Imperialism, War, and Revolution, 1881–1920 539roccan Crisis) resulted from a state visit by Kaiser Wil-
helm II to Tangier, Morocco, where he made a strong
speech in defense of Moroccan independence. When
Delcassé proposed that some territorial concession be
made to Germany to recognize the French position in
Morocco, the kaiser refused. This confrontation led, at
the invitation of the sultan of Morocco, to an interna-
tional conference at Algeciras (Spain) in 1906, where
Delcassé’s diplomacy succeeded again, although he was
driven from office in France by fears that he was dan-
gerously provoking Germany. The crisis strengthened
the Entente Cordiale and prompted closer Anglo-
French military conversations; and when a vote was
taken at Algeciras, only Austria supported Germany.
The survival of the entente cordiale convinced the Re-
ichstag to adopt a third Naval Law in 1906, but that in
turn frightened the British enough to negotiate their
territorial disputes with Russia in south Asia (Persia and
Afghanistan). The Russians recognized the need for
this in the aftermath of their defeat in 1905; the resul-
tant Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907 divided Persia into
spheres of influence and exchanged a Russian agree-
ment to stay out of Afghanistan in return for British
support for Russian naval access to the Mediterranean.
This entente combined with the Entente Cordiale to
create the Triple Entente. The Triple Entente did not
include the explicit military provisions of the Triple Al-
liance, but Britain, France, and Russia soon entered into
talks to plan military cooperation. Whereas French
diplomats once worried about their isolation by Bis-
marck, the diplomatic revolution made Germans speak
angrily of their Einkreisung(encirclement) by hostile
competitors.
The Eastern Question
and the Road to War
This division of Europe into two competing alliances
meant that virtually any local crisis could precipitate a
general war. Europe held several grave local problems,
but the worst remained the eastern question. Bismarck’s
Congress of Berlin in 1878 had not settled this issue, it
had merely temporized by placating the great powers;
it did nothing to resolve Balkan nationalist claims or to
settle the internal problems of the Ottoman Empire.
Fighting resumed in the Balkans in the 1880s and had
become severe in 1885 when Bulgarian nationalists in
East Rumelia sought unity with Bulgaria, and Serbia
went to war to prevent the creation of a large Bulgaria
on its frontier. Fighting broke out twice in the 1890s,then two more times in the early twentieth century be-
fore the next major crisis, known as the Balkan crisis of- The crisis began with a long-simmering rebellion
of westernizers inside the Ottoman Empire, known as
the Young Turk rebellion; the victorious Young Turks
won numerous concessions from the Sultan and ex-
posed the weakness of the government in Constantino-
ple to resist changes.
Almost constant crises wracked the Balkans from
1908 to 1914. Austria-Hungary, which had established
a claim to Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1878, took ad-
vantage of the Ottoman crisis to annex the two
provinces in 1908. This act outraged Pan-Slav national-
ists in Serbia who had long seen Serbia as “the Pied-
mont of the Balkans” and anticipated a merger with
Bosnia in a union of the southern Slavs (the Yugo Slavs
in the Serbian language). After the annexation, Slavic
nationalists turned increasingly to revolutionary soci-
eties, such as the Black Hand, to achieve unity. The
1911 statutes of the Black Hand stated the danger
bluntly: “This organization prefers terrorist action to in-
tellectual propaganda.” The Habsburg monarchy was
soon to discover that this was not an idle threat. None
of the European powers was pleased by the annexation
of Bosnia, but none intervened to prevent it.
The continuing weakness of the Ottoman Empire,
militancy of Balkan nationalism, and reluctance of the
great powers to intervene led to a succession of crises.
In 1911 a second Moroccan crisis occurred, in which
Germany sent the gunboat Pantherto Morocco to pro-
tect German interests and the French conceded terri-
tory in central Africa to resolve the dispute. In 1912 a
war broke out in North Africa, in which Italy invaded
Tripoli to acquire their compensation for French gains
in Morocco. Later that year, open warfare began in the
Balkans when Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, and
Greece joined to attack the Ottoman Empire and de-
tach some of the few remaining Turkish provinces in
Europe; the Italians soon joined this First Balkan War
(1912–13) by invading the Dodecanese Islands off the
coast of Turkey. After the Turks had conceded territory
to all of the belligerents, they quarreled among them-
selves; several states fought Bulgaria in the Second
Balkan War (1913) to redivide the spoils, but nationalist
ambitions were still unsatisfied.
Militarism and the European Arms Race
Imperial competition, alliance system rivalries, and the
Balkan crises were all happening in an age of militarism.