Free Europe's Last Summer by David Fromkin

withRussia after already having affirmed friendship with Austria-Hungary. In Bismarck's vision, it bound the three empires together in such a way as to keep the rivalry in the Balkans between Russia and Austria under control.Germany would throw its weight against whichever of its two allies threatened to upset the delicate balance between them. Berlin would keep both of them as allies, providing Germany with security on its eastern front. The treaties were kept secret: Russia did not know of Germany's treaty with Austria; Austria did not know of Germany's treaty with Russia.
For a century historians have blamed the Kaiser for allowing the Reinsurance Treaty to lapse. Scholars now have shown that the responsibility was not entirely his. On March 21, 1890, Wilhelm assured the Russian ambassador that he planned to renew the treaty. On March 27, told that his foreign policy advisers were opposed to it, he said, "then it cannot be done. I am extremely sorry." It was typical of him, while claiming to be an absolute monarch, to allow himself to be overruled.
From Bismarck, power passed within the German government to those who looked east: who perhaps dreamed of expanding territory, influence, or markets via the Balkans and perhaps Russia into the Middle East and on to China.
Behind this policy vision lay their dark historical vision of a fated clash between Teutonic peoples, on the one side, and the peoples of the East, Slavs and Orientals, in which the Easterners, if defeated, were to become servants or slaves. It was the counterpart of the pan-Slav ambitions animating some of the policymakers in St. Petersburg.
A question still debated is whether Wilhelm II played a great part in formulating policy. One area in which his judgment did have a considerable determining influence was in the shift of emphasis in grand strategy in the late 1890s: Germany's new focus onnaval policy.
The main figure with whom that strategy was associated was the state secretary of the Naval Office, the newly ennobled Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz. Tirpitz represented, in a sense, the rising middle classes. His plan seemed to solve several problems at once. It called for the creation of a major battleship fleet. Building it might bring high employment and prosperity, and thus buy off, as it were, a section of the hitherto socialist working class.
This naval program consumed more and more money, and was made possible only by the peculiar order of priorities of the army ministry. According to Berghahn, "From the mid-1890s onwards, naval expenditure increased enormously while, at the same time, the expansion of the Army came to a virtual standstill. . . . There followed two decades of stagnation." The funds were available to expand the navy only because the army chose not to expand; "it was the leadership of the Army itself that had called a halt to expansion." The generals had done so in order to avoid opening the ranks of the officer corps to what they regarded as unreliable elements: persons lacking a Junker Prussian background.
As Berghahn writes, a function of the officer corps was "guaranteeing absolute loyalty to the existing order and its supreme military commander, the monarch." Rather than enlarge, the better to combat enemies abroad, the ministry of war chose to remain at current force levels in order to combat enemies at home.
The naval expansion launched by Tirpitz supposedly would enable Germany to compete against the other powers for colonies. It would allowGermany to extend its reach anywhere in the world and not just in and around Europe. Germany would engage in world politics, not merely in continental politics. By its very nature the program posed a challenge toGreat Britain, against whom, in fact, it was directed. In building a major navy, in attempting to obtain a colonial empire, and in trying to play a role on the global stage, Germany was setting out either to rival England or to take England's place.
In retrospect, this was a