Holstein in the German Foreign Office gave the delegates said: ‘For the
state there is no aim superior to the protection of its interests … In the case of great powers these will not necessarily be identical with the maintenance of peace, but rather with the violation of the enemy and competitor by an appropriately combined group of stronger states.’
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Among the other powers, Austria-Hungary was as unenthusiastic. The instructions of its Foreign Minister, Gołuchowski, to its delegates said: ‘Existing relationships do not permit any essential results to be achieved. On the other hand, however, we ourselves would scarcely wish that anything could be achieved, at least in so far as military and political questions are concerned.’
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France, where there was a strong peace movement, was more inclined to support the conference but its Foreign Minister, Delcassé, was concerned that the assembled delegates might pass resolutions which would imply that France must give up hopes of peacefully regaining Alsace-Lorraine: ‘For my part, even if I am Foreign Minister, I am a Frenchman first and cannot prevent myself from sharing the feelings of other Frenchmen.’
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Great Britain, which sent Admiral Jacky Fisher as one of its delegates, was willing to discuss arbitration but had little interest in disarmament. The Admiralty told the government that a freeze on naval forces was ‘quite impracticable’, and that any restriction on new and improved weapons ‘would favour the interests of savage nations, and be against those of the more highly civilised’. As for trying to regulate war, ‘their Lordships are averse to binding the country in this manner, as such an arrangement would be almost certain to lead to mutual recriminations’. The War Office was equally blunt: none of the measures proposed by the Russians were desirable.
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The United States sent a delegation headed by Andrew White, its ambassador to Berlin, and which included Alfred Mahan, the proponent of naval power. ‘He has had very little, if any sympathy’, wrote White in his diary, ‘with the main purposes of the conference.’
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The American position was one of general support for peace but to resist discussion of arms limitations on the grounds that American forces, both naval and military, were so small that the Europeans should leave them alone.
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In the course of the conference White made an eloquent statement to this effect. The British military attaché reported to London: ‘The French Admiral remarked to me at the close of the speech that the Americans had destroyed the Spanish navy and commerce, and now wanted no one to destroy theirs.’
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Delegations from some twenty-six nations including most of the European powers as well as the United States, China, and Japan, along with peace activists led by Suttner and Bloch, assembled in The Hague in May 1899. (Suttner’s hotel flew a white flag in honour of her presence and her cause.) The Dutch, who because of their geography had much to fear from a war between France and Germany, gave a lavish opening reception and were to provide generous hospitality throughout the conference. ‘Probably since the world began’, said White, ‘never has so large a body come together in a spirit of more hopeless skepticism as to any good result.’
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The Dutch royal family put one of its palaces at the disposal of the conference, which met in the great entrance hall, decorated appropriately enough with a large painting of Peace in the style of Rubens. Delegates speculated about the motives of the Russians, who, many suspected, only wanted to buy time to strengthen their military.
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One member of the German delegation, a military officer, made an unfortunate impression when he gave an exceedingly belligerent speech in which he boasted that his country could easily afford its defence expenditure and that furthermore every German saw military service ‘as a sacred and patriotic duty, to the performance of which he owes his existence, his prosperity, his future’.
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The Belgian head of the commission looking into armaments correctly told his own government that no one was serious about disarmament.
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The conference did, however, produce agreements on relatively minor arms issues: to have a moratorium on the development of asphyxiating gas, to ban the dum-dum bullet which caused terrible wounds, and to forbid the throwing of projectiles out of balloons. It also approved what became the first of a series of international agreements on rules for the conduct of war such as the humane treatment of prisoners of war or civilians. Finally, and this was a significant step forward in international arbitration, the conference agreed on a Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes with a number of provisions including commissions of inquiry in the case of disputes between states. In 1905 Russia and Britain were to use one such commission successfully to resolve the Dogger Bank incident when the Russian navy had fired on British fishing vessels.

The Convention also provided for the establishment of a Permanent Court of Arbitration. (A few years later the American philanthropist
Andrew Carnegie donated the funds for the neo-Gothic Peace Palace in The Hague which still houses it today.) While the German government, with the full support of the Kaiser, initially intended to oppose the establishment of the Court, it eventually decided that Germany should not be alone in opposition. ‘Lest the Tsar make a fool of himself in front of Europe,’ the Kaiser said, ‘I shall go along with this nonsense. But in practice I shall continue to rely on and appeal to only God and my sharp sword. And shit on all their decisions!’ The German delegates managed to add so many exceptions to the final document that it looked, as Münster said, like ‘a net with many holes’.
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Although it was to settle a dozen cases before the Great War, the Court depended, as it does today, on the willingness of governments to bring issues before it. The German government expressed its public satisfaction at the ‘happy conclusion’ to the conference while its delegate Stengel chose to denounce it loudly.
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Yet again German diplomacy had been unnecessarily clumsy and had left behind an impression of a belligerent power which was not prepared to co-operate with the others.

In 1904 Roosevelt called for a second Hague Conference but the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War effectively postponed it until May 1907. By this point the international outlook was darker. The Anglo-German naval race was in full swing and the Triple Entente was forming. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, the new British Liberal Prime Minister, suggested that arms limitation be put on the agenda. Since he also claimed that British sea power had always been a benevolent force for peace and progress, it is perhaps not surprising that the reaction from the Continent was one of cynicism and hostility.

The widespread public sentiment in favour of peace further alarmed many of those in positions of authority, statesmen or the military for example, who felt that war was a necessary part of international relations and that pacifism would undercut their ability to use force. And conservatives saw in pacificism a challenge to the old order. As Alois von Aehrenthal, Foreign Minister of Austria-Hungary between 1906 and 1912, wrote to a friend, ‘The monarchies are against the international peace movement because the peace movement is against the idea of heroism – an idea essential to the monarchical order.’
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In Russia, where the government wanted a free hand to rebuild its forces after the devastating losses of the recent war, the new Foreign
Minister, Izvolsky, said that ‘disarmament was an idea just of Jews, socialists, and hysterical women’.
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When Bülow told the Reichstag shortly before the conference opened that Germany had no intention of discussing limitations on armaments at The Hague, he was greeted with laughter and cheers.
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Austria-Hungary followed its ally. ‘A platonic declaration’ should dispose of the issue nicely, said Aehrenthal.
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The French found themselves in an awkward position, torn between supporting their old ally Russia or their new friend Britain, and privately hoped that the whole matter could be given a decent burial. The United States, which had initially supported the idea of arms limitations, was now backing down; Roosevelt had become increasingly concerned about the growth of Japan’s naval power in the Pacific and was thinking of building dreadnoughts.
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This time representatives from forty-four countries assembled in The Hague and as before there were large numbers of peace activists including Bertha von Suttner and Thomas Stead, the radical English journalist, who organised an international Peace Crusade to put pressure on the powers. (The latter was soon afterwards to do a complete about turn; by the time he went down on the
Titanic
in 1912 he had become a fervent advocate for more dreadnoughts.)
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This time several Latin American countries were represented; they put on, said a Russian diplomat, banquets of ‘peculiar interest and attractiveness’. The Dutch again went all out to be hospitable; they faced competition from the Belgians who put on a mediaeval tournament for the delegates.
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The British realised that disarmament was a lost cause and graciously gave way; in a session of the conference which lasted for a mere twenty-five minutes, the senior British delegate put forward a resolution to the effect that ‘it was highly desirable that the Governments should resume serious study of this question’.
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It passed unanimously and the arms race, which by now was affecting the land forces as well, went on. While the Germans were more diplomatic than at the first Hague Conference, they still managed to derail an attempt to get an international arbitration treaty. Their senior delegate, Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein, the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, gave a speech in which he simultaneously praised arbitration and said that the time had not yet come to introduce it. He later said that he was not sure himself whether he had been for or against. A Belgian delegate wished
that he could die as painlessly as Marschall had killed the idea.
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Eyre Crowe, a leading opponent of Germany at the Foreign Office, who was in The Hague as a British delegate, wrote to a colleague in London: ‘The dominating influence has clearly been fear of Germany. The latter has followed her traditional course: cajoling and bullying in turn, always actively intriguing.’
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As before there were some minor improvements to the rules of war but the overall reaction among the public was that the conference had been a failure. ‘A nice peace conference!’ said Suttner. ‘You hear only about wounded and sick persons and belligerents.’
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A third Hague Conference was planned for 1915 and by the summer of 1914 a number of states had already set up groups to prepare for it.